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Melodrama arose in the second half of the 18th century as a genre intermediate between play and opera. It combined spoken recitation with short pieces of accompanying music. Music and spoken dialogue typically alternated in such works, although the music was sometimes also used to accompany pantomime.
Thus, for example, Lockwood, the first narrator of the story, tells the story of Nelly, who herself tells the story of another character. [48] The use of a character like Nelly Dean is a literary device, a well-known convention taken from the Gothic novel, the function of which is to portray the events in a more mysterious and exciting manner. [49]
Festival d'Avignon, dir. Otomar Krejča, 1978. The theatre of the absurd (French: théâtre de l'absurde [teɑtʁ (ə) də lapsyʁd]) is a post– World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s. It is also a term for the style of theatre the plays represent.
The Octoroon is a play by Dion Boucicault that opened in 1859 at The Winter Garden Theatre, New York City. Extremely popular, the play was kept running continuously for years by seven road companies. [2] Among antebellum melodramas, it was considered second in popularity only to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Both were anti-slavery works.
The genre also heavily influenced writers such as Charles Dickens, who read Gothic novels as a teenager and incorporated their gloomy atmosphere and melodrama into his works, shifting them to a more modern period and an urban setting; for example, in Oliver Twist (1837–1838), Bleak House (1854) and Great Expectations (1860–1861). These ...
Othello. Othello (/ ɒˈθɛloʊ /; full title: The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice) is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare around 1603. Set in Venice and Cyprus, the play depicts the Moorish military commander Othello as he is manipulated by his ensign, Iago, into suspecting his wife Desdemona of infidelity.
A stock character, popular in 16th-century Spanish literature, who is comically and shockingly vulgar. Clarín, the clown in Pedro Calderón de la Barca 's Life is a dream, is a gracioso. Examples of similar characters in Anglophone culture include Bubbles, Wheeler Walker, Jr. and the stand-up persona of Bob Saget.
The damsel in distress is a narrative device in which one or more men must rescue a woman who has been kidnapped or placed in other peril. The "damsel" is often portrayed as beautiful, popular and of high social status; they are usually depicted as princesses in works with fantasy or fairy tale settings. Kinship, love, lust or a combination of ...