caa a22 4500 388109815 CHVBK 20180307125350.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130s1999 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0307883300020769 doi S0307883300020769 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0307883300020769 Shepherd Simon Simon Shepherd is Professor of Drama, Goldsmiths College, London Blood, Thunder and Theory: The Arrival of English Melodrama [Elektronische Daten] [Simon Shepherd] One of the surest ways of registering disapproval of a play or a performance is to dismiss it as ‘melodramatic', thus invoking a whole network of mistaken dramatic values and improper practice. In arts reviews, classrooms and text books, ‘melodrama' recurs as the ‘other' of ‘proper' realist drama. In English Drama: A Cultural History, we describe the critical history of melodrama as ‘The Unacceptable Face of Theatre's importance and seriousness. One of the most influential interventions came from Peter Brooks, whose Melodramatic Imagination propounds two arguments in favour of melodrama'scultural centrality: first, Brooks shows how Diderot and Rousseau anticipated the French form of melodrama, then he makes connections between melodramatic gesture or sign and the work of Saussure or Barthes. My aim here is to develop the case further by suggesting that, in the case of English melodrama, the practice of the form as it emerged was very far from being non-intellectual, out of control or stupid. Indeed the dramatists themselves were well conscious of what they were doing formally: not only intelligence but also self-reflection were there from the start. Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1999 Theatre Research International Cambridge University Press 24/2(1999), 145-151 0307-8833 24:2<145 1999 24 TRI https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883300020769 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883300020769 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Shepherd Simon Simon Shepherd is Professor of Drama, Goldsmiths College, London NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Theatre Research International Cambridge University Press 24/2(1999), 145-151 0307-8833 24:2<145 1999 24 TRI CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge