The Old Price Wars: Melodramatizing the Public Sphere in Early-Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract

Early English stage melodrama was one version of a melodramatic mode that pervaded the nineteenth century in response to the effects of a growing market culture, especially the classificatory procedures of government bureaucracies and the concomitant formation of a class society. By examining the relation between this genre and the rioters who initiated the “Old Price Wars” in Covent Garden Theatre in 1809, I show how melodrama resisted a class society by supporting more traditional status hierarchies. Melodrama represented the contemporary confrontation between these two distinctive forms of social organization as a family conflict that included the audience. By means of climactic moments of audience participation in its plot, melodrama elicited the spectators' recognition of their own familial ties and therefore facilitated a symbolic reunion that both reflected and encouraged the behaviors of the Old Price rioters, who materially resisted the introduction of market relations into the theater.

Cite this

Elaine Hadley (1992). The Old Price Wars: Melodramatizing the Public Sphere in Early-Nineteenth-Century England. PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. https://doi.org/10.2307/462759

@article{elaine1992the,
  title  = {The Old Price Wars: Melodramatizing the Public Sphere in Early-Nineteenth-Century England},
  author = {Hadley, Elaine},
  year   = {1992},
  journal = {PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America},
  doi    = {10.2307/462759}
}

Citations in this library

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.

References