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Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

A. Dwight Culler*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Abstract

The term “dramatic monologue” was not in use when the great Victorian dramatic monologues were being written. They were sometimes called “monodramas,” which Tennyson defines as works in which successive phases of passion in one person take the place of successive persons. This agrees with the form as invented by Rousseau in Pygmalion (1763) and as practiced in Germany from about 1772 to 1815. It is related to other forms, e.g., the “attitude,” in which virtuoso performers attempted to portray rapidly shifting roles through pantomime. Monodrama was introduced into England by William Taylor of Norwich, Dr. Frank Sayers, Southey, and “Monk” Lewis; and Tennyson’s Maud, “Locksley Hall,” and “CEnone” have some characteristics of the genre. The form arose partly out of the prosopopoeia and should be distinguished from the Browningesque dramatic monologue, where the “drama” is normally between the speaker and the reader rather than between different phases of the speaker’s soul.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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References

Notes

1 Advertisement to Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Preface to ed. of 1868.

2 Songs of the Cavaliers and Roundheads (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1857), pp. 139–59. For this reference and those in the next 2 notes I am indebted to Klaus E. Faas, “Notes towards a History of the Dramatic Monologue,” Anglia, 88 (1970), 228–31.

3 “Robert Browning and the Epic of Psychology,” London Quarterly Review, 32 (July 1869), 329, 331; Fortnightly Review, 11 (Jan. 1869), 117–18; Athenaeum, 20 March 1869, p. 400.

4 Westminster Review, 39 (Jan. 1871), 85.

5 Tennyson: His Art and Relation to Modern Life (London: Ibister, 1894), pp. 411–12.

6 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (New York: Macmillan, 1897), ii, 329–30. Hereafter cited as Memoir. For Tennyson's comment on the dramatic character of “The Church-Warden and the Curate” see Jerome Buckley, Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet (Boston: Houghton, 1965), p. 197.

7 William C. DeVane, A Browning Handbook, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton, 1955), p. 430.

8 Curry, Browning and the Dramatic Monologue (Boston: Expression, 1908); Fletcher, Modern Language Notes, 23 (1908), 108–11; Howard, Studies in Philology, 4 (1910), 33–88; MacCallum, Proceedings of the British Academy, 11 (1924–25), 265–82; and Sessions, PMLA, 62 (1947), 503–16.

9 Browning, Works, Centenary Ed., 10 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1912), i, 11; v, 25.

10 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), Chs. i, vii, and viii.

11 J. W. Tilton and R. D. Tuttle, “A New Reading of ‘Count Gismond,’” Studies in Philology, 59 (1962), 8395; E. J. Chiasson, “Tennyson's ‘Ulysses’—a Re-Interpretation,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 23 (1954), 402–09.

12 Quoted in Donald L. Clark, Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1957), p. 200.

13 John Milton at St. Paul's School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (1948; rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1964), pp. 189–90.

14 Tennyson and His Friends, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 327. See Memoir, I, 401–02.

15 Richard Henry Home, A New Spirit of the Age, ed. Walter Jerrold (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1907), p. 253; Eclectic Review, 26 (Aug. 1849), 211.

16 The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, ed. Elvan Kintner (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1969), i, 30–31.

17 Tennyson, Complete Poetical Works, ed. W. J. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton, 1898), p. 198. See also James Knowles, “Aspects of Tennyson (A Personal Reminiscence),” The Nineteenth Century, 33 (Jan. 1893), 187.

18 In my account of the French and German monodrama I am heavily indebted to Jan van der Veen, Le Mélodrame musical de Rousseau au romantisme: Ses aspects historiques et stylistiques (Martinus Nijhof / 's-Graven-hage, [1955]), and to Kirsten Gram Holmström, Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants: Studies on Some Trends of Theatrical Fashion, 1770–1815 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967).

19 See Veen, p. 7; Holmström, p. 42. The text of the commentary in Kurzböck's edition is reprinted in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, ii (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 1929–30.

20 See Veen, pp. 48–79; Holmström, p. 46; Erich Schmidt, “Goethe's Proserpina,” Vierteljahrschrift fiir Literatur-geschichte, 1 (1888), 40, 42; Der Junge Goethe, ed. Max Morris, iii (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1910), 24.

21 Veen, pp. 88–89; Holmström, p. 52; see Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Eric Blom (New York : St. Martin's, 1961), s.v. “Melodrama.”

22 For the influence of the monodrama on Faust, see Stuart Atkins, Goethe's Faust: A Literary Analysis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), p. 26; Goethe, Faust, ed. R-M. S. Heffner, Helmut Rehder, and W. F. Twadell (Boston: Heath, 1954), pp. 60–61.

23 See Oxford Companion to Music, ed. Percy A. Scholes, 9th ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), s.v. “Melodrama”; Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, s.v. “Melodrama.”

In the 19th century the public stage reading, when performed by a single actor, was occasionally called a “mono-drama” (OED). One of the most popular of these was Charles Mathews' series “At Home,” dating originally from the 1810's but revived by his son in the 1860's, which, according to Philip Collins, consisted of “dazzling one-man displays of mimicry, in which he successively played dozens of roles.” Others were the “Illustrative Gatherings” of the German Reeds, which ran for many years in London, and John Parry's “Mrs. Roseleaf's Evening Party” (“that extraordinary scene,” says a contemporary, “in which the great mimic made his audience see a whole room full of people by simulation, and little tricks of expression and movement impossible to describe or to be repeated by another”). A variant on this kind of “one-man (or two-hander) virtuoso display was the sketch or playlet in which one actor adopted numerous roles: Mark Lemon's Mr. Nightingale's Diary is an example—it was written for Dickens, who took six character-parts in it. For these one-man displays, the term ‘monopolylogue’ was invented: or the performer might be called a ‘polyphonist’ ” (Philip Collins, Reading Aloud: A Victorian Métier, Tennyson Society Monographs, No. 5, Lincoln: Tennyson Research Centre, 1972, p. 25). Alternatively, he might have been called a “pantomimist,” for pantomime is literally “a player of all the parts.” In the original Roman pantomime the actor carried a 3-faced mask so that, if he were enacting the story of Mars and Venus, he could imitate successively the anger of Vulcan, the embarrassment of Venus, the alarm of Mars.

24 Jacques Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century (Boston: Little, 1950), i, 221.

25 Moore, Poetical Works, ed. Alfred D. Godley (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1929), p. 303. Joad's speech in Athalie is presumably that in Act iii, Sc. vii, where his prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem and the coming of the Redeemer is pronounced to the accompaniment of the orchestra.

26 I am indebted for my knowledge of Goz's work to Holmstrom, pp. 53–88.

27 For my knowledge of the attitude I am indebted to Holmstrom, pp. 110–208.

28 Travels in Italy, Bohn's Standard Library (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1883), p. 199, under date 16 March 1787.

29 In The Revolution in Tanner's Lane (London: Trübner, 1887), William Hale White (“Mark Rutherford”) has Pauline, the daughter of the French shoemaker, Jean Caillaud, do a shawl dance before Zachariah Coleman, printer, in 1814. With a light gauzy shawl over her shoulders “Pauline began dancing, her father accompanying her with an oboe. It was a very curious performance. It was nothing like ordinary opera-dancing, and equally unlike any movement ever seen at a ball. It was a series of graceful evolutions with the shawl, which was flung, now on one shoulder and now on the other, each movement exquisitely resolving itself, with the most perfect ease, into the one following, and designed apparently to show the capacity of a beautiful figure for poetic expression. Wave fell into wave along every line of her body, and occasionally a posture was arrested, to pass away in an instant into some new combination. There was no definite character in the dance beyond mere beauty. It was melody for melody's sake” (Ch. v).

30 Hill, The Actor (London : Griffiths, 1750), pp. 15–16.

31 Rousseau, Pygmalion: A Poem (London: Kearby, 1779), p. 1.

32 Dr. [Frank] Sayers, Collective Works, to Which Have Been Prefixed Some Biographic Particulars by W. Taylor of Norwich (Norwich: Matchett & Stevenson, 1823), p. xix. Hereafter cited as Collective Works.

33 John W. Robberds, A Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late William Taylor of Norwich (London: Murray, 1843), i, 447.

34 William Haller, The Early Life of Robert Southey, 1774–1803 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1917), pp. 45–46.

35 In the 1807 edition of Dramatic Sketches, Sayers notes that since 1792 “many pleasing Monodramas have been published in this country” (p. 91).

36 Quarterly Review, 35 (Jan. 1827), 207.

37 Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. John W. Warter (London: Longman, 1856), i, 67–68.

38 The Monthly Magazine and British Register, 6 (July 1798), 47–48; 7 (June 1799), 396–99.

39 Robberds, Memoir, I, 245.

40 Historic Survey of German Poetry, 3 vols. (London: Treutal & Würtz, 1828–30), iii, 311–16; I, 325–28; iii, 3–7.

41 The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, [ed. Margaret Baron-Wilson] (London: Colburn, 1839), i, 23031. Hereafter cited as Life and Correspondence.

42 Louis F. Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 90–91.

43 E. C. Knowlton, in his article “Southey's Mono-dramas,” Philological Quarterly, 8 (1929), 408–10, is apparently the first to connect monodrama with the dramatic monologue, but he sees it as leading into Browning, whose work I see as quite different.

44 Tennyson's Maud Vindicated: An Explanatory Essay (London, 1856), rpt. in part in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. John D. Jump (London: Routledge, 1967), pp. 198–99.

45 Edgar F. Shannon, “The Critical Reception of Tennyson's Maud,” PMLA, 68 (1953), 412. Shannon notes that the term “monodrama” was echoed by Alexander Macmillan in Macmillan's Magazine, 1 (Nov. 1859), 114. Since Tennyson saw Mann's pamphlet in proof and made suggestions to him, it is, of course, possible that the indebtedness was the other way around (see Shannon, p. 400, n.).

46 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Complete Works, ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas J. Wise, The Bonchurch Ed. (London: Heinemann, 1926), xvi, 360–62.

47 The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1969), pp. 1046–47.

48 For the original title see Memoir, i, 402. Christopher Ricks notes that Tennyson apparently “intended to revert to the original title, as the words ‘or the Madness’ are added in his hand” in the Univ. of Virginia copy (Tennyson, Poems, ed. Ricks, p. 1038).

49 “Prufrock and Maud: From Plot to Symbol,” Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism (Lexington : Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1965), pp. 201–12; see T. S. Eliot, “In Memoriam,” Essays, Ancient and Modern (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), p. 182.

50 Allen, “The Epyllion: A Chapter in the History of Literary Criticism,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 71 (1940), 1–26; Reilly, “Origins of the Word ‘Epyllion,‘” Classical Journal, 49 (1953), 111–14.

51 Windelband, A History of Philosophy (1901; rpt. New York: Harper, 1958), ii, 410, 412.

52 The Passions of the Soul, Art. ccxii, in Philosophical Works, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (1911; rpt. New York: Dover, 1955), p. 427.

53 The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700 (1961; rpt. New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 172–209.

54 Pater, The Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1893), p. 131.