"Melos" is Greek for song, and the term "melodrama" was originally applied to all musical plays, including opera.
In early nineteenth-century London, many plays were produced with a musical accompaniment that served simply to fortify the emotional tone of the various scenes.
The procedure was developed in part to circumvent the Licensing Act, which allowed "legitimate" plays only as a monopoly of the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theaters, but permitted musical entertainments elsewhere.
The term "melodrama" is now often applied to some of the
typical plays, especially during the Victorian Period, that were written to be produced to musical accompaniment.
The Victorian melodrama can be said to bear the relation to tragedy that
farce does to comedy. Typically, the protagonists are flat types: the hero is
great-hearted, the heroine pure as the driven snow, and the villain a monster
of malignity (the sharply contrasted good guys and bad guys of the movie
western and some television dramas are modern derivatives from standard
types of characters in the old melodramas).
The plot revolves around malevolent intrigue and violent action, while the credibility both of character and
plot is sacrificed for violent effect and emotional opportunism.
Nineteenth-century melodramas such as Under the Gaslight (1867) and the temperance play Ten Nights in a Barroom (1858) are still sometimes produced—less for thrills, however, than for laughs.
Recently, the composer Stephen Sondheim converted George Dibdin Pitt's Victorian thriller Sweeney Todd, The Barber of Fleet Street (1842) into a highly effective musical drama.
The terms "melodrama" and "melodramatic" are also, in an extended sense, applied to any literary work or episode, whether in drama or prose fiction, that relies on implausible events and sensational action.
Melodrama, in this sense, was standard fare in cowboy-and-Indian and cops-and-robber types of silent films, and remains alive and flourishing in current cinematic
and television productions.
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