Telling Stories by Michael Roemer

Author:Michael Roemer [Roemer, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461644019
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

Storytellers—New and Old

CHAPTER 20

Popular Stories

MELODRAMA

At one time, popular stories—myth, legend, and fairy tale—carried the same implication as King Lear and Madame Bovary. They suggested that our ability to predict and influence our lives is largely an illusion.

In the recent past, popular stories have often assumed the form of melodrama—a genre that evolved during the industrial revolution, when large numbers of people moved from rural communities to the city. Since they were illiterate and their oral tradition could not survive in an urban environment, they turned to the stage. Everyone went to the theater: men and women, young and old, parents with their children and nursing mothers with infants. London theatres in the 1860s could accommodate over 150,000 people on a single night.1 The stories enacted in them clearly served an important purpose and, like television, ran much of the day. Peter Brooks says that in Paris

(Audiences) absorbed their theatre going in massive doses: an evening’s entertainment would consist of various curtain raisers and afterpieces, as well as one and sometimes two full-length plays, and would last five hours or more.2

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