When Drama Went to the Dogs; or, Staging Otherness in the Animal Melodrama

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Author(s)
Miller, John MacNeill
Date Issued
May 1, 2017
Abstract
For much of the nineteenth century, nonhuman animals shared the English stage with human performers in a series of popular, widely produced quadruped dramas. Work in animal studies and performance theory overlooks this phenomenon when it laments theater’s unbroken history of animal exclusion—a notion of exclusion that quadruped dramas actually helped propagate and reinforce. The animal melodramas produced through the Victorian era featured animal characters whose appeal depended on the perceived otherness of animal actors, especially the knowledge that animals did not so much act in the drama as perform set responses to subtle, real-world cues from their trainers. Playwrights used animals’ imperfect integration in the dramatic illusion to inject an uncanny sense of reality into their melodramatic plots. Their experiments with estrangement admit the difficulties of animal performance by explicitly staging animal otherness—but only as a spur to deepen human engagement with the more-than-human world. (JMM)
Journal
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
Department
English
Citation
Miller, J.M. (2017). When drama went to the dogs; or, staging otherness in the animal melodrama. PMLA 132(3): 526-542. doi: 10.1632/pmla.2017.132.3.526.
Publisher
Modern Language Association
Version of Article
Published article
DOI
10.1632/pmla.2017.132.3.526
ISSN
0030-8129
Rights
This article has been selected for publication in May 2017, PMLA Vol. 132, No. 3. All rights are reserved by publisher and reprint author. Please contact for further use of this material.
Subjects

dramas

animal melodramas

animals as characters...

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