How did Planche feel about melodrama, the dominant dramatic mode of his time?
For the most part, he disliked it (although occasional exceptions drew complements from him). He often referred to plays he did not care for as “melodramas” and those he enjoyed as “dramas.” He strove, generally, to avoid the more patently artificial apparati of melodrama, for instance, the sudden, tearful reconciliation of estranged families at the climax of the play. On the other hand, the general melodramatic ethos, such as the concept of the “well-made play,” are very much part of Planche’s theatrical world. He never wrote a play in which the evildoers are not punished, in which at least some lovers do not end happily, or in which public perceptions of morality are not vindicated. He made abundant use of the mixture of comic and serious, even tragic, elements which Dickens remarked permeated melodrama like the alternate layers of fat and lean in streaky bacon. (Planche’s talents, however, always seemed more evident in the comic elements than in the tragic ones.) Planche’s works, in
