One of my first introductions to Victorian stage drama was a
reworking of a late nineteenth-century melodrama which we attempted in a school
drama class. The version of Maria Marten;
or the Murder in the Red Barn we put on seemed somewhat dull work when
compared with Andrew Sachs’s wittier and more knowing The Wages of Sin, which we also attempted.
The innocent virgin Maria is butchered in a secluded spot by
the evil and conniving Corder, following on from her seduction, as the audience
look on at his pantomime-like villainy. In The
Wages of Sin meanwhile there were gentlemen stroking table legs, a female
villain, and bullets ricocheting off chandeliers. There seemed to be no
competition.
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| Maria Marten |
It was only years on when I learned more about Maria Marten that
the play took on a new interest – not only the interest of knowing that a text
is based on a real story, but the interest attendant on that story’s adaption
for the stage and the corresponding elisions and deletions which involve
turning people into characters.
Maria Marten, 25, was murdered by her erstwhile lover
William Corder, 23, in 1827 on the night on which the pair had arranged to
elope. Her remains were discovered the next year after her stepmother had a
series of prophetic dreams, suggesting Maria’s fate, and Corder was captured,
tried and executed. The crime spawned more than a century of adaptations and
artistic responses, from an article by Charles Dickens in All The Year Round to five twentieth-century film versions.
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| A twentieth-century film version of the story |
In many of these versions, such as the first one I encountered,
Maria is transformed into a type – the virginal female victim. The real Maria
had had at least three lovers and three pregnancies and for the modern tabloid
press these details would make the story more salacious, but in the world of
melodrama this untenable.
In melodrama, the villains and victims must be clearly
indicated – the characters may be blind but an audience must not be. It’s the
kind of acting which argues that people cannot act and that ultimately evil and
murder will out. When I first encountered Maria
Marten, I found the play clichéd and predictable – but now I think that it
is much more interesting for being so.
What should be N in my Victorian Alphabet? Let me know here,
on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
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