1. David Mayer (1994) Playing Out the Empire: Ben Hur and Other Toga Plays and Films, 1883–1908 (Oxford: Clarendon), p. 33.
2. Eric Bentley (1965) The Life of the Drama (London: Methuen), p. 205 (original emphasis).
3. Michael Booth (1965) English Melodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins), p. 14.
4. See Peter Brooks (1976) The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, James, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press);
5. Elaine Hadley (1995) Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace (Stanford: Stanford University Press);