The official assignment is: “Consider a page or so from Lady Audley’s Secret and discuss its melodramatic qualities. How significant are they to the overall meaning of the text?”
Essentially, this assignment consists of selecting a page or two from the play and discussing its melodramatic aspects.
This is the link to the play: https://archive.org/details/ladyaudleyssecre00hazl/page/n1/mode/2up?view=theater
Below are several sources that discuss the defining features of a melodrama.
1-Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850-1910 (London: Routledge, 1981)
2-Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (Yale UP, 1976)
3-Michael Hays, Melodramatic Formations (Cambridge: CUP, 1995)
4-J. Redmond, ed., Melodrama (Cambridge: CUP, 1992)
5-Patrick Brantlinger, What is Sensational about the Sensation Novel?, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37.1 (1982): 1-28
