Comedy, Christianity and Melodramatic Affect: The Sorrows of Satan at the Shaftesbury Theatre

This article examines Paul M. Berton and Herbert Woodgate’s 1897 melodrama, The Sorrows of Satan, which opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London. The play was adapted from Marie Corelli’s bestselling novel of the same name (1895). In this article, I show how the stage production injected comedy into Corelli’s story, while maintaining and perhaps even amplifying its didactic Christianity. In exploring the techniques of the Berton and Woodgate play, and tracking the production’s critical reception, we can see that late-Victorian religious melodrama was both affectively and visually powerful, as well as capable of considerable nuance.