In this essay my aim is to outline the life of Dion Boucicault. I will look at his life, what influenced him and his work. I also examine how the experiences gained while travelling helped or hindered his career.

University Degree Creative Arts and Design

Dion Boucicault was born in Dublin in 1820 and he died in New York in 1890. He was a prominent playwright and prolific translator and adaptor of foreign, chiefly French, plays and novels for the Victorian London commercial theatre for more than 40 years. He achieved his first West End success with “London Assurance” in 1841. His work frankly catered to contemporary taste and soon fell into neglect after his death, however, his lively observation of humanity in its many moods and his unerring sense of “what works” for an audience, on the stage, have saved his plays from oblivion. There have been a number of successful revivals in recent years of his better known works by the Abbey theatre Dublin, Belfast’s Lyric, and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Dion Boucicault lived a long, very active, diverse life as a playwright, actor and theatre manager. This versatile theatrical personality wrote or adapted approximately 130 plays, including those he is most noted for: “London Assurance”(1841) and “The poor of New York”(1857). He was one of the most popular playwrights of his era. Most of his plays are now, largely forgotten, and the contemporary nature of his work can be seen in works like “The Octoroon”(1860) which was notable for its condemnation of slavery was written and performed in an age where slavery was widely accepted as being legitimate.

His life’s experiences lend him to travels to London, France, the United States and Australia. He was, by far one of the 19th century’s most dynamic theatre personalities, and a man that was to become known as the Irish Shakespeare.

Dion Boucicault was born Dionysius Larder Boucicault. His mother, Anne, was the sister of the Irish poet and playwright George Darly, although there remains a question in the minds of many scholars as to identity of his real father. The possibility exists that Samuel Smith Boursiquot, whom Anne married in 1813, is his father, but according to Andrew Parkin (in his book “Selected Plays”) it is more likely that Dr. Dion Dionysius Larder, after whom Boucicault was named and later became his guardian, is his real father.

Dion Boucicault’s formal education began in Dublin as a young ...

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Dion Boucicault’s formal education began in Dublin as a young child and ended with a year of studying civil engineering at the University of London. By this latter time in his life he had begun writing plays. In 1838 he joined the company at the Theatre Royal in Cheltenham, using the stage name Lee Moreton. His first play, “A legend of the Devil’s Dyke” opened at the Theatre Royal in Brighton in 1838. From this point on, his life as an actor and a playwright would be intertwined. His second play, “London Assurance”, opened at the theatre Royal in Convent garden on March 4th, 1841, and ran for 69 performances.

Boucicault’s next attempt at playwriting failed to firmly give him a good reputation as a playwright and was partly due to the fact that London managers found it cheaper and safer to produce English versions of successful French plays, than to open new English plays and there is evidence to suggest that he had difficulty being taken seriously because he was Irish.. Boucicault then decided to travel to France in 1844 in search of plots and stayed there until 1848. Although exact details are sketchy, while in Paris Boucicault married a French woman, Anne Guiot. The couple were vacationing on the French Alps when she fell and died. Although a widower at the age of 27 her death seemed to have little effect on him.

Upon return to England, Boucicault began to earn money from his knowledge of those French plays he adapted, beginning with “The Willow Copse” at the Adelphi in 1849 and produced several” Cape and Sword” melodramas written for Charles Keen, manager of the Princess Theatre. These scripts were an adaptation of the French scripts he had studied while in France. Of them, “The Corsican Brothers”(1852), and “Louis XI”(1855), proved popular with audiences. His relationship with Kean seemed to be beneficial, as it provided an outlet for the performance of his plays. Then in 1853 an argument between them ended when Boucicault set sail for New York with his new wife, (Charles Kean’s ward), Agnes Robertson.

After arriving in the United States, the couple both acted on the New York stage as well as on the road allowing Boucicault to gauge the American audience. The demand he observed was for” the actual, the contemporaneous, the photographic.” After he had a feel for an American audience, the plays he wrote in this period, between 1857 and his return to England in 1860, are wonderful examples of a playwright who has reached a mature style. These plays include: “The poor of New York”(1857), the title was later changed to “The Poor of Liverpool” which illustrates that his plays were easily adapted to different countries again “The Streets of London became The Streets of Dublin”(1864), “Jessie Brown” became “The relief of Luck now” (1858), and was further adapted a year later to “The Octroon (1859). Perhaps the latter is the best example of the contemporaneous nature of these plays. The Octoroon deals with the extremely important political and moral issue of slavery in the Southern US States.

As well showing an insightful understanding of how to satisfy an audience Boucicault also adapted the technology of the time by using and featuring a camera as a major plot device in capturing the villain.

“Colleen Bawn” opened on a New York stage in 1860. Perhaps it was the success of this play that persuaded him to return to England. He presented the script to Benjamin Webster, manager at the Adelphi Theatre, with whom he made an historic agreement to share the risk, by agreeing to share the profits instead of making a down payment for the manuscript. It was the first time a playwright and a manager had entered into such an agreement that would become the pattern for later authors. Again evidence of someone ahead of his time and perhaps more experienced by travel and seeing how others live, work and die.

From 1873 on most of Boucicault ‘s dramatic work originated from his New York home. His desire for a well - to - do life - style led him to excessive spending, even when his income dropped.” The Shaughraun”(1876) is said to have made him over half a million dollars, but little of it remained in 1885 when he suddenly left his wife Agnus Robertson and bigamously eloped to Australia with Louise Thorndyke, an actress, who was not much older than the oldest of his five children.

In his later years, plays did not flow from his pen as they once did, and he was too old to act as he had done for most of his earlier life, often in his own plays. He tried his hand at journalism until 1888 when he became a teacher in a newly established acting school in New York. He was still working on new plays when he died in the arms of his third wife Louise on 18th September 1890. During fifty years as an active dramatist, Boucicault wrote, adapted or concocted about 200 stage pieces, many included farce, pantomimes, musical interludes, and operettas, but after 1852 melodrama became his favourite mode, contributing 130 scripts in all.

In summary Boucicault has been described as “the cleverest, most theatrically incentive English-speaking playwright of his age” His early Irish plays alone are good enough to make him the most rewarding playwright for study and sheer amusement in Victorian theatre. “Robert Emmet” (1884) is considerably better than its neglect suggests, as it had suspense, genuine political feeling and understanding, high sentiment, balanced by earthly humour and common sense, rascally, vivid characters in the sub-plot , aphoristic dialogue and mordant wit. He is further distinguished by having written two of the best comedies of the period between Goldsmith and Gilbert ; “London Assurance” and “Old Heads and Young Hearts” although his detractors argued that these were lightweight and witless plays yet others argue that this criticism is less than fair as the plays had great dash, flair and pace.

But as Pinero observed “that seems to explain some of the problem with Boucicault ; his career spanned a decline before the modern resurgence of British drama. At his worst he was seen as sentimental, merely derivative, and lacking literary energy; at his best, character, dialogue and action are integrated in a way as to produce high energy theatre of a most absorbing kind.

I conclude that it is fair to say that Dion Boucicault was one of the most dynamic, cosmopolitan, theatre personalities whose life’s work and travelling experiences made him a highly talented and intelligent multi – disciplined, prolific Artist who wrote or adapted approximately 130 plays and who, perhaps justifiably earned the title as the “Irish Shakespeare”.