Dion Boucicault (Dec. 26, 1820 or 1822-Sept. 18, 1890) was an Irish-American playwright who saw mainstream popular success on both sides of the Atlantic. He is credited with shaping American drama as well as championing the first U.S. Copyright Act. His 1874 hit play, The Shaugran, was the impetus for the first gathering of the men who founded The Lambs, an organization that he was a charter member of in 1877.
Dionysius Lardner Boursiquot was born in Dublin. His mother, Anne Darley, belonged to an important Dublin family and was the brother of the poet-mathematician George Darley. She was less-than-happily married to a French Huguenot named Samuel Boursiquot (from which the Boucicault surname derives). He was sent to England for schooling. At Dr. Jamieson’s Academy, Brentford, he began writing dramatic sketches. Shortly afterward, he took up a stage career under the pseudonym Lee Moreton, playing in his own Legend of Devil’s Dyke at Brighton in October 1838.
Boucicault managed to get Charles Matthews, manager of Covent Garden, to read an unsolicited manuscript of what became London Assurance. When the comedy opened in 1841, the young dramatist’s future seemed assured. The play established him as “the cleverest, raciest, and most theatrically inventive playwright of his age,” as Andrew Parkin remarks in Victorian Britain, An Encyclopedia. Over his career, the wittiest dramatist in the era before Oscar Wilde produced some 200 plays, including the highly popular Smike; or, Nicholas Nickleby, which premiered in 1859 at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York.
At 24, Boucicault was supporting his mother and brother. His plays Used Up (1844) and Don Caesar de Bazan (1844) were not as successful as London Assurance, forcing him into debt. He decamped to Paris in December 1844 to try his hand at translating French plays into English. While there Boucicault married Anne Guiot, a French widow who owned real estate. She died less than four years later. Even tapping her estate wasn’t enough, and Boucicault found himself once again in Debtors’ Court. Ben Webster, manager of London’s Adelphi Theatre and a major name in Georgian era theatricals, bailed out the young playwright.
Princess’s Theatre in London was managed by Charles Kean, who booked Boucicault to write melodramas to complement Kean’s Shakespearean revivals. In 1852 he performed in his own piece The Vampire alongside Kean’s nineteen-year-old adopted daughter, Agnes Robertson, who was the juvenile lead of his company. When she began living with the playwright, Kean fired Boucicault and cut off Robertson.
Ben Webster paid for the couple’s steamship tickets to New York. They then teamed up both romantically and professionally, becoming one of the first transatlantic theatrical celebrities. They had six children, three of whom went into the family business and were successes.
Boucicault was a vocal supporter to protect the international copyrights of dramatists, which in the 1840s-1850s were not honored on both sides of the Atlantic. He was tired of seeing his work ripped off by managers who did not license his plays. In 1856 Boucicault agitated for new legislation to protect the rights of American dramatists. He settled down to a steady dramatic output:
*The Poor of New York (1857)
*Dot (1859)
*The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana (1859)
*The Colleen Bawn (1860)
In the summer of 1860 the Boucicaults returned to London, where Agnes had engaged with Webster to open in the title role of Colleen Bawn in September at the New Adelphi. The play had a then-record run of 278 performances, providing the family enough cash to take over the lease of Drury Lane in 1862, and begin refurbishing Astley’s Amphitheatre as The Theatre Royal, Westminster. It’s believed Boucicault was the first English dramatist to receive a royalty for his plays instead of a lump sum from an English theater management.
The Corsican Brothers (1852) had already established Boucicault as the master of stage spectacle and construction of melodrama. The Poor of New York, which Boucicault wrote and staged in Manhattan, was one of the first dramatic pieces by a foreigner to receive full protection under the new 1856 American copyright law that Boucicault had been instrumental in getting through Congress. From the controversial subject of urban blight and poverty Boucicault moved to the equally contentious antebellum topic of abolition in The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana (1859), which again used spectacular effects such as “the brilliant slave auction scene, the exploding river boat, and the up-to-the-minute device of using photography to solve a crime,” to enthrall audiences.
Teaming with his business manager, William Stuart, they started leasing theaters for short runs. In 1859, he and Stuart renovated an old theater on Broadway and renamed it the Winter Garden. The name lives on today on Broadway.
Boucicault is credited with being “the first dramatist to treat the American Negro seriously on the stage.” The success of the American production of Dot, starring comedian Joseph Jefferson, gave the actor his first serious role (Caleb Plummer), launching Jefferson into becoming one of the most popular actors in the U.S. in the late 19th century. In 1865, at the pinnacle of the U.S. Civil War, Boucicault adapted for the stage Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. Joseph Jefferson starred in the show for 40 years (and was elected to The Lambs as well). Boucicault continued to have success; Arrah-na-Pogue (1864), set during the Irish rebellion of 1798, the play tells a story of love and loyalty under pressure.
In 1872 Boucicault returned to the United States, where he remained, except for a trip to Australia that resulted in his third marriage (for which he renounced the legitimacy of his second marriage). In October 1885, he abandoned his wife Agnes Robertson Boucicault to marry Josephine Louise. His flagrant bigamy cost him the rights of many of his plays in the divorce proceedings.
In the early 1870s Boucicault was tapped by J. Lester Wallack, the powerful theatrical titan of New York City in the gaslight era, to produce plays for his stock company. Wallack had a roster of top American and English talent at his disposal.
The Shaughraun was Boucicault’s play that lit the match to launch The Lambs in New York. Many of the cast would be founders and early members of the Club. It debuted Nov. 14, 1874, at Wallack’s Theatre in Union Square, and continued a successful run until the following April. It was in December 1874 that The Lambs was created from these Shaughraun actors. In that run were some of the very early members of The Lambs: Edward Arnott, Harry Beckett (2nd Shepherd), Boucicault, John Gilbert, E. M. Holland (6th Shepherd), and Henry James Montague (1st Shepherd). The Shaughraun, a melodrama set amid the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and peasantry was a hit.
As late as 1884 Boucicault was still demonstrating his mastery of the comic and sensational elements of melodrama in Robert Emmet, but his reputation thereafter dwindled as a consequence of changing fin de siècle tastes. About 150 plays are credited to Boucicault, who, as both writer and actor, raised the stage Irishman from caricature to character.
Boucicault died on Sept. 18, 1890, in New York. He was 67 or 69 years old. He is interred in Mount Hope Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, Section 43.
At the time of his death he was a poorly paid teacher of acting in New York City. Ironically, Boucicault died in the very year that Ireland’s literary renaissance began. Professor Parkin credits him with perpetuating into the modern period the stereotype of “the imbibing, garrulous, merry, hot-tempered Irishman familiar from Elizabethan and Restoration plays”