London Assurance and Other Victorian Comedies

Dublin-born playwright of Huguenot extraction, Dion Boucicault (originally Boursiquot) attended University College in London and began his stage career as an actor in 1838. His first success as playwright came in 1841 with London Assurance. Thereafter, he wrote or adapted some 250 plays, including The Corsican Brothers (1852), The Poor of New York (1857), The Colleen Bawn, or, The Brides of Garryowen (1860), and The Shaughraun (1874), all extremely popular. Queen Victoria, for example, saw The Corsican Brothers four times.

Boucicault was one of the premier playwrights of the Victorian period, although his career was distinguished by both great successes and devastating failures. Especially toward the end of his life, Boucicault's plays fell increasingly out of favor, as farce and romance became less fashionable and were replaced on the London stage by the realist dramas of such authors as George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen.

In addition to his contributions to Victorian drama, Boucicault helped transform the business of the theater and the writing of plays in the nineteenth century by introducing such important innovations as royalties for playwrights and copyright for dramatists in the United States.

Boucicault died in 1890.

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