Perry Shields

Professor De Luca

Theater 355

2005 November 23

The Melodramatic Life and Stage of Dion Boucicault

It is interesting that the more things change, the more they stay the same.  When we read of the Hollywood crowd today, meaning writers, actors, and directors, the stories are often based on or laced with some personal drama involving divorce, affairs, devastating losses, or huge successes.  While this could be said of any business, we don’t regularly read of these items as they pertain to, say, the plumbing business.  Entertainment has always been about big things, and while the ups and downs associated with show business can be traced back hundreds and thousands of years, we see that the American obsession with big entertainment, and the attendant personal dramas, have existed in this country almost from its inception.  The life and work of playwright Dion Boucicault is a perfect backdrop to examine this phenomenon.

The name Dion Boucicault is virtually unknown today outside of academia.  One of hundreds of 19th century playwrights, he was born in Ireland in 1820, though “it was more likely vanity than confusion that led Boucicault to claim 1822 as the year of his birth” (Thomson 1).  While we are well acquainted today with the tendency of stars to obfuscate their ages, it is interesting that this practice is by no means new.  Boucicault’s upbringing was in an atmosphere of decidedly non-Victorian models.  His father, Samuel Boursiquot, was twenty-six years older than his mother Anne.  Anne was having a well-known affair with Trinity College (Dublin) professor Dionysius Lardner.  Even her lover’s first name hints at the somewhat “open” nature of this relationship, and the implication was certainly not lost on fifth-born Dion, who years later would prove just as unwilling to submit to monogamy.  So accepted was their relationship, that Samuel apparently had no problem with naming his son after his wife’s paramour.  It is believed that Dionysius Lardner may in fact have been the biological father of Boucicault, hence the name change (Kent Library).

His likely biological father Lardner sent Dion to several schools in London, where he learned civil engineering.  This would no doubt come in handy years later when he began staging his plays.  Attracted to acting, he performed under the pseudonym “Lee Moreton” and was known as purveyor of character roles, performed none too subtly.  Aspiring to playwriting, Boucicault was only 21 when his first successful play, “London Assurance,” premiered successfully at London’s Covent Garden.  This did not stop him, however, from continuing to write roles for himself in all of his plays.  He preferred the heavies, or character roles, and these lent themselves to his larger than life acting style.

Boucicault traveled to France in late 1844, searching out French plays for possible reinvention for English audiences.  In 1845 his first marriage to French widow Anne Guiot is recorded.  Guiot, some years older than Boucicault, had an inheritance that no doubt made it easier for him to do his work which was largely writing at this point.  This marriage, however, did not last long.  Anne Guiot died in 1848 after an illness, and Boucicault quickly became bankrupt.  Her death was shrouded in some mystery, again foreshadowing the show biz mystique the public has with the private lives of celebrities.

Boucicault’s sojourn in France no doubt blazed the trail for what was to develop creatively in his life.  Many of his plays can be easily traced in content and style to the French melodrama he immersed himself in.  Upon returning to England, he was forced to return to acting in order to make a living.

It is probably a case of “the author meeting the act” that Boucicault found his life’s work in writing melodrama.  Melodrama, literally “drama with melody,” was the dominant form of theater in the 19th century across Europe, England, and America (Londre 201).  Melodrama is “characterized by a strong, clear-cut line of action, ordinary (nonliterary) speech, emotional variety and intensity, uncomplicated character types, comic relief, spectacular visual effects, and a morally satisfying conclusion” (Londre 203).  Melodrama was clearly not aimed at the intelligentsia but was meant for the masses.  Indeed, it had its roots in “boulevard theater” which in turn was brought about by government censorship.  It must have been quite a catharsis for poor, working people who regularly felt put-upon to see these plays where good always triumphed over evil.

The broadly drawn thematic characters found in melodrama included the waif, villain, spurned lover, and hero, among others.  These were easily identifiable characters that most audience members could relate to.  Another hallmark of 19th century melodrama was the inclusion of animals in the plays.  Magpies, monkeys, horses, lions, and dogs in particular were sure to draw in the crowds and keep them coming back.  There is even a record of a production of “Hamlet” where Hamlet’s dog killed Claudius at the play’s conclusion!

Looking at Boucicault’s plays as typical of 19th century melodrama, we can see at a glance many representative elements.  The most obvious is that almost every action and character trait is “telegraphed” (hinted at) or explained outright.  It seems that these plays were not intended to incite audiences to think, but rather to provide a cathartic experience that would send them home feeling satisfied.  There is a beginning, middle, and “endness” to these plays that give them a form of a complete package.  It also seems that there may have been more freedom in terms of length of scripts.  Whereas today, when one hears “one act” or “two act” play, we know a one-act will generally play about an hour with no intermission.  A two-act play will have one intermission and run about two hours.  The musical form is almost always two acts and Opera can vary, up to five acts.

“Used Up,” first performed on February 6, 1844 at the Haymarket Theater, London (Thomson 23), is designated by Boucicault as “A petit comedy in two acts” with a running time of one hour and ten minutes.  There are probably not many two-act plays written in the past 100 years that run this short, but this is all the time Boucicault needs to tell his story.  Like Dickens, Boucicault seems to enjoy telegraphing something about the character’s personality in the name.  The central character in “Used Up” is Sir Charles Coldstream, a man of higher class whose feelings have run cold and who is bored with life.  Coldstream’s valet, James, gives the following information to Ironbrace (yet another name that indicates the character’s trait – he is a handyman):

“…he’s (Coldstream’s) always sighing for what he calls excitement: you see, everything is old to him – he’s used up – nothing amuses him – he can’t feel.” (Thomson 25). 

If that weren’t enough, one of Coldtream’s early speeches shortly following James’ exposition demonstrates Boucicault’s use of the obvious, giving the audience everything they need to know about Coldstream without having to think much:

“…I started at thirteen, lived quick, and exhausted the whole round of pleasure before I was thirty.  I’ve tried everything, heard everything, done everything, know everything, and here I am, a man of thirty-three, literally used up – completely blazé.” (Thomson 28).

Act I ends with Coldstream and Ironbrace fighting near and falling out a window that Ironbrace was hired to build a balcony for, precisely to prevent such as occurrence.

Act II continues with our learning that Coldstream and Ironbrace both survived the fall, but Coldstream is presumed dead as his body was not discovered.  This gives him the opportunity to embark on a hidden-identity scam that provides him with the thrills he is seeking.  His alter-ego in Act II, Joe, a ploughboy, is servant in Wurzel’s farm house.  It takes quite a stretch of the imagination to believe that Coldstream, with a different costume and probably a new hairstyle, could move about people he knows and successfully pull off this guise.  But that is not as important as the opportunity Boucicault gives the audience to sympathize with a character who is bored by what the world has to offer and finds his solace in not climbing but rather descending in class.  Since melodrama was “theater of the people,” the exposure of riches as ultimately futile and unfulfilling was no doubt cathartic to the audience.

Another convention Boucicault uses quite frequently is the “aside.”  In these speeches, characters directly address the audience and tell us what they are thinking, and it is understood that the other characters onstage do not hear these musings.  It is a convention almost unused today, probably because it is part of the melodramatic tradition that telegraphs everything to the audience that they need to know without having to overtax their mental faculties.  The play ends with a comical “slamming-door” routine, with different characters running under the stage with heads popping up through trap doors in the floor before the happy denouement.  Boucicault’s use of an attention-grabbing convention that brought a high-energy finale to his acts is something that is much older in origin but one that is still in use today.

“The Octoroon,” a five-act play premiering on December 6, 1859 at the Winter Garden Theater, New York (Thomson 133) is not given a running time by the author but it is presumed this would last somewhere around two hours, about the maximum length for a Boucicault play.  This play has many interesting qualities, and proved to be very successful for Boucicault.  Unusual in its downbeat ending, Boucicault was forced in Britain to rewrite the ending so that the title character lived!

The word “Octoroon” is no doubt unfamiliar to readers of today, and may have been so at the time the play was written.  Luckily, Boucicault gives the audience the information it needs in a speech by the title character (Zoe) in Act II:

“Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black – bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the flood…I’m an unclean thing – forbidden by the laws – I’m an Octoroon!” (Thomson 147).

George, a recently returned student from Europe, dares to profess his love for Zoe.  It is clear that in 1859 interracial romances were far from accepted in America.  To allow the plot to pass public opinion, having Zoe one-eighth black meant she could be played by a white actress and thus the point of interracial love could be made without being explicit.

Boucicault demonstrates a wonderful ear for writing dialect in this play.  The plantations of the deep South provide a rich mine of opportunity.  Read this speech by Pete, the old slave, out loud and hear how well Boucicault has captured the Negro dialect:

“Hey! laws a massey! why, clar out! drop dat banana!  I’ll murder dis yer crowd.  Dem little niggers is a judgment upon dis generation…It’s dem black trash, Mas’r George; dis ‘ere property wants claring – dem’s too numerous round; when I gets time, I’ll kill some on ‘em, sure!” (Thomson 135).

No doubt Boucicault spent time with people that would provide inspiration for his characters, journaling not only their dialect but their expressions as well.

Part of the fun of reading old plays is finding a seemingly modern invention being used as a major plot device.  In “The Octoroon,” a camera is used to not only solve a murder but also, in an uncharacteristic bit of subtle preaching to the audience, reveal that appearances can be deceiving.  An Indian character, Wahnotee, who speaks in typical “Ughs” and other presumably synthetic Indian syllables, is found at the scene of a murder, his tomahawk identified as the murder weapon.  What is unknown to the murderer is that the camera, an old style large-plate negative, slow exposure type, has captured him in the act of murdering Paul, a young black boy.  Naturally, prejudice amongst the whites leads them to the conclusion that Wahnotee is the murderer.  However, in true Columbo-like fashion, Salem Scudder, overseer of the Terrebonne plantation, presents the photographic proof that implicates the murderer (white former overseer M’Closky) and frees Wahnotee who exacts revenge on M’Closky, bringing instant justice to bear.  That the Indian character would be portrayed as heroic, and triumphant over the white man, shows an atypical point of view for the period that surprises the reader.

Boucicault could be extremely descriptive in his stage directions.  The climax of Act II is played out in description only, but sufficient for the actors to finish the act in an appropriately dramatic fashion:

(WAHTONEE runs on, pulls down apron – sees PAUL lying on ground – speaks to him – thinks he is shamming sleep – gesticulates and jabbers – goes to him, moves him with feet, then kneels down to rouse him – to his horror finds him dead – expresses great grief – raises his eyes – they fall upon the camera – rises with savage growl, seizes tomahawk, and smashes camera to pieces, then goes to PAUL – expresses grief, sorrow, and fondness, and takes him in his arms to carry him away – Tableau.)

Note that the act ends in a Tableau, or the actors freezing in position to create a stage picture that remains the last thing the audience sees before the next act begins.  This indeed is a very visual form of storytelling, and no doubt quite vivid in its day.  Given his penchant for portraying character roles, Boucicault appeared as Wahtonee in the initial run of “The Octoroon.”

What Boucicault discovered in adapting French melodrama for English audiences was that he could get a lot of mileage out of one play simply by swapping out names and locations in titles and dialogue that would localize the production.  For example, “The Poor of Liverpool” could be slightly rewritten and play in America as “The Poor of New York.”  Not only that, Boucicault could modify the names of towns anywhere so that the same play could appear all over England as “The Poor of Liverpool,” “The Poor of Leeds,” “The Poor of Dublin,” or anywhere else (Thomson 11).  In America, particularly, plays featuring Indian and frontier characters were especially popular as the West was still being opened up to eastward expansion.  The Gold Rush of 1848 supplied the kind of stories that would infuse American melodrama for the rest of the century.  What is interesting in Boucicault’s “The Octoroon” is the sympathetic way in which blacks and Indians are featured.  Though drawn stereotypically, these characters ultimately emerge as righteous and even heroic.

As if writing 400 plays was not Boucicault’s greatest legacy, one more lasting is worthy of that distinction.  Ironically, after having adapted many other authors’ works to create his own, Boucicault saw the problem that this might pose for his own income as others similarly adapted his plays.  In 1865, he fought for and won passage of an American copyright law that protected authors’ works performed in America from being plagiarized here or in other countries.  Edward Samuels, in an unused portion of his book “The Illustrated Story of Copyright,” unearthed some interesting quotes about Boucicault and his attitude toward copyright infringement: 

Although he was an advocate of performance rights for dramatists when he lived in the United States…he was also notorious for lifting the ideas, if not the plots, of others. He once boasted, "I am an emperor, and take what I think best for Art, whether it be a story from a book, a play from the French, an actor from a rival company." Charles Read, a collaborator, said, "Like Shakespeare and Molière the beggar steals everything he can lay his hands on, but he does it so deftly, so cleverly that I can't help condoning the theft." Lloyd Morris, author and drama critic, even suggested that it was this penchant that led Boucicault to be less generous in his advocacy of rights for foreign authors. "Naturally, Boucicault did not argue that the law should protect foreign playwrights, whose works he considered himself imperially privileged to pillage."

 

Boucicault spent his final years touring America as an acting teacher, and performing in his own plays with his third wife, Louise Thorndyke, 44 years his junior.  He died of pneumonia in 1890 and is buried in Hastings-on-Hudson, England.

Works Cited

 

Londre, Felicia Hardison. The History of World Theater. New York: Continuum. 1991.

Samuels, Edward. The Illustrated Story of Copyright. “The Railroad Scene: Daly v. Boucicault.” December 2000. <http://www.edwardsamuels.com/copyright/about/anecdotes/daly.html> 16 November 2005

Thomson, Peter. Plays by Dion Bouicault. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1984.

University of Kent Templeman Library. “The Boucicault Collections.” 2003.  <http://library.kent.ac.uk/library/special/html/specoll/bouc159.htm> 20 October 2005.

Wickham, Glynne. A History of the Theater. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1985.