This morning, I gave a lecture to our second year students on the nineteenth-century playwright and actor, Dion Boucicault. The lecture was given as part of our level 2 module, Crossing the Water: Transatlantic Literary Relations, but it could easily have appeared on one of our numerous Victorian Literature and Culture modules. My Victorianist colleagues Prof. Joe Kember and Prof. John Plunkett are very interested in popular forms of entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of which Boucicault’s body of work (in “melodrama”) is an excellent example.
Dion Boucicault was an Irish-born playwright who was enormously successful in the nineteenth century theatre on both sides of the Atlantic. His first hit play was London Assurance in 1841. Our students study two of Boucicault’s plays: The Octoroon (first performed in New York in 1859) and The Shaughraun (first performed in New York in 1874). The plays fit really well with the themes of the module, which is concerned with the transatlantic circulation of authors, print culture and performances from the nineteenth century to today. It encourages students to consider how such works transcend national boundaries and configurations. The concerns of the module dovetail with my own research interests in the Irish Atlantic and the figure of the “Returned Yank” in the cultural imagination.
The question of genre is very important to the study of Boucicault. I draw students’ attention to the fact that, despite the seeming local specificities of the two plays (the one set in Louisiana during the time of slavery; the other set in rural Ireland), there are numerous similarities between the two, similarities that owe themselves to the overarching melodramatic form so beloved of Boucicault.
Boucicault has enjoyed something of a revival on both the stage and in scholarly contexts over the past several years. In 2004, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin – Ireland’s national theatre – revived The Shaughraun for its centenary celebrations, where it received mixed reviews. The staging of the play was somewhat controversial because the Abbey Theatre had been founded with a mission to do away with “buffoonery and easy sentiment,” the latter defining features (some would argue) of The Shaughraun.
The Octoroon has also been subject to re-staging and rethinking. The African American playwright, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, adapted and reframed Boucicault’s work in a play renamed as An Octoroon which premiered in New York in 2014 and was later staged in London at the National Theatre in 2018.