A British dramatist and actor; born in Dublin, Dec. 26, 1822; died in New York, Sept. 18, 1890. His first drama, “London Assurance,” was written before he was 19 years of age, and made him famous. He also attained celebrity as an actor and manager in England and the United States; established a school for acting and produced about 300 dramas, many of which were original and many adaptations from the French. He dramatized Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” which Joseph Jefferson enlarged; and produced a series of Irish dramas which were extraordinarily popular, such as: “The Colleen Bawn” (1860); “Arrah-na-Pogue” (1864); and “The Shaughraun” (1875); in which he played the principal parts. “Old Heads on Young Shoulders;” “The Corsican Brothers;” “The Streets of London;” “Flying Scud;” and “After Dark;” were among his later productions.

General

  That despicable mass of inanity. [“London Assurance.”]

  We have already noticed Mr. Dion Boucicault’s share in “Foul Play.” This collaboration gratified Charles Reade more thoroughly than any during his lifetime; and although he could chaff Mr. Boucicault as “a sly fox,” esteemed both his society and friendship very highly. On one occasion, when a remark was hazarded in disparagement of a drama by this gentleman, he turned contemptuously on the speaker with the query, “Will you find me another man in England who could write such a comedy?” Nor was his belief in Mr. Boucicault ever shaken—indeed, he envied his capacity for commanding both the tears and laughter, the astonishment and delight, of the Gallery.

  I remember that when Mr. Dion Boucicault originally produced the “Shaughraun”—it was at Wallack’s Theatre in New York ten or twelve years ago—there was an attempt to prove that he had taken his plot from an earlier Irish drama by Mr. Wybert Reeve. At first sight the similarity between the two plays was really striking, and parallel columns were erected with ease. But a closer investigation revealed that all that was common to these two plays was common to fifty other Irish plays, and that all that gave value to the “Shaughraun”—the humor, the humanity, the touches of pathos, the quick sense of character—was absent from the other play. There is a formula for the mixing of an Irish drama, and Mr. Reeve and Mr. Boucicault had each prepared his piece according to this formula, making due admixture of the Maiden-in-Distress, the Patriot-in-danger-of-his-Life, and the cowardly Informer, who have furnished forth many score plays since first the Red-Coats were seen in the Green Isle. Both dramatists had drawn from the common stock of types and incidents, and there was really no reason to believe that Mr. Boucicault was indebted to Mr. Reeve for anything, because Mr. Reeve had little in his play which had not been in twenty plays before, and which Mr. Boucicault could not have put together out of his recollections of these without any knowledge of that.

  Dion Boucicault brought the stage romanticism of Victor Hugo and Dumas down to our day. But the transit was not made in Victor Hugo’s vehicle. That which was a conviction with the Master, became an expedient with the imitator. To fix the status of this indefatigable worker, who was always felicitous without being fecund, is not an easy matter. His repertoire affects the student of stage literature now, like a long twilight which gets glory from what has departed. And yet it is in Dumas and Klopstock that we must find the prototypes of this inspired activity, rather than in Lope de Vega. If he was not endowed with that reflex of the Infinite, which creates by an inbreathing, he was at least gifted with the wonderful finite craft which can fashion by an onlaying. This is always the playwright’s function, in contradistinction to the dramatist’s. But Dion Boucicault had something more than the playwright’s craft. He possessed the swift instinct which apprehends the aberrations of the public pulse, and can seize and use for its own purposes those vague emotions which sweep over a community, and are at once irresistible and evanescent…. The Dion Boucicault of “London Assurance” is an unknown quantity. The Dion Boucicault of “The Colleen Bawn” is within the measurement of most of us. And here it should be said at once that “The Colleen Bawn” is probably the most romantic, as it was certainly the most successful, Irish play that had been written, up to the time of its production. The success was Dion Boucicault’s. The romance belonged to another…. He had produced “The Shaughraun.” Greater and nobler plays lie like wrecks all along the record. A more phenomenal public triumph cannot be mentioned…. It is a matter of approximate verification that Dion Boucicault received as his share of the profits of the “Shaughraun” over eight hundred thousand dollars.

  His dramas show little originality, being almost without exception built on some work, play, or romance previously existing.