Renowned as the Irish Shakespeare, actor/manager/playwright Dionysius Lardner Boucicault's (pronounced boo siko) definite birth date is unknown but it is generally agreed that he was born either on 26 December 1820 or 20 December 1822 in Dublin, Ireland. His mother, Anne - the sister of poet and playwright George Darly, had married Samuel Smith Boursiquot in 1813 and was divorced in 1819, which led to doubts about Boucicault's paternity, with the majority of scholars agreeing that it was most likely that his true father was his guardian, Dr. Dion Dionysius Lardner, for whom he was named.
Boucicault was educated in Dublin until 1830 when he travelled to London with Dr Lardner, where at 16 he attended the University of London to study Civil Engineering. 1838 saw Boucicault join Cheltenham's Theatre Royal company under the stage name of Lee Moreton, and the production of his first play, A Legend of the Devil's Dyke(1838), at Brighton's Theatre Royal. This combination of actor and playwright continued throughout his career. His second play, which ran for sixty-nine performances, London Assurance (1841) was very successful and established Boucicault as a dramatist. During this period of England's Theatre, London manager's preferred to produce English versions of successful French plays. Boucicault travelled to France in search of plots returning to England in 1848 after the death of his first wife, Anne Guidot, to begin producing the extremely popular, ingeniously constructed play adaptations that he is most well known for. As a dramatist Boucicault's particular skill lay in weaving diverse incidents together into a swiftly moving and exciting plot composed of scenes of pathos, passion, or humour with characters well defined by his fresh and racy, for its time, dialogue.
In 1853 he eloped to America with Charles Keen's adopted daughter, actress Agnes Robertson where they both acted on the stage as well as on tour in a road company that Boucicault inaugurated. His plays continued to be successful and it was during this time that he wrote The Octoroon (1859) which dealt with the morality of the slave trade in the Southern states, Colleen Bawn (1860), Arrah-na-Pogue (1864) and The Shaughraun (1874) a play concerned about the Fenian uprising. Many of Boucicault's plays dealt with the social crises of his day but it was his employment of theatrical tricks which led to his coining the phrase ‘sensation drama'. Compared to many of the later sensation melodramas, Boucicault's sensation plays are quite tame: they were merely ordinary domestic melodramas, featuring one physically elaborate and thrilling scene dependent for success largely on stage mechanism, for example; moving scenery in The Shaghraun. Following the recipe for success that ‘sensation drama' brought, Boucicault would use trains, horses, fires and avalanches to rivet his audience. However, with the rise of realism and the emergence of Ibsen and G. B. Shaw, his work fell out of fashion. In 1885 he bigamously left his wife to elope to Australia with Louise Thorndyke, an actress about twenty years his junior. After a stint at journalism Boucicault accepted a teaching position at an acting school in New York. He died in his wife's arms on 18 September 1890.
During his lifetime, Boucicault had written and adapted more than 132 plays, he was a theatre owner and stage manager who introduced innovative safety and fireproofing features for theatres and scenery. Boucicault also led the way when he made an historic agreement with Benjamin Webster, manager at Adelphi, to share the risk by sharing the profits instead of receiving a down payment for his manuscript Colleen Bawn.
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