Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini | Page 3

for something else which is his alone. Get out of your age as far as you can."
These young men were not quickly received, and they regarded the utilitarian spirit of the time as against them. To Stoddard Boker once confessed: "Were poetry forged upon the anvil, cut out with the axe, or spun in the mill, my heaven, how men would wonder at the process! What power, what toil, what ingenuity!"
Boker's correspondence with Stoddard began in a letter, dated September 5, 1849, announcing overtures made by the London Haymarket Theatre for his new tragedy, "Anne Boleyn," which he was contemplating sending them in sheets. "I have also the assurance," he announces, "that Miss Cushman will bring it out in this country, provided she thinks her powers adapted to it."
Boker's pen was energetic, and it moved at a gait which shows how fertile was his imagination. "The inseparables" cheered the way for each other in the face of official journalistic criticism. Taylor declared "Anne Boleyn" far in advance of "Calaynos," prophesying that it would last. "Go ahead, my dear poet," he admonishes, "it will soon be your turn to damn those who would willingly damn you." Together these friends were always planning to storm the citadel of public favour with poetry, but Boker seems to have been the only one to whom the theatre held out attraction. By August 12, 1850, he was sending news to Stoddard that "The Betrothal" would be staged the following month. In good spirits, he writes:
The manager is getting it up with unusual care and splendour. Spangles and red flannels flame through it from end to end. I even think of appearing before the curtain on horseback, nay, of making the whole performance equestrian, and of introducing a hippopotamus in the fifth act. What think you? Have you and your miserable lyrics ever known such glory? If the play should take here, you benighted New-Yorkers will be illuminated with it immediately after it has run its hundredth night in the city which is so proud of its son.
This was the second of his pieces to be given performance, "Anne Boleyn" never seeing the boards. "The Betrothal" was produced at the Philadelphia Walnut Street Theatre, on September 25, 1850, and opened in New York, on November 18 of the same year. Taylor wrote to its author, on December 4: "I saw the last night.... It is even better as an acting play than I had anticipated, but it was very badly acted. I have heard nothing but good of it, from all quarters." It was Elizabethan in tone, quite in the spirit of that romantic drama practised by such American authors as Willis, Sargent and others. How it was received when presented in London, during 1853, is reflected in Boker's letter to Stoddard, dated October 9, 1853:
I have read the Times notice of the "Betrothal." It is honey to most of the other newspaper criticisms.... Notwithstanding, and taking the accounts of my enemies for authority, the play was unusually successful with the audience on that most trying occasion, the first night.... The play stands a monument of English injustice. Mark you, it was not prejudice that caused the catastrophe; it was fear lest I should get a footing on their stage, of which "Calaynos" had given them timely warning.
"The Widow's Marriage," in manuscript, and never published, was accepted by Marshall, manager of the Walnut, and is noted by Boker, in a letter to Stoddard, October 12, 1852, the chief handicap confronting him being the inability to find someone suited to take the leading r?le. Stoddard's own comment was:
Whether [it] was ever produced I know not, but I should say not, for the part of the principal character, Lady Goldstraw, is one which no actress whom I remember could have filled to the satisfaction of her creator. The fault of this character (me judice) is that it is too good to be played on a modern stage. It ought to have been written for antiquity two hundred years ago.
Boker was right when he referred to himself as "prolific" at this time. He already had produced, in 1851, according to markings on the manuscript, a piece called "All the World a Mask," and he had written "The Podesta's Daughter," a dramatic sketch, issued, with "Miscellaneous Poems," in 1852. Toward the end of this year, he completed "Leonor de Guzman."
"Her history," he writes to Stoddard, on November 14, "you will find in Spanish Chronicles relating to the reigns of Alfonso XII of Castile and his son, Peter the Cruel. There are no such subjects for historical tragedy on earth as are to be found in the Spanish history of that period. I am so much in love with it that I design following up 'Leonor de Guzman' by 'Don Pedro'.