Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini | Page 4

The present tragedy, according to the judgment of Leland, is the very best play I have written, both for the closet and the stage. Perhaps I am too ready to agree with him, but long before he said it I had formed the same judgment."
This tragedy was performed at the Philadelphia Walnut Street Theatre, on October 3, 1853, and at the New York Broadway Theatre, on April 24, 1854. Boker wrote to his friends, showing his customary concern about an actress skilled enough for the r?le of his heroine. When, finally, for the Philadelphia premi��re, Julia Dean was decided upon, he thus expressed his verdict to Stoddard, after the opening performance: "Miss Dean, as far as her physique would admit, played the part admirably, and with a full appreciation of all those things which you call its beauties."
During these years of correspondence with his friends, Boker was determining to himself the distinction between poetic and dramatic style.
"Seriously, Dick," he writes to Stoddard, on October 6, 1850, "there is, to my mind, no English diction for your purposes equal to Milton's in his minor poems. Of course any man would be an intensified ass who should attempt to reach the diction of the 'Paradise Lost', or aspire to the tremendous style of Shakespeare. You must not confound things, though. A Lyric diction is one thing--a Dramatic diction is another, requiring the utmost force and conciseness of expression,--and Epic diction is still another; I conceive it to be something between the Lyric and Dramatic, with all the luxuriance of the former, and all the power of the latter."
He must have written to Taylor in the same vein, for, in a letter from the latter, there is assurance that he fully understands what a slow growth dramatic style must be. But Boker was not wholly wed to theatrical demands; he still approached the stage in the spirit of the poet who was torn between loyalty to poetic indirectness, and necessity for direct dialogue. On January 12, 1853, he writes to Stoddard:
Theatricals are in a fine state in this country; every inducement is offered to me to burn my plays as fast as I write them. Yet, what can I do? If I print my plays, the actors take them up, butcher, alter and play them, without giving me so much as a hand in my own damnation. This is something beyond even heavenly rigour; and so I proceed to my own destruction, with the proud consciousness that, at all events, it is my own act. _�� propos_, have you ever read the English acting copy of my "Calaynos"? A viler thing was never concocted from like materials.
Whether or not the play, "The Bankrupt," preceded or followed the writing of "Francesca da Rimini" in 1853, we have no way of determining; but it would seem that it progressed no further in its stage career than in manuscript form, it being the only play on a modern theme attempted by Boker. Then, it seems, he was hot on the trail of the Francesca love story told in Dante, and used by so many writers in drama and poetry. It is this play, conceded to be his best, which is included in the present collection, and which calls for analysis and history by itself.
Taylor's collection of "Poems at Home and Abroad," dedicated to Boker in 1855, suggests that the two must have continually talked over the possibilities of gathering their best effusions in book form. Did not Taylor write, as early as June 30, 1850, "You must come out in the Fall with a volume of poems. Stoddard will, and so, I think, will I. You can get a capital volume, with your 'Song', 'Sir John', 'Goblet', and other things.... The publishing showmen would of course parade our wonderful qualities, and the snarling critics in the crowd would show their teeth; but we would be as unmoved as the wax statues of Parkman and Webster, except that there might now and then be a sly wink at each other, when nobody was looking." The two friends had been separated for some time, while Taylor wandered over the face of the globe, writing from Cairo, in the shadow of the pyramids, and exclaiming, in Constantinople (July 18, 1852), "There is a touch of the East in your nature, George."
In 1856, Boker prepared his two volumes of "Plays and Poems" for the press. He had won considerable reputation as a sonneteer, and this was further increased by the tradition that Daniel Webster had quoted him at a state dinner in Washington. As yet he was merely a literary poet, and a literary dramatist whose name is usually linked with that Philadelphia group discussed in Vol. II of this collection.[A]
Writing of the Philadelphia of 1868, Leland says:
[It was] "the