Introduction

Melodrama dominated American drama in the post–Civil War period as managers sought to attract a large popular audience by offering spectacle, sensational plots, and topical subjects. Success was measured by the box office. The ability to anticipate and satisfy popular taste, then as now, was difficult and required from playwrights a keen sensitivity to changes in the social and moral order as well as skill in crafting their plots in broad strokes to hold the attention of the public. Playwrights responded to and influenced public taste, shaping the experiences of the spectator in an ongoing and interactive process.

Arthur Hobson Quinn in his history of American drama credits Augustin Daly with laying the foundations for the post–Civil War American drama in the 1860s and 1870s, but one can argue that these foundations were established in the decade before the Civil War as the public began to abandon the standard repertory of the American stock company – Shakespearean revivals, eighteenth-century English classics, and nineteenth-century pseudo-Elizabethan romantic tragedies – in favor of more contemporary dramatic fare. Several milestones appear important. The success of George L. Aiken’s dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1853 and afterward suggested to managers that a fortune was to be made from plays that dealt with contemporary events and dramatized subjects of concern to most people, especially if they included sensational scenes such as Eliza’s crossing the Ohio River on blocks of ice. Also the new sensational French drama, especially Dumas fils’s La Dame aux camélias (The Lady of the Camellias), which, as Camille, Matilda Heron popularized at Wallack’s in 1857, made old war horses such as James Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius, and Bulwer-Lytton’s The Lady of Lyons and Richelieu seem old-fashioned.