The Hibernian Experience: John Brougham's Irish-American Plays

Abstract

John Brougham (1810-1880), America's most prolific dramatist, left over 160 identifiable scripts. He was also leading nineteenth-century actor in England, Ireland, and the United States; intermittently theatrical manager in Boston and New York; an embattled comic journalist; and author of numerous chauvinistic stories and poems about Ireland. Yet just over century since his death, he remains virtually unknown to the present generation of playgoers, readers, and even scholars. Arthur Hobson Quinn's mandarin History of the Drama (1923) cites Brougham as one who simply followed a British stage tradition and did not respond instinctively to themes.1 Quinn's pervasive nativist, elitist bias and post-Victorian predilection for stage-realism conditioned him to deprecate the Irish-American author, misunderstand his practiced comedic artifice, and even ignore his patriotic Revolutionary melodramas. Brougham lived and worked, wrote and published, in the United States fully thirty-three years over half his adult life but that wasn't enough for Quinn. The single major factor contributing to the scholarly neglect of Brougham's topical burlesques and multi-ethnic urban comedies probably has been Quinn's pioneering, subjective, influential chapter, American Comedy Types, 1825-1860, whose fabricated gallery of native characters and inclusive genre hierarchy have since hardened into unassailable critical mythology. It is noteworthy that, whereas Quinn's idiosyncratic essay includes no Irish immigrant characters, Brougham's 1850s social comedies contain no stage Yankees. Both Quinn and Constance Rourke, the author of Humor (1931), were Irish-surname Americans; but in their amalgamationist writings, Irish-American authors and IrishAmerican literary types have been undervalued or simply left out as is the case in regard to the work of John Brougham. His solid contributions to Irish-American immigrant literature, in particular, deserve to be better known.