Background
John Daly Burk was born in 1775 in Ireland and came to America in 1796, evidently a political refugee.
dramatist historian newspaperman
John Daly Burk was born in 1775 in Ireland and came to America in 1796, evidently a political refugee.
He was a student at Trinity College, Dublin.
John Burk was reputed to have attempted the rescue of a condemned political prisoner and then himself escaped the country in woman's clothes, supplied by a Miss Daly, whose name he added to his own in gratitude. He settled first in Boston, where, on October 6, 1796, he started a newspaper, the Polar Star and Boston Daily Advertiser. This venture lasted only six months. From Boston he went to New York and attempted the publication of another paper, the Time Piece. This also failed.
He then went to Petersburg, Virginia, where he finally settled. Here, on April 11, 1808, he was killed in a duel with a Frenchman named Coquebert. Burk's hot temper was probably the cause of the quarrel.
Burk was the author of A History of the Late War in Ireland (Philadelphia, 1799), "An Historical Essay on the Character and Antiquity of Irish Songs", and a four-volume History of Virginia. It was as a playwright, however, that he chiefly figured in American letters.
He was among the earliest to put an American battle scene on the stage, in Bunker Hill, or The Death of General Warren, produced first at the Haymarket Theatre, Boston, February 17, 1797, and at the John Street Theatre, New York, the following September. Burk apparently earned $2, 000 from the Boston engagement, a very considerable sum for a playwright in those days, and the play remained popular on such holidays as the Fourth of July for almost fifty years.
A full and interesting description of how the battle scene was staged will be found in a letter from Burk to the manager of the New York theatre. The play was full of inflated rhetoric and bombastic blank verse, to-day highly ludicrous. One character refers to nightingales singing in Boston. Of course Burk had no intention of doing this, and to tastes less fastidious than Adams's it did not seem that he had done so. The public of the day at any rate forgave the inflated rhetoric (if they did not enjoy it!) for the sake of the battle scene.
John Daly Burk was challenged to a duel by Felix Coquebert over comments he made in Powell's tavern, in Petersburg, in which he called the French "all a pack of rascals". The two fought at sunrise the following morning on Fleet's hill in Chesterfield County. Burk was shot through the heart at the second fire and died. In his will, he stated that he did not want to be interred in a church-yard, thus he was buried the following day with military honors in the family cemetery of his friend, General Joseph Jones at Cedar Grove near Petersburg.
Burk had an undoubted love for freedom and this was reflected in his plays, however crude.
Quotes from others about the person
President Adams saw the play in New York, and said to the manager, "My friend General Warren was a scholar and a gentleman, but your author has made him a bully and a blackguard. "
Professor Quinn calls this play one of the best of all our early American dramas. Joan, he says, is a human character and the verse rises to a respectable level of eloquence.
He married Christiana Borne Curtis, mother of Henry and Benjamin Curtis. They had one son, John Junius Burk, who later became a Judge.