John Daly

July 20, 1838 (age 60)

Plymouth, North Carolina, United States

Daly belonged to amateur organizations like the Murdoch and Burton Associations, corresponding to the Little Theatre groups of a later time, and he caught the inspiration of the great romantic actors and the sterling romantic plays which were America’s contribution to the mid-century theatre and drama. He rarely acted, for his interest lay from the first in the construction and direction of plays. As early as 1856, he rented a hall in Brooklyn and produced without a cent of capital an entertainment, varying from Toodles to Macbeth. The details of this performance, related in the biography of Daly by his brother, who was his constant companion, are an epitome of his later career of alternate success and failure, met with courage, resourcefulness, and unquenchable confidence. Ten years spent as a dramatic critic on the weekly Sunday Courier, during which time he also wrote for the Sun, the Times, the Express and the Citisen, gave him a valuable experience, and he began his play-writing while his critical work was in progress. After the usual rejections, came his first success, Leah the Forsaken, a free adaptation from the German play, Deborah, by S. H. von Mosenthal. Leah was first played at the Howard Athenaeum in Boston, December 8, 1862, and Kate Bateman carried the leading role into favor at home and abroad. During the sixties, Daly experimented in adaptations from the French and German and in dramatizations of novels like Griffith Gaunt and Pickwick Papers. Under the Gaslight, his first surviving original play, which was also the occasion of his first independent production, was performed at the New York Theatre, August 12, 1867. A melodrama of New York life, with realistic settings in the police courts and on the wharves of the North River, it introduced to the American stage the rescue, by the heroine, of a person bound to a railroad track in the path of an onrushing train. It proved to be one of the most popular of melodramas, and when played in London in 1868, inspired Dion Boucicault to his imitation of this sensation, in After Dark. Subsequent litigation established the exclusive right of Daly to this theatrical property in the United States. Another vigorous melodrama, A Flash of Lightning, produced at the Broadway Theatre, June 10, 1868, revealed in its burning of a Hudson River steamboat a source of danger in the construction of real boats. The Red Scarf, played first at Conway’s Park Theatre in Brooklyn, in 1869, contained the same element of suspense as Under the Gaslight, the hero in this case being bound on a log about to be sawed in two. In August of 1869, having leased the Fifth Avenue Theatre, he began to establish his own company, including Fanny Davenport, Mrs. Gilbert, and James Lewis. Here he produced the best of the older English comedies of manners and laid the foundations for his superb productions of Shakespeare. Of even more significance, Daly gave Bronson Howard his first opportunity and produced Saratoga in thus aiding the establishment of the profession of play-writing in America, at a time when managers were looking almost exclusively to foreign sources for their plays. It was not at his own theatre, however, but at the Olympic that his best play, Horizon, was performed, March 21, a drama of Western American life, with its clear-cut characters and natural language. He next attacked a growing social problem in Divorce, one of the great successes of the Fifth Avenue Theatre, where it began its run of two hundred nights on September 5, 1871. Here Daly adapted certain ideas from an English novel, Trollope’s He Knezu He Was Right, while changing them so as to apply to native conditions. On January 1, 1873 the Fifth Avenue Theatre burned. Daly, undaunted, leased the old New York Theatre, and in three weeks opened it as Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre. Booth, Wallack, Fechter, Palmer, and Jarrett were members with him. For a time Daly conducted the Grand Opera House and when the New Fifth Avenue Theatre was built for him on Twenty-eighth St. near Broadway, and opened on December 3, 1873, he found the burden of three theatres too great. He therefore confined his efforts to the new house, which he conducted until 1877. Roughing It, an amusing travesty on the life described by Bret Harte and Mark Twain, was put on at the Grand Opera House, February 18, 1873, and Pique, one of his most successful plays, was produced at the New Fifth Avenue Theatre, December 14, 1875. To a theme derived from Florence Maryatt’s novel, Her Lord and Master, that of a woman marrying out of pique because her lover is faithless, Daly added that of the search among the purlieus of the city for a stolen child, probably based upon the famous abduction of Charley Ross. The last of his original plays, The Dark City, produced September 10, 1877, a melodrama from which he hoped great results, failed, and the consequent financial loss forced him to give up his theatre. After his visit to England in 1878-79, where he established relations with managers and actors that laid the foundations of his future successes, he turned the Old Broadway Theatre into Daly’s Theatre. This was long to be the home of the remarkable company he assembled, including John Drew, Ada Rehan, and Otis Skinner. With the opening of the new theatre on September 18, 1879 Daly ceased writing original plays and devoted his talents to the adaptation of French and German drama. His energies were spent largely, too, in the direction of the numerous plays with which he sought to give variety to his audiences. His correspondence reveals his efforts to procure the works of native playwrights like Bronson Howard, whose adaptation from Molière, under the title of Wives, was one of the first successes of the theatre. But more and more he grew to depend upon his own adaptations, many of which were radical alterations of the originals. Among the French playwrights, Sardou and Dumas were his favorites and with one exception, Delmonico’s; or Larks up the Hudson (1871), he preserved the French scene when he dealt with the works of these two dramatists. About 1880 he began to transfer the scenes and characters to American conditions, perhaps because he was dealing with the work of less well-known playwrights. Probably his greatest successes were Hazardous Ground (1867) from Sardou’s Nos Bons Villageois; Monsieur Alphonse (1874) from Dumas (fils); Frou Frou (1870) from Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy; and The Lottery of Love (1888) from Les Surprises du Divorce by Alexandre Bisson and Antony Mars. In his adaptations from the German, Daly usually changed the scene to America. His adaptations of German comedy were almost invariably successful, among the most popular being Seven-Twenty-Eight; or, Casting the Boomerang, from Der Schwabcnstreich, of Franz Von Schonthan; A Night Off (1885), from Dcr Raub der Sabinerrinnen, by the Von Schonthan brothers; The Countess Gucki (1896) by F. Von Schonthan, which was written for Ada Rehan and is unique among the comedies from the German in that it preserves the foreign atmosphere. Daly took his company to London in 1884, playing at Toole’s Theatre and being especially successful with his representation of Colley Cibber’s She Would and She Would Not. In 1886, after again visiting London, he invaded the Continent, taking to Germany the first Englishspeaking company of any importance for nearly three hundred years. His reception in Berlin and Paris was only moderately enthusiastic. On a third foreign trip, in 1888, the most significant event was the production of The Taming of the Shrew, probably the first time a comedy of Shakespeare had been produced in Europe by an American company. Paris was not captured by this performance, but in 1891 As You Like It and The School for Scandal were received there with greater enthusiasm. The position which Daly had achieved by 1891 is evidenced by Tennyson’s choice of him to adapt his dramatic poem, The Foresters, for the stage. It was a thing of beauty when produced at Daly’s Theatre, March 17, 1892, especially noteworthy being the performance of Ada Rehan as Maid Marian. On June 27, 1893, Daly opened his own theatre in London and, after varying fortunes, produced Twelfth Night for one hundred nights. He continued his productions of Shakespeare after his return to America, The Tempest in 1897 being especially effective. Difficulties arising with the lessor of his theatre in London, he made a business trip abroad in the course of which he died in Paris on June 7, 1899. A martinet in his theatre, he demanded of his company the loyalty he gave them. Discriminating in his judgments of actors, he developed many who in their opinion outgrew the position he allowed them and passed from his control. The result was a standard which helped to raise the general level of taste, and his productions of Shakespeare alone would render his position secure. His place in American dramatic history has suffered from his unwillingness to publish his plays. Many of them were privately printed, but those which were published, Under the Gaslight (1867), Griffith Gaunt (1868), Frou Frou (1870), Seven-Twenty-Eight (1897), and A Night Off (1897), do not represent him at his best. In Horizon, Divorce, Pique, and in his more delicate interpretations of foreign comedy, he proved himself a skilled dramatist. How hard he worked on his adaptations is attested by Otis Skinner who tells us that when Pinero’s Lords and Commons was failing, Daly spent his nights adapting Love on Crutches, from Heinrich Stobitzer’s Ihre Ideale, in order to save the season. Daly’s biography, Woffington, A Tribute to the Actress and the Woman (1888), reveals him in another aspect of his writing. How thoroughly he knew the dramatic past of America and how he scorned the critical stupidity which demands that American drama shall limit itself to the parochial, is revealed in his article “The American Dramatist”.

John Augustin Daly Edit Profile

playwright producer

Background

John Augustin Daly was born on July 20, 1838 in Plymouth, Plymouth, North Carolina, United States. He was the son of Captain Denis Daly, a ship-owner, and Elizabeth (Duffcy) Daly, the daughter of a lieutenant in the British army. Early left a widow with two boys, his mother came to New York City, where Augustin grew up with a passion for the theatre.

Education

Daly was educated at Norfolk, Virginia, and in the public schools of New York City.

Career

Daly belonged to amateur organizations like the Murdoch and Burton Associations, corresponding to the Little Theatre groups of a later time, and he caught the inspiration of the great romantic actors and the sterling romantic plays which were America’s contribution to the mid-century theatre and drama. He rarely acted, for his interest lay from the first in the construction and direction of plays.

As early as 1856, he rented a hall in Brooklyn and produced without a cent of capital an entertainment, varying from Toodles to Macbeth. The details of this performance, related in the biography of Daly by his brother, who was his constant companion, are an epitome of his later career of alternate success and failure, met with courage, resourcefulness, and unquenchable confidence.

Ten years spent as a dramatic critic on the weekly Sunday Courier, during which time he also wrote for the Sun, the Times, the Express and the Citisen, gave him a valuable experience, and he began his play-writing while his critical work was in progress. After the usual rejections, came his first success, Leah the Forsaken, a free adaptation from the German play, Deborah, by S. H. von Mosenthal. Leah was first played at the Howard Athenaeum in Boston, December 8, 1862, and Kate Bateman carried the leading role into favor at home and abroad.

During the sixties, Daly experimented in adaptations from the French and German and in dramatizations of novels like Griffith Gaunt and Pickwick Papers. Under the Gaslight, his first surviving original play, which was also the occasion of his first independent production, was performed at the New York Theatre, August 12, 1867.

A melodrama of New York life, with realistic settings in the police courts and on the wharves of the North River, it introduced to the American stage the rescue, by the heroine, of a person bound to a railroad track in the path of an onrushing train. It proved to be one of the most popular of melodramas, and when played in London in 1868, inspired Dion Boucicault to his imitation of this sensation, in After Dark. Subsequent litigation established the exclusive right of Daly to this theatrical property in the United States. Another vigorous melodrama, A Flash of Lightning, produced at the Broadway Theatre, June 10, 1868, revealed in its burning of a Hudson River steamboat a source of danger in the construction of real boats. The Red Scarf, played first at Conway’s Park Theatre in Brooklyn, in 1869, contained the same element of suspense as Under the Gaslight, the hero in this case being bound on a log about to be sawed in two.

In August of 1869, having leased the Fifth Avenue Theatre, he began to establish his own company, including Fanny Davenport, Mrs. Gilbert, and James Lewis. Here he produced the best of the older English comedies of manners and laid the foundations for his superb productions of Shakespeare.

Of even more significance, Daly gave Bronson Howard his first opportunity and produced Saratoga in thus aiding the establishment of the profession of play-writing in America, at a time when managers were looking almost exclusively to foreign sources for their plays. It was not at his own theatre, however, but at the Olympic that his best play, Horizon, was performed, March 21, a drama of Western American life, with its clear-cut characters and natural language. He next attacked a growing social problem in Divorce, one of the great successes of the Fifth Avenue Theatre, where it began its run of two hundred nights on September 5, 1871. Here Daly adapted certain ideas from an English novel, Trollope’s He Knezu He Was Right, while changing them so as to apply to native conditions.

On January 1, 1873 the Fifth Avenue Theatre burned. Daly, undaunted, leased the old New York Theatre, and in three weeks opened it as Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre. Booth, Wallack, Fechter, Palmer, and Jarrett were members with him. For a time Daly conducted the Grand Opera House and when the New Fifth Avenue Theatre was built for him on Twenty-eighth St. near Broadway, and opened on December 3, 1873, he found the burden of three theatres too great. He therefore confined his efforts to the new house, which he conducted until 1877.

Roughing It, an amusing travesty on the life described by Bret Harte and Mark Twain, was put on at the Grand Opera House, February 18, 1873, and Pique, one of his most successful plays, was produced at the New Fifth Avenue Theatre, December 14, 1875. To a theme derived from Florence Maryatt’s novel, Her Lord and Master, that of a woman marrying out of pique because her lover is faithless, Daly added that of the search among the purlieus of the city for a stolen child, probably based upon the famous abduction of Charley Ross. The last of his original plays, The Dark City, produced September 10, 1877, a melodrama from which he hoped great results, failed, and the consequent financial loss forced him to give up his theatre.

After his visit to England in 1878-79, where he established relations with managers and actors that laid the foundations of his future successes, he turned the Old Broadway Theatre into Daly’s Theatre. This was long to be the home of the remarkable company he assembled, including John Drew, Ada Rehan, and Otis Skinner. With the opening of the new theatre on September 18, 1879 Daly ceased writing original plays and devoted his talents to the adaptation of French and German drama.

His energies were spent largely, too, in the direction of the numerous plays with which he sought to give variety to his audiences. His correspondence reveals his efforts to procure the works of native playwrights like Bronson Howard, whose adaptation from Molière, under the title of Wives, was one of the first successes of the theatre. But more and more he grew to depend upon his own adaptations, many of which were radical alterations of the originals.

Among the French playwrights, Sardou and Dumas were his favorites and with one exception, Delmonico’s; or Larks up the Hudson (1871), he preserved the French scene when he dealt with the works of these two dramatists.

About 1880 he began to transfer the scenes and characters to American conditions, perhaps because he was dealing with the work of less well-known playwrights.

Probably his greatest successes were Hazardous Ground (1867) from Sardou’s Nos Bons Villageois; Monsieur Alphonse (1874) from Dumas (fils); Frou Frou (1870) from Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy; and The Lottery of Love (1888) from Les Surprises du Divorce by Alexandre Bisson and Antony Mars.

In his adaptations from the German, Daly usually changed the scene to America. His adaptations of German comedy were almost invariably successful, among the most popular being Seven-Twenty-Eight; or, Casting the Boomerang, from Der Schwabcnstreich, of Franz Von Schonthan; A Night Off (1885), from Dcr Raub der Sabinerrinnen, by the Von Schonthan brothers; The Countess Gucki (1896) by F. Von Schonthan, which was written for Ada Rehan and is unique among the comedies from the German in that it preserves the foreign atmosphere.

Daly took his company to London in 1884, playing at Toole’s Theatre and being especially successful with his representation of Colley Cibber’s She Would and She Would Not.

In 1886, after again visiting London, he invaded the Continent, taking to Germany the first Englishspeaking company of any importance for nearly three hundred years.

His reception in Berlin and Paris was only moderately enthusiastic. On a third foreign trip, in 1888, the most significant event was the production of The Taming of the Shrew, probably the first time a comedy of Shakespeare had been produced in Europe by an American company.

Paris was not captured by this performance, but in 1891 As You Like It and The School for Scandal were received there with greater enthusiasm.

The position which Daly had achieved by 1891 is evidenced by Tennyson’s choice of him to adapt his dramatic poem, The Foresters, for the stage. It was a thing of beauty when produced at Daly’s Theatre, March 17, 1892, especially noteworthy being the performance of Ada Rehan as Maid Marian.

On June 27, 1893, Daly opened his own theatre in London and, after varying fortunes, produced Twelfth Night for one hundred nights. He continued his productions of Shakespeare after his return to America, The Tempest in 1897 being especially effective. Difficulties arising with the lessor of his theatre in London, he made a business trip abroad in the course of which he died in Paris on June 7, 1899. A martinet in his theatre, he demanded of his company the loyalty he gave them. Discriminating in his judgments of actors, he developed many who in their opinion outgrew the position he allowed them and passed from his control. The result was a standard which helped to raise the general level of taste, and his productions of Shakespeare alone would render his position secure. His place in American dramatic history has suffered from his unwillingness to publish his plays. Many of them were privately printed, but those which were published, Under the Gaslight (1867), Griffith Gaunt (1868), Frou Frou (1870), Seven-Twenty-Eight (1897), and A Night Off (1897), do not represent him at his best. In Horizon, Divorce, Pique, and in his more delicate interpretations of foreign comedy, he proved himself a skilled dramatist. How hard he worked on his adaptations is attested by Otis Skinner who tells us that when Pinero’s Lords and Commons was failing, Daly spent his nights adapting Love on Crutches, from Heinrich Stobitzer’s Ihre Ideale, in order to save the season. Daly’s biography, Woffington, A Tribute to the Actress and the Woman (1888), reveals him in another aspect of his writing. How thoroughly he knew the dramatic past of America and how he scorned the critical stupidity which demands that American drama shall limit itself to the parochial, is revealed in his article “The American Dramatist”.

Achievements

Daly was one of the most influential figures in theatre world of his time. He formed the first organization among the producing managers of New York, to avoid cutthroat competition and to provide for the loaning of players to each other.