Background
John Augustin Daly was born on July 20, 1838 in Plymouth, North Carolina, United States of Captain Denis Daly a sea-captain and ship owner, and of Elizabeth.
dramatic critic playwright producer
John Augustin Daly was born on July 20, 1838 in Plymouth, North Carolina, United States of Captain Denis Daly a sea-captain and ship owner, and of Elizabeth.
He was educated at Norfolk, Virginia, and in the public schools of New York City.
At age 21 he became dramatic critic for The Courier in New York (1859 - 1869). He began his career as an adapter of plays with a melodrama based on the German Leah the Forsaken (1862). He later turned to the work of French authors, especially Victorien Sardou and Alexandre Dumas. In all, he wrote, altered, or adapted some 90 plays which reached the stage. Daly made his debut as a producer in 1867 with his first original play, Under the Gaslight, a febrile melodrama in which the heroine saves a wounded soldier from being crushed by an onrushing locomotive. In 1869 he opened his first theater in New York, the Fifth Avenue (1869 - 1877). Ten years later he established his well-known stock company in Daly's Theatre, Broadway, and it flourished with a membership that included John Drew, Ada Rehan, E. L. Davenport, and Fanny Davenport. In 1888 Daly took his production of The Taming of the Shrew to London; the event was noteworthy because it was the first presentation of a Shakespearean comedy in Europe by a company from the United States. Tennyson chose Daly to adapt The Foresters to the stage (1891). Two years later, Ada Rehan triumphed in London under his management as Rosalind in As You Like It. Both in New York and in London, Daly's first nights were important dramatic and social events. Daly's original plays included the melodrama A Flash of Lightning (1868), the New England drama The Red Scarf (1869), the frontier play Horizon (1871), Divorce (1871), and The Dark City (1877). In 1873 he brought all the rival New York managers into an association to eliminate cutthroat competition, thus planting the seeds of the later theatrical trusts. More than any theater man of his day he lifted the theatrical standard of his time; and although his partiality for adaptations of foreign plays and his standards of playwriting did not rise above his time, he made genuine attempts to bring literary talent to the theater, interesting Mark Twain, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and Henry James in the drama.