I’m not a historian, so there will be no more about the Lincoln assassination from me. I'd rather write about Our American Cousin. Is there more to the last play that Lincoln saw than the fact that it was the last play that Lincoln saw?
As it turns out, yes.
The play’s author, Tom Taylor, had made a name for himself before entering American history books. Aside from working as a professor at Cambridge and an editor at Punch magazine, he also wrote (according to Wikipedia) about 100 plays. One of his best-known was The Ticket-of-Leave Man, one of the first plays to feature a detective, and the origin of the term “Hawkshaw” (a popular slang word for “detective” in the early 20th century). Our American Cousin was incredibly popular in its day, too, though more so with audiences than critics.
The play is a farce, and its plot as simple as the title suggests: an American visits his English cousins, and hilarity ensues. The American in question (Asa Trenchard) is prone to incomprehensible slang and inappropriate behaviour, but he has a good heart. He's a simple character, and the rest of the cast isn't much better: words like “shyster” or “idiot” are usually sufficient descriptions. The most three-dimensional is probably Abel Murcott, a legal clerk and struggling alcoholic, but even he ultimately falls flat because his struggles with the demon drink, though used for drama rather than comedy, are more discussed than depicted.
Interestingly, according to journalist/playwright Richard Byrne’s essay "Our American Cousin: A Sort of Defense," the play was originally written as a melodrama, and only later rewritten into a comedy by actress and pioneering female theatre manager Laura Keene. That doesn’t surprise me; many of the subplots involving serious issues like poverty or (as noted above) alcoholism. Unfortunately, those plotlines are all as under-developed as the cast, with a beginning and an end but little in the way of a middle, which makes me suspect that they were trimmed down to make more room for jokes. The comedic routines here don't always grow organically from the plot so much as ram themselves in wherever they can. The end result reminds me of a less skilful predecessor to the sort of comedies the Marx Brothers would later do so well: funny characters bumble around doing bits in the middle of a serious, but unremarkable, narrative. To judge Our American Cousin properly, you have to judge it the way you would judge a Marx Brothers movie: by asking if it's funny.
Unfortunately for us, Our American Cousin only really became popular because of Edward Askew Sothern’s legendary portrayal of the Dogberry-like Lord Dundreary, a man whose intellect could earn pity at the Drones Club, and probably the only character in the play worth discussing in detail. Dundreary was originally such a minor role that Sothern almost turned it down, but the character and actor ultimately managed to steal the show with his physical comedy and memorable malapropisms, such as "birds of a feather gather no moss." For a time, such sayings were known as Dundrearyisms. (Which means that Tom Taylor helped coin at least two short-lived words during the course of his career--three if you count “Dundrearies,” a style of long sideburns, separately.) Dundreary himself even starred in a handful of sequels, including a novel, Lord Dundreary and His Brother Sam, which seems to have been written anonymously but is available on Amazon and Google Books.
Whether the play itself, sans Sothern, is actually funny is, of course, a matter of personal taste (though, in my experience, most of the people who read it today say that it is not). There's a bit of physical comedy, but that does not work very well in a script. That leaves readers with the verbal comedy, which includes puns and other types of silly jokes, but nothing especially clever. Admittedly, I like this sort of simple, vaudeville-type humour, but I always feel that it relies on a good delivery.
This is an actor's play. The sort that calls for improvisation and uses the word “business” as a stage direction. The aforementioned "birds of a feather gather no moss" quote wasn’t even in the text that I read, though it was mentioned in the introduction to point out that many of the play’s beloved Dundrearyisms are missing. Sothern's performance was never recorded (audio recording was invented a few years before his death, and film many years after) so no one alive today will ever be able to experience him for themselves. The play is still occasionally performed today, and someday someone may well perform Dundreary well enough to return him to the spotlight. But it won't be Sothern. Everything that made Our American Cousin such a huge hit in the 1800s will stay in the 1800s.
I guess that I need to turn back around to my original question, which is where this play stands without Lincoln. Is it worth reading? Maybe--if you like cheesy humour, it provides a nice guilty pleasure. Or, if you’re interested in archaic popular culture, you’ll probably want to meet Lord Dundreary. But, on the whole, there’s little literary merit or serious entertainment value.
You can read Project Gutenberg's version of the play here. Or, if you'd rather hear actors read the lines, you can find lostplays.com's production here.
