Dion Boucicault: showman and Shaughraun

Abstract

Dion Boucicault’s three Irish plays: The Colleen Bawn (1860), Arrah-na-Pogue (1864) and The Shaughraun (1874), while not critically significant, owe their perennial popularity to their appeal to Irish romantic nationalism and to their memorable character types. While Boucicault’s character Myles Murphy or Myles na gCopaleen (Myles of the Ponies), an example of his native Irish hero, was the first of a series of rogue heroes that John Millington Synge developed in his character of Christy Mahon, Boucicault also owes the character of Myles to American native heroes like Sam Patch, Davy Crockett and Mose the Bowery B’hoy. While the plays are not great drama, they are good theatre and a less self-conscious national theatre has found room for both Boucicault and Synge.