Both as an American actor and dramatist, John Brougham brought a copious amount of farces, burlesques, curtain pieces, adaptations of novels and stories to the stage. He experimented with virtually every genre popular in the theater in the nineteenth century, including reviews, melodramas, and "local dramas," all but a few pieces written for American audiences and produced in American theaters. With the exception of Dion Boucicault, Brougham was the most prolific playwright of the nineteenth century,having written 126 dramatic pieces during his thirty-three-year career in the United States.

Brougham first came to America in 1842 when he was thirty-two years old. Born in Dublin 9 May 1810, he was of Irish and French ancestry and studied at Trinity College and the Peter Street Hospital in preparation for a medical career until family financial problems forced him to seek immediate employment. For twelve years--from age twenty until he went to America--he made...