Although the texts of only three of his plays survive, John Daly Burk was one of the major American dramatists at the end of the eighteenth century. Bunker-Hill (1797) was amazingly successful in the theaters, and Walter Meserve, the historian of early American drama, has called Female Patriotism (1798) "one of the best American plays written in the eighteenth century." Little is known of his early life, and he seems to have had a facility for self-dramatization that may have made an already adventurous life sound even more romantic and mysterious. Probably born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1772 to a Protestant family, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, in June 1792, where in addition to the usual course of studies he became involved with Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen and began writing for an antigovernment newspaper. After the College Board of Senior Fellows expelled him in 1794 for professing atheistic principles, he published The...