Between
1860 and 1861, Ellen Wood (writing as "Mrs. Henry Wood") published her
serialized novel East Lynne. The next
year stage adaptations of the play began flooding theatres, creating one of the
dramatic sensations of the latter nineteenth century.
Though
the novel takes place in England, the first stage adaptation was actually in
the U.S., premiering at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on January 26, 1862. The
adaptation was anonymous, and it closely followed both the plot and the
language of the original.
The
story surrounds Lady Isabel, an earl's daughter who marries the rising lawyer
Archibald Carlyle. Isabel grows jealous, suspecting her husband is in
love with another woman, Barbara Hare.
The play weaves together this jealousy plot
with a murder mystery. Barbara's brother Richard must stay in hiding because he
has been falsely accused of murder. He suspects the real killer to be a man he
knows only as Thorn.
In
the second act, Isabel sees her husband arm in arm with Barbara Hare, not
realizing Archibald is actually trying to help exonerate her brother. Her
jealousy becomes so intense, that she agrees to run off with a scoundrel named
Sir Francis Levison just to revenge herself on her husband. She regrets her
decision in the very next act, though, sending Levison away and refusing to
take money from him or from her own relatives.
Typically,
the climax of a melodrama was in the fourth act. This is where Isabel disguises
herself as "Madame Vine" to get a position caring for her own children. We have
to suspend disbelief to accept that Archibald doesn't recognize his own wife,
but the dramatic payoff is worth it. Isabel is forced to watch her own sickly
son slowly die, but is unable to tell him she is his mother. Many adaptations
had her utter something along the lines of: "Dead! And never called me mother." That line doesn't appear in the book, though, nor is it in the first stage
adaptation.
The
fifth act wraps up the action, with Richard Hare being cleared of the charges
against him, and Levison (who was actually the mysterious "Thorn") being
convicted of murder. Isabel, of course, has already been tainted, so she ends
up dying amid tears of repentance.
