Today is the 214th birthday of Charles Dickens, which is as good a time as any to mention that my review of The Plays of Charles Dickens ran in the most recent issue of Dickens Quarterly.
Joanna Hofer-Robinson and Pete Orford edited this wonderful collection that includes both plays Dickens authored solo and collaborations he did with friends like Wilkie Collins, as well as prologues he wrote for plays including The Lighthouse and The Patrician's Daughter, and a closing scene he wrote for Elizabeth Inchbald's farce Animal Magnetism.
Dickens himself didn't always have a high opinion of his plays, and he came to regret writing the libretto to the operetta The Village Coquettes, which had music by John Pyke Hullah. His comic burletta The Strange Gentleman has some fun moments, but it is essentially the same as his prose sketch "The Great Winglebury Duel." Is She His Wife? is perhaps Dickens's most unlucky play, since it was after seeing it that his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth collapsed and later died. (Probably not from the play, though.)
Having all of Dickens's plays together with the in-depth notes provided by the editors is quite useful. In the early part of his career, Dickens went back and forth between the stage and the page. His play The Lamplighter, for instance, was originally penned for William Charles Macready, but after the actor rejected it, Dickens turned it into a short story for Sketches by Boz. Dickens also wrote with his friend Mark Lemon a farce called Mr. Nightingale's Diary, which included characters suspiciously similar to ones in Pickwick Papers and Martin Chuzzlewit.
Perhaps Dickens's most famous play today is The Frozen Deep, a melodrama officially authored by Collins, but very much a collaboration between the two authors. Dickens supplied the subject for the play, Collins wrote the first draft, and then Dickens substantially reworked it, tailoring the part of Richard Wardour for himself. He indeed played the role in an amateur performance, and then for a charity production, where he met his future love, Ellen Ternan. (You can read about the two of them in my own play, Capital.)
More successful in his own lifetime was another melodrama he wrote with Collins, No Thoroughfare, which was based on a tale the two had written together and published in the journal All the Year Round. The editors of The Plays of Charles Dickens note that Dickens even wrote an alternate ending to the play for a French production, though sadly it is not included in the book.
