Hoyt, Charles H(ale)

Hoyt, Charles H[ale] (1860–1900), playwright. The only child of a railway mail clerk who also served one term as a state legislator, Hoyt was born in Concord, New Hampshire. He briefly attended Boston Latin School, tried studying law, and served on a Western cattle ranch before accepting work with the Boston Post. Within a few months he was awarded a humorous column called “All Sorts,” and in its paragraphs can be found the prototypes of many of his later characters. He made friends with the theatre magnate William Harris Sr., and when Harris suddenly found himself with an empty week at the Howard Athenaeum in 1881, Hoyt quickly threw together a farce, Gifford's Luck. The play was a hit but a second effort, Cazalia (1882), failed; both plays have been lost. Hoyt's revisions of Willie Edouin's farce‐comedy Dreams turned the piece into a success, so the following year Edouin persuaded Hoyt to write a new play, A Bunch of Keys (1883), and the comedy was an immediate success, regularly performed as late as 1900. His subsequent plays included A Rag Baby (1884), A Parlor Match (1884), A Hole in the Ground (1887), A Brass Monkey (1888), A Midnight Bell (1889), A Texas Steer (1890), and his most important work, A Trip to Chinatown (1891). Among Hoyt's later works were A Temperance Town (1893), A Milk White Flag (1894), A Runaway Colt (1895), A Black Sheep (1896), A Contented Woman (1897), A Stranger in New York (1897), and A Day and a Night in New York (1898). By this time Hoyt was displaying symptoms of mental instability. When his next play, A Dog in a Manger (1899), opened in Washington to a severe drubbing and immediately closed, the failure apparently proved too much. His mind snapped and he was committed to an insane asylum. He was soon released but died a few months later. With Hoyt, farce‐comedy reached its peak. Indeed, even more than the works of Edward Harrigan, with whom he was often compared and whom his contemporaries suggested he had succeeded, most of his plays can be seen as primitive musical comedies. Their loosely structured plots allowed the insertion of numerous songs. However, where Harrigan was interested mainly in what today would be viewed as New York ethnic types, Hoyt built his plays around more established, acclimated American figures. Both men wrote essentially sunny, wholesome works of questionable literary merit, especially in Hoyt's case, but eminently theatrical. Biography: The Life and Work of Charles H. Hoyt, Douglas L. Hunt, 1945.