Payne, John Howard

Payne, John Howard (1791–1852), American actor and dramatist, who as a precocious 14-year-old had his first play Julia; or, The Wanderer produced in New York. Three years later he went on the stage and made a great reputation, touring the larger American cities in such parts as Hamlet, Romeo, Young Norval in Home's Douglas, and Rolla in Kotzebue's Pizarro. In 1811 he appeared at the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, as Frederick in his own version of Kotzebue's Das Kind der Liebe, which, as Lovers' Vows, was already well known in English translations by Mrs Inchbald and Benjamin Thompson. Two years later he sailed for England, and appeared at Drury Lane with great success. A visit to Paris brought him the friendship of Talma and the freedom of the Comédie-Française, and for many years he was engaged in the translation and adaptation of current French successes for the English and American stages. Of his own plays—he has been credited with some 50 or 60—the best was Brutus; or, The Fall of Tarquin (1818), in which Edmund Kean was seen at Drury Lane; he adapted several melodramas by Pixérécourt, of which the most successful was Therese; or, The Orphan of Geneva (1821), which provided him with the money to pay off the debts incurred by his unsuccessful attempt to manage Sadler's Wells Theatre. With Washington Irving, a lifelong friend, he also adapted Duval's La Jeunesse de Henry V (1806) as Charles II; or, The Merry Monarch (1824). In 1842 he was appointed American Consul at Tunis, where he died. He is now best remembered for the lyric of ‘Home, Sweet Home’, part of the libretto which he wrote for Henry Bishop's opera Clari, the Maid of Milan, first performed at Covent Garden in 1823.