George Henry Boker

George Henry Boker , 1823-90, American poet and playwright, b. Philadelphia, grad. Princeton, 1842. He is best remembered for his romantic and heroic tragedies, written in the manner of Elizabethan drama. The best of these were Leonor de Guzman (1853) and Francesca da Rimini (1855), based on the story of Francesca and Paolo. He also wrote a series of love sonnets.

Bibliography: See biography by E. S. Bradley (1927, repr. 1972).

Boker, George Henry (1823–90), playwright. Born into a comfortable Philadelphia family, he was educated at Princeton and prepared for a career in law, but he elected to travel and write instead. After publishing a volume of poetry, he turned to drama, and his first play, Calaynos, a tale of Spanish‐Moorish animosities, was published in 1848, produced successfully in London without authorization in 1849, and mounted by James E. Murdoch in Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theatre in 1851. Boker's comedy in verse, The Betrothal (1850) in which the heroine is saved from an unwanted marriage to a wicked merchant, was played successfully in several cities, and his prose comedy The World a Mask (1851) had a brief run at the Walnut. His two most distinguished plays were Leonor de Guzman (1853), which told of the tragic rivalry between the heroine and Queen Maria of Castile, and Francesca da Rimini (1855), based on the Paolo and Francesca story in Dante's Inferno. Boker's last produced play was a melodrama, The Bankrupt (1855). His unproduced Königsmark was published in 1868 but not until Lawrence Barrett's acclaimed revival of Francesca da Rimini in 1882 did Boker again take up playwriting. His last two plays, Nydia and Glaucus, both derived from Bulwer‐Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii, were never produced. He continued to write poetry and served as Minister to Turkey (1871–75) and Minister to Russia (1875–78). One of his modern editors, Richard Moody, has observed, “American audiences of the nineteenth century had an insatiable taste for romantic tragedy, as is clearly demonstrated by the repeated performances of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Lear, but only George Henry Boker, among the native and foreign dramatists, produced an original romantic tragedy of notable quality for them.” Biography: George Henry Boker: Poet and Patriot, Edward S. Bradley, 1927.

Boker, George Henry (1823–90), American dramatist and a poet of some standing, one of the few successful writers in modern times of poetic tragedy. His romantic dramas based on historical incidents included Calaynos (1849) and Leonor di Guzman (1853), both with Spanish settings. The most popular was Francesca da Rimini, first produced for only eight performances in New York in 1855, but revived in 1883 by Lawrence Barrett with himself as Lanciotto, Francesca's husband, who in Boker's version is the chief character. It remained in Barrett's repertory for many years. Boker also wrote two comedies in verse, The Betrothal (1850) and The Widow's Marriage (1852), and one in prose, The World a Mask (1851), a melodrama The Bankrupt (1855), and several unproduced plays. He was American envoy to Turkey, 1871–5, and to Russia, 1875–8.