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Charles Reade |
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By the time Charles Reade had reached the age of forty, he had written only two of his fourteen novels, Peg Woffington (1853) and Christie Johnstone (1853); but he had already written at least fifteen of his forty plays, and he continued to write, translate, and plagiarize plays, and to dramatize novels, as long as he lived.
His dramas tend to fall into three classifications: translations, collaborations, and plays based on or adapted into his own novels. The translations (usually without permission) were of plays by Augustine Eugène Scribe, Ernest Legouvé, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Eugène Moreau, Paul Siraudin, Alfred Delacour, Edouard Brisbarre, Eugène Nus, Jean Baptiste Molière, August Maquet, Victorien Sardou, and Émile Zola. The most significant of these was probably Drink, first performed in 1879, Reade's translation of Zola's novel L'Assommoir (already dramatized by Zola in collaboration with William Bertrand Busnach and Octave Gastineau). Conservative critics were shocked and dismayed by French naturalism; critics who followed the theater on the Continent were delighted; William Archer, who usually blasted the bombastic egoism and inordinate length of Reade's sensational spectacles, wrote: "If ever there was a drama which would cause instant conversions from evil ways, 'Drink' was that drama."
The second classification of Reade's drama includes collaborations with Tom Taylor, Dion Boucicault, and Henry Pettitt.
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