The Irish-American playwright and actor Dion Boucicault (1820-1890) was a theatrical rather than a dramatic talent, more an adapter than a creator of plays. He was noted for ingenious stage effects.

Dion Boursiquot, later Boucicault, was born in Dublin on Dec. 26, 1820, a year after his mother's divorce from a wine merchant. When the budding actor dropped out of London University in 1837, he turned to the stage. His first success was London Assurance (1841), which imitated the earlier English comedy of manners. Because of the lack of an international copyright law, theater managers found it more profitable to adapt French plays than to gamble on untried native ones, so Boucicault became an adapter. He lived in Paris from 1844 to 1848, where he was married and shortly widowed.

In London he adapted French romantic melodrama for Charles Kean and learned from him the technique of staging sensational scenes--a knowledge that would serve...