Thomas Holcroft Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Thomas Holcroft

Perhaps the most notorious playwright of the eighteenth century's closing decade, Thomas Holcroft was a professional writer in the broadest sense: a prolific translator, journalist, novelist, and critic, whose opinions of the theater were frequently consulted by the age's literati. A synthesist in the great tradition of actors who become playwrights, Holcroft profited from his experience as a strolling player, incorporating others' plots, characters, and stylistic affectations into his own dramatic pieces (The School for Arrogance's Lady Peckham and The Deserted Daughter's Mrs. Sarsnet are modeled on Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop). Observing in The Monthly Review that "Mere sentimental comedy is indeed a puling, rickety, unhealthy brat, and no fair offspring of the muse," and acutely feeling the aristocratic elitism of the comedy of manners, Holcroft wrote "elegant comedy" that mixes sentimentality and caricature to dramatize human error in the hope of affecting change. A domestic moralist in his fictions, Holcroft remained quiet on the subject of his private life, avoiding public comment about having been married four times (1765, circa 1772, 1778, and 1799) and widowed three, and about the suicide of his only son, William (after stealing forty pounds from his father), in 1789.

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