SOURCE: Voelker, Paul D. “George Henry Boker's Francesca da Rimini: An Interpretation and Evaluation.” Educational Theatre Journal 24, no. 4 (December 1972): 383-95.

In the following essay, Voelker examines Boker's most famous play, attempting to account for twentieth-century critical neglect of both the play and its author.

George Henry Boker's Francesca da Rimini (1853) has generally been regarded as one of the great dramas of the last century. Arthur Hobson Quinn referred to it in 1923 as “the greatest play that was written in English during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century,” and in 1927 as “the supreme creation of the early [American] drama.”¹ Joseph Wood Krutch had referred to Boker's romantic tragedies as a whole as “the climax in the development of this form,”² and in his 1927 biography of Boker, Edward Scully Bradley echoed and enlarged Krutch's claim, calling Francesca da Rimini “the greatest American romantic tragedy, and one of the...