


Transcribed from the 1887 Cassell & Company edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





THE HUNCHBACK.
THE LOVE-CHASE.


                                    BY
                          JAMES SHERIDAN KNOWLES

                       CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
                _LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_.
                                  1887.




INTRODUCTION


James Sheridan Knowles was born at Cork in 1784, and died at Torquay in
December, 1862, at the age of 78.  His father was a teacher of elocution,
who compiled a dictionary, and who was related to the Sheridans.  He
moved to London when his son was eight years old, and there became
acquainted with William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb.  The son, after his
school education, obtained a commission in the army, but gave up
everything for the stage, and made his first appearance at the Crow
Street Theatre, in Dublin.  He did not become a great actor, and when he
took to writing plays he did not prove himself a great poet, but his
skill in contriving situations through which a good actor can make his
powers tell upon the public, won the heart of the great actor of his day,
and as Macready's own poet he rose to fame.

Before Macready had discovered him, Sheridan Knowles lived partly by
teaching elocution at Belfast and Glasgow, partly by practice of
elocution as an actor.  In 1815 he produced at the Belfast Theatre his
first play, _Caius Gracchus_.  His next play, _Virginius_ was produced at
Glasgow with great success.  Macready, who had, at the age of seventeen,
begun his career as an actor at his father's theatre in Birmingham, had,
on Monday, October 5th, 1819, at the age of twenty-six, taken the
Londoners by storm in the character of Richard III Covent Garden reopened
its closed treasury.  It was promptly followed by a success in
_Coriolanus_, and Macready's place was made.  He was at once offered
fifty pounds a night for appearing on one evening a week at Brighton.  It
was just after that turn in Macready's fortunes that a friend at Glasgow
recommended to him the part of Virginius in Sheridan Knowles's play
lately produced there.  He agreed unwillingly to look at it, and says
that in April, 1820, the parcel containing the MS. came as he was going
out.  He hesitated, then sat down to read it that he might get a
wearisome job over.  As he read, he says, "The freshness and simplicity
of the dialogue fixed my attention; I read on and on, and was soon
absorbed in the interest of the story and the passion of its scenes, till
at its close I found myself in such a state of excitement that for a time
I was undecided what step to take.  Impulse was in the ascendant, and
snatching up my pen I hurriedly wrote, as my agitated feelings prompted,
a letter to the author, to me then a perfect stranger."  Bryan Procter
(Barry Cornwall) read the play next day with Macready, and confirmed him
in his admiration of it.

Macready at once got it accepted at the theatre, where nothing was spent
on scenery, but there was a good cast, and the enthusiasm of Macready as
stage manager for the occasion half affronted some of his seniors.  On
the 17th of May, 1820, about a month after it came into Macready's hands,
_Virginius_ was produced at Covent Garden, where, says the actor in his
"Reminiscences," "the curtain fell amidst the most deafening applause of
a highly-excited auditory."  Sheridan Knowles's fame, therefore, was
made, like that of his friend Macready, and the friendship between author
and actor continued.  Sheridan Knowles had a kindly simplicity of
character, and the two qualities for which an actor most prizes a
dramatist, skill in providing opportunities for acting that will tell,
and readiness to make any changes that the actor asks for.  The
postscript to his first letter to Macready was, "Make any alterations you
like in any part of the play, and I shall be obliged to you."  When he
brought to the great actor his play of _William Tell_--_Caius Gracchus_
had been produced in November, 1823--there were passages of writing in it
that stopped the course of action, and, says Macready, "Knowles had less
of the tenacity of authorship than most writers," so that there was no
difficulty about alterations, Macready having in a very high degree the
tenacity of actorship.  And so, in 1825, _Tell_ became another of
Macready's best successes.

Sheridan Knowles continued to write for the stage until 1845, when he was
drawn wholly from the theatre by a religious enthusiasm that caused him,
in 1851, to essay the breaking of a lance with Cardinal Wiseman on the
subject of Transubstantiation.  Sir Robert Peel gave ease to his latter
days by a pension of 200 pounds a year from the Civil List, which he had
honourably earned by a career as dramatist, in which he sought to appeal
only to the higher sense of literature, and to draw enjoyment from the
purest source.  Of his plays time two comedies {1} here given are all
that have kept their place upon the stage.  As one of the most earnest
dramatic writers of the present century he is entitled to a little corner
in our memory.  Worse work of the past has lasted longer than the plays
of Sheridan Knowles are likely to last through the future.

                                                                     H. M.



THE HUNCHBACK.




DRAMATIS PERSONAE.


(AS ORIGINALLY