Charles Johnson
Charles Johnson was an English playwright active in the early eighteenth century, known for his prolific output and association with London's theatrical scene. He wrote seventeen plays, with sixteen being produced, and achieved notable success with works such as *The Country Lasses* and *The Masquerade*, which featured recurring themes of reformed rakes and misused women. Johnson's career began around 1709, and he quickly established himself at the Drury Lane Theatre, where he collaborated with his friend Robert Wilks. Despite a promising start, including his first produced play, *The Force of Friendship*, Johnson faced challenges, such as harsh criticism from contemporaries like John Dennis and Alexander Pope. His most successful work, *The Country Lasses*, enjoyed over one hundred performances, while his later play *Caelia* marked a downturn in his playwriting career, prompting him to retire from the stage. After marrying a financially stable woman in 1733 and opening a tavern, Johnson lived comfortably until his death in 1748, leaving behind a legacy that would be reevaluated by later critics.
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Charles Johnson
Playwright
- Born: 1679?
- Died: March 11, 1748
- Place of death: London, England
Biography
Charles Johnson enjoyed more than two decades of fame in the early eighteenth century but then faded from view. He was a prolific playwright who in the second decade of the eighteenth century wrote a play a year for the Drury Lane Theatre, managed by his good friend, actor Robert Wilks. He eventually wrote seventeen plays, sixteen of which were produced. Two of his plays, The Country Lasses, and The Masquerade, continued to be performed throughout the eighteenth century.
Little is known about Johnson’s early life. At the age of twenty-two he entered the Middle Temple to study law but apparently never became a barrister. The first record of him as a playwright dates to 1709, when his first play, Love and Liberty, was published. The play was not staged during Johnson’s lifetime. His first produced play, The Force of Friendship, a tragicomedy, opened at London’s Queen’s Theatre in 1710. When the play was criticized for mixing tragedy and comedy, Johnson reworked his material, creating a comedy, Love in a Chest, and a tragedy entitled, like the earlier play, The Force of Friendship, both staged within two week’s of the first play’s production.
Johnson’s first play for Drury Lane was staged in 1711 and marked the beginning of the writer’s long association with that theater company. The play, The Generous Husband, was an amusing comedy that ran for only three performances. It evoked contention because of its thinly veiled satirical presentation of playwright and critic John Dennis in the character of Dypthong. Dennis took umbrage at this depiction and sought revenge a decade later when he made a formal complaint against Johnson’s The Successful Pyrate to the master of the revels.
Johnson’s most successful play was The Country Lasses, which ran for more than one hundred performances during the eighteenth century and was the basis for two adaptations. This play presents two of Johnson’s most frequent characters and themes: the reformed rake and the misused woman. He revisited these characters and themes in his next commercial success, The Masquerade.
In The Sultaness, Johnson took a swipe at Three Hours After Marriage (1717), a play by John Gay, Alexander Pope, and John Arbuthnot. Pope retaliated in his poem The Dunciad by noting Johnson’s tendency to turn old plays into new. The 1729 production of Johnson’s The Village Opera, which elicited hissing and booing from audiences, was forced to close after its third performance. More modern critics think better of the play than did its audience and have compared it to The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Gay’s tremendously popular folk opera. Johnson’s final play for Drury Lane, Caelia, again explored the theme of the misused woman but was such a disaster that Johnson, although he lived for fifteen more years, gave up playwriting. In 1733, he married a younger, financially secure woman. They opened a tavern in Covent Garden. When she died, Johnson retired and lived on his considerable fortune until his death in 1748.