Bronson Howard

• Born: October 7, 1842
• Birthplace: Detroit, Michigan
• Died: August 4, 1908
• Place of death: Avon-by-the-Sea, New Jersey

Other Literary Forms

Bronson Howard is remembered primarily as a dramatist. Given his place as the first American to make a profession of writing plays, his comments on playwriting and the theater in America are important for the student of American dramatic literature. In 1906, for example, he surveyed, in New York’s Sunday Magazine, the accomplishments of American playwrights and their critics after 1890 in an essay entitled “The American Drama.” He commented on the art of acting in “Our Schools for the Stage,” which appeared in Century Magazine in 1900. In one of the most revealing contemporary articles on late nineteenth century American dramatists—“American Playwrights on the American Drama,” appearing in Harper’s Weekly on February 2, 1889—Howard described his own approach to drama. Howard was a man of very definite opinions, and his most significant explanation of his theory of the “laws of dramatic composition” was first given as a lecture before the Shakespeare Club at Harvard College in March, 1886. This speech, in which he discussed at some length the origin and development of his play The Banker’s Daughter, was repeated for the Nineteenth Century Club in New York in December, 1889, and was printed by the American Dramatists Club in New York and published as The Autobiography of a Play in 1914. This volume also included “Trash on the Stage and the Lost Dramatists of America,” in which Howard outlined his approach to the theater and expressed his optimism regarding the future of American drama.

Achievements

Bronson Howard’s most significant achievement was his ability to earn a living by writing plays. Before Howard, many Americans—including William Dunlap, John Howard Payne, Robert Montgomery Bird, Nathaniel Bannister, Cornelius Mathews, George H. Boker, Epes Sargent, and Nathaniel Parker Willis—had written plays, some of which were better than Howard’s. Although these earlier writers were professionals in the sense that they made money by writing plays, they were unable to sustain themselves with the income from their plays alone.

There is neither an extensive nor an impressive body of dramatic theory from pre-twentieth century American dramatists. Before Howard’s lecture “The Laws of Dramatic Composition,” commentary on dramatic theory was often scattered, slight, and haphazard. Basing his observations on one of his own plays, The Banker’s Daughter, Howard outlined certain laws of dramatic construction that are significant in the history of dramatic theory in the United States, in particular illuminating those practices that made the melodramas of late nineteenth century America among the best that have been written. For Howard, the laws of dramatic composition were derived from an understanding of the sympathies of the audience as well as from the expected actions and motives of characters. To follow these laws, he believed, the dramatist had only to use common sense—to remain in touch with human nature. An audience will accept as “satisfactory” an occurrence that is, in a sense, deserved. For example, while an audience will accept the death of a good person in a tragedy, this acceptance will not be forthcoming in an ordinary play. Here, the death must be deserved or the audience will not be satisfied. Further, if a character is evil, the audience will not be satisfied unless that character is punished.

Howard’s understanding of the importance of American business during the late nineteenth century and his ability to portray this characteristic of society effectively in his plays is both evidence of his insight and an achievement that distinguishes his work. His first work to explore the world of business, and, in fact, the first in its genre, was Young Mrs. Winthrop, a play in which business affairs consume the time and energies of the title character’s husband, whose neglect of his society-minded wife threatens their life together. The Henrietta, considered by some critics to be his most successful play, reflects the stressful life of Wall Street financiers.

A creator of popular social melodramas on both the American stage and the English stage, Howard also left his mark on the future of professional American dramatists as the founder, in 1891, of the American Dramatists Club, later the Society of American Dramatists and Composers, the forerunner of the Dramatists Guild. Concerned with promoting a sense of community among dramatists, Howard used his prestige as the first president of the club to bring into existence an amendment to copyright laws that threatened severe punishment for any individual who attempted to steal the work of a playwright.

Biography

Bronson Howard was the son of Charles Howard, a merchant in Detroit, Michigan, whose grandfather, Seabury Howard, fought for the English in the French and Indian War and against them in the American Revolution. After a public school education in Detroit, Howard attended an eastern preparatory school, intending to go on to Yale University. Instead, after suffering from eye problems, he returned to Detroit, where he began his writing career with a series of humorous sketches for the Detroit Free Press. In 1864, the Detroit Free Press published his first play, Fantine, a dramatization of a portion of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862; English translation, 1862).

Howard’s interest in writing plays made him aware of the need to know and to understand the commercial theater, and he moved to New York in 1865. Although he continued to write plays, his innocence of the demands of his chosen profession rendered his early efforts fit only for the fireplace. He persisted, however, until he learned the accepted theater conventions of his day, eventually evolving his own principles of dramaturgy. As he studied his craft, he attended theatrical performances, observed the society around him in New York, and made his living by writing for the New York Tribune and Evening Post.

One of the major problems facing American dramatists of this period was the dual demand placed on them: to satisfy the immediate theater audience while also providing dialogue that could be enjoyed by a literate public. Before Howard, American literary dramatists had generally eschewed the theatrical techniques that brought people into the theaters, while the actor-playwrights gave little thought to anything but the action on the stage. As a consequence of this split, there were few fully satisfactory American plays. Although Howard started as a journalist writing plays, he soon learned that plays were to be seen and must present interesting spectacles to the eye. At the same time, he was aware of the importance of the written word, particularly of dialogue that would reflect the interests of society.

Like all successful dramatists, Howard realized that his work would have to be judged not wholly as literature but according to the laws of the theater. Indeed, he objected to the publication of his plays and felt a slight contempt for literary people such as William Dean Howells, resenting their assumption that a true American drama might be realized only through their efforts. Late in his life, he went so far as to argue that drama should be absolutely divorced from literature, and he insisted on being called a “dramatist” rather than a “literary man.”

Howard’s first success in the theater came with the production in 1870 of a farce entitled Saratoga, which ran for 101 nights in Augustin Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre. Two years later, Daly opened another Howard play, Diamonds, a comedy of manners which dealt with New York society. Moorcroft, also produced by Daly, was not particularly successful, but by this time Saratoga had been transferred to English circumstance by Frank Marshall and produced at the Court Theatre as Brighton, with Charles Wyndham in the leading role of Bob Sackett. Brighton had considerable success on London stages and gave Howard the beginning of a fine reputation that brought him much pleasure during his visits to England. His marriage to Charles Wyndham’s sister helped sustain his English popularity. Five of Howard’s plays eventually found responsive English audiences, and he was recognized during his lifetime as the first American playwright with a substantial reputation in Great Britain.

Howard’s best-remembered play, The Banker’s Daughter, first produced in 1873 as Lillian’s Last Love, gained prestige after Howard’s 1886 account of its development in his lecture The Autobiography of a Play. It was still being produced in 1914. A dozen years after he first came to New York, Howard was an established playwright. Young Mrs. Winthrop appeared in 1882; One of Our Girls, which stressed the international contrast in social life that was being exploited by Howells and Henry James, opened in 1885 and ran for two hundred nights. In The Henrietta, Howard satirized life on the stock exchange, and in Shenandoah he provided an exciting sentimental melodrama about love during the Civil War.

Howard wrote fewer plays in his later years. He lessened his stature in the eyes of historians of the drama by writing for the Theatrical Syndicate, an association of businessmen, formed in 1896, which for years controlled most New York theaters and many theaters in other large towns and which gradually exerted a stranglehold over entertainment in the United States. With audiences, however, he remained popular. Howard was one of the first American playwrights to make a fortune in his profession. A kind and honorable man, wholly without pretense, he enjoyed a long and productive career as a dramatist. When he died on August 4, 1908, at his home in Avon-by-the-Sea, New Jersey, he was widely acknowledged as the dean of American dramatists.

Analysis

Bronson Howard came into the theater at an opportune time—a time when American rather than English actors and managers were beginning to control American theaters and were looking for American playwrights. As a writer-journalist rather than an actor or manager, Howard tried new approaches in order to learn about the theater. His subsequent comments reveal that literary dramatists and elitist critics tried his patience. This was a transition period—Howard’s life in the theater—and when it was over, the writing of drama in the United States had undergone a change. Clyde Fitch was making a fortune in New York and elsewhere; Langdon Mitchell and William Vaughn Moody were successful playwrights, while Rachel Crothers and Edward Sheldon were about to appear on the scene. During that transitional period, other dramatists added to the development of an American drama, but no one matched Howard’s accomplishments in social melodrama, dramatic theory, and service to American playwrights.

Howard’s career as a dramatist developed during that period in American drama when playwrights were turning from dramatizing farcical representations of a stereotyped society, portrayed only in the most obvious ways, to a social comedy in which manners might be clearly distinguished. Earlier, the American theater had been dominated by spectacles and amusements created either by a star actor or actress or by the ingenuity of a theater manager and his stage carpenter. The Civil War cast a shadow over the American theater, but amid the struggle of social reconstruction, the dramatic arts bounced back with astonishing vigor, strengthened by the nationalism of Andrew Jackson’s years, stimulated by the social and intellectual revolutions sparked by Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, and tempered by the sorrows of war. By the time Howard stopped writing, the United States had changed, both forcibly and by choice. American society, challenged by the strains on it, developed its own unique and distinctive character, and the United States was recognized as a nation among nations.

To match these changes, American dramatists needed to create a drama that could both amuse and stimulate the emotions and thoughts of the human mind. Howard was a major factor in the development of this American drama—as it grew from amusement to art.

Although Howard collaborated on at least three plays—Baron Rudolph with David Belasco, Knave and Queen with Sir Charles L. Young, and Peter Stuyvesant with Brander Matthews—and adapted Molière’s L’École des maris (pr., pb. 1661, verse play; The School for Husbands, 1732) and L’École des femmes (pr. 1662, verse play; The School for Wives, 1732) as Wives, he is remembered primarily for the originality of his plots and for his sensitivity and insight into American society. Although he was limited by the conventions and requirements of the theater of his time, he was deeply interested in dramatic theory and was particularly concerned with questions of dramatic structure. A well-constructed play, for Howard, was a “satisfactory” play—a play that is satisfactory to the audience. Believing that American and English audiences would not accept the death of a heroine in a play, Howard changed the ending of his original version of The Banker’s Daughter. He made other changes in this play—changes that he claimed were founded on his “laws of dramatic composition.” One of these laws, based on Howard’s theory of what will satisfy an audience, is that those who do wrong (for example, a wife who has soiled her moral character) must always die before the final curtain falls. Similarly, and for the same reason, a love triangle must always bring disaster.

The Banker’s Daughter

In the original version of The Banker’s Daughter, Lillian Westbrook has married an older and wealthy man, John Strebelow, in order to save her father from financial ruin and also as a result of a quarrel with Harold Routledge. Five years later, now living in Paris with her husband and child, Lillian again meets Harold but remains faithful to her husband. The situation is then complicated by the Count de Carojac, who loves Lillian and who forces a duel with Harold. The supposed death of her old lover causes Lillian to reveal her passion and tell Strebelow that she never loved him. As a result, Strebelow takes the child away, and Lillian dies of a broken heart. The revised work shows the influence of Howard’s theories of dramaturgy. First, because she has remained faithful, Lillian cannot be allowed to die in the last act, but because a love triangle cannot go unresolved, either Strebelow or Routledge must die. Howard chose Routledge, who is killed in the duel with the Count. Lillian now needs to recognize her own moral strength and save herself through this recognition rather than depend on her child for that renewed strength. Finally, Strebelow needs to become a much stronger character, the hero of the play, in fact, and an appropriate mate for a mature Lillian, who now recognizes her own love for him.

Young Mrs. Winthrop

By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, American society had been strongly affected by the industrial advances that had helped the North win the Civil War and by the so-called Robber Barons, notorious for their lifestyle of “conspicuous waste.” Howard recognized the growing influence of the businessman in American society, and he foresaw the social pressures that would result. Howard’s first play to reveal a conscious use of the social-economic movement against a background of fashionable society was Young Mrs. Winthrop. In this play, Howard dramatized the conflict between the world of business and the domestic sphere. The play enjoyed an initial run of 180 performances, and reviews hailed it as a great American dramatic work; indeed, many consider it to be Howard’s most important play, if only because it was the first of its kind. Douglas and Constance Winthrop, businessman and society wife, no longer find joy in their married life. When a gossip, Mrs. Chetwyn, arouses Mrs. Winthrop’s suspicions concerning Mr. Winthrop’s fidelity, Mrs. Winthrop attends a society ball in opposition to the wishes of her husband. Circumstances promote ready suspicions, but Howard added melodrama to social comedy by having the Winthrops’ child fall ill and die while they are away. Although the early action is enlivened by the careless and amusing Mrs. Chetwyn, the parents’ grief in the later stages of the play threatens to overwhelm the initial premise. Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop part, only to be reunited in the final act as Howard superimposes his moral opinion on the problems that can confront the businessman in American society.

The Henrietta

In Young Mrs. Winthrop, Howard portrayed a businessperson but did not present the details of the business world. He would do this most explicitly in The Henrietta, which more recent critics have called the first of the American business plays. Linking New York society and the world of finance, Howard created a stage sermon on the vices of commercial gambling and the worship of money. Taking its title from the fictitious Henrietta Railroad, the control of which is the main issue in the melodramatic plot, the play dramatizes the financial rivalry between a father and his son. Nicholas Vanalstyne is known as “the Napoleon of Wall Street.” His son, Nicholas Vanalstyne, Jr., is equally unscrupulous and is monomaniacally concerned with wrenching control of the financial empire from his father—he is even capable of robbing the company safe. To both men, business is “health, religion, friendship, love—everything.” Through the activities of a second Vanalstyne son, Bertie, a satiric portrait of the club man of this period, Howard showed that other side of society that looked askance at the feverish and frequently sordid life of moneygrubbers such as the Vanalstynes. The success of young Nicholas is short-lived, and Bertie eventually saves the day for his father and wins the heroine. In addition, while the villainous son dies of a heart attack, Bertie continues his successful operation on the stock exchange, basing his decisions on the flip of a coin. Popular on the American stage for a number of years, The Henrietta was revised by Winchell Smith and Victor Mapes in 1913 as The New Henrietta. Changed to meet new theater conventions and modern thought, the play was surprisingly successful.

One of Our Girls

As the international comedy of manners became a strong social theme for American writers, Howard began to plumb its possibilities in his plays. His first such work, One of Our Girls, illustrates his mastery of the international theme. One of Our Girls ran for two hundred nights after its opening. The action of the play takes place in Paris, where the Fonblanque family is arranging the marriage of their daughter Julie to the Comte de Crebillon, known as a scoundrel and as a fine duelist. Opposed to this situation is Fonblanque’s niece, Kate Shipley, the forthright and confident daughter of an American millionaire, who not only would not tolerate this arranged marriage of her cousin but also finds no good qualities in the Comte. The complications include a British army captain who falls in love with Kate, and Julie’s lover, Henri Saint-Hilaire, but these are finally resolved through the good sense and actions of Kate. Julie is united with her lover; Kate and the Captain have a promising future; and the Comte, having confessed that he killed his first wife, is proved to be a villain. Strong melodramatic action is present in the duel in which Henri is wounded and in the scene in which Kate protects Julie and allows herself to be caught in an embarrassing situation with Henri. Kate’s American speech patterns provide some humor, as do the chatter of the gossips and the witticisms of the doctor. The main subject of the play, however, is the contrasting pictures of French and American marriage customs.

Aristocracy

Howard tried again but failed to dramatize an international contrast in Met by Chance, in which part of the action takes place in the Adirondack Mountains. In Aristocracy, however, he effectually combined his interests in international society and the business world. The hero is Jefferson Stockton, a California capitalist and millionaire whose power and self-confidence precede him into every room. When his young wife reveals her social ambitions, he knows exactly how to satisfy them. Millionaires, he explains to her, are graded according to years and grandfathers, and in New York the newly rich man who thinks himself impressive is a fool. As he once ordered ten thousand tons of iron in New York, he will now order about five tons of good society for his wife, but it must be done carefully. The way to enter New York society is to take a house in London, and this Stockton does—after a few farcical episodes in London among the money-hunting European nobility. Although the caricatures of the financier and of the society he encounters weaken the overall effect of the social melodrama, the play has an interesting basic idea, and it held the stage for a respectable run.

Bibliography

Frerer, Lloyd Anton. Bronson Howard, Dean of American Dramatists. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. A biography of Howard that examines his life and the times in which he lived in addition to his dramatic works. Bibliography and index.

Mason, Jeffrey D. Melodrama and the Myth of America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Mason examines five nineteenth century melodramas, including Howard’s Shenandoah, to demonstrate how dramatists interpreted history for their audiences. He argues that the melodramas presented reassuring myths about the past.

Meserve, Walter J. “Comedy and Social Drama: Caricature, Comedy, and Thesis Plays.” In The Revels History of Drama in English, 1865-1920. Vol. 8. London: Methuen, 1977. A brief introduction to Howard as the first professional American playwright. Meserve focuses on Howard’s depiction of businessmen and describes his “Laws of Dramatic Composition.” Howard pioneered the awareness of the new social, middle class in the United States.

Vaughn, Jack A. Early American Dramatists. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. A brief biography and introduction to the major plays. Contrasts Howard’s early comedies with his later social dramas, focusing on The Henrietta and Shenandoah.