Thomas Holcroft

Playwright

  • Born: December 10, 1745
  • Birthplace: Orange Court, Leicester Fields, London, England
  • Died: March 23, 1809

Biography

Thomas Holcroft was born December 10, 1745, the son of a shoemaker in East London. He worked hard throughout his life to rise out of the working class and to become a gentleman. He began his career as an actor, occasionally writing short pieces for the newspapers. His luck as an actor was dubious: He was hired by Charles Macklin for a touring company going to Ireland, but his roles and salary kept being reduced. He then joined a series of other touring companies until he decided that acting might not be his forte.

Holcroft turned to writing for the stage. He had the good luck of convincing Sir Richard Sheridan (through Mrs. Sheridan) to produce his comic opera, The Crisis: Or, Love and Fear at Drury Lane in 1778. The play had one performance, and Sheridan was unwilling to attempt the other plays he offered. Holcroft had better luck with Thomas Harris, the manager of Covent Garden Theatre, where his play, Duplicity, had a successful run in 1781. Meanwhile he was also writing novels, the first of them a narrative based on his life as a strolling player with the title Alwyn: Or, The Gentleman Comedian, published in 1780. Simultaneously he was at work as a journalist, writing essays on theater for The Westminster Magazine and The Town and Country Magazine.

Many of his works for the stage are derivative, and some actually stolen, although he never made any effort to conceal the source of his material. He had spent some time on the continent and became familiar with the Parisian theatre as well as becoming fluent in French. This enabled him to copy some of the plays he felt most promising and then write his versions of them for Covent Garden. There in 1784, he found considerable success with his The Follies of the Day, derived directly from Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro. Similar instances of borrowing are The Force of Ridicule (1796), derived from Nivelle de La Chaussée’s Le Préjugé à la mode (the fashionable prejudice); Deaf and Dumb (1801), from Jean Nicolas Bouilly’s L’abbé de l’epée; and A Tale of Mystery (1802), from Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt’s Coelina.

Still, he produced many plays and novels that were entirely original in material. Among his plays, the best known is probably The Road to Ruin, produced at Covent Garden in 1792 and often revived after that. All told, he saw twenty-four of his plays produced. Generally, they are plays that carry a strong moral illustrated in a tone that is simultaneously sentimental, satirical and comic. He was distinctly anti-aristocratic and argued that virtue and merit should be the legitimate measure of a man.

Holcroft enthusiastically supported the American and French Revolutions. This point of view he argued not only through his plays, but also through his several novels. He was prolific with novels (some in multiple volumes,) poetry, essays and translations. His republican convictions got him in trouble for arguing what appeared to be subversion of the government, especially because of his membership in the Society for Constitutional Information.

Holcroft was arrested and charged with high treason in 1794. After two months in prison he was freed. He never had his day in court, so he chose to publish his defense in his 1795 A Narrative of Facts, Relating to a Prosecution for High Treason. In 1816, seven years after his death (on March 23, 1809), his friend, William Hazlitt, edited and published his memoirs. The figure that emerges from those pages is a man of good humor, gentleness and generosity.