The three plays of Charles Robert Maturin, produced in London between 1816 and 1819, document Maturin's attempts at theatrical success. His first three novels were not popular, but his luck improved with Bertram (1816), which ran for twenty-two nights. Even with this success in hand, Manuel (1817) and Fredolfo (1819) failed completely, partly through the sabotage of indifferent actors and a fickle public. A posthumous play, Osmyn, the Renegade, had slightly better luck, but only fragments remain.
Few if any plays of this period, when public tastes valued excess and melodrama over literary quality, are performed or read today. The reader of Maturin's novels, however, will find in his plays ample evidence of the wild Romantic imagination that fueled his novels. The rhetorical vigor common to all his works revealed perhaps its most unfettered expression in the plays.
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