Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca Da Rimini

One of the most successful American plays of the nineteenth century, Francesca Da Rimini brought classical Italian tragedy to the American stage with devastating effect. George H. Boker transformed the legendary medieval love affair into a meditation on desire, honor, and the remorseless mathematics of fate. The story is simple and shattering: Francesca, a noblewoman of Rimini, is married to the deformed and brutal Lanciotto Malatesta, while his more handsome brother Paolo serves as her companion. What begins as kindness becomes passion, and the two fall hopelessly in love, knowing their affair will destroy everything they hold dear. Boker's verse crackles with restrained intensity, building toward a conclusion that Dante himself might have recognized. This is tragedy not as spectacle but as wound, the slow unveiling of how love, when it blooms in the wrong soil, becomes indistinguishable from destruction.