The Octoroon

Common card · No. 347557

The Octoroon is a play by Dion Boucicault that opened in 1859 at The Winter Garden Theatre, New York City. Extremely popular, the play was kept running continuously for years by seven road companies. Among antebellum melodramas, it was considered second in popularity only to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Both were anti-slavery works. Boucicault adapted the play from the novel Quadroon (1856) by Thomas Mayne Reid. It explores the lives of free whites, and enslaved mixed-race and black Americans resident at a Louisiana plantation called Terrebonne. It sparked debates about the abolition of slavery and the role of theatre in politics. It contains elements of Romanticism and melodrama. The word octoroon signifies a person of one-eighth African ancestry and typically seven-eighths white. In comparison, a quadroon would have one quarter African ancestry and a mulatto for the most part has historically implied half African ancestry. The Oxford English Dictionary cites The Octoroon with the earliest...

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