Our American Cousin

Tom Taylor’s three-act comedy, first staged in 1858, sends a rough, plain-spoken American named Asa Trenchard to England to claim a family inheritance, where his manners collide with those of his snobbish aristocratic relatives. The plot about a mortgaged estate and a scheming lawyer is mostly a frame for broad farce, and audiences came above all for Lord Dundreary, a dim, whisker-sporting nobleman whose garbled sayings became a Victorian craze. The play was a transatlantic hit for years. It also carries a somber place in American history as the show Abraham Lincoln was watching at Ford’s Theatre on the night he was shot in April 1865. This edition of the script is free to download as a PDF and EPUB.