London Assurance

Drama Classics: The World’s Great Plays at a Great Little Price

When the amorous Sir Harcourt Courtly prepares to wed an heiress several decades his junior, he hasn’t reckoned on the superior charms of her cousin, the foxhunting Lady Gay Spanker…

Dion Boucicault, the Irish genius of London theatre in the age of Dickens, wrote the brilliantly funny London Assurance in 1841 and thereby created - in Sir Harcourt and Lady Spanker - two of the great comic roles of the English stage.

A classic comedy of manners that borrows from Sheridan and anticipates Oscar Wilde, the play is a small comedic masterpiece and is regularly revived.

This edition of London Assurance, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is edited and introduced by Trevor R. Griffiths.

‘Wonderfully outrageous… bursting with elegant, biting but warm-hearted wit and revelling in its own mastery of theatrical skill… a comic masterpiece’
- Sunday Times