The play of “The Prince and the Pauper,” dramatized by Mrs. Richardson
and arranged for the stage by David Belasco, was produced at the Park
Theater, Philadelphia, on Christmas Eve. It was a success, but not a
lavish one. The play was well written and staged, and Elsie Leslie was
charming enough in her parts, but in the duality lay the difficulty.
The strongest scenes in the story had to be omitted when one performer
played both Tom Canty and the little Prince. The play came to New
York--to the Broadway Theater--and was well received. On the opening
night there Mark Twain made a speech, in which he said that the
presentation of “The Prince and the Pauper” realized a dream which
fifteen years before had possessed him all through a long down-town
tramp, amid the crowds and confusion of Broadway. In Elsie Leslie, he
said, he had found the embodiment of his dream, and to her he offered
homage as the only prince clothed in a divine right which was not rags
and sham--the divine right of an inborn supremacy in art.
It seems incredible to-day that, realizing the play's possibilities as
Mark Twain did, and as Belasco and Daniel Frohman must have done, they
did not complete their partial triumph by finding another child actress
to take the part of Tom Canty. Clemens urged and pleaded with them, but
perhaps the undertaking seemed too difficult--at all events they did not
find the little beggar king. Then legal complications developed.
Edward House, to whom Clemens had once given a permission to attempt
a dramatization of the play, suddenly appeared with a demand for
recognition, backed by a lawsuit against all those who had a proprietary
interest in the production. House, with his adopted Japanese daughter
Koto, during a period of rheumatism and financial depression, had made
a prolonged visit in the Clemens home and originally undertook the
dramatization as a sort of return for hospitality. He appears not to
have completed it and to have made no arrangement for its production
or to have taken any definite step until Mrs. Richardson's play was
profitably put on; whereupon his suit and injunction.
By the time a settlement of this claim had been reached the play had run
its course, and it was not revived in that form. It was brought out in
England, where it was fairly prosperous, though it seems not to have
been long continued. Variously reconstructed, it has occasionally been
played since, and always, when the parts of Tom Canty and the Prince
were separate, with great success. Why this beautiful drama should ever
be absent from the boards is one of the unexplainable things. It is a
play for all times and seasons, the difficulty of obtaining suitable
“twin” interpreters for the characters of the Prince and the Pauper
being its only drawback.