Mr. Edward Fitzball

Edward Fitzball was a popular melodramatists of the Romantic and Victorian periods, and a very prolific one as well; he produced about 170 melodramas, opera librettos, burlettas, tragedies, comedies, and farces. But he is best know for his melodramas. The peak of his success was between the 1920's and 1930's.

Fitzball was not his original last name. His real name was Ball, which he added his mother's maiden name too. He produced his first three plays in Norwich, Edwin (1817), Bertha (1819), and The Ruffian Boy (1819). It wasn't until his play The Innkeeper of Abbeville (1821) at the Surrey Theatre did he find an appreciative audience. 

He gained a reputation of writing plays that were '"fantastically staged" and "highly intricate."' (Schneider) He was also known for his innovations in theatre special effects, such as back projection, which is "using light set on a track backstage to project a shadow on cotton gauze in the forestage so that the shadow of the object increased as the light moved further back from the object."

In a historically daring move, in the crime melodrama The Murder at the Roadside Inn (1827) he had a cross section of a building with 4 rooms, and simultaneous and overlapping action sequences in each. This was protested by his co-workers, but became a huge success for The Surrey Theatre, running 264 nights. (Schneider)

From 1835 to 1838 he was the resident dramatist and reader at Covant Garden. His popularity waned in the late 1830's when the publics interest in realistic drama increased. 

http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/britlit/Lacy71_80.html

His play The Inchcape Bell opened at The Surrey Theatre on May 26 1828, and was later published in the first volume of Cumberland's Minor Theatre in 1828, and then in Lacy's Acting Edition of Plays Vol. 79 in 1851. (Booth, pg xxvii)

Other plays he is well known for:

The Flying Dutchman (1827)

The Pilot (1825)

Resources Used:

Schneider, Jacob. "British Poetry of the later Eighteenth and Earlier Nineteenth Centuries." The Corvey Poets Project at the University of Nebraska . University of Nebraska , Dec. 2004. Web. 11 Mar. 2011. <http://www.unl.edu/Corvey/html/Projects/Corvey%20Poets/BallEdward/BallBio.htm>.

Booth, Michael R., Michael Cordner, Peter Holland, and Martin Wiggens, eds. The Lights O' London and Other Victorian Plays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. N. pag. Print.