Douglas (play)

The play was a big success in both Scotland and England for decades, attracting many notable actors of the period, such as Edmund Kean, who made his debut in it.

The opening lines of the second act are probably the best known: My name is Norval; on the Grampian Hills My father feeds his flocks; a frugal swain, Whose constant cares were to increase his store.

It was performed on 14 December 1756 with overwhelming success, in spite of the opposition of the presbytery,[3] who summoned Alexander Carlyle to answer for having attended its representation.

Home wisely resigned his charge in 1757, after a visit to London, where Douglas was brought out at Covent Garden on 14 March.

David Hume summed up his admiration for Douglas by saying that his friend possessed "the true theatric genius of Shakespeare and Otway, refined from the unhappy barbarism of the one and licentiousness of the other."

Gray, writing to Horace Walpole (August 1757), said that the author "seemed to have retrieved the true language of the stage, which has been lost for these hundred years," but Samuel Johnson held aloof from the general enthusiasm, and averred that there were not ten good lines in the whole play.

It may have been this persecution which drove Home to write for the London stage, in addition to Douglas' success there, and stopped him from founding the new Scottish national theatre that some had hoped he would.

[3] Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) both allude to the line "My name is Norval".

Harry Walmers in Charles Dickens' The Boots at the Holly Tree Inn also refers to it: Consequently, though he made quite a companion of the fine bright boy, and was delighted to see him so fond of reading his fairy-books, and was never tired of hearing him say my name is Norval, or hearing him sing his songs about Young May Moons is beaming love, and When he as adores thee has left but the name, and that; still he kept the command over the child, and the child was a child, and it's to be wished more of 'em wasThere is also another reference to Norval in Nicholas Nickleby, when Wackford Squeers, while in custody, refers to his son as "a young Norval", supposedly the darling of the town.

Hugh MacDiarmid, the twentieth century pioneer of the Scottish Renaissance, included the following lines in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1922): My name is Norval.

[8] The play was produced at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow under the direction of Robert David MacDonald in March 1989, with Angela Chadfield in the role of Lady Randolph.