Ede Szigligeti

His father thereupon forbade lim to bear his name in future, and the younger Szathmary henceforth adopted instead the name of Ede Szigligeti, the hero of one of Sandor Kisfaludy's romances.

[1] He supported himself for the next few years precariously enough, earning as he did little more than twelve florins a month, but at the same time he sedulously devoted himself to the theatre and sketched several plays, which differed so completely from the "original" plays then in vogue (The Played-out Trick actually appeared upon the boards) that they attracted the attention of such connoisseurs as Vorosmarty and Bajza who warmly encouraged the young writer.

During the half-century of his dramatic career Szigligeti wrote no fewer than a hundred original pieces, all of them remarkable for the inexhaustible ingenuity of their plots, their up-to-date technique and the consummate skill with which the author used striking and unexpected effects to produce his denouement.

[1] Szigligeti's most successful tragedies were Gritti (1844), Paul Beldi (1856), Light's Shadows (1865), Struensee (i&ii), Valeriaa and The Pretender (1868).

He is a perfect master of the art of weaving complications, and he prefers to select his subjects from the daily life of the upper and upper-middle classes.