Joseph Stirling Coyne

One of the most prolific British playwrights[1] of the mid-nineteenth century, he wrote more than sixty plays; his twenty-seven farces are surpassed in number only by John Maddison Morton's ninety-one and T. J. Williams's thirty.

Coyne brought to the stage accomplished comedic interchanges, puns, irony, exaggerated character traits, ludicrous plot situations, and surprising outcomes.

After attending the Royal School Dungannon, he began studying law but decided to pursue a literary career after some of his articles appeared in local publications.

Joseph Stirling Coyne's everyday characters and realistic situations and language appealed to working-class theatergoers, and his plays enjoyed long runs during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when staged.

His work is a significant link between the stylized French and English comedies of the eighteenth century and the witty, intellectual plays of Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.