The Whip is a melodrama by Henry Hamilton and Cecil Raleigh, first performed in 1909 at the Drury Lane Theatre in London.
The play's original production had intricate scenery and spectacular stage effects, including a horse race and a train crash.
Its plot embraced a twelve-horse race on a treadmill (for the Gold Cup at Newmarket), a Hunt Breakfast embellished by fifteen dogs, an auto-smash-up, the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's Waxworks, and a train wreck with a locomotive hissing real steam.
It boasted a dissolute earl and a wicked marquis, and a heroine whose hand was sought by both knave and hero.
The heroine, "Lady Di" Sartoris, created by Jessie Bateman, was referenced in P. G. Wodehouse's Heavy Weather (1933).