very successful and was considered by Wallack to contain one of his best parts. When after the burning of the National Theatre in 1839 the elder Wallack returned for a time to England, he produced Tortesa at the Surrey Theatre, London, in August, 1839. He afterward played "Tortesa" frequently, and the first professional appearance of Lester Wallack, his son, was in the character of "Angelo" when he supported his father in this English tour. In this country the play was acted as far south as Mobile, Alabama, where E. S. Connor played "Angelo" in 1845, the part he had acted with Wallack in 1839.
In character delineation, in the use of practical stage devices, and in the manner in which the playwright has, without making the language stilted, placed such excellent poetry in the mouths of the characters, Tortesa the Usurer is noteworthy. The influence of Romeo and Juliet and of The Winter's Tale is probably sufficiently evident. The direct source of the play goes back to the Florentine story of Genevra degli Amieri, who was married to Francesco Agolanti while in love with Antonio Rondinelli, and who apparently died and was buried. Coming to life during the night she escaped from the vault and was refused admittance by her husband, her father and her uncle, all of whom thought she was a spirit. She then went to Antonio's house and was tenderly and considerately treated by him. They were afterwards married, the former marriage being annulled. The story, which suggested merely the main outlines of one incident in the play, is to be found in the story of La Sepolta Viva, by Domenico Maria Manni, translated by Thomas Roscoe in his Italian Novelists, London, 1825, vol. 4. Eugene Scribe wrote an opera on the theme with the title of Guido et Genevra ou La Peste de Florence, played and published in 1838. This is so different from Willis's play that it is unlikely that he used it as a source, unless he took the idea of Genevra rising from the tomb from it instead of from the Italian. Scribe made Guido a sculptor, but his art plays no part in the play as in Angelo's case. Shelley also used the theme in his fragment, Genevra.
Tortesa the Usurer and Bianca Visconti were published in 1839 in New York and also in London. They are now hard to obtain. For references to the plays, see Ireland, Records of the New York Stage, Vol. 2, p. 283; Lester Wallack, Memories of Fifty Years, New York, 1889, p. 35. For the Life of Willis, see Henry H. Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis, American Men of Letters Series, Boston, 1893, and for an interesting criticism of Tortesa, see Poe's articles in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, August, 1839, later expanded and incorporated in a discussion of The American Drama, in the American Whig Review, August, 1845. They are to be found in vol. 10, p. 27, and vol. 13, p. 33, of the Virginia edition of Poe's works.
