page_title: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Or a Mis-Spent Life
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Or a Mis-Spent Life / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson
context_page_description: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Or a Mis-Spent Life is a four-act play written in 1897 by Luella Forepaugh and George F. Fish. It is an adaptation of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, an 1886 novella written by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. The story focuses on Henry Jekyll, a respected London doctor, and his involvement with Edward Hyde, a loathsome criminal. After Hyde murders a vicar, Jekyll's friends suspect he is helping the killer, but the truth is that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. Jekyll has developed a potion that allows him to transform himself into Hyde and back again. When he runs out of the potion, he is trapped in his Hyde form and commits suicide.
  Forepaugh and Fish wrote the adaptation for the repertory company at a family theater Forepaugh managed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After Forepaugh and Fish left the theater business, the play was published in 1904 for the use of other theater companies. A 1908 silent film was based on the play.
context_section_description: The Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1885. In January 1886, it was published in the United Kingdom by Longmans, Green & Co. It was published that same month by Charles Scribner's Sons in the United States, where it was also frequently pirated due to the lack of copyright protections in the US for works originally published in the UK. Despite the opportunity to adapt without authorization, the actor Richard Mansfield secured permission for both the American and British stage rights in early 1887. Mansfield asked Boston writer Thomas Russell Sullivan to create the script. Their authorized adaptation debuted at the Boston Museum on May 9, 1887, under the title Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A competing, unauthorized adaptation was written by John McKinney in collaboration with the actor Daniel E. Bandmann. It also used the title Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and it opened at Niblo's Garden on March 12, 1888. Both of these adaptations were subsequently performed on tour in other cities.
  Luella Forepaugh became the manager of Forepaugh's Family Theatre, a repertory theater in Philadelphia, when her husband, John A. Forepaugh, became ill and died in 1895. In 1897, she and George F. Fish wrote a new adaptation of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for the theater's company. Their version is very similar to McKinney and Bandmann's 1888 adaptation. It debuted at Forepaugh's on March 14, 1897, with the company's leading man, George Learock, in the dual role of Jekyll and Hyde. The debut was a matinée, with cinematograph images projected between the acts for the entertainment of children in the audience, and patrons were given souvenir copies of Stevenson's novella with their admission.
  Forepaugh and Fish married in 1899, and they decided to leave the theater to start the Luella Forepaugh-Fish Wild West Show, which opened in St. Louis, Missouri on April 17, 1903. Their adaptation of the Jekyll and Hyde story was published by Samuel French in 1904 under the title Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Or a Mis-Spent Life, for use by other stock theater companies.
caption: The story was adapted from a novella by Robert Louis Stevenson.
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