A native of Dublin, commenced writing plays at the age of sixteen, and practised dramatic composition with such rapidity that the Biographia Dramatica enumerates nearly fifty of his plays produced before the end of the century. A collection of his “Dramatic Works,” in 4 vols. 8vo, was pub. in 1798; his “Recollections of his Life” appeared in 1826, 2 vols. 8vo; and a small volume of his poems, with autobiographical reminiscences, entitled “O’Keefe’s Legacy to his Daughters,” was pub. in 1834, 12mo. Of his plays, “Tony Lumpkin in Town,” “The Agreeable Surprise,” “Wild Oats,” “Modern Antiques,” “Fontainebleau,” “The Highland Reed,” “Love in a Camp,” “The Poor Soldier,” and “Sprigs of Laurel,” still keep their place on the stage. O’Keefe became blind in his fiftieth year.
General
If Foote has been called our English Aristophanes, O’Keefe might well be called our English Moliere. The scale of the modern writer was smaller, but the spirit is the same. In light, careless laughter, and pleasant exaggerations of the humourous, we have had no one equal to him. There is no labour or contrivance in his scenes, but the drollery of his subject seems to strike irresistibly upon his fancy, and run away with his discretion as it does with ours. His “Cowslip” and “Lingo” are “Touchstone” and “Audry” revived. He is himself a modern antique. His fancy has all the quaintness and extravagance of the old writers, with the ease and lightness which the moderns arrogate to themselves. All his pieces are delightful, but the “Agreeable Surprise” is the most so. There are in this some of the most irresistible double entendres, the most felicitous blunders in situation and character, that can be conceived; and in Lingo’s superb replication, “A scholar! I was a master of scholars,” he has hit the height of the ridiculous.
His [Goldsmith’s] comic writing is of the class which is perhaps as much preferred to that of a staider sort by people in general, as it is by the writer of these pages,—comedy running into farce; that is to say, truth richly coloured and overflowing with animal spirits. It is that of the prince of comic writers, Molière (always bearing in mind that Molière beats every one of them in expression, and is a great verse-writer to boot). The English have no dramatists to compare in this respect with the Irish. Farquhar, Goldsmith, and Sheridan surpass them all; and O’Keefe, as a farce-writer, stands alone.
The choicest and most popular farce-writer since the career of Foote; and as a pure farcist, as a dispenser of reckless fun, his rival, even his surpasser.
O’Keeffe’s “Wild Oats” is played to this day, and one of the most successful of Buckstone’s revivals was “The Castle of Andalusia,” in which that actor took a leading part. But O’Keeffe’s popularity has not proved permanent, and his unpublished and unacted pieces, which his daughter offered for sale at his death, did not find a purchaser.
O’Keefe was to a certain extent a follower of Foote; but his pieces—though he was a practised actor—depended less upon his own powers of exposition than Foote’s. They range from rather farcical comedies to pure farces and comediettas much interspersed with songs for music; and their strictly literary merit is not often great, while for sheer extravagance they require the utmost license of the boards to excuse them. There is, however, something much more taking in them than in most of the dramatic work of the time. For instance, the “wild farce” (referred to but not named by Lamb in his paper on Munden) of “The Merry Mourners,” though as “improbable” as Mrs. Barbauld thought “The Ancient Mariner” to be, has a singular hustle and bustle of sustained interest, and not a few shrewd strokes…. O’Keefe has few gifts beyond knowledge of the stage, Irish shrewdness, Irish rattle, and an honest, straightforward simplicity; and that one turns to him from other dramatists of the period with some relief, is even more to their discredit than to his credit.
