What play was Lincoln watching when he was shot?
-6th grade students at Zeigler-Royalton Jr. High School, Zeigler, IL The play was called “Our American Cousin”, written by Tom Taylor, a British playwright. It was a comedy that depended a lot on topical humor, puns, and jokes that were tied into the current events and the comedy preferred by people of that time. That’s why most of us from our own time don’t get the jokes and find “Our American Cousin” to be quite boring. The story line of the play is that Asa Trenchard, a backwoods, unsophisticated American goes to England because his British cousins mistakenly think that he inherited a great deal of money when one of their relatives died. Because of their mistaken belief that Asa Trenchard will soon become a very rich man, his British cousins try to marry him off to their daughters, despite their perception that he is a boorish “hick” who does not know the manners of good society. The star of the play that night was a British actress named Laura Keene, who held the American copyright
