Box and Cox

Box and Cox is a one act farce by John Maddison Morton. It is based on a French one-act vaudeville, Frisette, which had been produced in Paris in 1846.

Box and Cox was first produced at the Lyceum Theatre, London, on 1 November 1847, billed as a "romance of real life." The play became popular and was revived frequently through the end of the nineteenth century, with occasional productions in the twentieth century. It spawned two sequels by other authors, and was adapted as a one-act comic opera in 1866 by the dramatist F. C. Burnand and the composer Arthur Sullivan, Cox and Box, which also became popular and continues to be performed regularly. Other musical adaptations were made, but have not remained in the repertory.

The phrase "Box and Cox" has entered the English language: the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "applied allusively to an arrangement in which two persons take turns in sustaining a part, occupying a position, or the like."

In the nineteenth century, it was common practice for plays to be adapted from French originals for the London stage, with changes often made to conform to Victorian playgoers' expectations. The main source of Morton's play was a French one-act vaudeville, Frisette, by Eugène Marin Labiche and Auguste Lefranc, which had been produced at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, Paris in 1846. Some commentators have stated that Morton also drew on another vaudeville, La Chambre à Deux Lits (The Double Room), which itself reputedly derived from earlier French, English and Spanish comedies. Morton is not known to have pronounced on the matter, but F. C. Burnand, who later adapted Box and Cox as an operetta, discounted the importance of La Chambre à Deux Lits. He wrote, "Whether La Chambre was 'taken from the Spanish', who, I dare say, have got on very well without it, or not, certainly it was not the original source of Box and Cox. This immortal English farce was adapted – a masterpiece of adaptation, be it said – from a comédie-vaudeville by Labiche and Lefranc entitled Frisette." Burnand added that the later sections of the plot of Box and Cox, namely the men's connubial entanglements, their efforts to evade them, and the discovery that they are brothers, were not derived from anyone, and were "thoroughly Mortonian".

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Wikipedia