George Lillo

George Lillo (3 February 1691 – 4 September 1739) was an English playwright. He was also a jeweller in London. He produced his first stage work, Silvia, or The Country Burial, in 1730, and a year later his most famous play, The London Merchant. He wrote at least six more plays before his death in 1739, including The Christian Hero, Fatal Curiosity (1737) and Marina (1738).

Life George Lillo was born in Moorfields, or Moorgate, in the City of London. He became a partner in his father's goldsmith's and jewellery business. In The London Merchant, the subject is an apprentice who is seduced by Sarah Millwood, a "lady of pleasure," and then struggles to atone for his indiscretion throughout the remainder of the play, with little success. Lillo shows how "evil breeds evil," and Barnwell's initial dalliance eventually leads him to rob his master and murder his uncle in an attempt to secure the money needed to save Millwood's ostensibly endangered reputation. Her seduction, however, is simply a ruse to exploit his naïveté, so her reputation is never actually in danger. Lillo redefined the subject of dramatic tragedy and demonstrated that middle and lower class citizens were worthy of tragic downfalls. It was dismissed as a "nauseous sermon" by Charles Lamb, though much admired by Lillo's contemporaries Samuel Richardson and Colley Cibber, who acted in the original production of the play.

Lillo revived the genre of play referred to as domestic tragedy (or bourgeois tragedy). Even though the Jacobean stage had flirted with merchant and artisan plays in the past (with, for example, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood), The London Merchant was a significant change in theatre, and in tragedy in particular.

Lillo was concerned that plays be morally correct and in keeping with Christian values. In 1734 he produced a patriotic masque, Britannia and Batavia, for the royal wedding of Anne, the Princess Royal, to William IV of Orange-Nassau. His next play was The Christian Hero (1735), a retelling of the story of Skanderbeg. He based Marina on the play Pericles by William Shakespeare. Lillo adapted the anonymous Elizabethan play Arden of Feversham, which was posthumously performed, first in 1759. It was based on the life of Alice Arden.

In his own day, his later plays, other than Merchant, were only moderate successes, and after his death old style tragedies and comedies continued to dominate the stage. All of Lillo's plays were produced in London, and only three of them produced any profit.

Lillo died at age 48, in 1739, in Rotherhithe, London.