Introduction

Abstract

Modern drama’s preoccupation with questions of heredity is well known. But the extent of this interest and its connections to science and popular culture is rarely acknowledged. Obsessions with heredity played out in very different kinds of theatre in the modern period, from fairground exhibits to the plays of prominent European modern dramatists like Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and George Bernard Shaw. The rise of vital American dramatists like Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill took place against this backdrop and alongside the now largely forgotten but ubiquitous eugenics movement in America.