Sir F C Burnand

Francis Cowley Burnand (London, 29 November 1836 – Ramsgate, 21 April 1917) was an English librettist and dramatist who achieved great popularity on the Victorian stage. His name today is chiefly associated with comic opera and his collaboration with Arthur Sullivan.

He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, where he founded the Amateur Dramatic Club. Although he was trained for the Church and then read law until he was called to the bar, his true vocation was the theatre. By the 1860s he had become one of the leading suppliers of burlesque to the Royalty Theatre in London, where his first great success was Black Eyed Susan (1869). He was knighted in 1902.

His output, abundant and hurried, relied on puns, topical allusions and slang. Of all this material, only Cox and Box (1866), an adaptation of J. Maddison Morton's 1847 farce turned into a one-act operetta by Sullivan, managed to remain in the repertoire. He wrote almost twenty pieces for the entertainments of the German Reeds, and it was Reed who brought Burnand and Sullivan together again for The Contrabandista (1867). His other collaborators included Alexander Mackenzie, Alfred Cellier, Edward Solomon and J. L. Molloy. He also translated operas by Audran, Lecocq and Planquette for London.