The story
In 1709 the critic and playwright John Dennis staged his tragedy Appius and Virginia at the Drury Lane Theatre in London. It closed after just three nights.
The play was a flop, but Dennis had come up with a new and better way to make the sound of thunder on stage, and it impressed people. Soon after, as the story goes, he sat in the same theater for a performance of Macbeth and heard his own thunder rolling across the stage.
The earliest telling, by the poet Alexander Pope in 1729, has Dennis crying, “S’death! that is my Thunder.” By 1747 the line had grown to: “They will not let my Play run, but steal my Thunder.”
No one knows for sure what Dennis really said. Pope and Dennis were bitter rivals, and Samuel Johnson, among others, suspected Pope made the tale up. Still, the phrase stuck, and by the 1830s people were stealing one another’s thunder far from any theater.
