Incle and Yarico and The Incas : two plays

by Thelwall, John

"This book presents two unpublished plays by the English radical, John Thelwall (1764-1834), who, as a leading member of the prorevolutionary London Corresponding Society, was tried and acquitted of high treason in 1794. A close friend of Coleridge, Thelwall was a prolific man of letters who produced novels, poetry, journalism, criticism, scientific and political essays, and autobiography. Both plays, libretti for the London theater, are especially topical today as they use popular literary forms to polemicize critical issues of race, empire, revolution, and sexuality." "Incle and Yarico (1787) comically treats the well-known eighteenth-century love story of Inkle and Yarico, in which an English merchant betrays and sells into slavery an Indian maiden, an innocent "Noble Savage." The play may well be the earliest drama penned specifically in the cause of abolition. The Incas (1792) allegorizes the French Revolution and the English suppression of dissent in portraying a confrontation be