- Inkle and Yarico
Inkle and Yarico is a
comic opera first staged inLondon, England in August1787 , with music by Samuel Arnold and alibretto byGeorge Colman the Younger .The opera was highly successful, performed 98 times at the
Haymarket Theatre , and a total of 164 performances on London stages by 1800. There were also performances in Dublin (1787), Jamaica (1788), New York (1789), Philadelphia (1790), Calcutta (1791), and Boston (1794).Plot
Inkle, an English trader, is shipwrecked in the
West Indies , and survives with the help of Yarico, a Negro maiden. They fall in love, but when Inkle returns to his civilization, he plans to sell Yarico into slavery to recover his financial losses while he marries a woman, Narcissa, who will give him the social standing he wants. In the end, Inkle repents and marries the faithful Yarico.Origins
The supposedly true story first appeared in
Richard Ligon 's book "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes" (1657 ).Richard Steele's "
Spectator " printed another version in March1711 , in which Yarico is a Native American, sold into slavery while bearing Inkle's child.External links
* [http://www.uwec.edu/mwood/colman/troost.html excerpt] from Linda V. Troost's "The Rise of the Comic Opera"
* [http://tabula.rutgers.edu/spectator/text/march1711/no11.html Original 1711 Spectator text]
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