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  • Incle and Yarico and The Incas:Two Plays by John Thelwall
  • Susan B. Iwanisziw
Frank Felsenstein and Michael Scrivener, eds. "Incle and Yarico" and "The Incas": Two Plays by John Thelwal (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ., 2006). Pp. 167. $39.50. ISBN 0-8386-4101-6

This volume of two previously unpublished plays by the English radical John Thelwall (1764-1834) is a fascinating supplement to earlier studies documenting Thelwall's prolific and parlous writing career and to the literary trope, or myth, that coalesced from the tragic story of the American princess Yarico. The editors offer the farce Incle and Yarico (1787) and the comic opera The Incas (1792) not only to augment Thelwall's growing canon, but also to illuminate his spirited disdain of inequality, slavery, and imperialism. Rejected respectively by the theater managers George Colman the Elder and Thomas Harris, these pieces expose the reach of one radical's high idealism. Perhaps the prospective discovery of other lost manuscripts or publications will inspire scholars to search the archives for texts that similarly recover eighteenth-century humanitarian earnestness from the hostility of modern scholarship.

The editors are fully equipped for the task of introducing these plays and of rectifying the misconception that the English were universally complicit in the colonial enterprise and its attendant cruelties. In English Trader, Indian [End Page 116] Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World: An Inkle and Yarico Reader (1999), Felsenstein established his expertise by compiling numerous renditions of Yarico's legend, a tale first recorded in Richard Ligon's A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657). Felsenstein excels in assessing the theatrical and cultural importance of George Colman the Younger's popular and long-lived comic opera Inkle and Yarico (1787), which Thelwall claimed was plagiarized from his farce, published for the first time in this volume. Michael Scrivener's background, equally germane, arises from his research into late eighteenth-century radical politics, especially his study Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing (2001), in which he discusses Thelwall's profound commitment to English activism and governmental attempts to silence him.

A polemicist and debater of some renown, Thelwall belonged to that cadre of hopeful hacks, magazine publishers, and literary adapters who strove to augment their income through theatrical enterprises. Unluckily, but perhaps not unexpectedly, no manager was willing to produce his plays. Evidently, Thelwall's Incle and Yarico and The Incas were deemed far too radical for the public stage. Insofar as his plays invoke abolitionist activism, revolutionary politics, colonial chauvinism, mixed-race sexuality, and national honor, they deserve to be read today alongside canonical literary offerings that touch upon the same topics and yet, so frequently, equivocate about personal or national ethics.

For example, Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688), frequently cited by modern scholars as abolitionist for its sympathetic treatment of Prince Oroonoko, nonetheless virtually ignores the suffering of nonroyal slaves. Thomas Southerne's adaptation, The Tragedy of Oroonoko, was first performed in 1695 and laid the groundwork for a series of later versions by amateur or semiprofessional playwrights. Only in John Ferriar's adaptation, The Prince of Angola (1788), whose performance was sponsored by the Manchester abolition society, did the action persuasively promote antislavery. Thelwall's Incle and Yarico, far more radical in tone and scope than Ferriar's play, stands as the antithesis of the last known eighteenth-century Oroonoko offshoot: Thomas Bellamy's The Benevolent Planters, published and performed (if only twice) in 1789. In this short, musical play, the prologue promotes abolition, while the plot closes disappointingly with grateful African slaves lauding their kindly European masters. How refreshingly fair-minded is Thelwall's notion that worthy Europeans, instead of exploiting the New World, should go native.

Proceeding through readings of linked texts, the editors set out at length the intertextuality and radical political import of Thelwall's plays. Felsenstein discusses Incle and Yarico in relation to Richard Steele's Spectator article about Yarico (1711), to various poetical renditions, to Colman's comic opera, and to John Stedman's immensely popular Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against [End Page 117] the Revolted Negroes of Surinam...

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