In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

introduction Political and Cultural Exchange in the British Atlantic Come with me and stroll along the Thames River to the Haymarket Theatre Royal on August 4, 1787. Shackled African slaves are being marched to Greenwich, where a ship will transport them to the Americas. The streets teem with pedestrians , peddlers, and pickpockets; bawdy drunks spill out of taverns; rakes and painted women pack brothels; playwrights and wits mingle at coffee houses. Cobbled streets lead to St. Paul’s Church with its Tuscan-style portico and Italianate square, the south side of which houses a bustling open-air fruit and vegetable market. Demobilized and desperately impoverished veterans of the war against the former American colonies—many of them African American ex-slaves who fought on Britain’s side for the promise of freedom—beg. Theatergoers stroll along Strand Street, a major thoroughfare, before turning off for the Haymarket to see the debut of George Colman Jr.’s Inkle and Yarico. The play tells the story of British merchant, Inkle, who is shipwrecked off the coast of Barbados and saved by Yarico, a noble African maiden; she becomes his mistress, but he heartlessly sells her into plantation slavery. A street minstrel belts out the show’s ballads to the multiracial, cross-class, male and female ticketholders milling outside under the theater’s neoclassical colonnades. Playgoers buy song sheets from the orange girl, who also hawks illustrated broadsheets to advertise the play to the illiterate. Peddlers sell cartoons featuring images of popular theatrical characters used to satirize topical political issues. Inside, the pianoforte is barely audible above the rowdy audience of over two thousand. Oil-lamps cast flickering light on the cavernous stage, and middling sorts and high-end women of ill repute are seated in the main gallery above the lower-priced orchestra pit. Three tiers of gilded boxes flank the right and left of the hall, allowing the upper sorts, nobility, and even royalty to overlook the stage. Alas, King George III and Queen Consort Charlotte are not in attendance on August 4. In any event, the plebeian “gods” in the upper balconies rule the theater. Their raucous boos, hisses, taunts, and cheers determine the success or failure 2 Performing the Temple of Liberty of any performance. As the play starts, the gods, boxes, galleries, and pits guffaw at the blackface Wowski—with her childlike, lisping “black” pidgin English—and her romance with Trudge, Inkle’s cockney manservant. The gods’ boos and heckles indict the cruelly mercenary Inkle when he sells Yarico. Sympathetic sighs greet her ballad, a pathetic plea for Inkle’s continued love: For him by day with care conceal’d To bring him food I climb the mountain And when the night no form reveal’d Jocund we fought the bubbling fountain Then wou’d joy my bosom fill. Ah! Think of this and love me still. After the governor of Barbados, Sir Christopher Curry, saves Yarico from slavery and shames Inkle into marrying her, the curtain falls, to wild applause. In the crowded, smoke-filled Bedford Coffee House, literati and artisans enjoy their post-show punch and buzz with gossip of sexual scandals, the stock market, politics, and the crowd-pleasing Inkle and Yarico. Here, patrons can read newspapers reporting that antislavery philanthropists have raised money to rescue black ex-soldier slaves from penury by sending them to West Africa where they will found a colony. Patrons hotly debate these loyalists’ presence on the streets of London and the rights and wrongs of African slavery. William Wilberforce, a Tory member of Parliament who helped found the new London Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, has just proposed that Parliament ban the trade. Excited chatter turns to Colman’s musical opera. Some claim it will stir support for the slave-trade ban—even though Wilberforce, in keeping with the precepts of the Church of England’s evangelical Clapham sect to which he belongs, finds the theater immoral.1 A theater aficionado has a hotoff -the-press edition of Inkle and Yarico and reads from its preface, written by famous playwright Elizabeth Inchbald: “This is a drama which might remove from Mr. Wilberforce his aversion to theatrical exhibitions, and convince him that the teaching of moral duty . . . is most effectually inculcated [in] the resorts of the gay, the idle, and the dissipated.”2 Discussion returns to the play’s antislavery message, heightened by Colman’s decision to change Yarico’s original Native American identity to African, at...

Share