A more accurate description of the plot and the characters follows: Inkle, a middle-class tradesman, sails with his fiancee, Narcissa (the daughter of the island’s Governor) to Barbados where their parents have instructed them to marry. Inkle takes Trudge, his servant and his uncle, Medium, ashore to the coast of Virginia to survey the land and its natives for their value. When chased by natives, Trudge panics from fear and Inkle and Trudge hide in a cave. There they discover Yarico – a native Princess and hunter – and her servant / friend Wowski. Yarico learnt English as a child, from a shipwrecked English sailor (evoking Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), but Wowski speaks only a little. During their few months stay on the island Yarico and Trudge feed and protect Trudge and Inkle. Trudge falls in love with Wowski and Inkle claims to fall in love with Yarico, who he persuades to help him by flagging down an English trip. His promise to marry Yarico and to live with her in a mansion “with white servants” is taken with a very large pinch of salt by Yarico, who questions it. Nevertheless, for reasons open to interpretation, Yarico does as he asks.

When they arrive at Barbados, Inkle sells Yarico as a slave.

The story is horrific, especially the last scene. Research I have conducted on this play strongly suggests it is best acted with spectators on three sides, as it was first acted in the surviving 18th century Regular Theatre at Richmond, Yorkshire in the U. K. – a playhouse not unlike the Little Theatre in the Haymarket (built in 1766) that saw its first performances.

This was the play most frequently acted in the last 25 years of the 18th century (second only to The School for Scandal). It was a hugely popular play, and when the “happy ending” probably written and added by the Government’s Examiner of Plays, is replaced by the surviving, more open, ending in a surviving torn-off manuscript in the George Colman the younger’s hand, the play is shocking and deeply disturbing.

I have staged the play for teenagers who have shouted abuse at Inkle when he tries to sell Yarico. The story was very well known throughout the 18th century, from 1711 when playwright Richard Steele first published a short story version of it in The Spectator. The story was popular throughout the eighteenth century because the issue of Liberty (capital L deliberate) remained so popular especially after the English Revolution of 1788, which led, in turn, to the American and French Revolutions. It is no coincidence that this play was first performed in Westminster’s Theatres Royal in 1787, and went on to storm the country in 1788 – the centennial anniversary of the Glorious Revolution.

Mark Howell