Inkle and Yarico

Inkle and Yarico is a comic opera first staged in London, England in August 1787, with music by Samuel Arnold and a libretto by George 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 March 1711, in which Yarico is a Native American, sold into slavery while bearing Inkle's child.

External links

• excerpt from Linda V. Troost's The Rise of the Comic Opera
• Original 1711 Spectator text