Playbill for Inkle and Yarico

On the programme for the evening of Tuesday October 6th 1818 was ‘a favourite comic opera’ Inkle and Yarico. Written by George Colman the Younger with music by Samuel Arnold, Inkle and Yarico portrays the love affair between an English trader shipwrecked in the West Indies and an Indian maiden who he betrays and sells into slavery. We know from the diary of James Tate, a local school master, that this was one of the plays performed by the Butler company on the opening night of the Richmond Theatre in 1788, only months after it was first produced in London in August 1787.