ABSTRACT
In March of 1784, George Colman the Elder, manager at the Haymarket, accepted Elizabeth Inchbald’s afterpiece The Mogul Tale for production. The piece would be an overnight hit, propelling Inchbald from her position as mediocre actress to one of the most successful playwrights of the late eighteenth century. Yet she and Colman exhibited caution when it came to publicizing this, her fi rst accepted piece. Both took “the greatest care . . . to conceal that she was the author of the farce,” and “the best mask they thought was to give her a part in it.”1 As a result, Inchbald attended the fi rst reading of the play as an actress, not as the playwright.None of the other actors were told that she was the author, and her friend and fellow actress Mrs. Sumbel comments with some annoyance that during the reading Inchbald “corrected me in some of the passages which I did not speak to please her; which was by no means agreeable to me at the time, for I then conceived her very inadequate to the task.”2
