ABSTRACT
John Thelwall's two plays, written at an early stage of his career, deconstruct cultural myths upholding slavery and empire. An operatic farce, Incle and Yarico comically treats the well-known eighteenth-century story of Inkle and Yarico, in which an English merchant betrays and sells into slavery his Indian lover, represented as a 'Noble Savage'. A historical opera, The Incas – a full-length drama designed as a theatrical main piece – translates Spanish Conquest narratives into an anti-imperialistic play. The Incas, strongly parallels that articulated by Williams, as the play's hero, Faulkland, who occupies a higher social position than the sailor in Thelwall's farce, also sides with the Amerindians against the Europeans. Applying the translation model to Thelwall's two plays, one can say that his Incle and Yarico translates the intertextual fable to bring out its abolitionism through two different kinds of English, the London demotic speech and the African stage dialect.
