On 1 February 1749, two young African men, a prince and his companion, attended Covent Garden to see a performance of Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko, whose protagonist is an African prince tricked into slavery by a ship's captain. What is remarkable is that they had themselves been tricked and sold into slavery by a ship's captain while on their way to England for education. Such abductions were not unknown, but their plight had caused a furore; a ransom had been paid for them by the British government and they had been presented to the king himself. Their appearance at the theatre and the sensation this caused among the audience, who greeted them with a burst of applause, was a rare and instantaneous fusion of life and art. For the audience, it combined the theatrical experience of Southerne's highly popular play with the theatrical spectacle of the two real-life abductees, ‘doubl[ing] the tears which were shed for Oroonoko and Imoinda’. For the young men, the pathos of this theatrical reflection of their own experience was almost too much – one had to leave before the play's end; one remained, weeping the whole time. It is an episode which evokes all those ramifications (and occasional contradictions) of Britain's involvement with slavery and slavetrading on which its international commerce and prosperity was built; a trade which, at the time of the young men's capture, was reaching unprecedented proportions.