While the mobs that had stormed the Bastille were still rejoicing their audacity on the night of 14 July, the audience at the Haymarket Theatre, London, gathered to see Inkle and Yarico by the theatre's manager George Colman the Younger. First performed on 8 August 1787, this comic opera had dominated the Haymarket's last two summer seasons and between October 1788 and June 1789 had also been performed twenty-four times at Covent Garden. Its 164 patent theatre performances by 1800 were a record for the last quarter of the century beaten only by The School for Scandal. Unlike Sheridan's play, a classic example of classic comedy, Inkle and Yarico was of a new genre rather vaguely defined as ‘mixed’. Containing thirteen songs, it was published as an ‘opera’, and, while its tone was essentially comic, its potential for tragedy locates it in the Sentimental tradition, with topical references to the anti-slave trade movement. This hybrid entertainment is indicative of what Alan Sinfield has described as a ‘cultural faultline’: ‘Faultline stories are the ones that require most assiduous and continuous reworking; they address the awkward, unresolved issues, the ones in which the conditions of plausibility are in dispute [and which] comprise within themselves the ghosts of the alternative stories they are trying to exclude.’ Despite her having saved his life, the merchant Inkle attempts to sell Yarico, a Native American, as a slave. And, although the benevolent Governor of Barbados thwarts his plan, the play challenged the ideological complacency of the mid-eighteenth century.