Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s last play, an adaptation of August von Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru first performed in 1799, was one of the most popular of the entire century. Set during the Spanish Conquest of Peru, Pizarro dramatizes English fears of invasion by Revolutionary France, but it is also surprisingly and critically engaged with Britain’s colonial exploits abroad. Pizarro is a play of firsts: the first use of music alongside action, the first collapsing set, the first production to inspire such celebratory ephemera as cartoons, portraits, postcards, even porcelain collector plates. Pizarro marks the end of eighteenth-century drama and the birth of a new theatrical culture.

This edition features a comprehensive introduction and extensive appendices documenting the play’s first successful performances and global influence. It will appeal to students and scholars of Romantic literature, theatre history, post-colonialism, and Indigenous studies.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan's profile page

Selena Couture is assistant professor or drama at the University of Alberta.

Selena Couture's profile page

Alexander Dick is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia.

Alexander Dick's profile page

“This exemplary edition of Sheridan’s spectacular melodrama demonstrates how the play made history in multiple ways—theatrically, technically, nationally, and imperially. The editors expertly bring together source materials and stage history to revivify the original context of the play, its production, and its reception.” — Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater, Yale University

“The new Broadview edition of Pizarro has thus the great merit of helping a modern-day readership to rediscover this classic hit of Romantic drama through an innovative commentary and appendices, including a wide selection of historical sources on the invasion of Peru and dramatical testimonies of the invasion of the Americas by the Spanish, along with contemporary reviews and criticism resulting from the play’s representation. This edition demonstrates once again that English Romantic drama, even when adapted from already existing texts, possessed an innovative momentum that can be recognized at different levels: technical, theatrical, and, last but not least, political.” — Carlotta Farese, European Romantic Review