In 1696 Southerne’s great tragedy, founded upon Mrs. Behn’s novel, was produced at Drury Lane. Oroonoko was created by Verbruggen, Powell acted Aboan, and the beautiful Mrs. Rogers Imoinda. The play has some magnificent passages, and long kept the stage. Southerne had further added an excellent comic underplot, full of humour and the truest _vis comica_. It is perhaps worth noting that the intrigues of Lucy and Charlotte and the Lackitt _ménage_ were dished up as a short slap-bang farce by themselves with, curiously enough, two or three scenes _in extenso_ from Fletcher’s _Monsieur Thomas_ (III, iii, and V, ii). This hotch potch entitled _The Sexes Mis-match’d; or, A New Way to get a Husband_ is printed in _The Strollers’ Pacquet open’d_. (12mo, 1741.) On 1 December, 1759, there was brought out at Drury Lane a most insipid alteration of _Oroonoko_ by Dr. Hawkesworth, who omitted all Southerne’s lighter fare and inserted serious nonsense of his own. Garrick was the Oroonoko and Mrs. Cibber Imoinda. Although Hawkesworth’s version was not tolerated, the underplot was none the less pruned in later productions to such an extent that it perforce lost nearly all its pristine wit and fun. There is another adaption of Southerne: ‘_Oroonoko_ altered from the original play . . . to which the editor has added near six hundred lines in place of the comic scenes, together with an addition of two new characters, intended for one of the theatres.’ (8vo, 1760.) The two new characters are Maria, sister to the Lieutenant-Governor and contracted to Blandford, and one Heartwell; both thoroughly tiresome individuals. In the same year Frank Gentleman, a provincial actor, produced his idea of _Oroonoko_ ‘as it was acted at Edinburgh.’ (12mo, 1760.) There is yet a fourth bastard: _The Prince of Angola_, by one J. Ferriar, ‘a tragedy altered from the play of _Oroonoko_ and adapted to the circumstances of the present times.’[4] (Manchester, 1788.) It must be confessed that all this tinkering with an original, which does not require from any point of view the slightest alteration or omission, is most uncalled for, crude, and unsuccessful.