Overview

The Kansas State Historical Society holds notebooks containing a handful of original unpublished dramas by New York playwright Kate Edwards Swayze (1834-62), author of Ossawattomie Brown.; or The Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry (1859). One of these is an anti-slavery play that revises George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico (1787) to tell the story of a White Southerner who falls in love with the African woman he seeks to enslave. Mielke and Baldwin transcribed and encoded the play manuscript in TEI-compliant XML and then used the tool Juxta to create a collation of it and Colman’s original. The edition includes the full play by Swayze (the title of which contains a racist epithet), eight passages highlighted for direct comparison with Inkle and Yarico, and a scholarly introduction and notes.