Pizarro

Pizarro (1800). Richard Brinsley Sheridan's long‐popular tragedy of a noble Inca's doomed battle against the Spanish invader, its most famous scene depicted the hero, Rolla, leaping over a chasm with a young child in one hand and his defending sword in another. Sheridan had based his play on a German drama by Kotzebue. When it was first played at the Park Theatre in America in 1800, a year after its Drury Lane premiere, it was further revised by William Dunlap and offered as Pizarro in Peru; or, The Death of Rolla. In one version or the other it remained a major attraction for seventy years. Among the notable Rollas who followed John Hodgkinson were James Fennell, Thomas Abthorpe Cooper, Edwin Forrest, William B. Wood, and Edward Eddy.