Play: Pizarro

Overview
Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro (1799) reimagines the Spanish conquest of Peru as a grand, patriotic melodrama adapted from August von Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru. Set against the invasion led by Francisco Pizarro, the play opposes rapacious tyranny to indigenous valor and private honor. Sheridan heightens the moral contrasts, streamlines the intrigue, and inserts stirring speeches that resonated with contemporary British anxieties about invasion and national virtue. The result became one of Drury Lane’s biggest successes, powered by spectacle, sentiment, and political edge.

Plot
Pizarro lands in Peru bent on plunder and dominion, aided by fanatics and opportunists who dress conquest in the language of faith and civilization. His one-time protégé, Alonzo, has vanished from the Spanish ranks, disillusioned by the cruelty of the expedition. Living among the Peruvians, Alonzo has married Cora and has a young child. Their friend and protector is Rolla, the Peruvian general, a paragon of courage, simplicity, and patriotic devotion, who serves the Inca monarch Ataliba.

Warned that Pizarro advances by treachery as much as force, Rolla rallies the Peruvians with an exhortation to defend hearth and liberty. Pizarro, enraged by Alonzo’s defection and eager to crack Peruvian resistance from within, sets a trap and captures Alonzo. He demands military secrets and safe passage through the mountain defiles; Alonzo refuses even under threat of death. Elvira, Pizarro’s proud and perceptive mistress, tries to temper his fury and sees with increasing clarity the baseness of his cause.

To save his friend, Rolla infiltrates the Spanish camp disguised as a monk, claiming the right to hear a condemned man’s confession. In the cell he compels Alonzo to exchange clothes and flee to Cora and the army, while Rolla remains to face the consequences. The ruse buys time and crystallizes the contrast between magnanimity and tyranny. Pizarro, thwarted and suspecting treachery, orders Rolla’s immediate execution.

Battle erupts around the Spanish encampment. In the mêlée, Rolla seizes Alonzo’s infant and, braving volleys and sabres, threads the field to place the child back in Cora’s arms, an image of devotion that electrifies the Peruvian ranks. He returns to the fore to cover the retreat and confronts Pizarro in single combat. Mortally wounded, Rolla’s fall seals his martyrdom and shames the invaders. Elvira, fully estranged from Pizarro, denounces his perfidy and aids the oppressed. Though history presses darkly, Ataliba’s capture and Spanish ruthlessness haunt the margins, the stage victory is moral and emotional: the tyranny that conquers bodies cannot subdue honor, love, and patriotism.

Characters and dynamics
Pizarro embodies ruthless ambition and the corruptions of imperial zeal, his charisma curdling into cruelty. Rolla stands as his antithesis, a warrior-statesman whose simplicity underwrites moral grandeur. Alonzo provides a bridge between worlds, a Spaniard redeemed by conscience and domestic affection. Cora’s steadfast courage gives the play its humane center, while Elvira’s evolution from complicity to defiance supplies its sharpest critique of power. Ataliba represents lawful authority betrayed by deceit, and the presence of clerical figures frames the abuse of religion in service of conquest.

Themes and style
Sheridan fuses sentimental domesticity with martial spectacle to dramatize liberty versus despotism, the sanctity of the household, and the ethical claims of indigenous resistance. The famous orations, Rolla’s rallying speech, Elvira’s denunciations, are crafted for contemporary ears, turning a Peruvian fable into a mirror for late-1790s British patriotism. Pageantry, sudden reversals, disguise, and emblematic tableaux (Rolla bearing the child) mark a melodramatic idiom designed for maximum theatrical impact.

Impact
Premiering at Drury Lane to extraordinary receipts and long runs, Pizarro became a cultural phenomenon, its speeches echoed in pamphlets and politics. More than an exotic adventure, it served as a parable of national character, staging the defeat of naked power by public virtue and private love.