Originally composed and published in 1981, this second book makes up two volumes of the plays of George Colman the Younger. Versatile, industrious, talented, Goerge Colman the Younger (1762-1836) followed Sheridan as England's most popular playwright. He wrote not only monologues, farces, pantomimes, comic operas, and straight comedies, but also hybrid three-act anticipations of melodrama.

This volume contains edited texts of five plays by two late eighteenth-century dramatists. The plays have been chosen to represent the range of the two playwrights and the variety of dramatic material on offer during the period. The full-length plays and afterpieces by George Colman the Younger and Thomas Morton were as popular as Sheridan's works in their time, but today are seldom performed or read. This discrepancy lies at the heart of Barry Sutcliffe's extensive introduction, which explores the critical and social background to the dramatic activity of the period and relates the dramas to the shifting demands of the theatre audiences for whom these plays were written.