So the book has always been better than the movie. Southerne thought it would be a good idea to take the affecting slavery novel Oroonoko, tape on a who-marries-who Restoration subplot, and then let the twain run roughshod alongside one another until the pathos of the one makes the other too tacky--but of course by that time his Oroonoo and Imoinda have fallen well over the edge into melodrama. I like a good melodrama, and their inability at the end to do each other harm must be heartbreaking when staged. And the Othello aspects of thestory come out really explicit in this telling, with the Aboan character using Imoinda's body as the explicit site for his Iago-esque seduction of Oroonoko into fighting the whites (not that Aboan was evil like Iago, and the question of whether fighting was the right thing to do is left satisfyingly unresolved). But wedding hijinx and women in drag? Why not just add a dog and clown and call it a blockbuster? ( )

From the auction catalogue:

FIRST EDITION, with the unnumbered leaf at end with the epilogue by William Congreve. Based on Aphra Behn's novel History of the Royal Slave, Oroonoko was a very popular play of the late 17th-century and was a prototype of a host of popular melodramas. "According to Cibber, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, subsisted for several years on the success of this and two or three other plays" (Pforzheimer 959). Wing S-4761.