The South Sea Company (officially The Governor and Company of the merchants of Great Britain, trading to the South Seas and other parts of America, and for the encouragement of fishing) was a British joint-stock company founded in 1711, created as a public-private partnership to consolidate and reduce the cost of national debt. The company was also granted a monopoly to trade with South America, hence its name. At the time it was created, Britain was involved in the War of the Spanish Succession and Spain controlled South America. There was no realistic prospect that trade would take place and the company never realised any significant profit from its monopoly. Company stock rose greatly in value as it expanded its operations dealing in government debt, peaking in 1720 before collapsing to little above its original flotation price; this became known as the South Sea Bubble.

The Bubble Act 1720 (6 Geo I, c 18), which forbade the creation of joint-stock companies without royal charter, was promoted by the South Sea company itself before its collapse.

South Sea Bubble is a play by the English actor and dramatist Noël Coward. It was written in 1949 but not performed until 1951, and not in its final form until 1956. The play was moderately successful in 1956 but failed to match the popularity of Coward's pre-war hits.

Background

The play is named after the South Sea Bubble, an economic bubble that arose from speculation in the South Sea Company.

The play was originally written as a vehicle for Gertrude Lawrence, titled Home and Colonial. Coward intended her to open in it after the conclusion of her run in The King and I, but her unexpected death meant that she never played it. The play was retitled Island Fling, which opened in 1951 with Claudette Colbert in the lead. It ran for eight performances in Westport, Connecticut, U.S.

The final version of the play opened as South Sea Bubble, at the Lyric Theatre in the West End, on 25 April 1956. It was directed by William Chappell and starred Vivien Leigh as Sandy Shotter, the wife of the governor of Samolo, a British island colony in the South Seas. Leigh left the cast in August 1956 and was succeeded by Elizabeth Sellars. The play ran until Christmas 1956, a total of 276 performances.

South Sea or South Seas or Southsea may refer to:

The South China Sea is a marginal sea that is part of the Pacific Ocean, encompassing an area from the Singapore and Malacca Straits to the Strait of Taiwan of around 3,500,000 square kilometres (1,400,000 sq mi). The area's importance largely results from one-third of the world's shipping sailing through its waters and that it is believed to hold huge oil and gas reserves beneath its seabed.

It is located

The minute South China Sea Islands, collectively an archipelago, number in the hundreds. The sea and its mostly uninhabited islands are subject to competing claims of sovereignty by several countries. These claims are also reflected in the variety of names used for the islands and the sea.

Names

South China Sea is the dominant term used in English for the sea, and the name in most European languages is equivalent, but it is sometimes called by different names in China's neighboring countries, often reflecting historical claims to hegemony over the sea.

The South Sea (Korean: 남해, hanja: 南海 ) is the region of ocean near Korea that is bounded by the southwestern part of the Sea of Japan and by the southeastern part of the Yellow Sea.

See also