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  • John Gay’s Polly (1729), Bernard Mandeville, and the Critique of Empire
  • Richard Frohock (bio)

When the production of John Gay’s Polly, sequel to the famous Beggar’s Opera (1728), was just about to go into rehearsals at Mr. Rich’s theater, it suddenly was halted by order from the Lord Chamberlain, who, after reading the script, determined to prohibit the performance. Gay published his play in 1729 instead with a preface and an introduction that offer a defense of his work. The Lord Chamberlain did not state reasons for his decision to ban Polly, but Gay tells readers that he had been charged generally with having written many “disaffected libels” and “seditious pamphlets,” and that Polly in particular contained “immoralities” and “slanders against particular persons,” as well as against majesty itself. Gay offers a familiar defense of his satire, claiming that it attacks vice generally, not particular persons, and that only the guilty would have reason to apply its critiques to themselves. Such defenses can be disingenuous, and certainly part of the gleeful irreverence of The Beggar’s Opera lies in its lampooning of several contemporary persons of note. In the case of Polly, however, there is something to Gay’s claim; in his banned sequel, Gay moves beyond Jonathan Wild, Lord Charles Townshend, Robert Walpole, and the particulars of law, crime, and politics in London to critique the building of empire in broad terms.1 [End Page 147]

The practice of transporting criminals makes the West Indies a logical setting for Gay’s Polly, and the contact zone of the Caribbean islands allows Gay to juxtapose familiar and foreign cultural outlooks and practices. Gay’s play explores the relationship between imperial center and colonial outpost, suggesting in many ways that planter society, though geographically removed and commonly disparaged as a degenerate simulacrum of the metropole, is culturally and ideologically contiguous with home. Gay also includes two alternative societies that raise possibilities of reconceiving and refashioning social organization in the West Indies. The pirates, led by a disguised Macheath, have abandoned mainstream society and have fashioned a rogue commonwealth with its own laws and protocols, while the indigenous West Indians represent a starkly drawn utopic vision of a virtuous society. The interplay among these cultural groups—their alignments and collisions—allow for an imaginative examination of the essentials of human nature and civil society, both within and beyond the expanse of English empire.

Scholars of Gay’s Polly have long addressed the play’s engagement with empire and offer very diverse—even opposing—opinions concerning the extent to which Gay critiques imperialism in Polly. Albert Wertheim and Diana Dugaw were among the first to read Gay’s play as a critique of empire; Robert G. Dryden and Peter P. Reed took matters a step further by reading Morano/Macheath as a subversive figure who challenges a colonial ideology built on racial oppression. In contrast, John Richardson counters such arguments by asserting instead that the play encourages the “duplicitous mental habits” that support slavery and empire, and Jochen Petzold aligns with Richardson in opposing those who read Polly as an anticolonial play by arguing that its satire is directed primarily at domestic rather than imperial corruptions.2 In this essay, I offer a new perspective on Gay’s engagement with empire by contextualizing it in terms of topical discussions of human nature and civil society stirred up in the 1720s by Bernard Mandeville’s notorious The Fable of the Bees (1714). Gay, like Mandeville, imagines and thinks through the core philosophical issue of the place of virtue in a fundamentally self-serving world; in Polly, he extends Mandeville’s domestic social analysis to the realm of Atlantic empire, positing that self-love and self-interest determine how people organize themselves abroad as well as at home. The alternative societies he presents—the pirate commonwealth and the West Indian nation—reinforce in different ways the view that a successful trade economy and the successful expansion of the imperial state must be predicated on, and driven by, base human desires and vice. Gay’s Mandevillian outlook defines his critique of English empire and illuminates the play’s ambivalent ending, which celebrates...

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