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John Gay, Ballad Opera and the Théâtres de la foire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

VANESSA L. ROGERS
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Abstract

Daniel Heartz was the first musicologist to link John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) with opéras comiques en vaudevilles, light musical theatre entertainments popular at the annual Paris fairs. Other scholars such as Edmond Gagey and Calhoun Winton had also suggested that French comédies en vaudevilles might have been models for Gay's ‘original’ new genre of the ballad opera, but were unable to find compelling evidence for their suspicions. This article shows that the music of Polly (1729), Gay's sequel to The Beggar's Opera, can finally provide a link between ballad operas and the comédies en vaudevilles, as four of the unidentified French airs in the opera can now be identified as popular French vaudevilles. I investigate the fruitful exchange between Paris and London in the early eighteenth century (despite prevailing anti-French sentiment in Britain), focusing on musical borrowings, translations and the performers who worked in both cities. We shall see that ballad opera and the comédies en vaudevilles share common ground, including vaudevilles finals, common tunes sung by actor-singers and the use of musical parody and double entendre. A closer examination of Gay's (and his contemporaries') knowledge of the comédies en vaudevilles illuminates previously unknown French contributions to eighteenth-century English popular musical theatre, and demonstrates the unique way in which French practices were appropriated in early eighteenth-century England.

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Eighteenth-Century Music , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , September 2014 , pp. 173 - 213
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Gagey, Edmond McAdoo, Ballad Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 33Google Scholar.

2 The Théâtres de la Foire have been studied recently by Isabelle Martin, in Le Théâtre de la Foire: des tréteaux aux boulevards (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002). Ola Forsans discusses the importance of the Italian repertoire in Le Théâtre de Lélio: étude du répertoire du Nouveau Théâtre Italien de 1716 à 1729 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2006).

3 Gagey, Ballad Opera, 31.

4 Winton, Calhoun, John Gay and the London Theatre (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 110Google Scholar.

5 Heartz, Daniel, ‘The Beggar's Opera and opéra-comique en vaudevilles’, Early Music 27/1 (1999), 42–53Google Scholar. He notes the interspersed popular tunes, and Gay's use of French airs and musical parody.

6 Westrup, J. A., ‘French Tunes in The Beggar's Opera and Polly’, The Musical Times 69 (04 1928), 320–323Google Scholar.

7 See also Kidson, Frank, The Beggar's Opera: Its Predecessors and Successors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 66Google Scholar: ‘As there are several French tunes interspersed, Gay had no doubt access to a French collection, which I have not yet been able to identify, or else they have been noted down from songs sung by some of his friends.’

8 It is difficult to recognize the so-called ‘French’ style in the music of Purcell and his later English counterparts. The exportation of French forms (overtures and suites), dance rhythms and ornamentation during the late seventeenth century has been documented by musicologists in the music of Eccles, Clarke, Galliard, John Stanley and others. In addition, ‘French-style’ scoring practices and the Opéra's influential use of orchestral subdivision have been noted in English works of the same era (Mary Térey-Smith, ‘Orchestral Practice in the Paris Opéra (1690–1764), and the Spread of French Influence in Europe’, Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 31/1–4 (1989), 81–159), along with the inclusion of French dance movements. Since native composers frequently adopted the prevailing international styles, determining an exclusively ‘French’ or ‘English’ national style is quite a difficult undertaking and should keep musicologists busy for many more years.

9 Wilson, John, Roger North on Music (London: Novello, 1959), 350Google Scholar.

10 Wilson, Roger North, 300. North also states: ‘And after the manner of France, he [Charles II] set up a band of 24 violins to play at his dinners, which disbanded all the old English musick at once.’

11 For example, Dryden/Purcell's 1690 Amphitryon, which was adapted from Molière's version of Plautus's play. Richard Luckett discusses the attraction of Italian and French offerings in ‘Exotick but Rational Entertainments: The English Dramatick Operas’, in English Drama: Forms and Development, ed. Axton, Marie and Williams, Raymond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 123–141Google Scholar. French operas were performed frequently in the 1670s. See Buttrey, John, ‘New Light on Robert Cambert in London, and His Ballet et Musique’, Early Music 23/2 (1995), 199–220Google Scholar; Danchin, Pierre, ‘The Foundation of the Royal Academy of Music in 1674 and Pierre Perrin's Ariane’, Theatre Survey 25 (1984), 55–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Visser, Colin, ‘French Opera and the Making of the Dorset Garden Theatre’, Theatre Research International 6/3 (1981), 163–171CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the performance of French operas see Gilman, Todd S., ‘Augustan Criticism and Changing Conceptions of English Opera’, in Theatre Survey 36/2 (November 1995), 31Google Scholar, note 12.

12 Purcell reported that English music was ‘studying a little bit of the French Air, to give it somewhat more of Gayety and Fashion’ in his Preface to The prophetess, or, The history of Dioclesian (1691). Several of Purcell's tunes were commonplace in ballad opera; I have found eighteen which were used more than once. The most popular was ‘Your Hay it is Mow'd’ from King Arthur (1691), which is found in at least seventeen ballad operas under its later title ‘We've Cheated the Parson’.

13 Nicoll, Allardyce and Rosenfeld, Sybil, The Garrick Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 117Google Scholar, 122. See also Campardon, Émile, Les spectacles de la foire, two volumes (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1877)Google Scholar, for descriptions of lights, scenes and machines in the Théâtres de la Foire, especially the entries for Alard, Bertrand, Maurice and St Edmé.

14 Hughes, Leo, in A Century of English Farce (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956)Google Scholar, discusses the ‘persistent popularity of Molière, who was himself no stranger to farce and whose plays were much closer in spirit to English comedy than to that of the Italians’ (141). Of course Molière worked with Italians, and translated their influence to his successors as well.

15 See Hughes, Leo, ‘Afterpieces: Or, That's Entertainment’, in The Stage and the Page: London's ‘Whole Show’ in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre, ed. Stone, George Winchester Jr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 55–70Google Scholar, and Pry, Kevin, ‘Theatrical Competition and the Rise of the Afterpiece Tradition 1700–1724’, Theatre Notebook 36/1 (1982), 21–27Google Scholar.

16 See Moira Goff, ‘John Rich, French Dancing, and English Pantomimes’ and Thorp, Jennifer, ‘Pierrot Strikes Back: François Nivelon at Lincoln's Inn Fields and Covent Garden, 1723–1738’, both in The Stage's Glory: John Rich (1692–1761), ed. Barlow, Jeremy and Joncus, Berta (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 85–98Google Scholar and 138–146 respectively. Goff defines ‘French dancing’ on pages 85–86. See also Thorp, , ‘À la mode de France?: La danza en Londres y París entre 1680 y 1730 / Dancing in London and Paris between 1680 and 1730’, Goldberg: Early Music Magazine / Revista de musica antigua 35 (2005), 46–55Google Scholar. Different styles of dancing in London are also discussed in Thorp, , ‘Dance in the London Theaters c. 1700–1750’, in Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick (1250–1750), ed. Nevile, Jennifer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 136–152Google Scholar.

17 See the Introduction by Carol G. Marsh to the edition of Anthony L’Abbé, A New Collection of Dances, Music for London Entertainment 1660–1800 (London: Stainer & Bell, 1991), and Jennifer Thorp's entry ‘L'Abbé Anthony’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography <www.oxforddnb.com> (3 July 2013). Roger played Pierrot with Moylin's troupe, and later with De Grimbergue. He worked for the Théâtres de la Foire in Paris in between his trips to England. See Highfill, Phillip H. Jr, Burnim, Kalman A. and Langhans, Edward A., Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, volume 13 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 61–62Google Scholar.

18 Nye, Edward, Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: The Ballet d'Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 45–46Google Scholar.

19 Goff, ‘John Rich’, 86. There were three Delagarde male dancers in London during this period; it is most probably Charles who is the headliner. He was celebrated for dancing ‘The French Peasant’.

20 Goff, ‘John Rich’, 86–87.

21 Sarah McCleave, ‘Sallé, Marie’, in Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (17 April 2014).

22 The dancer-actors were usually their English-born pupils, for example Hester Booth, who was a scholar of René Cherrier. See Goff, Moira, The Incomparable Hester Santlow: A Dancer-Actress on the Georgian Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)Google Scholar. Lebrun or Le Brun is one of the French dancer-actors; he appeared as the ‘English Harlequin’ in John Kelly's pantomimic ballad opera The Plot. A later dancer-turned-actor/singer was Jane Poitier, whose career was outlined by Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson in their paper ‘“The Liveliest Baggage on the Modern Stage”: Jane Poitier, French Dancer and English Singer’ given at the fifteenth annual Oxford Dance Symposium in April 2013.

23 Goff, ‘John Rich’, 94.

24 Purcell had also written French-style tunes: see Semmens, Richard, ‘“La Furstemberg” and “St Martin's Lane”: Purcell's French Odyssey’, Music & Letters 78/3 (1997), 337–348Google Scholar. Graham Cummings has also noticed French influences in Handel's Poro (1731); see ‘Handel and the Confus'd Shepherdess: A Case Study of Stylistic Eclecticism’, Early Music 33/4 (2005), 575–589.

25 ‘Fill Ev'ry Glass’ is Air 19 in The Beggar's Opera. Many seventeenth-century operatic airs and dances (such as those composed by Purcell), tunes swiped from contemporary composers such as Handel and other ‘art’ songs entered the eighteenth-century repertory in the guise of ‘traditional’ songs when publishers and authors gave them new titles and new words in English. Operatic arias, foreign airs and other types of ‘art’ songs thereby become new forms of British national culture.

26 See David Lasocki, ‘Paisible, James’, in Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (10 July 2013), and William J. Burling, ‘New Plays on the London Stage, 1700–1810’ (2006), archived at <http://es.convdocs.org/docs/index-18448.html>.

27 Examples include ‘Vanne à seguire’ (as ‘Vanne Sigue’), ‘Love leads to battle’, ‘Cease, cruel tyrannizing’, ‘Fair Dorinda’ and ‘O Nymph of Race Divine’. See also Lindgren, Lowell, ‘Camilla and The Beggar's Opera’, Philological Quarterly 59/1 (1980), 44–61Google Scholar; David Fuller and Peter Holman, ‘Dieupart, Charles’, in Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (10 July 2013); and Milhous, Judith and Hume, Robert D., eds, Vice Chamberlain Coke's Theatrical Papers 1706–1715 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. Dieupart is best known today for his Six suittes de clavessin, partly because J. S. Bach knew them and might have been influenced by them in the composition of his English Suites.

28 Other orchestra members included Pietro Chabourd (flute, bass), Mr Desabaye, Mr Le Sac, who was also on the lists as a dancer (maybe André Le Sac or Le Sacq, who published flute sonatas), Mr Cadet (bassoon) and Mr Grenoust (trumpet), and also employed were singers Mrs (Isabella) Aubert and Mons Gautier.

29 The usual band consisted of strings, two flutes (or flageolets), oboe, sometimes bassoons, trumpets, timpani and basso continuo (clavecin or theorbo). See Porot, Bertrand, ‘Aux origines de l'opéra-comique: étude musicale du Théâtre de la Foire de Lesage et D'Orneval (1713–1734)’ in The Opéra-Comique in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Frassà, Lorenzo (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 322Google Scholar. Compare with Ozmo, Žak, ‘The Ballad Opera Orchestra’, in A Handbook for Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Music (Oxford: Burden, forthcoming)Google Scholar, and Vanessa L. Rogers, ‘Writing Plays “in the Sing-Song Way”: Henry Fielding's Ballad Operas and Early Music Theatre in Eighteenth-Century London’ (PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 2007), 140–152.

30 See The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces, part 2: 1700–1729, two volumes, ed. with a critical introduction by Emmett L. Avery (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960), and Sybil Rosenfeld's Foreign Theatrical Companies in Great Britain in the 17th and 18th Centuries (London: printed for the Society for Theatre Research, 1955). Rosenfeld shows that Rich made significantly more money during the seasons when the French comedians were playing at Lincoln's Inn Fields.

31 In England, Rich's pantomimes would sometimes parody serious stage works as well; it is possible that his Amadis; or the Loves of Harlequin and Columbine satirizes Lully's Amadis. See Goff, ‘John Rich’, 91.

32 Of course, parade-style entertainments by strolling players in fairs can be found across Europe; see Green, Frederick C., Literary Ideas in 18th[-]Century France and England: A Critical Survey (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 6Google Scholar. The importance of the English fairs – the counterparts to the Théâtres de la Foire – in the development of the genre of ballad opera has been virtually ignored. Emerging playwrights tried out their new ballad operas for audiences in fair-theatre booths over the summer, which were staffed with established performers from London's patent theatres, as well as new singers and actors hoping to find employment in the coming theatrical season; a number of enduring works and popular songs would emerge in this way. Many new ballad operas appeared at the London fairs each summer in the period from 1729 to 1737, and (more notably) others were adapted for London fair audiences into the versions through which they would find enduring success. Theophilus Cibber, especially, found success in cutting down the longer ballad operas of other authors into successful afterpieces during the summer season: Phebe (1729) and The Devil to Pay (1731) are two notable examples.

33 Highfill, , Burnim, and Langhans, , A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, volume 14 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 196–197Google Scholar. On the number of French troupes during the Restoration see Horn-Monval, M., ‘French Troupes in England during the Restoration’, Theatre Notebook 7/4 (1953), 81–82Google Scholar.

34 The ‘night scenes’ were called scènes du nuit in Paris, and descriptions of the mimed scenes are available in police reports. Their relation to English pantomime is evident, especially when the phrase is appropriated in English works, for example Thurmond, John's Harlequin Sheppard. A night scene in grotesque characters: as it is perform'd at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane (London: Roberts, 1724)Google Scholar. See Scott, Virginia P., ‘The Infancy of English Pantomime: 1716–1723’, Educational Theatre Journal 24/2 (1972), 127 and 129Google Scholar, and Papetti, Viola's Arlecchino a Londra: la pantomima inglese 1700–1728 (Naples: Intercontinentalia, 1977)Google Scholar.

35 Scott, ‘Infancy of English Pantomime’, 128.

36 See The London Stage, 1660–1800, part 2, volume 2, and part 3: 1729–1747, volume 1, ed. with a Critical Introduction by A. H. Scouten (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961).

37 See Letters of the late Thomas Rundle, L. L. D. Lord Bishop of Derry in Ireland, to Mrs. Barbara Sandys, with Introduction by James Dallaway, two volumes (Gloucester: R. Raikes, 1789), volume 2, 17–23. Quoted in Milhous, Judith and Hume, Robert D., A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660–1737, two volumes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), volume 2, 632Google Scholar.

38 Quoted in Milhous and Hume, Register, volume 2, 632.

39 Rosenfeld, Foreign Theatrical Companies, 13.

40 England and France had fought against each other in the Nine Years War (1689–1697), and again in 1702 in the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Though they were allies in the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–1720), France was still popularly thought of as England's oldest enemy.

41 This French project of Heidegger's has not yet been noticed by scholars.

42 Weekly Journal or Saturday's Post, 5 October 1717.

43 Weekly Journal or Saturday's Post, 5 October 1717. George I struggled with English and for that reason conducted his court business in French.

44 Scott, ‘Infancy of English Pantomime’, 125–134.

45 The commedia dell'arte had influenced British theatre since at least Elizabethan times. See the first chapter of Clive Chapman's ‘English Pantomime and Its Music, 1700–1730’, two volumes (PhD dissertation, Royal Holloway, University of London, 1981). Jama Stilwell has recently suggested a rethinking of the history of the abduction opera, which also had its inception in the French fair theatres, in ‘A New View of the Eighteenth-Century “Abduction” Opera: Edification and Escape at the Parisian “Théâtres de la foire”’, Music & Letters 91/1 (2010), 51–82. In addition, there was a precedent for the ‘magic stick’ of Rich (with which he tapped pieces of scenery in order to effect magical transformations) in the French fair repertoire, for example in Le Sage and d'Orneval's Les animaux raisonnables (1718).

46 Campardon, Les spectacles de la foire, volume 1, 100. Quoted in Scott, ‘Infancy of English Pantomime’, 131. See the CESAR database of French theatre of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where Baxter is listed in fair performances from 1712–1716 (<www.cesar.org.uk> (3 July 2013)); also François, and Parfaict, Claude, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des spectacles de la foire, two volumes (Paris, 1743), volume 1, 118–119Google Scholar, which describes Baxter's unsuccessful attempt at forming a troupe for opéra comique at the St Laurent fair in 1721.

47 Chetwood, William, A General History of the Stage (London: W. Owen, 1749), 46Google Scholar.

48 Heartz has also established Lesage's preeminence in the genre of opéra comique; see his ‘Terpsichore at the Fair: Old and New Dance Airs in Two Vaudeville Comedies by Lesage’, in Music in Context: Essays for John M. Ward, ed. A. D. Shapiro (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 278–304. Jeremy Barlow traces the history of this dance in ‘The Dances in The Beggar's Opera’, in On Common Ground 5: Dance in Drama, Drama in Dance. Proceedings of the Fifth Dolmetsch Historical Dance Society Conference (2005), 5–14, and in his Critical Notes to The Music of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 112. It appears in Télémaque and was parodied by Lesage in his Parodie de l'opéra Télémaque (1714). The tune for ‘Cotillon’ was also known as ‘Toney's Rant’ in England; it was printed in Frankfurt and Leipzig in the late seventeenth century as well. See Calmus, Georgy, Zwei Opern-Burlesken aus der Rokokozeit (Berlin: L. Liepmannssohn, 1912), 28Google Scholar.

49 Westrup says that none of the French tunes used in The Beggar's Opera are used elsewhere, but this is incorrect. See ‘Ballad Operas Online’ <www.odl.ox.ac.uk/balladoperas>.

50 Lesage, Alain-René and D'Orneval, Jacques-Philippe, Le théâtre de la foire, ou l'opéra comique, volume 1 (Paris: chez Étienne Ganeau, 1721)Google Scholar, Preface, no pagination.

51 See also Clifford Barnes, ‘Vaudeville’, in Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (10 July 2013), and Schneider, Herbert, ed., Timbre und Vaudeville: Zur Geschichte und Problematik einer populären Gattung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Bericht über den Kongreß in Bad Homburg 1996 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1999)Google Scholar.

52 Porot, ‘Aux origines de l'opéra-comique’, 304.

53 Barnes, ‘Vaudeville’, 342.

54 John Kersey the Younger's revised version (sixth edition) of Edward Phillips, The New World of Words; or, Universal English Dictionary (London, 1706).

55 Evaristo Gherardi, Le Théâtre Italien De Gherardi (London: Tonson, 1714).

56 Mary Hunter, ‘Gillier, Jean-Claude’, in Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (10 July 2013). Gillier played the hand organ in Rich's Rape of Proserpine pantomime. His music was still known later in the eighteenth century; volume 3 of A Collection of Catches, Canons, Glees, Duettos, &c. Selected from the Works of the most eminent Composers Antient & Modern (Edinburgh, 1780) included his three-voice catch ‘Crown the Glass’.

57 A fuller list of Gillier's pieces can be found in the CESAR database.

58 See Hunter, ‘Gillier, Jean-Claude’. Gillier wrote music for William Burnaby's The Ladies’ Visiting Day (1701) and Farquhar's The [Beaux] Strategem (1707), and played the hand organ in Rich's pantomime The Rape of Proserpine.

59 Gillier, Jean-Claude, A Collection of New Songs (London: T. Heptinstall, for H. Playford, c 1698)Google Scholar; single-sheet songs in English are ‘The Excuse or Preamble’ (1710), ‘One Day when Damon with his Caelia Walk'd’ (c1701), ‘Farewell, Vaine Nymph’ (c1705) and ‘In vain I seek for Ease’ (c1715).

60 Hunter, ‘Gillier, Jean-Claude’, and Barnes, Clifford, ‘Vocal Music at the “Théâtres de la foire” 1697–1762, I: Vaudeville’, Recherches sur la musique française classique 8 (1968), 141–160Google Scholar.

61 James R. Anthony, ‘Théâtres de la Foire’, in Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (10 July 2013).

62 M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, ‘Opéra Comique’, in Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (10 July 2013).

63 Heartz, ‘The Beggar's Opera’, 50–51. There is no one single model of ballad opera (or comédie en vaudevilles, for that matter). There are, however, general features which appear again and again in the most prominent operas – especially those with the largest number of performances, like The Beggar's Opera and the operas of Fielding. Leo Hughes said that vaudevilles had anticipated ‘the English ballad opera by several years’ (Hughes, A Century of English Farce, 100).

64 Like ballad opera, English pantomime mixed high- and low-style conventions, incorporating for example la belle danse, physical theatre, allegorical masque and harlequinade. There were several ballad opera–pantomime hybrids, including Henry Woodward's The Beggar's Pantomime (1736), Fielding's Tumble-Down Dick (1736) and Theophilus Cibber's The Harlot's Progress (1733).

65 Instead, England separated Italian opera from theatrical works in English: (plays, masques, ballad operas, pantomimes and English operas).

66 See ‘The Yorkshire Ballad’, given below in the main text, and also Rogers, Vanessa L. and Joncus, Berta, ‘Ballad Opera and British double entendre: Henry Fielding's The Mock Doctor’, in Die Praxis des Timbre in verschiedenen europäischen Kulturen: Eine musikalische Praxis zwischen Oralität und Schriftlichkeit, ed. Schneider, Herbert (Hildesheim: Olms, 2013), 101–140Google Scholar.

67 Barnes, ‘Vaudeville’, 342.

68 By the early nineteenth century the word ‘vaudeville’ was applied ‘in a generic sense, to the concluding scenes of comic operas and other musical dramas’ in English. Busby, Thomas, A Musical Manual, or Technical Directory (London: Goulding and De'Almain, 1828), 181Google Scholar.

69 This is Thomas D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth; or, Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719–1720, reprinted frequently).

70 Gagey, Ballad Opera, 6. Winton thinks that Gay's second trip might have been with the Earl of Burlington.

71 Winton (John Gay, 63) has also linked Gay's pastoral tragedy Dione to Racine, believing that Gay became interested in rhymed tragedy while in Paris. Racine was also performed in London, however; see the Appendix to this article.

72 Gay, John, Poetry and Prose, ed. Dearing, Vinton A. and Beckworth, C. E. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 214Google Scholar.

73 Letter dated 22 November 1726 [1727], quoted in Gay, John, The Letters of John Gay, ed. Burgess, C. F. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 63Google Scholar. Swift and Gay had visited Voltaire while he was staying in London, according to David Nokes, John Gay: A Profession of Friendship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 395.

74 That said, two years earlier Gay himself had answered critics of his What D'Ye Call It (1715) by citing modern French comedies as an authority: ‘As to the Third Objection, That the Sentiments are not Comical, I answer … For the Sentiments being convey'd in Number and Rhime, I have the Authority of the best Modern French Comedies.’ It should be noted that it is not known if the author of the Preface is Gay himself, or one of his collaborators, John Arbuthnot or Alexander Pope.

75 Other ballad-opera authors make the same complaints. In The Wanton Jesuit (1732) the Player tells the Poet that ‘in my Opinion, the Town will not relish your French Opera: And for my own Part, I hate every Thing that comes from France, except their Wine and Brandy’; the Poet answers that ‘their Dramatic Writings are so far from being flat … in my Translation I have preserved the French Idiom to a Nicety’.

76 Westrup, ‘French Tunes’, 320.

77 According to advertisements in London newspapers, J. Groenewegue near Katherine Street and N. Prevost in the Strand traded in imported books in London, including Lesage's plays in French.

78 Anthony, ‘Théâtres de la Foire’. This also became the practice in ballad opera. See Rogers, Vanessa L., ‘The Audience as Poet: Traditional Tunes and Contemporary Satire in Early Eighteenth-Century Ballad Opera’, Ars Lyrica: Journal of the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations 18 (2009), 63–83Google Scholar.

79 Fielding was bilingual, with many personal links to France. His play The Miser (1732) was also based on Molière's L'avare. John Watts published several volumes of Molière translations (many of them advertised in publications of Fielding's plays), but they were not translated by Fielding, as was long thought to be the case. See Tucker, Joseph E., ‘The Eighteenth-Century English Translations of Molière’, Modern Language Quarterly 3 (1942), 83–103Google Scholar. Fielding did have all eight volumes of Molière's Les oeuvres de Monsieur de Molière. Nouvelle edition (Paris, 1718) in his library, according to Ribble, Frederick G. and Ribble, Anne G., Fielding's Library: An Annotated Catalogue (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1996), 219–230Google Scholar.

80 Ribble and Ribble, Fielding's Library, 193–194. It is notable that Fielding did not employ any of the vaudevilles in his own ballad operas, but perhaps the author of the patriotic song ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’ had an aversion to writing texts to French music.

81 Ralph wrote the Prologue to Fielding's The Temple Beau (1730), which began their friendship, and when Fielding started up a troupe at the Little Haymarket Theatre in 1736, Ralph worked with him there.

82 While its usual meaning is ‘doggerel’, ‘mirliton’ is also (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) a flute or pipe like a kazoo. ‘Mirliton’ was later used in several ballad operas: Edward Phillip's The Stage-mutineers (1733) and Britons Strike Home (1739), George Stayley's The Rival Theatres (1737?), the anonymous The Decoy (1733) and Moses Mendez's The Double Disappointment (1746). It is also found in Kane O'Hara's burletta Midas (1760).

83 Since satire of theatrical conventions and personalities was a common feature of ballad opera, it is not surprising that there were several operas which satirized pantomime; John Kelly's The Plot (1735) and Charlotte Charke's The Carnival (1735) specifically spoof French (rather than English) Harlequins, although many others satirize pantomime generally and include Harlequin among their dramatis personae. Other operas have a French nobleman or (more typically) a French dancing-master as a figure of fun.

84 For a discussion of this ballad opera's political satire see Loveridge, Mark, A History of Augustan Fable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 227–238Google Scholar. Forrest (1700–1793) was a lawyer and writer who was friends with Rich and Hogarth, and a founding member in their Sublime Society of Beefsteaks club.

85 Forrest, Ebenezer, Momus turn'd Fabulist; or, Vulcan's Wedding (London: J. Watts, 1729)Google Scholar[, i].

86 Johnson had adapted other French pieces for Drury Lane, including two tragedies, The Victim (1714) and The Sultaness (1717), both based on Racine. See Table 1.

87 According to the number of performances recorded in The London Stage, it was the fifth most popular ballad opera of the decade.

88 Cited in Martin C. Battestin, with Battestin, Ruthe R., Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Routledge, 1989), 143Google Scholar.

89 Daily Post, 22 August 1732. It is not known what might have been ‘surprising’ about Phillips's postures; probably they were acrobatics or contortions.

90 Translated from the fifth letter of ‘Voiage d'Angleterre’ by Pierre-Jacques Fougeroux in Gerald Coke's Handel Collection (now housed in the Foundling Museum in London). Part of the letter is included as an Appendix to Burrows, Donald, Handel (The Master Musicians) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 603Google Scholar.

91 Quoted in Goulding, Sybil, ‘Eighteenth-Century French Taste and “The Beggar's Opera”’, Modern Language Review 24/3 (1929), 278Google Scholar. My translation.

92 See Rochedieu, Charles Alfred, Bibliography of French Translations of English Works 1700–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948)Google Scholar.

93 According to Rosenfeld, The Ludlow Post-Man; or, The Weekly Journal (4 March 1720) printed the rumour that Drury Lane troupe would go to Paris ‘during their Vacation next Summer’ (Rosenfeld, Foreign Theatrical Companies, 9). For information on Baxter see Campardon, Les spectacles de la foire, volume 2, 230. William Phillips (1699–c1775), dancer, actor, acrobat, musician, manager, possibly Welsh, toured the United Kingdom and Paris and ran booths at the London fairs in the summer. His wife played many roles in ballad operas in Dublin and at Goodman's Fields in London, including Nell in The Devil to Pay and Polly in The Beggar's Opera. Phillips was most famous in England for a dance called ‘The Drunken Peasant’. See Biographical Dictionary of Actors, volume 11 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 293–299.

94 Campardon, Les spectacles de la foire, volume 1, 226–227.

95 According to Goulding, ‘Eighteenth-Century French Taste’, 286, they liked the ‘pensées philosophiques’ in both The Beggar's Opera and Polly. This corresponded with an increasing critical reception for Shakespeare in France, beginning with Voltaire's Les lettres philosophiques (1733–1734). See chapter 3 of Green, Literary Ideas, for Voltaire's opinions, and chapter 4 for a history of Shakespeare in the French dramatic tradition. Riccoboni and abbé Le Blanc also promoted Shakespeare, and abbé Prévost promoted English culture in his novels; see Frail, Robert J., A Singular Duality: Literary Relations between France and England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: AMS Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

96 General Advertiser, 29 April 1749.

97 Goulding, ‘Eighteenth-Century French Taste’, 286. I have found no evidence of a performance of this piece in France.

98 General Evening Post, 26–28 August 1800. Many thanks to Harriet Tait for pointing me towards this account.

99 See Goulding, ‘Eighteenth-Century French Taste’.

100 Choix de petites pièces du théâtre anglais, two volumes (London and Paris: Prault fils, 1756). Gay's comic play The What D'Ye Call It was translated as Comment l'appelez-vous? (1756) in the same volume; it was performed in the early part of the century in the Paris fair theatres. Goulding, ‘Eighteenth-Century French Taste’, 292, said that the ‘sheer dullness’ of Patu's translation killed further interest in The Beggar's Opera in France.

101 Bertil van Boer has outlined how The Devil to Pay's subsequent translation into German began the new genre of singspiel in ‘Coffey's The Devil to Pay, the Comic War, and the Emergence of the German Singspiel’, in The Journal of Musicological Research 8/1–2 (1988), 119–139.

102 It first appeared in The Beggar's Opera, as mentioned above, as well as The Court Legacy (1733) (and the version renamed as The Ladies of the Palace, 1735), The Oxford Act (1733) and Court and Country (1743), all anonymous operas.

103 Cibber's Chuck; or, The School-Boy's Opera (1729), Aston's The Restauration of King Charles II (1732), Edward Phillips's The Stage-Mutineers (1733) and its adaptation for Dublin by George Stayley, The Rival Theatres (1737).

104 Polly (with seventy-one airs) has more music than The Beggar's Opera; it was unfortunate that it was never performed in Gay's lifetime, as its musical influence might have been as great as that of The Beggar's Opera.

105 Fiske, Roger, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 113–114Google Scholar. It is true that relatively few French tunes appear in ballad operas, especially in comparison to the number of Italian selections; if more exist, they are currently unidentified. Many ballads are set with generic identifications such as ‘A French Tune’ or a ‘French Air’ (or even a ‘French Minuet’), or circulate under their English names (like ‘Fill Ev'ry Glass’).

106 Winton, John Gay, xv, 160.

107 Gay used two airs from Corelli's concerti grossi Op. 6 Nos 9 and 10, and two airs from the trio sonatas Op. 4 No. 5 and Op. 2 No. 5 (Fiske, English Theatre Music, 113).

108 The minuets were published only in ‘inaccurate’ (probably pirated) song-arrangement versions at this point (Fiske, English Theatre Music, 111). The titles do attribute the music to Handel, but do not mention the Water Music; the music is described as ‘A Favourite Minuet of Mr Handell's’ or ‘a celebrated minuet of Mr Handells’. Winton (John Gay, xiv) writes that the musical choices in Polly and Achilles ‘may also be seen as Gay's attempts to extend the scope – and the musical sophistication – of the form’ rather than representing failed copies of The Beggar's Opera.

109 The popular ballad-opera author William Rufus Chetwood, who noted the reciprocal relationship between French and English authors in his General History of the Stage, was also a printer who published pieces by Gherardi and Regnard. In addition, he was a prompter in the London theatres during the years when the French troupes were regular visitors. See Vanessa L. Rogers, ‘Chetwood, William Rufus’, in The Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660–1789 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), ed. Jack Lynch and Gary Day, <www.literatureencyclopedia.com> (forthcoming).

110 A start has been made by Leathers, Victor, in British Entertainers in France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959)Google Scholar; see chapters 2 and 3 (8–25). Leathers makes special note of the year 1745, when a roster of British entertainers substituted for the performers of the Opéra-Comique. I suspect that a fuller investigation of English characters and situations on French fair stages would prove fruitful to scholars wishing to clarify the dramatic interchange between these two countries as well. A cursory search on the CESAR database shows the appearance in Paris of pieces entitled L'Anglais à la Foire (no date), Le Français à Londres (1727), Le Ballet anglais (1723), ‘scènes anglaises’ from La Tempète (no date), ‘La Spectacle de la troupe anglaise de Delamain’ in 1738, and several other productions of similar interest to historians of English theatre and dance.