ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a few of the songs that John Gay adapted for the ballad opera Polly, the sequel to The Beggar's Opera. It offers a brief overview of musical theater in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and explains how Gay brought together disparate forms to create his first ballad opera. The chapter traces the history of two Anglo-Amerindian alliances, and considers Gay's trans-Atlantic politics in his earliest dramatic work The Mohocks. It describes Polly, and suggests that how Gay used the Indian characters and musical pieces of this ballad opera to launch a scathing attack on Britain's emergent global empire. When commenting on the relationship between planters and Indians in Polly, Calhoun Winton writes of the "confrontation between colonist and Indian, a confrontation in which the Indian is the total moral victor". Far from having a relationship based upon confrontation, however, the Indians and the planters are in collusion.
