John Gay's masterpiece, The Beggar's Opera, has so dominated the landscape of his subsequent reputation that many theatergoers are not aware he did anything else. The Beggar's Opera is a great work, indisputably, and deserves the acclaim it enjoys; everyone knows that it made "Gay rich and Rich [the theater manager] gay," as the wits of his own time said. But Gay's other works for the stage are also interesting, in their own right and for the insights into The Beggar's Opera that they provide from an angle, as it were.

One should remember that Gay was a man of the theater, from his entrance onto the literary scene--a few minor poems excepted-with the publication of his first play, The Mohocks, in 1712, until his death in 1732, when he left three plays in various stages of completion. The Beggar's Opera (1728) was certainly the high point of his career, but...