1 1. When the rebellious pirates Capstern and Laguerre under the nominal command of Macheath declare war against the whole world, they change, at least for a few minutes, the tone and texture of John Gay’s comic opera Polly (1729).1 Like its nominal first part, The Beggar’s Opera, this continuation set in the West Indies where several of the main characters from the earlier play have been transported or arrived as indentured labour, seems to work in a satirical mode. The strokes of satire are simple and broad, and finally as superficial as those of the pastoral or sentimental comedy. The foibles and sins of normal English society are viewed in burlesque through a reductive metaphor: but where the first part, actually staged and very popular, looked at Newgate Prison and its denizens as though it were the true image of middle-class English society, the second part, Polly, never permitted on the boards (Loftis 102, 139; Burgess note 3, 79-80) and subsequently put aside in most general awareness of Gay’s work,2 displaces the tensions of bourgeois life to a colonial setting and finds there that the structures of society are both replicated, with all their faults, and exaggerated for comic and corrective purposes. The ruling elite, made up of plantation owners and their families, demonstrate the craven, self-centred characteristics of the rising bourgeoisie in England, and the transported felons and the poor who sell their labour for a chance to start afresh in the colonies tend to show an obsequiousness and selfishness that undercuts any pretensions to a new start for society. Escaped criminals formed into pirate bands and slaves always fomenting rebellion surround and pervade the microcosmic colonial community with real dangers. However, the presence of Indians. which seems to be the explicit danger feared by the colonists, provides a different sort of context for the Englishmen and women. Noble savages, these Indians image forth the lost or forgotten Roman ideals of honour, courage, and self-control absent from the transplanted British community, but they too, fail to provide a sustainable alternative to the realities of the modem colonial regime.

2The plot of the opera turns on the arrival of Polly Peachum in search of Macheath, whom she takes as her legal husband, and to whom she seeks to give love, honour and obedience, despite his violence, philandering, and neglect. After escaping from the sexual advances of one of the great planters, Mr. Ducat, and taking advantage of a rumoured slave uprising, Polly disguises herself as a youth and seeks to join the pirates of whom Macheath, under the name and disguise of Morano,3 the runaway slave, is the chief.

3When we look at the different kinds of war presented in this play, there are some which are literal and some which are metaphorical, but the real distinction lies in their ideological import. It is here that we must distinguish between a formal state of belligerence in which the laws of a kingdom and between nations comes into play, that is, the rules of warfare, as distinct from the code of honor between individual soldiers and of soldiers towards civilians. War in this sense is a matter of law and of traditional conduct. But it may also involve the use of force by the state for the preservation or expansion of its territories, protection of its trade, and other public “goods” which it feels threatened.

4But while the government of the colony is duty-bound to call up its militia and fight against the Blacks who are seeking to free themselves from bondage, there is also an apparent right suggested by the structures of the play for the slaves to engage in violent acts to force the colonial government into recognizing their status as free men; this would be the kind of situation we know in the twentieth century as a war of national liberation. There is also another kind of warfare inherent in the structure of Gay’s play that resides in the constant fear that the Indians will break their treaty with the English regime and make war in the sense of one state against another state represented by the colonial government. The question here is whether or not the savage Indians constitute a sovereign state and so can engage in legitimate warfare. but the treaty between the Crown and the natives already grants to the Indians a tacit legal status that makes war a formal possibility.

5The menace of the pirates, however, requires a war of a different sort, since here it will be the legitimate government of the colony acting in a police operation against these criminal outlaws (Schonhorn XVI-XXII). This would be a war only in the sense that the criminals form a dangerously large and permanent threat to the settlers. This is war in the figurative mode, but the figure is that of exaggeration: there will be real military operations and even pitched battles. The pirates do not have a recognized social structure and their leader is not granted any sovereignty by legal means. Macheath rules by his forceful personality and by the respect accorded to his self-proclaimed violent nature.

6Even more metaphorical is the social war between the middle-and upper-class settlers who constitute the governing elite and the servants, craftsmen, and petty merchants who work as indentured labour or as a quasi-proletariat not yet permitted to participate in the governing of the State. Gay had developed this aspect of the satirical plot in The Beggar’s Opera, although the dominant metaphor there was the double reversible image of Newgate prison: England was seen to be a criminal society writ large, while the roles of law-makers and lawbreakers were ambiguously differentiated, the one just as easily the other. Here in Polly the monopoly of violence that is claimed by the colonial government on behalf of the sovereign is not just ambiguously similar to that of the pirate gang but also more complex in that many criminals have achieved positions of power and authority within the West-Indian community and their use or misuse of that power is both an exaggeration and a parody of the displays of power in the metropolis of London.

7There is also another figurative war that is alluded to in the contention between male and female, the war of the sexes. The Ducat family is seen satirically as the site of oppression by the tyrannic husband and of sabotage and rebellion by the ambitious wife. Ducat’s attempt to rape Polly, with the various degrees of collusion by other women, ranging from Lady Ducat to various procuresses and servants, further indicates that the war between the sexes is a class war and a cynical means of self-empowerment through betrayal and guile (Sloterdijk, Simms).

8But the war declared by the rebellious pirates both against their own leader and the whole of the outside world belongs to a different order altogether, one that recalls, in the first instance, the State of nature described by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan (1651), but also a more deeply ambiguous cynical and grotesque order of reality that goes beyond the satirical and comic aspects of the play and comes close to the special malignancy of Edmund in Shakespeare’s King Lear.

9 2. Before sketching out the Hobbesian and cynical nature of this war declared against the whole world and discussing how the tone and textures of the comic opera are briefly and deeply disturbed, we need to set out the ways in which the different kinds of warfare, literal and figurative, mark the comic and satirical directions of Gay’s work. Like the Indians, with their sense of honour and self-controlled dignity, Polly Peachum represents a positive coordinate which at once exposes the comic follies of the other persons in the play and reveals the deeper faults in its satiric structure. Polly’s “naiveté” serves to highlight the duplicity, weakness and incipient lack of principle in settlers, servants, pirates —everyone, in fact, except the Indians. The comedy of her innocence in the midst of such deceptiveness and self-deception gives a romantic charm to the play that on occasion approaches sentimentality, since her emotions of love and loyalty strike through any realistic necessities that life in the colony calls forth. Even when she turns away from the noble professions of love from her Indian suitor, Polly responds not so much out of a racial prejudice that stigmatizes her as part of the colonialist regime, but also by the conventions of the pastoral and comic theatre. Although this racism is a muted presence and complicates her character beyond that of the sentimental role she enacts, she acts within the limits of the romantic code she lives by, which finally is seen to exclude the Indians, in spite of their satiric presence as foils to European hypocrisy and weakness of character. The Indian prince, unlike a shepherd swain, represents a different level of natural idealism, one that would draw Polly into another kind of social and political order, not just merely allow her to live in a perfected version of the European model.

10The romantic and sentimental qualities of Polly are closely related to the Stoic virtues embodied in the Indians and act as further coordinates within the comic and satirical model of the play. As we can see in some of Dryden’s heroic plays and in Aphra Behn’s novel Oronooco, (c. 1688) the Indians —like Black princes, Turkish and other Middle Eastern heroes in plays like Dryden’s The Indian Queen (1664)— embody the Roman ideals which are missing or perverted in European society. Insofar as the Europeans are thereby viewed as foolish, cowardly and weak-willed individuals when set against the Stoic duty, loyalty and self-control of the exotic others, the model creates comedy; and insofar as the wit penetrates into a more incisive critique of the structural and institutional faults of modem European society the satiric paradigm functions. The satiric model goes beyond a mere contrast between them and us, or a use of the other as an optic through which to read the otherwise hidden text of hypocrisy and selfishness, and begins to evaluate the presumed principles by which European society has been established in both its private and public institutions. In Othello, Shakespeare can figure his tragic hero in a comic way, when he seems like an out-of-control comic character, a Black Man caught in the intrigue of Italian passions and ambitions; for he then demonstrates the weaknesses of all great men whose ideals have been superseded by the Machiavellian realities of the modem world:

Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump.
The spirit-stirring drum, th’ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
And O ye mortal engines whose rude throats
Th’immortal Jove’s dread clamours counterfeit,
Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone.
(Othello, 3. 3. 353-61)

11The glory of war, with its warrior’s code of honour, courage and respect for the enemy, is revealed as a form of madness, an uncontrolled violence to those who must now learn the arts of politics and domestic intrigue. Similarly, for all the respect which Polly has for the nobility of her Indian friends, when it comes to marrying one of them, the great King Pohetohee’s son, Prince Cawwawkee, she is unable to cross over from being a European romantic mistress to a savage wife. Like Desdemona, albeit with greater rational self-consciousness, she would risk arousing the passions of a husband that are too great for the bourgeois model of her life as a European woman.

12Instead of war being the theatre of heroic activities, it becomes the place where everything valuable in bourgeois society is put at risk. The Stoic behaviour of the Indians can only function in contrast to that of the colonial government and its internal enemies. Their antique virtues cannot provide an adequate matrix in which a modem European individual or family can feel comfortable or safe. Hence the nobility of the Indians functions as a satiric ploy in the opera and becomes unacceptable when other perspectives are turned on it. Any marriage between Polly and her Indian prince would immediately turn into a war between cultures, Kulturkampf as well as between the sexes.

13Shakespeare has shown in King Lear how Edmund’s bastard status puts him in a similar position to the savage others, like Othello. But Edmund seeks to defy the cultural laws by claiming in a modem, rational, secular way the rights due him by nature; that is, he too must declare war on the whole world of civil law in order to find what he considers to be a rightful place for himself in that society.

14The key passage in Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) occurs in Part I, Chapter 13. There are, according to this argument, “three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.” When there is no central government to order social relations, these three features of human nature go out of control and result in a war; but not just any war: “such a war as of every man against every man.” Then Hobbes goes on to explain how war is to be taken in a wider sense than the contention of warriors or armies, and also is to be seen in an analogy with bad weather, a comparison that reminds us of King Lear:

For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together; so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting but in the known disposition thereto. during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.

15In this State of war, “where every man is enemy to every man,” there is no place for culture, arts or letters, but in their place “continual fear, and danger of violent death,” and hence arises the (in)famous passage that marks out the natural condition of mankind: “and the life of men, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short….”

16To those who object that there was never really such a time. Hobbes responds that this picture is a myth in the sense of providing a fundamental paradigm for the nature of humanity without a properly constituted government, and besides that, he argues, one has only to look at the savage peoples of America to see how true his description is. Once this paradigm is accepted as a functioning description for the State of primal warfare, then Hobbes can argue that in this condition of war by every person against every other, there are no distinctions possible between right and wrong, justice and injustice, and “Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues….” Moreover, only when this war is brought under control and peace established can there be the idea of property, respect for the integrity and possessions of each person. To establish such a peace, in which there are “desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them,” reason dictates that humanity must follow the Laws of Nature. In other words, the natural State of mankind is unnatural, and the peace that is the condition of rational life derives front a respect for natural laws.

17The paradox inherent in this posture is brought out by Edmund in King Lear where the words “nature” and “natural” play off their inner contradictions as kind, mad, uncultured, savage, violent, loving. and so forth. As a bastard son. a love child, Edmund is outside the legal scope of inheritance front his father. unless his father makes a deliberate legal public declaration. To achieve that goal, the bastard son seeks to stir up a contention between the legal son, Edgar, and his natural father, Gloucester. In this way, Edmund manifests at once the savage selfishness of the natural human born outside the conventions of law and government and the slick, Machiavellian politics of the rational, modem man who rejects the conventions of society because they are arbitrary and sentimental. Hence, when Edgar comes on stage, Edmund mockingly describes him as a creature of the medieval morality plays who will be, by his own foolish goodness, the author of his own destruction: “And pat he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy; my cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom O’Bedlam” (King Lear 1.2.129-31). If Edgar is scorned as a relic of the sentimental morality of the past age, Edmund is cool and rational, a cynic of the modem age.

18 3. The pirates do not appear on stage until the first scene of Act II, when Polly, dressed as a young man, goes into the countryside to search for her missing husband, Macheath. Then the pirates —Capstern, Hacker, Culverin, Laguerre, and Cutlace— talk above the hidden, sleeping figure of Polly. They discuss their occupation, their relationship to the newly appointed leader, whom they believe to be an escaped black slave named Morano, and their own individual reasons for becoming pirates.

19As they have failed in their immediate mission to either gain booty or find out information relevant to the slave uprising, they discuss how best to present themselves to their chief, and decide, cynically, that they can easily make up some news and so compensate for the lack of treasure: treasure which in any case, they further reveal, they would have held back for themselves. From the first, then, the audience sees the individual pirates as lacking in the romantic posturing that marks out Macheath, even if it is in itself a hypocritical pose. These men are selfish, conniving, duplicitous, weak-willed and cynical. They are cynical in suiting their words and deeds to the occasion and reassuring one another that any real principles or ideals are, in the end, neither possible nor worthy of holding. In this, they are very much in the tradition of the literary picaros who begin their lives on the margins, move even further out of civil society, and either by choice or circumstance, take up lives of criminality in which, as they pass through the world, they discover in the hypocrisy of all classes, respectable and shabby, reason for a hard-nosed disbelief in ideals of any sort. The narrative of the picaro thus is more than a satirical inversion of the courtly romance or even of an anti-romance in the style of Cervantes’s Don Quixote; the picaresque tale is an autobiographic statement of cynical discontent with the world.

20In Gay’s comic opera, however, the frank statements of the pirates do not develop the cynical mode, but rather work through a number of comical and satirical strategies. As in rhetorical prosopopoeia, the speeches of the wicked characters explain their own hypocrisy and lack of principles frankly and boastfully, thus they at once contrast themselves to the idealism of Polly and the romantic postures of Macheath, and suggest very strongly a matrix of selfishness that includes Mr and Mrs Ducat and the entire colonial administration. The confessions reduce the pirates to ineffective farcical types and set them up as satirical points of reference to measure more complex characters and situations.

21Deciding they can invent necessary lies to avert the displeasure of Morano, the pirates prepare themselves by commencing two preliminary acts to this false presentation: they plan to drink and sleep. But once they start to drink, they also start to boast, and in parading their reasons for becoming pirates they sketch out typical picaresque histories, partly grounding their occupation in the historical insecurities and inequalities of early modem times, and partly revealing the way in which the picaresque life provides an epistemological vantage point for assessing the contours of that early modem society.

22Hacker makes the first autobiographie statement in his cups, and in this way sets out the grounds of the cynical argument upon which each of the subsequent pirates justifies his life as a pirate. His view is Hobbesian to the extent that he has discovered, in the course of his experiences, that society is built on hypocrisy and pretensions, in which the people and institutions of authority hide their true intentions from the masses of the people, middle-class and below, and those who are exploited by these institutions and individuals, instead of being ennobled by their suffering or perceptive enough to see the perversion of higher truths, are either active collusion in the cynical ruse or worn down into passive complicity. The pirate’s life, in its frank anti-social criminality, has the advantage, he believes, of the only nobility possible —that of being true to itself. What Hacker and the other pirates cannot recognize. though, is the sincerity of Polly’s sentimental idealism nor the stoic virtue of the Indians. Even though these two forms of ideal will be revealed in the course of the play as less than perfect paradigms for modem society to live by, nevertheless they hold the play from developing fully in the direction of the dark cynical conceit. When Hacker tells his companions, in Act II scene 1: “I had always a genius for ambition. Birth and education cannot keep it under. Our profession is great. brothers, What can be more heroic than to have declared war with the whole world!” (34), his four-part speech looks as though it will deepen and darken the comedy of the play beyond comedy, and even satire, to the Hobbesian vision of primal anarchy. First, like Edmund or Iago, Hacker sees himself as naturally endowed with ambition. Such ambition is unlike the metaphysical hybris of the ancient Greek theatre and more like the over-reaching greed of capitalism, and the uncontrollable jealousy against those with power and prestige by the nascent picaro. Rather than rail against the heavens, the picaro steals, seduces, and inflicts pain, and at the end of his life looks back to justify his behaviour through denunciation of a world unworthy of its pretensions. Constitutionally at odds with himself, that is, with the nature that makes him forever uncomfortable in the world he is born into, the pirate also rejects the society that legislates the leviathan System meant to control the natural forces which he defines as his own real self. His ambition is the cause and the consequence of the Hobbesian war of every man against every other.

23Hacker’s second statement expresses both his frustration and his shared hostility to society as presently constituted. Neither birth, that is, inherited positioning in the civil hierarchy, nor education, that is, the inculcation of society's constraining rationalizations for that hierarchy can put out the flames of his natural ambition. Culture is thus a block to nature’s fulfilment, and a pirate has no real choice but to move away from society in order to attack it from without, to make war on it. While the desire for wealth, power, sexual gratification and prestige are strong, they are not coordinated into any policy or principles; and the war that is declared on society results, not in an all-out assault on civil government —certainly not in a political sense that could be construed as revolution or rebellion, even— but merely as furtive raids, and these particular, random sallies are subject to constant interference as each individual pirate is diverted by some immediate personal goal. Fear of capture or death is enough to prevent any grand concerted war of pirates on government, and it begins to emerge that the radical negativity —or even nihilism— of the dark cynical conceit is itself a posture, that the pirates can themselves be momentarily sentimental, stoical, satirical or comic because, finally, they lack coherence at the centre (Fray and Fray XI). Just as the man they follow, Morano, is not what he seems to be, and even as Macheath is hypocritical in several ways, depending on circumstances, so too what they say about themselves lacks ideological cohesion; and in the end, the pirates fall apart into snivelling fools.

24By the third sentence of his speech, Hacker is declaring that the pirates compensate for their discontented place in society by sharing in the project of piracy. To call their occupation “great” is to take a word which, as readers of Pope and Fielding recall, has come to signal the presence of canting hypocrisy. Whether the Macedonian Alexander, or some current prime minister, or London thief-taker, the “Great Man” is the very reverse, morally and politically, of what he pretends to be. In their collective identity as pirates, these weak individuals, unable to participate in rational society for both good and bad reasons, expose the ever present reality of Hobbes’s harsh insight into the human condition. Hence Hacker’s fourth and final statement becomes the key to the argument of this paper that the nature of anarchie warfare at the heart of Gay’s play is impossible to develop without destroying the operatic lightness of the comedy and the sentimental superficiality of the satire. It is possible that among the reasons for banning Polly from the stage the censors recognized the dark cynical conceit that is much more frightening in its implications than the social satire developed in The Beggar's Opera, but it is more likely that neither they nor John Gay himself could perceive the implications of the Hobbesian insight which for a few seconds breaks through the more superficial textures of the play.

25In the last sentence, Hacker says: “What can be more heroic than to have declared war with the whole world!” At first sight, given the word “heroic” in this exclamation, the statement would seem not to be Hobbesian at all, but merely the insane utterance of a mad malcontent. As such, it cannot be taken as a clear philosophical assertion; it is a speech in a play and has dramatic function —this is what one drunken pirate says to his fellows as they try to screw up the courage to confront their leader with lies.

26Moreover, the war declared on the “whole world” is not the same as the war of every man against every other, that Hobbes’s text speaks. Hacker is not describing a primal scene before the advent of civil government but of the ambitious antisocial feelings of a small band of outlaws who are out to wreak revenge on a society they feel has harmed them. He speaks for criminals who simply want to rob and murder for the sheer fun of it all. Hacker also wants his speech to Sound like the romantically puffed-up vaunts of some world conqueror —an Alexander the Great. In the play, he echoes the cynical boasts of Macheath to his latest mistress, Jenny Diver. Hacker wants to exalt his negative feelings into something his fellow pirates will approve of—a positive, expansive ambition.

27Yet once Hacker moves into his personal narrative, he is much more the typical picaro than the satirical foil to Great Men. Through the supposed group ambition of the pirates, the petty individual grudges turn into something that has a collective goal; but the more each of the pirates tells his personal life history, the more it is clear that there is no solidarity amongst them. Each one is selfish and willing to sell out his fellow when it is advantageous. Not even the negativity is radical, then; the cynicism has no coherent core to it.

28This collapse of the absolute negative in the pirates, shown by their response to offers of bribery and imminence of capture and imprisonment, gives to the outlaws a farcical quality. Yet there is also a kind of retreat in the other counters of the play, the sentimentality of Polly, the stoicism of the Indians, and even the hypocrisy of the colonial rulers. West-Indian society provides a sufficiently tough matrix for the playing out of these various options, so that there can be no purely romantic, comic or satirical actions or personalities.

29For example, when later in Act II, Polly offers Cawwawkee the chance to escape from captivity, he at first rejects the opportunity on the grounds that it would involve an act of dishonesty. Polly, still in the disguise of a would-be-pirate youth, urges him on by saying, “Had you means of escape, you could not refuse it. To preserve your life is your duty.” But this pragmatic imperative is denied until Polly further argues: “But stratagem is allow’d in war; and ’tis lawful to use all the weapons employ’d against you” (56). In saying this Polly begins to sound like Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver justifying European weapons of mass destruction to the King of Brobdingnag. If war legitimates all dishonorable deeds, provided the other side first uses the ignoble weapons first, then really there are no ideals to live up to, and the combat is evaluated simply by who wins and who loses. The end justifies the means.

30Polly then begins to negotiate with the pirates for the release of the Indian prince, an agreement which has the pirates turn against their own leader Morano, and which Cawwawkee agrees to by accepting the pragmatic option. He is convinced by Polly that there is no honorable intent on the part of his captors, and so there is no reciprocity required of him —and no taint to his honor. In these negotiations, the pirate named Laguerre stands out, and thus forms an insight into the way in which Gay conceives of the primal Hobbesian war of each against each. Laguerre, in fact, says: “Every man for himself, say I. There is no being even with mankind, without that universal maxim" (57). To “be even” with mankind signals the need to wreak revenge on the entire human race which, constituted as a Leviathan State, seeks to control and thereby limit the natural ambitions —that is, the unruly antisocial behaviours— of the would-be world conquerors. What impels the pirates is, according to Laguerre, a universal maxim, which is not just a principle of human natural aggression but something more unprincipled and cynical, as one of the other outlaws, Capstern, puts it: ‘‘If we gain our ends, what matter how we come by it?” (57). In short, the end justifies the means.

31This second maxim, more fundamentally Machiavellian than cynical, where there is a knowing desire to undercut the pretensions of a hypocritical world, allows for any sort of betrayal or criminality provided it seizes the moment of essential selfishness. Why? Because it does not rest on any assessment or pretended assessment of a relationship to a world hypocritically set up to exploit the gullible and the weak. Like the stage-Machiavel of an earlier age, the villains in this piece —and even the good people— refer to the figure of cynicism as “the politician,” the man of policy, who puts personal and institutional convenience ahead of morality and the good of the commonweal, but who pretends in so doing to be acting out of the best motives.

32Thus, as the deal for releasing Cawwawkee is concluded and the pirates are promised a place in court as their reward, Laguerre tells the Indian prince: “You will consider, prince, our own politicians would have rewarded such meritorious services: We’ll go off with you” (58). The Indian’s compromise, prompted by Polly’s appeal to the pragmatic option, is designated the normal behaviour of English parliamentarians, and the places distributed are classified not as bribes but honorable rewards for services rendered. The Leviathan State functions, then, by secret manipulations which are rendered public only under the code words and dress of honorable patriotism. As Polly observes the pirates patting each other on the shoulder for what they believe is a sly deal pulled off for their own interests, not for the Indians or their own leader, Morano, she says: “’Tis thus one able politician outwits another; and we admire their wisdom” (58).

33To admire the “wit” and “wisdom” of a politician in this context is strictly to inhabit the space of satire, where the key words undercut the real behaviour of the Machiavellian agents. This is certainly the case with Mr. Ducat. When he appears in Act III to lead the colonial militia against the slave rebels and the pirate raiders, he really seeks to avoid any heroic action, yet wishes to take credit for the benefits that accrue to the State when the fighting has ended. In this, like Falstaff, he is quite open in making discretion the better part of valour; but nevertheless, he lacks the warmth of Prince Hal's companion and the hearty and earthly charms of Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza:

For my own part, I think it wiser to talk of fighting, than only to be talk’d of. The fame of a talking hero will satisfy me; the Sound of whose valour amazes and astonishes all peaceable men, women, and children. Sure a man may be allow’d a little lying in his own praise, when there’s so much going about to his discredit. (66)

34The difference between a Falstaff or Sancho Panza and a Mr. Ducat is, to begin with, that this man is the officer in charge; he is not the friend or sidekick of the hero. Second, what he presumes to is the fame of a hero with the charismatic power of an Othello, whose very narrative of “big wars” is enough to win over Desdemona’s love, but he wants the words without the substance. Thirdly, Ducat’s speech calls to mind Polly’s words about the “wit” and “wisdom” of politicians, and Mr. Ducat's disarming frankness serves only to place him in the spotlight of the satiric gaze. Like Laguerre and his fellow-pirates, this leader of the colonial militia has no real sense of responsibility to anyone but himself, although he is in a position to take credit for the heroic behaviour and diplomatic abilities of others, especially here of Polly and her negotiations with the Indians and pirates. It is thus not the statement per se that sets him into the class of the Machiavellian politician but the fact that he is in power and uses his position cynically; the others are out of power and act in ways that protect them from exploitation and give them some small share in the glory or wealth of the State. Thus Mr. Ducat goes on: “I had better too be upon the spot, or my men may embezzle some plunder which by right should be mine” (67). The right by which this plunder should be his, rather than a pirate chief’s, like Morano, is only a relative one, imposed by the laws of Leviathan, not intrinsic to the heroic or moral actions performed. Those who balk at the rights of the State to act in this way opt out of the System and cannot claim its rewards. Insofar as Polly and the Indians take the moral high ground, they present a pastoral or stoical alternative, but despite some minor compromises to their virtue the Indians remain savages outside of any practical alternatives to be followed, and Polly’s sentimentality allows her to speak of necessary, pragmatic modifications in her sentimental posturing so that she can return to England. These alternatives do not really threaten the status quo, and Mr. Ducat remains in charge and the pirates will continue to raid the margins of civil society. The Blacks remain enslaved, the indentured women servants continue to be sexually abused, and the middle classes compromise their principles for the sake of profit and safety within the State. Gay allows no room for a dark cynical conceit to undermine that authoritative Leviathan, though his comic opera seems to permit a brief holiday in the West Indies from its most oppressive pressures.

***