Between John Gay and William Schwenk Gilbert, between The Beggar's Opera (1728) and The Beefeater's Bride (known as The Yeoman of the Guard, 1888), there was Isaac John Bickerstaff and his bevy of musical and dramatic entertainments. Popularizer, plagiarizer, and, as his biographer Peter A. Tasch calls him, "dramatic cobbler," Bickerstaff, in the span of a dozen years (1760-1772), not only revised and revived plays by Molière, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, William Wycherley, and many more, adapting them to the more "refined" sensibilities of his era, but also pumped new life into the flagging English opera. English ballad opera, the rage of the 1720s and 1730s, had set original English lyrics to popular English tunes. With the exception of The Beggar's Opera , this overused form had lost its freshness for theatergoers of Bickerstaff's day. Bickerstaff's solution was a novel blending of English words and Continental-style...