SOURCE: "The Significance of Gay's Drama," in English 'Drama: Forms and Development-Essays in Honor of Muriel Clara Bradbrook, edited by Marie Axton and Raymond Williams, Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 142-63.

In the following essay, Erskine-Hill considers the whole of Gay's dramatic corpus to illuminate Gay's experimentalism and the development of his most famous work, The Beggar's Opera. Erskine-Hill focuses on Gay's tendency to mix and subvert familiar generic forms to create entirely new types of theatre.

John Gay's comedy The Distress'd Wife is the last and least-known of his full-length plays. Among those but once reprinted since the eighteenth century, it is a useful vantage-point from which to view Gay's dramatic achievement. The great original success of The Beggar's Opera, and continuing attention paid it in our time, have obscured the interest of the other plays, the relation of these to the Opera, and the larger significance of...