In the footsteps of Virgil's The Aeneid: John Gay's Polly, a Female Aeneas"

Abstract

Generally, critics have read John Gay’s Polly (1729) as a satire of the political and social corruption that marked his own era. Other studies have attempted to explain the play as an anti-slavery and anti-imperial voice. My proposal looks beyond the immediate contemporary context of the play and attempts to read it as a propaganda for the futuristic imperial aspirations of Britain. This is revealed through constructing a structural comparison between Polly and Virgil’s The Aeneid. Like the ancient Roman poet, Gay emerges obsessed with the time not as a simple historical fact, but as a vehicle for imperial ideology and legacy. Thus, the structure of The Aeneid has found its way into Polly, asserting the indispensable literary and ideological legacy of the Imperium Romanum. Gay promotes Britain’s imperial agenda through emulating the structure of Virgil’s Aeneid. Like that of the imperial epic, Polly’s structure is based on the dynamic of struggle where the heroine occupies a central position similar to that of Aeneas. Like the Aeneid, Polly’s, structure is of three stages; exodus, sea voyage and the Promised Land. Both characters follow the same structure in search of new life in a new land. Aeneas who reaches Italy from the destroyed Troy founded the Roman Empire through marrying the Princess of Latium. Polly ends her struggle by marrying Prince Cawwawkee, the heir to of the Indian throne. The bond between them legalizes the British dominance in the West Indies and by extension the creation of the British Empire. By following Virgil’s steps and his Roman empire, Gay finds his way well charted.