SOURCE: "Sex and Gender in Gay's 'Achilles,'" in John Gay and the Scriblerians, edited by Peter Lewis and Nigel Wood, Vision Press; St. Martin's Press, 1988, pp. 184-215.

[In the following essay, Noble argues that Gay's later drama registers the paradoxical position of women in a patriarchal society, with an emphasis on contemporary constructions of rape. Noble concludes that while Gay was not necessarily 'feminist," his work nonetheless reflects the voice of the oppressed.]

At a time of unparalleled academic interest in the relationship (which is to say, discrepancy) between sex and gender, John Gay emerges as an extremely interesting writer, distinctively conscious and candid, able through his characteristic duple forms and modes to render the simultaneous state of authenticity and inauthenticity in which those who do not embody the norm are condemned to dwell. Little interested in party politics, uninterested in social theory, Gay was acutely aware of the transactions of oppression between individuals; he is able through these duple forms and modes to force those who would be intractable to preaching to take account of the unvoiced suffering even in their own circle. Gay's last work, the seemingly frivolous ballad opera Achilles, confronts in this way the serious issue of rape.

Achilles, which had just gone into rehearsal when Gay died, features its hero throughout dressed in the clothes of a girl. How is this figure to be read? Much current writing would presume that a figure like this, particularly in a work of burlesque, must at least trivialize its subject or at worst serve a retrograde and conservative function by embodying a mockery of woman to mollify the anxieties, and reinforce the prejudices, of men.¹ While by no means denying the applicability of such insightful analysis to the theatre of Gay's time—for indeed, the pronounced sexism of the period cries out for analysis of this sort²—I would nevertheless like to widen the realm of interpretation by suggesting quite a different possibility for Gay's travesty subject. I propose that Gay selected this Achilles as his subject precisely because the figure could open up interesting questions of gender-identity³ and be used to undermine one of the key tenets of male dominance—the principle that women's sexual desire corresponds to men's—exactly at its most reinforcing point of textual authority in classical literature. My reading will locate an important significance of the figure of Achilles by reference to classical contexts it invokes, in a current of meaning flowing from Gay to those of his auditors who could recognize that context. This study will therefore also chart a little more of that relatively neglected side of Gay's artistry, his relation to and transformation of the literature of antiquity, through which he moves with grace, wit, fondness, and good acquaintance.⁴

Achilles is based upon the episode in which the hero, disguised as a girl, is concealed on the island of Scyros among the daughters of King Lycomedes. His mother, the sea-goddess Thetis, has learned by a prophecy that her son can have a long, uneventful life in obscurity or a short life of great glory if he joins the Trojan War; understandably Thetis seeks to preserve her son. The Greeks, on the other hand, discover that they cannot win without Achilles and therefore mount an expedition to find him. Ulysses, in the guise of a merchant, prepares a stock of women's gear amid which he places a suit of armour together with arms. When Ulysses displays these wares to the maidens of Scyros, Achilles is found out, tricked by the lure of the arms into revealing himself.

One epigraph to the printed Achilles (1733) directs us to Ovid's Metamorphoses for the classical source being represented or evoked. The passage occurs in Book XIII, as a part of a speech by Ulysses, debating against Ajax after Achilles's death in order to claim the hero's armour. Ulysses brings up the episode in order to demonstrate that the Greeks would not have had the services of Achilles except for Ulysses's cleverness—and he includes the gibe that his opponent Ajax was completely taken in by Achilles's disguise. (Gay alludes to this point in making Ajax avid to duel for 'Pyrrha' in Act III.5) Besides schoolboy exposure to Ovid's poem, Gay would have encountered the passage as one of Dryden's Fables (1700, reprinted 1713, 1721), an excerpt later collected into Garth's edition of the Metamorphoses Englished (1717, 1720, 1727) to which Gay also contributed work; this translation obtained new currency in 1732—the year Achilles was written—as the English part of a sumptuous illustrated Latin-English folio of Ovid's poem, containing a visual representation of the disguised Achilles in the recognition scene.⁶ Accompanying other work by Gay, the passage appears as translated by Theobald in the rival English Metamorphoses edited by Sewell (1717 [1716], 1724 (reissued 1726)). Such repeated editions and reprintings imply a wide public thoroughly familiar with the stories, whom a writer like Gay could assume he was addressing. Book XIII—the pair of speeches—was also often translated by itself, and Gay would have had particular reason to notice two of these versions: one in 1708 with Ulysses's speech translated by his schoolfriend and early London mentor Aaron Hill⁷, and a modernized burlesque version in 1719 put out by his pseudonymous namesake and bane, 'Joseph Gay' (later to be immortalized as a pursuable phantom by Pope in the Dunciad games).8 Of course, it would not have taken someone else's work to put John Gay's mind running on burlesque, and the low-life treatment by 'Joseph Gay' is rather coarse, but certain features might have stimulated his imagination, particularly the wife supplied for the first time for Lycomedes and the garb and kit of a Scottish peddler that Ulysses assumes.⁹

Gay incorporates into his ballad opera, however, many aspects of the legend that were well-known in antiquity but do not figure in the Metamorphoses, with its focus upon concealment and disclosure.¹⁰ These include such memorable features as the clandestine amour with King Lycomedes's daughter Deidamia, Achilles's engagement in women's work (spinning), the presence of a group of daughters (or court maidens), the use of a trumpet call as part of Ulysses's ruse, and Achilles's adoption of the name 'Pyrrha'. The first two can be found elsewhere in Ovid (Ars Amatoria), in Statius, and in (pseudo-) Bion. Lycomedes's daughters are in Statius and in Bion, as well as in a number of minor writers, and the trumpet call occurs in Statius and others. From Statius, Gay could draw the psychology of awareness: 'Conscious of her and Achilles's concealed guilt, Deidamia is tormented with anxiety and thinks her sisters are aware but not mentioning what they suspect or know.'¹¹ The idea that the intrigue began as a result of the couple's having been assigned the same bed or bedchamber derives, by contrast, not from Statius but from Bion and Ovid (Ars Amatoria). To know that Achilles was called 'Pyrrha', Gay must have had first-hand or at least indirect access to the less familiar writers, Apollodorus, Hyginus and Sidonius.¹²

But as my review of the English versions of the Metamorphoses tale suggests, Gay could draw upon not only his own familiarity with the classical story, but also that of his readers, even the unlearned. Thus it is important to review, with the content of his likeliest sources, how widely they could have been known. Of the Bion—the fragmentary Epithalamius of Achilles and Deidameia—I have found no translation into English until long after Gay's death.¹³ I believe, nevertheless, that Gay must have known this fragment, which occurs among a group of idylls often associated with those of Theocritus, of whom he composed a full-scale imitation in The Shepherd's Week and whom he cites there many times by name. In the Bion fragment the story of the love affair is told in the same Doric style that Theocritus uses and that Gay approximates with clattering rhymes, low country lore, and archaisms. In Bion such a version answers the call made by a rustic for 'a pretty (Sicilian) love-song such as Polyphemus sang to Galatea'; Gay's mind would have seized on this text, for he wrote exactly that song himself—'O ruddier than the Cherry!' for Handel's Acis and Galatea (II, 17-27).¹⁴ Treating Achilles, Bion's singer stresses the clear male selfhood within the ostensibly feminine beauty, then paints in detail the lover's conduct in the early stages of courtship:

Achilles alone hid among the girls, the daughters of Lycomedes, and he learned woolworking instead of arms, and with white arm he sustained a maiden's task, and he appeared like a girl; for he actually became girlish like them, and just such a blossom blushed on his snowy cheeks, and he walked with the walk of a girl, and he covered his hair with a veil. But still he had the heart of a man and the passion of a man, and from dawn to night he sat beside Deidamia, and sometimes he kissed her hand, and many a time he raised up her fair weaving and he praised her patterned web; and he did not eat with any other companion, and he did everything in his eagerness to share her bed; and he even spoke a word to her: 'The other sisters sleep with one another, but I sleep alone and you girl sleep alone, we two maiden companions, we two fair; but we sleep alone in our separate beds; but that wicked crafty Nysaia cruelly separates me from you. For I do not you.… '¹⁵

As for Statius's version of the story, it was certainly known by part of Gay's audience, for one critic, 'Atex' Burnet, writing before the printed edition of Achilles (with its Ovid epigraph) was published, unhesitatingly declared Statius—that is, his Achilleid—to be Gay's source.¹⁶ This work had been published in an English translation by Sir Robert Howard among his Poems in 1660. Many common details—for example, Achilles's insisting upon a ceremony to confirm his marriage to Deidamia—make it clear that Gay knew Statius's poem. The general currency of this classical author may be indicated by recalling the place of translations from his earlier epic, the Thebaid, among Pope's juvenilia and earliest publications. In Book I of the Achilleid Statius treats Achilles's time in Scyros at length. Here, Achilles agrees to put on the woman's garment only after he has been kindled by the sight of Deidamia. The poet slowly builds with psychosomatic details—tightenings of the scalp, flushes of the skin, impulsive movements checked by bashfulness—the representation of the force of sexual feeling within an inexperienced adolescent boy. Achilles constantly hovers near Deidamia, keeping his presence known by little gaucheries. In Deidamia, similarly, Statius depicts the special psychological state of a nubile virgin, who encourages Achilles's courtship without allowing herself consciously to know the circumstances in which she is placed; whenever Achilles tries to explain his deception, she will not allow him opportunity to do so. After many days of restraint, combined with the loss of his old male activities and the frustrations of his new role, finding himself near the girl in the dark one night in a sacred grove, 'He gains by force his desire, and with all his vigour strains her in a real embrace.'¹⁷ Statius conveys that this act, while not wholly unpremeditated, largely flows from a compulsion more powerful than the lad at his stage of understanding and of physical development can control. Deidamia, who has had no idea that there was a man nearby, is of course frantic and terrified. When these stresses have abated, however, their mutual attraction draws them to continue a secret liaison as lovers and to protect each other. Deidamia achieves considerable mastery over her circumstances, for, with the assistance of her nurse, she manages to conceal her pregnancy, her lying-in, and her growing child, and to prevent Achilles impetuously giving himself away many times to Ulysses's searching eyes; Achilles, in turn, immediately his identity is revealed, also confesses their situation and asks (successfully) to marry her. In short, while Statius does not condemn the rape, and even uses it in his narrative as an index of his hero's masculinity, he also presents it as an index of his hero's immaturity.

Sustaining the sexual dynamic I have already described, Statius renders the disclosure of Achilles's true self at the sound of the alarm as the unleashing of even more irresistible natural power concentrated within the taut form: standing motionless amid the panic, Achilles simply grows huge and dominant: as his womanly garments fall away, he (his whole body) erects:

illius intactae cecidere a pectore vestes,
iam clipeus breviorque manu consumitur hasta,
—mira fides!—Ithacumque umeris excedere visus
Aetolumque ducem: …
immanisque gradu, ceu protinus Hectora poscens,
stat medius trepidante domo: Peleaque virgo quaeritur.
(I, 878-81, 883-85)

From his breast the garments fall away untouched, now the shield and puny spear are swallowed up by his hands—marvellous to believe!—his head and shoulders loom up above those of Ulysses and Diomede: …

Mighty of limb, in combat stance, as if he could summon Hector, he stands amid the panic-stricken house: and the girl-that-was for whom they search [they will never find].¹⁸

Achilles in legend enacts the tragic impossibility of escaping one's destiny. At the moment Statius treats in this passage, the ties of life—the long life Thetis has sought for him, the inane alternative symbolized in his inappropriate raiment—are sloughed away by the true heroic reality that declares itself. Not accidentally is this heroic manifestation expressed by likeness to the declaration one part of a man's body can make of exemption from qualifying circumstance and personal uncertainty. Throughout the Scyros episode Statius makes plain, both explicitly and symbolically, the relationship between male sexual, and heroic military, potency, and grounds them both in irresistible nature. Gay takes over Statius's themes, but recasts into questions his certainties.

Of all the classical treatments of Achilles and Deidamia, however, Ovid's Ars Amatoria would have been the most familiar and most influential. Throughout the history of secular classical education, the confident, urbane advice to men by the writer of the Ars Amatoria on how to obtain and retain women's love must have been devoured by schoolboys after hours when it failed to find a place in the formal curriculum. Since Gay's time, bowdlerism has successfully prevented many readers from becoming aware of Ovid's full text.¹⁹ Gay's contemporaries, by contrast, could choose among many candid translations of Book I by Thomas Heywood (1650, 1662, 1672, 1677, 1682, 1684), Francis Wolferston (1661), Thomas Hoy (1682, 1692), or Dryden (1709, 1712, 1716, 1719). They could also read the advice applied to modern times—in the coarse anonymous Art of Love (1701, reissued slightly revised in 1702 as The Poet Banter'd) or in William King's elaborate adaptation (1708, reissued 1712), where quite witty burlesque elements sometimes conceal the onset of the bowdlerizing impulse.²⁰

It was Ovid in the Ars Amatoria who introduced the idea that Achilles raped Deidamia (setting for his successor Statius the problem he so brilliantly solved of accounting for the rape).²¹ The story is brought in as an illustration in a context I shall describe later. Ovid's narrator is a bully, interested in understanding others' psychology only in order to achieve an ascendancy: he therefore mocks Achilles for dressing as a woman and for spinning. But, for him, Achilles asserts his true nature not as a hero in warfare but as a man in rape. Manliness is staked upon sexual conquest.

Thus, while the account in the Metamorphoses focuses on Achilles as an object of concealment and disclosure, other sources concentrate upon the significance of the figure while in disguise, as he shares the education, occupations, indeed one of the beds, of the daughters of Lycomedes. Achilles's love affair with Deidamia, confirmed in her pregnancy,²² testifies to the hero's genuine manliness despite his appearance. The figure—or idea—of the disguised Achilles spinning doubles with that of Hercules in similar garments engaged at the same task, and therefore indicates that what is represented is not man, or mere man, but hero, in displacement. Depending on the treatment, the image could suggest. a wide range of possible values, from debasement through latent power to the enhancement of one's power by encompassing the attributes of the Other. These parts of the legend share an interest in the question of gender-identity and its relation to 'true' identity and to the ability to act effectively in the world.

The Achilles-in-Scyros story therefore held many interesting themes for Gay to explore. He would have met the figure of Achilles in petticoats early in his studies and had reason to be reminded of the figure over and over in the intervening years. Furthermore, the figure would in itself have appealed to Gay, whose imagination repeatedly created figures in cross-gendered disguise. In his plays such figures partly reflect common theatre conventions, but for Gay they also reflect his wider imaginative habitation in double forms—burlesque- or mock-modes—and his fascination with duple or liminal figures, such as pregnant maidens or castrati. Gender disguise can be found also in his poetry and translations. Particularly striking is the early passage in his Epistle to Burlington (circulating in manuscript in 1717, printed 1720) in which he candidly and without any suggestion of oddity describes his pleasure in finding himself in women's clothes. He and his squires have ridden four days. on horseback; at an inn they have the chance to strip to the skin, and have all their clothes laundered; the maid gives them women's nightgowns to sleep in:

The Maid, subdu'd by Fees, her Trunk unlocks,
And gives the cleanly Aid of Dowlas Smocks.
Mean time our Shirts her busy Fingers rub,
While the Soap lathers o'er the foaming Tub.
If Women's Geer such pleasing Dreams incite,
Lend us your Smocks, ye Damsels, ev'ry Night!
(103-8)

The idea of fingers touching the clothes from the outside combines with the reverie induced by comfort, relaxation, passivity, the sensation of unfamiliar but agreeable garments felt from the inside, and the strange but not unpleasant disruption of the attributes of sexual identity. Day returns the dreamers to the certainty of their masculinity, 'We rise; our Beards demand the Barber's art' (109), but allows them to reassume their reverie with all the elements I have mentioned—the stroking fingers, the sensation to the skin, the comfort, relaxation, passivity, the pleasing disruption of sexual norms:

A Female enters, and performs the part.…
Smooth o'er our Chin her easy Fingers move,
Soft as when Venus stroak'd the Beard of Jove.
(110, 113-14)²³

The composition of the immediate predecessor to Achilles among Gay's ballad operas may help to explain why Gay thought later of Achilles as a subject. In that work, Polly, Gay had put his heroine into breeches. Quite apart from any imaginative predispositions, Gay would have arrived at this feature by the same process that led him to write Polly in the first place: to follow up on the unprecedented success of The Beggar's Opera. Polly Peachum had become a celebrity—there were 'biographies' of her, books of her sayings, engraved portraits, her face on screens and fans—and the actress who embodied her had capped the glamour with a flourish by setting up with a duke. How natural to feature Polly in a sequel and to put her into disguise as a man, at once greatly extending the character's scope for action and the actress's scope for display.

For his next ballad opera Gay would easily think of reviving the travesty in reverse, and Achilles-in-Scyros would readily follow to mind—already associated, furthermore, with modernization and with burlesque. For Polly-in-breeches Gay had written a scene based upon the story of Potiphar's wife. As Polly had not been performed, Gay carried the idea over to his new piece and rewrote the scene with the sexes reversed. Adding a jealous wife for Lycomedes and taking over the two elements—love affair and disclosure—from the classical story, Gay had the material for his text. This material he then structured to raise questions about the relation of gender to personal identity.

A noticeable feature of his structure is that during the greater part of Achilles no other character present is aware that the person called Pyrrha is anything but the young woman she seems. The exposition is set out for the audience in dialogue between Achilles, already disguised, and Thetis, who then departs. Until II, x, the drama then deals with the feminine-gendered Pyrrha, whose treatment and circumstances the audience must evaluate in terms of the smouldering male consciousness that must endure them. The nature of what Gay achieves here can be made clearer by comparing his plotting with that of Paolo Rolli for Handel's last opera, Deidamia (1741). As soon as possible in Act I, Rolli establishes that both Lycomedes and Deidamia are aware that their guest Pyrrha is Achilles—Lycomedes has promised his friend Peleus, Achilles's father, that he will conceal his son. Without my delaying to set out the obvious male ruling-class affiliation of the heroic mode, we might notice that the goddess Thetis, whom antique plots were able to tolerate, if only to thwart, is obliterated in Rolli's heroic plot in favour of her mortal, but male, spouse: Lycomedes can be bound, against the claims of Ulysses, by an oath to Peleus, as he cannot by a promise to a female, a mother. Rolli can concentrate the action of his drama upon the efforts of his principal, Ulysses (for Ulysses, not Achilles, was primo uomo), to discern the evidences of heroic manliness in the lineaments of a nymph who hunts exceptionally well, and who fails to respond to the gestures of courtship, but who, in the end, cannot resist a helmet and shield.²⁴ Ulysses, the 'subject', or viewing mind, achieves mastery over the 'object', which has an existence and a true nature independent of him that can be 'dis-covered', and that, by the right test, he can force it to disclose. In this ontology, a person's nature inheres in his or her sexual identity, which informs all aspects of behaviour and taste; it therefore cannot be long concealed from the discerning eye. Rolli's position is precisely Ovid's: 'She, not discover'd by her Mien or Voice,/ Betray'd her Manhood by her manly Choice' (Metamorphoses, translated by Dryden).²⁵ With Ulysses as subject, Achilles does not simply manifest himself like Statius's hero; not self-directed and irresistibly powerful, he is beckonable, controlled.

Unlike Rolli, Gay holds off till the last moment—the tenth scene of the final act—before allowing Ulysses's configuration of reality to take hold of his play. Ulysses, observing the discernible behaviour of 'Achilles … handling and poising the Armour', sees in it first the outward manifestations of the hero's nature—'That intrepid Air! That Godlike Look!'—then the heroic nature itself—'His Nature, his Disposition shews him through the Disguise.' 'Son of Thetis, I know thee', he declares, and Achilles acknowledges himself (III, x, 81-90). But the finale, which Gay gives to Ulysses and his point of view, in fact undercuts the value, and the grounds, of the discovery:

Nature breaks forth at the Moment unguarded;
Through all Disguise she her self must betray.…

Thus when the Cat had once all Woman's Graces;
 Courtship, Marriage won her Embraces:
Forth lept a Mouse; she, forgetting Enjoyment,
 Quits her fond Spouse for her former Employment.

Nature breaks forth at the Moment unguarded;
 Through all Disguise she herself must betray.
(III, xii, 80-1, 84-9)

Here is a reality, a 'something' that can 'break forth', as the essence of 'catness' leaps out of the woman's clothes to pursue the mouse, when stressed by the irresistible temptation specific to its nature, which for the hero is the armour. Yet the 'something' is controlled neither by its own integrity (it can 'betray' itself), nor by its male master; it responds no more readily to guile than to random contingency. The hierarchical status of what Ulysses has discovered—the heroic male warrior—is discredited by his being equated with a female domestic beast in pursuit of her 'former Employment', while man-the-subject-discerner is left embarrassed at not being able to discriminate at all, even in the intimacy of marriage, between the image of woman concealing the nature of cat, the image of woman concealing the nature of hero, and the image of woman concealing the nature of woman (if, for such subjects, the latter distinction can be known).

Following Achilles backwards from this final wobbly affirmation of a knowable inner essence to its beginning, we find a series of progressively external definitions of identity that occupy more and more of the play time (or text) the earlier, and more external, they are. The speech preceding the finale, 'We may for a while put on a feign'd Character, but Nature is so often unguarded that it will shew itself.—'Tis to the Armour we owe Achilles' (III, xii, 77-9), suggests in its last phrase that the heroism lodges not in the man but in the armour. In one sense, Ulysses's clothing-trick brings out a distinction between Achilles and the maidens, but in another sense it is a distinction without a difference: some are attracted by costumes of one sort, some by costumes of another sort, but all are the same in being attracted by costumes. Rather than there being an innate, hierarchical difference, there may be no meaningful difference at all—Gay's irreverent presentation certainly supports the latter notion. His point is explored in the Prologue 'Written by Mr. GAY' (nevertheless attributed by some to Pope).²⁶

To Buskins, Plumes and Helmets what Pretence,
If mighty Chiefs must speak but common Sense? …
And whatsoever Criticks may suppose,
Our Author holds, that what He [Achilles] spoke was Prose.
(17-18, 23-4)

The questions of diction and criticism—particularly if they are raised by the translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey—invoke the debate between Ancients and Moderns, with the indication that if Gay's Achilles 'speaks prose',²⁷ as he does (even while the Prologue 'speaks couplets'), correspondingly what is embodied or dressed in the epic verse will be absent, too. Once, 'Buskins, Plumes and Helmets' were put on by real warriors and corresponded to real danger, real courage: they signified grandeur and magnanimity as opposed to triviality and mean-spiritedness. Now they have no function except as costumes put on by actors or opera singers. But the first line hints by its metonymy that, even in the past, heroes—'Buskins, Plumes and Helmets'—were no more than their costumes and that their virtue had no more existence than now. Thus can be read Ulysses's summation: ''Tis to the Armour we owe Achilles' (III, xii, 79).

Institutionalized distinctions in virtually all cultures testify that for most people the essence of personal identity lodges in the sex organs and in their expression of fertility and potency. Gay uses the Deidamia plot to set forth sexuality's claim to be the lodgment of true identity. For him love-making—sex—is naturally a matter of mutual pleasure and desire understood to lead to pregnancy: 'I have copied Nature, making the Youths Amorous before Wedlock, and the Damsels Complying and Fruitful' (preface, The What D'Ye Call It, 90-1). In the verse of Air III of Achilles— with a hint of Statius's outlook—Gay suggests the danger of attempting to repress the power of sexual energy in the metaphor of a foolish shepherd who would pen up a hungry wolf within the fold, while the tune Gay chooses for this air reinforces the theme by recalling that paragon of vainly-pent sexual energy, Macheath, in the condemned cell of Newgate Prison singing Air LXV to the same strains, 'But can I leave my pretty Hussies,/ Without one Tear, or tender Sigh?' (The Beggar's Opera, III, xiii, 18-19).

There are a few jokes that play upon the sense of the hidden male organ, particularly when Lycomedes's guards begin to search Pyrrha for a 'Dagger … You will find … some where or other conceal'd' (II, v, 9-10), but direct references like these to Achilles's sex are few. Gay is far more interested in the question of how sexual identity can be known indirectly: he sets up the Achilles-Deidamia plot as flowing from Theaspe's incorrect judgement about Achilles's sexual identity. This has induced her to demand that her daughter be 'scarce ever from her [Pyrrha]; they have one and the same Bed-Chamber' (I, viii, 83-4). Other lines in Theaspe's same speech indicate further ways of knowing on this plane of identity—direct verification of the organ (Deidamia 'insists upon it that I have nothing to fear from Pyrrha; and is … positive in this Opinion' [I, viii, 76-8], recalling Thetis's fear 'that when you are among the Ladies you shou'd be so little Master of your Passions as to find your self a Man' (I, i, 85-7), and indirect indication through the symptoms of pregnancy, here morning sickness ("There must be some Reason that Deidamia hath not been with me this Morning' (I, viii, 86-7).

In Gay's original text the subplot that presents this plane of the question of identity may have been introduced directly in dialogue between the two lovers²⁸, even so, there, as in the published version, this subplot (and the plane it presents) are set aside until very late in the play (the last scene of Act II or, in Burnet, several scenes into Act III), where they occupy a brief, discreet segrnent of the text. It is important to notice that Gay, utterly in contrast to Statius, does not dramatize the love-making. Nor does he exploit the longstanding analogy of penis to weapon of warfare or conquest, hero to sexual conqueror, even disregarding Statius's striking representation of this theme. What interests him principally is the eloquence of indirect testimony, as expressed in the shape of not the man's but the woman's body, which makes the male presence 'monstrously evident' (III, vii, 56-7)²⁹: 'That she [Deidamia] hath all the outward Marks of Female Frailty must be visible to all Woman-kind' (III, vii, 65-6), say her sisters. Sexed—female—body here speaks to sexed (or gendered?) female eye.

Deidamia is defined by, and defines Achilles by, his sex, but he defines manhood by behaving publicly—and being recognized—as manly:

Achilles. When shall I behave my self as a Man!
Deidamia. Wou'd you had never behav'd yourself as one!
(II, X, 9-10)

A whole repertory of gestures—long strides, swearing, 'aukward Behaviour'—define men as different from women (II, x, 72, 85-6; I, i, 75). Air XXXVI captures the process of rationalization by a man, Achilles, who finds it difficult to behave as women so easily do: soon the impossible attainment begins to be disqualified as merely a manifestation of a 'natural variousness'; then that nature begins to be disqualified as one that a man, with his integrity of being, would not wish to have:

Your Dress, your Conversations,
 Your Airs of Joy and Pain,
All these are Affectations
 We never can attain.
The Sex so often varies,
 'Tis Nature more than Art:
To play their whole Vagaries
 We must have Woman's Heart.
(II, x, 76-83)

In the first act the difference between men and women is asserted over and over in the dialogue between Thetis and Achilles, not precisely themselves a woman and a man but very conscious of their several natures—divine and heroic—that they feel they debase by pretending to be women (I, i, 30-2, 67-8). Here Gay approaches the issue at the heart of the old legend about the heroic destiny that cannot be gainsaid. Manliness longs to define itself as an immutable inner essence residing in 'the Heart of a Man' (I, i, 14-15), but the language keeps pressing the residence of manly reality outward, to the minds of other manly men with whom one interacts in public deeds—who know one's 'character', recognize one's 'honour', the worth of one's 'Word', remember one's 'glory', preserve one's 'Fame' (I, i). Embroidery, the reading of romances, preoccupation with dress, the spleen (I, ii), are the gendered occupations of 'the Life of a Woman' (I, i, 52), which is not to live as something distinct—womanly—but as something not manly, not truly or fully existent and therefore debased: manly 'Character' is opposed to womanish 'Infamy', 'Honour' to 'Cowardise', 'Death with Fame' to 'Life with Shame', one's 'Word' to the pleasure of breaking promises, integrity of being to natural variousness, sword to tongue, duty to country to obedience to mama, resolution to pity, freedom to captivity (I, i, Air XXXVI; III, iii, 18-19, Airs L, XXXIII). In short, whatever one's qualities of generosity, courage, resolution, confidence, one cannot be a 'Man' unless one is recognized to be so by other 'Men', and to be visible requires definition against the contrasting background. 'Honour' is in the recognition; it is for this reason that Achilles becomes dishonoured by his disguise: 'my Honour is already sacrific'd to my Duty. That I gave you when I submitted to put on this Womans Habit' (I, i, 30-2).

Dependency upon the recognition of others for the empowerment of one's identity is only a step away from our final category, in which the reality arises out of how we are apprehended by others. Deidamia fears that Achilles will seem to her sisters to be a man because 'whenever I look upon you, I have always the Image of a Man before my Eyes' (II, x, 97-8). The greater part of Achilles is given to investigating the reality of this kind of identity wherein what Achilles is is only what he is believed to be by Lycomedes—a young girl. When Deidamia sees in Pyrrha the image of a man, she discerns what she knows but also projects what she desires; for Lycomedes, however, Pyrrha is his desire alone.

The Lycomedes plot is the most interesting part of Achilles, for it is entirely Gay's own contribution to the legend; he emphasizes its importance by giving it the greater part of his dramatic time. Its basis is the stock situation in theatre—soon to become the stock situation in the novel as well—in which the young heroine is exposed to unwelcome sexual advances from a man, usually older or of a higher social position, whom she ought to be able to look to for protection. This plot comes into Achilles, we have noticed, from Polly, where Gay used it in its 'Potiphar's wife' variant. His adding the twist of the travesty to the scene moves its concern from the question of sex to the question of gender and stresses how largely the harassment is a function of power rather than of true sexual desire. In Gay's version of the Achilles plot (unlike Rolli's), Thetis, pretending to be 'a distress'd Grecian Princess' (I, i, 68), asks Lycomedes to allow her 'daughter Pyrrha' to share the education and pastimes of his girls. Lycomedes does not believe the reasons Thetis gives for making her request, but, when his aide Diphilus flatters his vanity by suggesting that the 'most delicious Piece' he admires might be 'had' (I, v, 3, 12), he cannot find any other explanation for the girl's being left behind than that the women hope that he will make the girl his mistress. In other words, the girl exists for him only as a blank onto which he projects his own fantasies; he cannot summon up the thought that she might have a mode of being beyond his awareness or imagination. Though he can see clearly that Pyrrha's behaviour—for example, her vehemently denouncing Diphilus as 'a Pimp, a Pandar, a Bawd' (II, i, 34)—is not overtly encouraging, he eagerly accepts Diphilus's construction that the girl's language is a matter of 'ill-breeding' and her attitude an 'affectation' covering 'Modesty' (II, iv, 31), which therefore expresses the receptiveness he desires: 'She had all the Resentment and Fury of the most complying Prude' (II, iii, 19-20).

Lycomedes begins his effort to possess the girl by sending an agent to attempt to buy her with gifts. Next he offers the presents personally. Next he tries to beguile her with flattery. He declares his passion. Indifference and resistance become imperatives for aggressive love-making:

To save the Appearances of Virtue, the most easy Woman expects a little gentle Compulsion, and to be allow'd the Decency of a little feeble Resistance. For the Quiet of her own Conscience a Woman may insist upon acting the Part of Modesty, and you must comply with her Scruples. (II, iii, 36-41)

When the last tactics seem not to work, he quickly turns to trying rape:

When the Fort on no Condition
 Will admit the gen'rous Foe,
Parley but delays Submission;
 We by Storm shou'd lay it low.³⁰
(II, iv, 65-8)

the burlesque battle this conceit introduces functions in comic terms to release the tension in the scene. We must not leap to the supposition, however, that the playwright thereby trivializes the kind of oppression he has been dramatizing. As Pyrrha, Gay's underdog is endowed with precisely the invincible power that Lycomedes's whole attitude presupposes—and that the very idea of Hero embodied in Achilles presupposes—to be utterly absent in women (i.e., non-men): 'Am I so ignominiously to be got the better off … By a Woman!' (II, iv, 99, 101). Humiliated, Lycomedes takes the still-all-too-familiar recourse of blaming the victim:

Achilles: Who was the Aggressor, Sir?
Lycomedes: Beauty, Inclination, Love.
(II, v, 24-5)

When Lycomedes becomes finally convinced that the girl cannot become his own possession, he does not enlarge his perception of her from object to person, but merely comes to look upon her as something disturbing to be got rid of. Candidly stating what most people act upon but do not admit to themselves about someone whom they have injured, he declares: 'Her Presence just now wou'd be shocking.—I cou'd not stand the Shame and Confusion' (II, viii, 30-1). He therefore joins in with his wife's plans to marry her off to the (as it happens, uninterested) man of their choice.

'When shall I appear as I am', says Achilles to himself, to be able to 'extricate my self out of this Chain of Perplexities!—I have no sooner escap'd being ravish'd but I am immediately to be made a Wife' (II, x, 65-8). He is clear that these torments occur because he is gendered as female, even though he may not realize the link between the intended marriage and the failure of the attempted rape. Gay's plot makes explicit how, in a society with a double standard, women are forced to destroy each other: Queen Theaspe, whose status derives from her husband, looks through his eyes to see the object of his desire ('I can see her [Pyrrha's] Faults, Sir. I see her as a Woman sees a Woman. The Men, it seems, think the aukward Creature handsome' (I, vi, 16-18). She confirms the men's deduction as to why Pyrrha has been left behind: 'The Woman, no doubt, depends upon it, that her Daughter's Charms are not to be resisted' (I, vi, 97-8). She is attuned to proclivities in her husband before he is even aware of them; she feels jealousy, well-placed, but before the event. Diphilus is able to use her jealousy as an argument to persuade Lycomedes to pursue the affair; the evidence that women are (merely) objects of men's desire comes, then, not just from the men but also from other women's jealousy and anxiety.

The young girl is therefore perceived in sexual terms by the persons she must look to for protection. By the travesty Gay makes this quite clear: Achilles's attractiveness to young men, presumably by virtue of his felt qualities of heroism and leadership, is, because of his gender, interpreted as the sexual charm of a belle (by Diphilus, II, v, 96-7, by Theaspe II, vi, 13-14). His enthusiastic admiration, when Theaspe asks him how he likes Periphas, for the man's wonderful 'Impatience … to serve … at the Siege of Troy' (II, ix, 9-10), she misreads in the same way. The predicament for women in an oppressive society is that young girls require protection, but because of hypocrisy and the double standard it is assumed that they are being put forward not for protection but for advantage through covert sex. It is the inexperienced and little-aware girl who has the greatest chance for advantage, while, for men, experience, wealth, and self-confidence offset the natural attractions of youth. What is 'experience' for 'experienced women' is the coming to awareness of the arrangements and how they work, but, as Gay shows, that very awareness acts to propel the oppression forward upon other women.

What a woman must do—and is entitled to do—in the face of unwelcome attentions Gay expresses through Parthenia in Dione. Gay supports her point of view by arranging his plot so that her wishes can be fully met, and in order to do so he was obliged to cast his play as a tragedy, for him not at all a comfortable mode.³¹ Because of her exceptional beauty Parthenia persistently finds herself attracting men's desire; a man puts the argument to her: 'What heart is proof against that face divine?/ Love is not in our power' (I, iii, 11-12). But she refuses to accept that someone else's desire should obligate her when she had done nothing to encourage it:

If e'er I trifled with a shepherd's pain,
Or with false hope his passion strove to gain;
Then might you justly curse my savage mind,
Then might you rank me with the serpent kind:
But I ne'er trifled with a shepherd's pain,
Nor with false hope his passion strove to gain:
'Tis to his rash pursuit he owes his fate,
I was not cruel; he was obstinate.
(I, iii, 13-20)

And she goes on with what one might call a Whig feminist credo:

Why will intruding man my peace destroy?
Let me content, and solitude enjoy;
Free was I born, my freedom to maintain,
Early I sought the unambitious plain.
(I, iii, 25-8)

She sternly advises that her suitor be 'Bid … his heart-consuming groans give o'er, … be wise,/ Prevent thy fate' (I, iii, 37, 39-40). Lycidas's disregard of her insistence that he take responsibility for his own life (or, his disregard of the autonomy of nature) brings death to himself and Dione but leaves Parthenia unmated and unharassed, as she had wished.

By the time of Achilles the question of women's right—or desire—to live unmolested had become a topical issue through the sensational Charteris case, which had dramatized the social factors as blatantly as can be imagined. Colonel Francis Charteris had amassed a huge fortune by graft, gambling, close-dealing and chicanery. He had been censured before the House of Commons for taking pay-offs as an officer. He was known by his male visitors to run his household of maid-servants as a brothel.³² He had been found guilty in Scotland of raping a woman at pistol-point on a public road, but had been pardoned by George I. In February 1730 he was found guilty of raping a recently hired serving-maid in his London house and was sentenced to hang. Vast quantities of his property, which had become forfeit, were then seized by various public officials, and in due course bought back by his son-in-law, the Earl of Wemyss, for very large sums. On 10 April he was pardoned by George II. Charteris was a well-known public figure, whose life had touched many of both sexes and all social classes in various parts of Great Britain, and his case attracted great interest. Day-to-day details, particularly between the trial and pardon, were widely reported and reprinted in the numerous London newspapers, and there flourished a complement of ballads, 'lives', portraits, and journalistic commentary.

Charteris's defence declared that the woman had been sleeping with him for many nights and that she had many times joked with other servants about his being impotent.³³ Some people (Addison, for example) preferred to fancy that this was true, in order to secure the piquant irony that Charteris 'having daily deserved the GIBBET for what/he did,/Was at last condemn'd to it for what he could/not do'.³⁴ Implicit in Charteris's defence—and accepted, though perhaps not faced, by those who liked the irony—was the idea that the rape charge was false. This is not far from the idea that all rape charges are false, that there is in fact no such thing as rape—'The late King [George I], as likewise Queen Elizabeth', Viscount Percival observes, predicting Charteris's pardon as early as 28 February, 'would never suffer a man condemned for a rape to be executed, as not believing it possible for to commit the crime unless the woman in some sort consented'.³⁵ The physical vulnerability of the woman's body to the man's invasion is opposed to the legal vulnerability of the man to the woman's accusation. In Charteris's instance the sex difference was underscored as a class difference, not only between master and serving-maid, but also between jurymen and Privy Council. Satirical editorials began to comment that, inasmuch as members of the upper class did not count rape a crime but instead something called 'gallantry', those with money and influence ought to be licensed to do it freely; this would spare useless trials, clarify social distinctions, and teach the lower classes—particularly lower-class women—their place.³⁶

Gay followed this case—in fact he wrote to Swift just at the moment that Charteris was about to be pardoned:

today I dine with Alderman Barbar the present Sheriff who holds his feast in the city. Does not Chartres' misfortunes grieve you, for that great man is like to save his life and lose some of his money, a very hard case!³⁷

Gay's thoughts run as they do because Barber had been one of the three officials involved in the seizure of Charteris's forfeited goods, payment for which was still being negotiated,³⁸ and he was doubtless looking forward to talk of the case at the dinner. Gay probably heard other stories about Charteris from the Duke of Queensberry, whose mother is said to have been cheated of several thousand pounds by him at cards in a single evening.³⁹ After the pardon, interest in Charteris did not fade; rather, he became a symbolic figure of public corruption for artists of greater imaginative scope: Swift compares him to the recently-appointed English Dean of Fern in Ireland, who was indicted for rape on 6 June; The Craftsman and other political writers establish him as a satirical surrogate for Robert Walpole; Hogarth depicts him leering at Moll Hackabout, just disembarked from the York coach; Pope cites him in the Epistle to Bathurst as evidence that wealth is no index of moral worth.⁴⁰ All these works appeared in the period between Charteris's pardon and the opening of Achilles in February 1733.

The context in 1730 also generated Fielding's Rape upon Rape,⁴¹ which, targeting its satire against the venal Justice Squeezum and his associates, builds a plot out of false charges of rape, accusations of false charges of rape, and charges of conspiracy to bring false charges of rape. For Fielding rape is rather more a term of utterance than a frightening and opprobrious reality:

But, Ladies, did not you too sympathize?
Hey! pray, confess, do all your Frowns arise
Because so much of Rape and Rape we bawl?
Or is it, that we have no Rape at all?

 Indeed, our Poet, to oblige the Age,
Had brought a dreadful Scene upon the Stage:
But I, perceiving what his Muse would drive at,
Told him the Ladies never would connive at
A downright actual Rape—unless in private.⁴²

'Jokes about rape', writes Ian Donaldson, 'characteristically imply that the crime may not in fact exist; that it is a legal and social fiction, which will dissolve before the gaze of humour and the universal sexual appetite.' Fielding validates his knowing implication by having a woman speak the lines quoted, thus exposing the 'disparity between a woman's words and her actual desires' that such jokes presume.⁴³ Fielding discounts 'rape' by locating it as an encounter between men and women of the same high and sophisticated social class. Fielding's outlook is that of a man of this class, classically educated, confident, forward, whose social and financial ascendancy encourage him and his fellows to understand that the desires of others correspond to their own.

Gay began to formulate Achilles sometime in the wake of the Charteris case. Certainly, even if we resist accepting the partisan impulse to which The Daily Journal and Achilles Dissected attribute its genesis, we must acknowledge that it arises out of the temporal context in which people, certainly the people in Gay's circle, knew the configuration of sexual desire among persons at Court—the King, the Queen, Mrs. Howard, Lord Hervey (the Vice Chamberlain)—and knew that symbols inviting identification with Walpole's administration would be read in a partisan way. The duel between Ajax and Periphas, for example, could recall that between Pulteney and Hervey in January 1731 over the former's putting into print innuendos about the nature of Hervey's passion for Stephen Fox." Since The Beggar's Opera, as Gay was well aware, the theatre had become more and more explicitly partisan and satirical of Walpole and the Court.

However much Achilles may have arisen out of this context, and whatever invitation it could be perceived to offer party journalists to politicize its genesis, intention and meaning, the fact is that, for Gay, public corruption was always less interesting and acutely felt than the tyranny of one individual over another. In the figure of the travesty Achilles, Gay saw a means—in a light context that would not be resisted—to signal to men of Fielding's background and mentality an indirect but telling point about themselves in their personal conduct. To the legend, Gay added Lycomedes's pursuit of Pyrrha. Lycomedes's attempted rape of Pyrrha, the culmination of this extensive part of Achilles, invokes by inversion, for the classically-aware segment of his audience, the rape of Deidamia by Pyrrha in Ovid's version, where the idea of rape was added to the old tale. One might wish to argue, in fact, that the epigraph from Ovid's Metamorphoses on the title page of Achilles be construed as a significant misdirection to the right author but the wrong text.

What I have not mentioned so far is the context in which Ovid invokes the tale. Many of my readers will be surprised to learn that what is today called 'daterape' has for generations of 'gentlemen' been sanctioned by classical authority. In Ars Amatoria Ovid, the sophisticated instructor of the inexperienced young man, assures him that he need have no hesitation in raping his girl if she does not readily yield:

oscula qui sumpsit, si non et cetera sumit,
  haec quoque, quae data sunt, perdere dignus erit.
quantum defuerat pleno post oscula voto?
  ei mihi, rusticitas, non pudor ille fuit.
vim licet appelles: grata est vis ista puellis:
  quod iuvat, invitae saepe dedisse volunt.
quaecumque est veneris subita violata rapina,
  gaudet, et inprobitas muneris instar habet.
at quae, cum posset cogi, non tacta recessit,
  ut simulet vultu gaudia, tristis erit.
(I, 669-78)⁴⁵

Henry Fielding himself (though years later) was to put out a 'modernization' of the Ovid with quite a close translation of these particular lines:

Now when you have proceeded to Kisses, if you proceed no farther, you may well be called unworthy of what you have hitherto obtained. When you was at her Lips, how near was you to your Journey's End! If therefore you stop there, you rather deserve the Name of a bashful 'Squire than of a modest Man.

The Girls may call this perhaps Violence; but it is a Violence agreeable to them: for they are often desirous of being pleased against their Will: For a Woman taken without her Consent, notwithstanding ^*her Frowns, is often well satisfied in her Heart, and your Impudence is taken as a Favour; whilst she who, when inclined to be ravished, hath retreated untouched, however she may affect to smile, is in reality out of Humour.⁴⁶

To support this advice Ovid adduces various instances of women who came to dote on their rapists, most importantly 'the well-known story, worth repeating nevertheless' (fabula nota quidem, sed non indigna referri (I, 681)) of Achilles and Deidamia. As rhetorically Ovid claims ascendency over his pupil by the skilful anticipatory blocking action of the terms rusticitas and pudor (I, 672), which pressure the young man to act as he directs, so does he sustain his posture by daring to mock even Achilles, in his disguise, who conceals his manhood behind a skirt (veste virum longa dissimulatus (I, 690)) and who messes about with spindles and wool. But, he observes, Deidamia certainly found out that he was a man (vir, viri)—and it was by force (vis, vim, vires):

  haec illum stupro comperit esse virum
viribus illa quidem victa est, ita credere oportet:
  sed voluit vinci viribus illa tamen.
(I, 698-700)

She wanted to be conquered by force, and afterwards when he was going off to Troy she kept begging him to stay. As Fielding puts it:

He ravished her, that is the Truth on't; that a Gentleman ought to believe, in favour of the Lady: but he may believe the Lady was willing enough to be ravished at the same time.⁴⁷

Gay calls up this passage—the example, the very advice (in lines already quoted)—and by moving Achilles from agent to recipient enforces a reassessment of the advice from within the consciousness of the woman whom Ovid keeps silent until she has been subdued. The burning male consciousness of Achilles invites his fellow Fieldings, or Ovids, to recognize what it might be to suffer and be silent, while, for those of Gay's audience gendered female, the concealed power replots Ovid's tale so that the would-be rapist becomes the booby object of ridicule. Alas that it takes a John Gay to be able both to see what Ovid's attitude implies for women and to express to men what he sees. The characteristic duality of-his symbols, his forms and his modes reflects the dependency of his life and both enables him to speak and withholds what he would say. While, through Gay's comedy, women who are sexually harassed become empowered by the representation of Pyrrha, at the same time the figure of Pyrrha must suggest that to become empowered they must become what they cannot become, a hero and a man.⁴⁸

My argument is not that Gay is a feminist per se, but that the predicament of women represents one mode of the wider condition of dependency, the dynamics and abuses of which Gay knew all too well in his own life, and which he probes in terms of many kinds of social relationships in his writing. Many other modes of dependency, not touched upon in this paper but well worth attention, can be found in the very piece we have been considering. Gay's duples, such as Pyrrha/Achilles, enable him to render the dependent's unresolved adherence to, and rage against, the social system in which he or she is both sustained and suppressed. Gay's art can make us hear simultaneously the voice (or the eloquent silence) of acquiescence and the voice of rage, as the inner ears of dependents hear. And by the very means of something apparently inconsequential—a burlesque, a ballad opera—perhaps Gay beguiles some of the powerful to hear the double voices, too.

Notes

¹ For example, Sue-Ellen Case, 'Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts', Theatre Journal, 37 (1985), 317-27, or David Mayer, 'The Sexuality of Pantomime', Theatre Quarterly, 4, 13 (1974), 60, 63.

² John Harold Wilson noticed in 1958 the sexual dimension added to 'page' or 'breeches' parts (such as Shakespeare's Rosalind and Viola) when after the Restoration they came to be played by women. He points out (quoting Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees, Remark P) that they provided a unique, sanctioned public opportunity for men to look at women's legs and thighs in an era when skirts came to the floor (All the King's Ladies: Actresses of the Restoration (Chicago, 1958), p. 75). Quite apart from consideration of the practice of cross-casting, he finds that, out of about 375 new or altered plays first produced in London beween 1660 and 1700, eighty-nine contained roles for women dressed as men (p. 73). New parts of this sort continued to be written after the turn of the century, as we see, for example, in The Recruiting Officer (the most performed play of the period before The Beggar's Opera) or in Gay's Dione and Polly.

The advent of actresses at the Restoration had quite different consequences for travesty of the opposite kind. Actors who before the Commonwealth had been trained to play women found difficulty now in getting parts, and few new roles calling for men to appear as women were written; R. C. Sharma finds only one, in Farquhar's The Constant Couple, within the plays he surveys (Themes and Conventions in the Comedy of Manners (New York, 1965), p. 184). In theatre the scope of female travesty tended to dwindle to the occasional roles that could be played as a comic 'dame', a representation, Mayer points out, that projects considerable hostility to, and ambivalence about, women (see note 1). (Opera, incidentally, has quite a separate history during this period with respect to travesty.)

In this theatrical context Gay's travesty role of Achilles seems modally unique, projected along a psychological plane that burlesques women no more than men. Whatever comic latitude the actor may feel he is invited to take throughout most of the play, he must embody an attractive person fit to be a hero, and one of the young marrying couple, at the end. The ideas of youth and manliness combined with the idea of the dependent young girl suggest quite different psychological features from those of the dame. We do not know whether Gay gave indications about casting and in any event he was dead before the play was worked out in rehearsal, but the actor so cast, Thomas Salway, seems to support the resonance I suggest. Apparently in his mid-twenties, he counted as a singer in Rich's company (he was a tenor); from his roles he appears to have been capable of slapstick, comedy and second-line romantic parts (Edward A. Langhans, draft of 'Salway', to be published in the Biographical Dictionary of Actors [& c.] 1660-1800, ed. Philip H. Highfill, Jr., et al.).

³ See, for example, Phyllis Rackin's insightful study of the figure in an earlier period, 'Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage', PMLA, 102 (1987), 29-39, which unfortunately appeared too late for me to use in preparing this essay.

⁴ Little critical attention has been given to Achilles. Contemporary party journalists—a reviewer in the Daily Courant (16 February 1732/33) and an 'Atex Burnet' (see note 16)—pretended to discover in it a satire of George II's household and of Walpole. Howard Erskine-Hill, touching upon the work briefly but approvingly in 'The Significance of Gay's Drama', sees the disguised Achilles as the 'truth-bearer' giving moral weight to the form of farce (Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (eds.), English Drama: Forms and Development: Essays in Honour of Muriel Clara Bradbrook (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 160-61). Seven M. Armens finds Gay non-judgemental—ribald, comical, light—about the men's sexual politics that form the plot of Achilles, but sees the work as 'studded' with 'sharp and even misogynistic comments' about women (John Gay: Social Critic (New York, 1954), pp. 142-46). In his valuable study, 'John Gay's Achilles: The Burlesque Element', Peter Lewis sets forth the burlesque relationships of the work to heroic drama, Italian opera, and sentimental comedy (Ariel, 3 (1972), 17-28). But none of these critics address the aspects of Achilles I wish to consider.

⁵ This is the only source that gives Ajax as Ulysses's companion; Statius and Philostratus have Diomede (and Argytes, noticed but unnamed by Philostratus, to blow the trumpet); Hyginus indicates, but does not name, one or more companions; Apollodorus indicates no companions (for references, see note 10).

⁶ T. Folkma, sculp. (1722), 'Achilles disguised like a Woman, is discovered by Ulysses', S. le Clerc, invent., Ovid's Metamorphoses (Amsterdam, 1732), p. 419.

⁷ Published for the same bookseller (William Keble) and advertised in the same notice that announces publication of Gay's Wine (Daily Courant, 22 May 1708). Ajax's speech is by Nahum Tate.

⁸Ovid in Masquerade, being, A Burlesque upon the xiii tl Book of His Metamorphoses, containing the Celebrated Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses.… By Mr. Joseph Gay. London: for E. Curll, 1719 [1718]. Foxon enters the item under John Durant de Breval, but advises caution, 'since the pseudonym Joseph Gay was also used by Francis Chute'.

⁹ Also circulating would have been the seventeenth-century translations of the passage in George Sandys's Ovid's Metamorphosis English'd (1626, 1628, 1632, 1638, 1640, 1656, 1664, 1669, 1678, 1690); and in two versions of Book XIII: Wisdoms Conqvest (1651), sometimes assigned to Thomas Hall; and P[atrick] K[er]'s Logomachia (1690).

¹⁰ The Achilles-in-Scyros story is told or alluded to in the following classical texts: Greek: Apollodorus, The Library, III, xiii, 8; Bion (or Pseudo-Bion), II; Euripides, Skyrioi; Paulus Sileniarius (Greek Anthology), V, 255; Pausanias, I, xxii, 6; Philostratus the Younger, Imagines, I; Latin: Horace, Odes, I, 8; Hyginus, Myths, XCVI; Ovid, Ars Amatoria (hereafter AA), I, 681-704, Metamorphoses (hereafter M), XIII, 162-70; Pliny, Natural History, XXXV, 134; Seneca, Troades, 212-15, 343-44, 570-71; Sidonius, Carmina, IX, 140-43; Statius, Achilleid, I, 5-6, 142, 270-72, 283-381, 533-35, 560-674, 709-960.

¹¹sed opertae conscia culpae/cuncta pavet tacitasque putat sentire sorores (Achilleid, I, 562-63; Loeb edition of Statius, ed. J. H. Mozley (London and New York, 1928)).

¹²Deidamia and the Love Affair: not in M (but as intrigue mentioned by Sandys (1632 only), Ker); as intrigue: Apollodorus, Philostratus, Seneca; as rape: AA, Statius; Bion's 'stolen joys/espousals' could be read as either, according to whether they are considered 'unknown to others' or 'stolen from Deidamia'; Sidonius's language is coy, but seems to allude to Statius's mise en scene. Achilles Spinning: not in M; in AA, Statius, Bion. The Group of Lycomedes's Daughters; not in Ovid (but mentioned by Sandys); in Statius, Bion, Philostratus, Hyginus, Pausanias (also reporting Polygnotus), Sidonius. The Trumpet: not in Ovid; in Statius, Apollodorus, Hyginus.

¹³ Eric Arthur Barker rejects its attribution to Bion (Oxford Classical Dictionary (1949), p. 138). This piece is not in the following volumes that might have contained it: Thomas Stanley, Poems (1651); Theocritus, Idylliums, trans. Creech (2nd edn., 1713); Moschus and Bion, Idylliums, trans. Cooke (1724); Thomas Cooke, Tales (1729).

¹⁴ Act, scene, and line references are to the texts of Gay's plays in John Fuller (ed.), John Gay: Dramatic Works, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1983) [DW], from which all quotations are taken (roman and italic reversed in predominantly italic passages such as Airs).

¹⁵ The fragment breaks off at this point; 'A veritable cliffhanger', remarks Professor Peter Westervelt of Colby College, to whom I am grateful for providing a literal translation where the Loeb edition (The Greek Bucolic Poets, trans. J. M. Edmonds (London and New York, 1919), pp. 398-401) was seduced into a false Spenserian style.

¹⁶Achilles Dissected: Being a Compleat Key of the Political Charaoters In that New Ballad Opera, Written by the late Mr. Gay. An Account of the Plan upon which it is founded. With Remarks upon the Whole … To which is added, The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated in a Dialogue between Mr. Pope and the Ordinary of Newgate (London, 1733), p. 1; Burnet's identity is unknown, despite his being confused sometimes with the author of the accompanying poem, Guthry, or with Tom Burnet.

¹⁷ Loeb translation: vipotitur votis et totopectore verosl admovet amplexus (I, 642-3); translations from Latin, when not otherwise credited, are my own.

¹⁸Pelea virgo, 'the daughter of Peleus', is whom Thetis asked to leave behind; Achilles is Peleus's son. But in ending the passage with these words, Statius's principal opposition is not of female child to male child, but of what is lesser than man (woman), hence shameful, to what is greater than man (hero), hence awesome.

¹⁹ Observe, for example, the actively misleading language of even quite recent scholars in describing Achilles's rape of Deidamia in Statius and Ovid: 'The event [Ulysses's disclosure of Achilles] was told … at some length by Statius in his Achilleid. The courtship of Deidamia was recorded by Bion and by Ovid in his Art of Love' (Wilmon Brewer, Ovid's Metamorphoses in European Culture, rev. edn. (Francestown, New Hampshire, 1978), II, 1419); 'Gay's principal source [for Achilles] seems to have been Statius, but the story also appears in Bion and Ovid' (John Fuller, 'Introduction', [DW, I, 59]). Fuller gives no citations for Bion and Ovid and no indication that the Scyros episode is treated twice in Ovid, and he discusses the treatment of the love affair in these authors no further.

²⁰ King 'endeavour[s] … to give Readers of both Sexes some Ideas of the Art of Love; such a Love as is innocent and virtuous'; to this end, he manipulates Ovid's text, which he prints in blocks as footnotes, rearranging the material and taking occasion to omit a number of lines; furthermore, he neglects to translate some of the Latin he actually prints. Ovid's advice that prompts the Achilles story is entirely omitted, as is the rape (although King does recount the rape of the Sabines); here it is Deidamia who initiates the affair, which King represents as the consequence of avoiding military service: 'Thus whilst we Glory's Dictates shun,/Into the Snares of Vice we run' (The Art of Love: In Imitation of Ovid De Arte Amandi (London, 1708—dated by Foxon, who also records the reissue, which I have not seen), pp. vii, 59-64). Gay would have been aware of this edition, for the announcement of its publication follows immediately on the page of the Daily Courant the announcement of his own Wine (22 May 1708). By 1711, at least, Gay knew King, whose destitute plight he mentions with compassion in The Present State of Wit, Vintan Dezring (ed.), with the assistance of Charles E. Beckwith, John Gay: Poetry and Prose, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1974) [PP], II, 449). If he also knew King's text, Gay must have enjoyed its burlesque, which has affinities with themes he would develop in The What D 'Ye Call It—when Deidamia's pregnancy is about to be discovered, Achilles runs off into the army in order to avoid punishment. For Achilles Gay may have taken hints from King's modernization for Thetis's instructions to her son concerning women's dress, posture, movement and mannerisms (which have their source in Statius, not Ovid) and for the substitution of embroidery work for spinning.

²¹ Ovid may have received the rape from a lost Greek tradition (as represented by papyrus Hypothesis, cited by T. B. L. Webster, The Tragedies of Euripides (London, 1967), pp. 95-6).

²² The child was called Neoptolemus or Pyrrhus; he appears in The Iliad as Achilles's son, even if the Scyros episode does not. Shortly before arriving at the Scyros tale in his speech in the Metamorphoses, Ulysses mentions Pyrrhus of Scyros as Achilles's son (and therefore logical recipient of the contested armour if it is to be awarded on the grounds of kinship), but Ovid does not clearly connect his origin to the time Achilles dwelt in disguise. Statius of course treats these connections in the episode fully.

²³pp, I, 206 (Commentary, II, 581). The classical sources Gay associates with his garb and reverie are worth noticing, all together forming an imaginative cluster that could have influenced the choice and shaping of Achilles; Dearing (PP, II, 583) observes that it is not Venus (Aeneid, I. 229ff.) but Thetis, appealing on behalf of Achilles (Iliad, I, 501), who holds Zeus 'under the chin'.

²⁴ I have not been able to see the 1741 libretto; my knowledge of the plot of Deidamia is taken from the summary by Edward J. Dent ('The Operas', in Gerald Abraham (ed.), Handel: A Symposium (London, 1954), pp. 59-62), and from Winton Dean's broadcast commentary accompanying a B.B.C. radio performance (ca. 1974) of which I heard an imperfect transcription.

²⁵ Samuel Garth (ed.), Ovid's Metamorphoses (London, 1717), p. 443; Ovid has decepterat omnes … sumptae fallacia vestis: arma … anima motura virilem (XIII, 163-66), the last phrase being translated literally as 'to tempt a manly mind' by Sandys, Wisdoms Conqvest and Theobald.

²⁶ Burnet, who of course took the view that a number of writers were involved in finishing Achilles, is the first to state that the 'Prologue … was written by Mr. Pope' (p. 2); Norman Ault provides an extensive argument to support this attribution ('The Prologue to Achilles', New Light on Pope (London, 1949), pp. 215-21). Fuller accepts Ault's argument and deploys Ault's evidence in a series of footnotes (DW, II, 390). Maynard Mack, however, in his review of Ault's book finds the argument unconvincing (Philological Quarterly 29 (1950), 291), and, pace Ault, John Butt places it among the less plausibly attributable to Pope of the 'Poems of Doubtful Authorship' considered for volume VI of the Twickenham Pope (Norman Ault and John Butt, (eds.), Minor Poems, (London and New Haven, 1964), p. 457).

²⁷ This alludes to Dennis's description of Pope's Homer as a translation in which 'there are Twenty Prosaick Lines, for One that is Poetical.' 'Where the Original is pure, the Translation is often barbarous,' he writes: 'In short, the HOMER which LINTOTT prints, does not talk like HOMER, but like POPE' (Remarks Upon Mr. Pope's Translation of Homer (London, for E. Curll), 1717, pp. 10-12).

²⁸ The considerable differences in the dramatic structure of the performed Achilles described by Burnet in Achilles Dissected and the version appearing in the printed edition do imply that rearrangements and perhaps rewriting of this aspect of the work may have taken place in rehearsal and during the run. Achilles opened on 10 February; Burnet's pamphlet is dated 12 February (leaf Bl), but one should note that it extracts (at length) the review appearing in the Daily Courant of 16 February; Achilles was published on 1 March (Grub-street Journal). One song, probably (as Fuller points out (DW, II, 391)) from the end of III, ii, with the lines

 Hercules's Shirt[-a]
 Which burnt him all to—Dirt[-a],
And set him all on a Fire-a,
[Contriv'd by his Deianira]

(Daily Courant, with bracketed variants from Burnet), may have been cut in response to their ridicule. Scholars of Gay have noticed this song (if not its variants), but no commentator, so far as I am aware, has discussed the changes in structure. The structure Burnet describes is as follows: Act I: 'our young Hero burns for his Deidamia, and she sighs for her Achilles'; Lycomedes desires Pyrrha; Act II: Lycomedes's pursuit of Pyrrha and Theaspe's jealousy; Act III: Lycomedes's attempted rape of Pyrrha; duel between Ajax and Periphas; revelation of Deidamia's sexual knowledge of Pyrrha's masculinity; Ulysses's disclosure of Achilles's identity (pp. 2-5). In the revised version the Lycomedes plot is disposed of before the Deidamia plot is begun, and several of the climaxes are moved back from Act III to increase the dynamics of Act II. These alterations do not affect the main argument of this paper, which attributes the exploration of sex and gender identity in the work to Gay and which finds greatest interest in the part of the story that Gay added, the Lycomedes plot, which in Burnet's version occupies even more of the play than in the version we read.

²⁹ Thus Ladylike he with a Lady Lay,! Till what he was her belly did bewray' (Heywood, tr., AA (1650 edn.), p. 30); see also King translation, AA (1708), p. 63.

³⁰ Some earlier translators anticipate Gay in making the implicit analogy explicit in their diction: 'Yet will she fight like one would loose the field' (Heywood, p. 29); 'Who e'er retreats, when he thus far has gone;/ How almost was He Master of the Town!' and 'The Siege [of a Royal Virgin] much safer, … by Force, he won the Field' (Hoy translation, AA (1682), pp. 40, 41). For the use of this metaphor in Ovid and elsewhere in antiquity, see Molly Myerowitz, Ovid's Games of Love (Detroit, 1985), pp. 205-6, n. 78.

³¹ The play was never performed and has attracted few readers. Shortly after Achilles opened, however, an operatic adaptation set by Johann Friedrich Lampe using Gay's plot of Dione and some of his dialogue for the recitative ran briefly from 23 February 1733 (Fuller, DW, I, 36; The London Stage 1660-1800, Part 3 (1729-1747), ed. Arthur H. Scouten (Carbondale, Ill. 1961), p. 273.

³²Diary of Viscount Percival, Afterwards First Earl of Egmont—Historical Manuscripts Commission, Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont, I (London, 1920), 75 (28 February 1730).

³³The Proceedings at the Sessions of the Peace, and Oyer and Terminer, for the City of London, and County of Middlesex held At Justice-Hall in the Old Bailey, on Friday the 27th of February … upon a Bill of Indictment found against Francis Charteris, Esq; for committing a Rape on the Body of Anne Bond, of which he was found Guilty ((London), 1730). A fuller version of the trial appears in Select Trials, for Murders, … at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bailey.… Vol. II: From the Year 1724, to 1732, Inclusive (London, 1735), pp. 339-51; this text also covers subsequent events beyond his death in 1732 by collating and reprinting the newspaper coverage. A brief notice of Charteris's life by Pope can be found as annotation to the Epistle to Bathurst, 1. 20 (F. W. Bateson (ed.), Epistles to Several Persons (Moral Essays), 2nd edn. (London and New Haven, 1961), pp. 85-6—vol. III, ii of the Twickenham Pope). A fuller summary occurs in the Dictionary of National Biography. A good modern account, directed towards his meaning for Hogarth, can be found in Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times (New Haven and London, 1971), I, 244-51.

³⁴ 'An Epitaph' (beginning, 'Here lieth the body of Colonel/Don Francisco'). It was printed in the London Magazine, 1 (April 1732), 39, in the Gentleman's Magazine, 2 (April 1732), 718, and also in the PopeSwift Miscellanies, The Third Volume (1732), with the Select Trials (1735) (n. 33), and as part of Pope's footnote (Epistle to Bathurst, 1. 20n (n. 33)), where its attribution to Arbuthnot is made.

³⁵Diary, I, 75.

³⁶Grub-street Journal (12 March and 9 April 1730).

³⁷ C. F. Burgess (ed.), The Letters of John Gay (Oxford, 1944), pp. 90-1 (31 March 1730).

³⁸ For the seizure: Daily Courant (28 February), London Evening Post (26-28 February), Daily Post (28 February), Monthly Chronicle (27 February). For the payment: Daily Journal (31 August). Sheriff Barber's share was £1,650.

³⁹ E. Beresford Chancellor, Col. Charteris and the Duke of Wharton—The Lives of the Rakes, III (London, 1925), 62-3.

⁴⁰ 'An Excellent New Ballad: or, The true Eng—sh D—n to be hang'd for a R-pe', The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd edn., II (Oxford, 1958), 516-20; it appeared in the Grub-street Journal of 11 June 1730. The Country Journal; or, the Craftsman, 8 August 1730, and An Answer To One Part of a late Infamous Libel, intitled, Remarks on the Craftsman's Vindication of his two honourable Patrons; In which The Character and Conduct of Mr. P. is fully Vindicated In a Letter to the most Noble Author (London, 1731), pp. 43-4, sometimes attributed to William Pulteney. 'A Harlot's Progress', Plate 1; the painting of the series may have been finished in September 1731; the prints were published on 10 April 1732 (Ronald Paulson, comp., Hogarth's Graphic Works (New Haven and London, 1965), I, 141, 144). The Epistle to Bathurst was published on 15 January 1733.

⁴¹ Bertrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722-1742 (Lincoln, Neb., and London, 1976), pp. 105-10.

⁴² 'Epilogue. Spoken by Mrs. Mullart', The Coffee House Politician; or, the Justice Caught in his own Trap (London, 1730) leaf A3^r; italic and roman reversed. Rape upon Rape; or, the Justice Caught in his own Trap opened on 23 June 1730 and was immediately published (London Evening Post, 23/25 June). When the play reopened in November its title was softened to The Coffee House Politician; or, the Justice Caught in his own Trap; the text was reissued under this title with altered front matter, including revision of the epilogue. The quotation is from this revised epilogue.

⁴³ Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformation (Oxford, 1982), pp. 87-9, which also treat other flippant references to rape in English plays of the period. Donaldson's thoughtful and intelligent study provides a valuable consideration of the theme of rape in literature and art.

⁴⁴ See Romney Sedgwick, 'Introduction' to John, Lord Hervey's Some Materials towards Memoirs of the Reign of King George II (London, 1931), I, xxii-xxx, and Robert Halsband, Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier (Oxford, 1973), pp. 108-18, 144. It is plausible that Gay might have been led to think of a 'Master-Miss' at Court as a comic subject, in the context of gossip about Hervey in 1731, perhaps in banter with political friends. In Achilles Dissected, Burnet, already having indicated that Gay's Lycomedes might not have been 'ignorant of the sex of ACHILLES', insinuates that 'the Duel fought between that Hero AJAX and a Great LORD, [is] a plain Representation of what lately happened between a Little LORD and a Great COMMONER' (pp. 12, 13); Gay's version of the duel (if it is that) belatedly lags after the immediate spate of satires inevitably following the event—An Epistle from Little Captain Brazen, to the Worthy Captain Plume, The Countess's Speech To her Son Roderigo, The Duel; A Poem, Pulteney: or, the Patriot, and others—which had laid the ground for comic interpretation. One might note that Hervey, writing of Achilles to the Duke of Richmond on 17 February, singles out Ajax as 'the only part that has the least pretence to humour', though rather more owing to the actor Hall than Gay, in an otherwise dull piece (The Earl of Ilchester (ed.), Lord Hervey and His Friends: 1726-38 (London, 1950), pp. 162-63).

⁴⁵ Latin texts of AA are conflated from A. S. Hollis's edition of Book I (Oxford, 1977), pp. 26-7, and J. H. Mozley's Loeb edition, rev. G. P. Goold (1979), pp. 58, 60.

⁴⁶ Fielding, Ovid's Art of Love Paraphrased, and Adapted to the Present Time. With Notes. and A most Correct Edition of the Original. Book I (London, 1747), p. 75. The 1760 edition of this work, which bears the title The Lovers Assistant, or, New Art of Love, is edited by Claude E. Jones as Augustan Reprint 89 (Los Angeles, 1961). See Ovid, The Erotic Poems, trans. Peter Green ((Harmondsworth), 1982), for an excellent modern translation.

⁴⁷ Fielding, p. 79.

⁴⁸ Gay's indirection, or a blunter social sanction, seems to have got his message across to Fielding to some degree by 1747, for he prefaces his treatment of the Achilles passage with a disclaimer (however ironic) for modern times: 'Ravishing is indeed out of fashion in this Age; and therefore I am at a loss for modern Examples; but ancient Story abounds with them.… Though the Story of Deidamia was formerly in all the Trojan News-Papers, yet my Readers may be pleased to see it better told' (p. 77).