Valerie C. Rudolph, ‘Isaac John Bickerstaff: September 26, 1733-1808’, LiteratureResourceCenter. [ accessed 23 May 2008]
Source:Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 89: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Dramatists, Third Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Paula R. Backscheider, University of Rochester. The Gale Group, 1989. pp. 12-24.
BetweenJohn 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 music. His resulting "comic operas" delighted London audiences more eager for entertainment than for edification. And Bickerstaff the playwright did not disappoint them.
Bickerstaff the man, however, did. Born in Dublin on 26 September 1733, the young Bickerstaff no doubt benefited from this cultured city's musical and theatrical offerings, which included both local and imported talent, for example, George Frideric Handel. Bickerstaff's father, John, supervised Dublin's bowling greens and tennis courts. When, as lord lieutenant of Ireland, Philip Dormer, lord Chesterfield abolished John Bickerstaff's office, he mitigated the loss by appointing young Bickerstaff as one of his pages. When he was only twelve, Bickerstaff received an army commission, and he held the rank of second lieutenant for ten years. A small inheritance enabled him to resign his commission, receive half-pay, and remove himself to London to try his fortune in the theater. His first work, the dramatic poem Leucothoe (1756), failed to be produced, and financial necessity soon compelled Bickerstaff to enlist in the marines. During his five years in the marines, he wrote the comic opera Thomas and Sally (1760) and the oratorio Judith (1761). The success of Love in a Village (1762) enabled Bickerstaff to resign his marine commission and devote his talents exclusively to the theater. With one exception (Love in the City, 1767), his unerring sense of what would stage well kept Bickerstaff's entertainments lively and likable.
After more than a decade of success, Bickerstaff's future seemed assured. In 1772, however, scandal cut short that future. Accused of homosexuality, Bickerstaff fled to France to escape the death penalty. A letter to David Garrick from Bickerstaff indicates that he was living in poverty. Finally, he seems to have disappeared. Conflicting contemporary reports allege that Bickerstaff was living either in France, in Italy, or in England under an assumed name. The year of his death is unknown, but Bickerstaff seems to have been alive as late as 1808, the year payment of his military pension ceased. Though Bickerstaff himself disappeared, many of his entertainments held the stage well into the nineteenth century, and some have even enjoyed brief revivals in the twentieth.
Bickerstaff's chief composers were Thomas Arne and Charles Dibdin, the latter also playing the renowned role of Mungo, the black servant, in The Padlock (1768). Bickerstaff himself down-played the importance of his librettos and elevated the importance of the music, which he insisted should develop plot and reflect character, instead of being a gracious, but gratuitous, insertion into the action. Most of Bickerstaff's works are sentimental. Characters who are basically good triumph over all obstacles, especially those confronting young lovers whose guardians insist on their marrying someone inappropriate. Restoration bawdiness is either tamed or banished. Intrigues are intended, but with the exception of Bickerstaff's version (1765) of Wycherley's Plain Dealer (1676), little happens to challenge conventional morality. When Bickerstaff began writing for the stage, the theaters were offering only a handful of musical entertainments per season and almost none of the older comedies. When Bickerstaff quit writing for the stage, however, he had already established that no theatrical season could be successful without offering a substantial number of the kinds of works he wrote…
[Summary of plays]
The abrupt ending to Bickerstaff's career forestalls speculation about whatever new directions the late eighteenth-century theater might have taken had it had the services of his considerable talents. Would he have experimented with other musical forms? Would he have returned more older plays to the repertory albeit in altered form? Bickerstaff was certainly not a major playwright. He was, however, a competent artist whose works entertained the audience of his day and would, for the most part, do likewise in our own.