Isaac Bickerstaff

Isaac Bickerstaffe c.1735-c.1812, English dramatist, b. Ireland. Included among his comedies and ballad operas are The Maid of the Mill (produced in 1765) and The Padlock (produced in 1768).

Bickerstaffe, Isaac (1735–1812), English dramatist, considered in his day the equal of John Gay as a writer of ballad operas. The first of these, Thomas and Sally; or, The Sailor's Return (1760), was given at Covent Garden. It was followed by Love in a Village (1762) and The Maid of the Mill (1765), based on Richardson's novel Pamela, which held the stage for many years, and is found in the repertory of the toy theatre. Of Bickerstaffe's later productions, many of them written in collaboration with Samuel Foote and Charles Dibdin, the best was Lionel and Clarissa (1768). In 1772 Bickerstaffe was suspected of capital crime, and fled to the Continent, where he died in poverty.

Bickerstaffe, Isaac (1733–?1808), an Irish playwright who arrived in London in 1755 and produced many successful comedies and opera librettos including the popular comic operas Love in a Village (1762), with music by Arne, which has a claim to be the first comic opera and contains the well-known song about the Miller of Dee (‘There was a jolly miller once’), and The Maid of the Mill (1765, with music by Samuel Arnold and others), the plot of which is Richardson's Pamela. The Padlock (1768, with music by C. Dibdin) provided the London stage, in the part of Mungo, with its first black-faced comedian, and the lines ‘Mungo here, Mungo dere, Mungo everywhere’ became a catch-phrase. The Hypocrite (1768, adapted from Molière's Tartuffe and Cibber's The Non-Juror) contains the well-known character of a hypocrite, Mawworm. Bickerstaffe also wrote adaptations of Wycherley and Calderón.