“Monstrous” yet “Pretty”: Popular Culture Adaptations of Polly Oliver
Lindsay Ragle-Miller
In “Polly Oliver” Polly Oliver decides to go enlist as a soldier to be with her love, whom her parents have forbidden her to see. When she goes to town in men’s clothing, carrying a sword and, sometimes, pistols, she meets her lover at a tavern. He does not recognize her, but he does offer her a space in his bed, which Polly declines. The next morning, she comes downstairs in her female clothes, and everyone laughs, her lover marries her, and she lives a happy, married life, usually with quite a bit of money and freedom (Dugaw 660-668). This ballad is one of the more enduring ones that Dugaw catalogued, in print for almost 100 years, and it continues to pop up in popular culture in modern popular culture.
Although the song “Polly Oliver” was frequently performed on the radio (once the radio was invented), other variations of the ballad appeared there as well. The BBC performed a musical play based on the ballad of “Polly Oliver” on April 14, 1942, and, in the 1960s, the adventures of two young people, Polly (a sergeant’s daughter) and Oliver (a drummer boy), were also serialized for the BBC . The theme song for these episodes was a variation of “Polly Oliver” (Twentieth Century Children’s Writers 342).
Variations of “Polly Oliver” continue to be performed today, including one by Sarah Brightman, which asserts that the men’s clothes that Polly Oliver wears to enlist were her “dead brother’s” and nurses her sick lover. The fact that the clothes belong to Polly’s dead brother becomes a major plot point in a novel by Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment, in which Polly puts on the uniform of her brother, who is missing in action, and goes by the name Oliver; she soon wishes she had picked a different name because, although she chose the name based on the popular ballad, she tires of people asking her if she had ever heard a song called “Polly Oliver”. This novel takes many of the elements of the ballad and subverts or twists them to emphasize modern issues, but it also harkens back to the original ballad in many ways.