107-) English Literature
John Gay (born June 30 , 1685, Barnstaple, Devon,
Eng.—died Dec. 4, 1732, London) was an English poet and dramatist and member of
the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera (1728), a
ballad opera. The characters, including Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum,
became household names. The Beggar’s Opera , a work distinguished by
good-humoured satire and technical assurance.
Early life
Gay was born in Barnstaple, England, last of five
children of William Gay (died 1695) and Katherine (died 1694), daughter of
Jonathan Hanmer, "the leading Nonconformist divine of the town" as
founder of the Independent Dissenting congregation in Barnstaple. The Gay
family- "fairly comfortable... though far from rich"- lived in
"a large house, called the Red Cross, on the corner of Joy Street".
The Gay family was "of respectable antiquity" in North Devon,
associated with the manor of Goldsworthy at Parkham and with the parish of
Frithelstock (where the senior line remained, resident at the priory Cloister
Hall with its lands, until 1823) and became "powerful and numerous"
in the town, "established among Barnstaple's leading families for
generations". Gay's great-grandfather, Anthony Gay, served as Mayor; his
wife, Elizabeth, was daughter of the merchant and three-time Mayor of
Barnstaple, Richard Beaple.
A member of an ancient but impoverished Devonshire
family, Gay was educated at the free grammar school in Barnstaple. He was
apprenticed to a silk mercer in London but was released early from his
indentures and, after a further short period in Devonshire, returned to London,
where he lived most of his life. Among his early literary friends were Aaron
Hill and Eustace Budgell, whom he helped in the production of The British
Apollo, a question-and-answer journal of the day. Gay’s journalistic interests
are clearly seen in a pamphlet, The Present State of Wit (1711), a survey of
contemporary periodical publications.
On
leaving school- his elder brother, Jonathan, an Army officer, having inherited
the family property- Gay was apprenticed to a silk mercer in London, but being
weary, according to Samuel Johnson, "of either the restraint or the
servility of his occupation", he soon returned to Barnstaple, where he was
educated by his uncle, the Rev. John Hanmer, the nonconformist minister of the
town. He then returned to London.
Early career
His
first play, The Mohocks (1712), had censorship issues. The following year he
wrote a comedy The Wife of Bath, which appeared at the Drury Lane Theatre.
The
dedication of his Rural Sports (1713) to Alexander Pope began a lasting
friendship with him. In 1714, Gay wrote The Shepherd's Week, a series of six
pastorals drawn from English rustic life. Pope had urged him to undertake this
in order to ridicule the Arcadian pastorals of Ambrose Philips, who had been
praised by a short-lived contemporary publication The Guardian, to the neglect
of Pope's claim to be the first pastoral writer of the age and the true English
Theocritus. Gay's pastorals achieved this goal and his ludicrous pictures of the
English country lads and their loves were found to be entertaining on their own
account.
In
1713 Gay and Pope both joined the Scriblerus Club, a group of Tory writers
supportive of first minister Robert Harley that also included John Arbuthnot,
Jonathan Swift and Thomas Parnell.
Diplomatic service
In
1714 Gay was appointed secretary to the Earl of Clarendon the new British
ambassador to the Electorate of Hanover through the influence of Swift. However
the death of Queen Anne three months later put an end to his hopes of official
employment. The mission had been an unsuccessful attempt by the Tories to
ingratiate themselves with Elector George, heir to the throne, who was angry
that the Peace of Utrecht had led to Britain's abandoning its allies in the war
against France and suspected that the Tory leadership favoured the Jacobites.
The
Hanoverian succession led to the ousting of the Harley Ministry and
establishment of the Whig oligarchy and Gay never held a government post again.
While in Hanover he met Caroline of Ansbach, the future Princess of Wales, and
Henrietta Howard, who would become a close friend of his.
Return to London
In
1715, probably with some help from Pope, Gay produced The What D'Ye Call It? ,
a dramatic skit on contemporary tragedy, with special reference to Thomas
Otway's Venice Preserv'd. This appeared on 23 February 1715 as an afterpiece at
Drury Lane to Nicholas Rowe's tragedy Jane Shore. It left the public so
ignorant of its inner meaning that Lewis Theobald and Benjamin Griffin published
a Complete Key to What D'Ye Call It to explain it. The play also featured a
ballad, Twas When the Seas Were Roaring, co-written with George Frideric
Handel, which became popular in its own right.
In
1716 appeared his Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London, a poem
in three books, for which he acknowledged receiving several hints from Swift.
It contains graphic and humorous descriptions of the London of that period,
depicting the city with photographic accuracy and acting as a guide to the upper-class
and upper-middle-class walkers of society. By taking a mock-heroic form, Gay's
poem was able to poke fun at the notion of complete reformation of street
civility, while also proposing an idea of reform in terms of the attitude
towards walking. In January 1717 he produced a comedy, Three Hours After
Marriage, which was thought to be grossly indecent (without being amusing) and
a failure. He had assistance from Pope and John Arbuthnot, but they allowed it
to be assumed that Gay was the sole author.[4]
By
1717 Gay was associated with George, Princes of Wales, who as part of the Whig
Split had set up a rival court to his father the King which was frequented by
opposition Whigs and Tories.[17] In 1718 he collaborated with Handel on the
masque Acis and Galatea for which he supplied the libretto.
Patrons
Gay
had numerous patrons, and in 1720 he published Poems on Several Occasions by
subscription, taking in £1000 or more. In that year James Craggs, the secretary
of state , presented him with some South Sea stock. Gay, disregarding the
advice of Pope and others of his friends, invested all his money in South Sea
stock, and, holding on to the end of the South Sea Bubble, he lost everything.
The shock is said to have made him dangerously ill. His friends did not fail
him at this juncture. He had patrons in William Pulteney, afterwards Earl of
Bath, in the third Earl of Burlington, who constantly entertained him at
Chiswick or at Burlington House, and in the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry. He
was a frequent visitor with Pope, and received unvarying kindness from William
Congreve and John Arbuthnot.
In
1727 he wrote for six-year-old Prince William, later the Duke of Cumberland,
Fifty-one Fables in Verse, for which he naturally hoped to gain some
preferment, although he has much to say in them of the servility of courtiers
and the vanity of court honours. He was offered the situation of
gentleman-usher to the Princess Louisa, who was also still a child. He refused
this offer, all his friends seemingly having regarded it- "for no very
obvious reason"- as an indignity. His friends thought him unfairly
neglected, but Gay, who had never rendered any special services to the court,
had nevertheless been given a sinecure as lottery commissioner with a salary of
£150 a year in 1722, and from 1722 to 1729 had lodgings in the palace at
Whitehall.
Literary Career
Poet
and playwright John Gay was born in Devon to an aristocratic though
impoverished family. Unable to afford university, Gay went to London to
apprentice as a draper instead. While in London, he began writing journalism,
including the pamphlet The Present State of Wit (1711), a survey of
contemporary periodicals and authors. Rural Sports (1713) is generally
considered his first important poem; the poem is ostensibly pastoral, but the
speaker discovers that predatory instincts undergird much of nature. By 1714,
Gay had started corresponding with Alexander Pope and become a member of the
Scriblerus Club, a group that included Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot, Thomas Parnell,
and Lord Oxford. Gay’s publications dating from this time include the poems
Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716) and The Shepherd’s
Week (1714). The Scriblerus Club influenced Gay’s major plays of this period,
The What D’Ye Call It (1715) and Three Hours After Marriage (1717), which was
frequently linked to Pope.
Gay was more or less dependent on patronage
his whole life and lived in various semi-employed states with a number of
aristocrats. Many works, such as the Fables (1727, 1738), were written to win
the favor of specific members of court. Though relying on the generosity of
patrons such as the Duchess of Queensberry, Gay also earned money from his
plays, especially The Beggar’s Opera (1728), which enjoyed unprecedented success.
Running for 62 performances, the opera inspired numerous imitations and
parodies and provided the basis for Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s
20th-century Threepenny Opera (1928). Allegedly satirizing then-prime minister
Sir Robert Walpole, Gay’s play gained notoriety and made staging its sequel,
Polly, impossible until 1777. The Beggar’s Opera was in some ways the
culmination of Gay’s career. In 1730, he moved to the Queensberry estate in
Burlington Gardens, where he spent the last years of his life in partial
isolation. He restaged an early effort, The Wife of Bath (1713, revised 1730),
and continued writing plays, though he didn’t attempt to get them produced.
After his sudden death from fever, he was buried in Westminster Abbey. Pope was
a pallbearer and contributed an epitaph to Gay’s memorial. Above it are Gay’s
own words: “Life is a jest; and all things show it / I thought so once; but now
I know it.”
From
1712 to 1714 he was steward in the household of the Duchess of Monmouth, which
gave him leisure and security to write. He had produced a burlesque of the
Miltonic style, Wine, in 1708, and in 1713 his first important poem, Rural
Sports, appeared. This is a descriptive and didactic work in two short books
dealing with hunting and fishing but containing also descriptions of the
countryside and meditations on the Horatian theme of retirement. In it he
strikes a characteristic note of delicately absurd artificiality, while a
deliberate disproportion between language and subject pays comic dividends and
sets a good-humoured and sympathetic tone. His finest poem, Trivia: or, The Art
of Walking the Streets of London (1716), displays an assured and precise
craftsmanship in which rhythm and diction underline whatever facet of
experience he is describing. A sophisticated lady crossing the street, for
example:
The
couplet does not aim to startle the reader, yet the experience is perfectly
conveyed. Another couplet, on the presence of spring felt throughout the whole
of creation, states:
Here
the effect is at once satirical, sympathetic, and—in its correlation of the
animal and human kingdoms—philosophical. It is in such delicate probing of the
surface of social life that Gay excels. The Shepherd’s Week (1714) is a series
of mock classical poems in pastoral setting; the Fables (two series, 1727 and
1738) are brief, octosyllabic illustrations of moral themes, often satirical in
tone.
Gay’s
poetry was much influenced by that of Alexander Pope, who was a contemporary
and close friend. Gay was a member, together with Pope, Jonathan Swift, and
John Arbuthnot, of the Scriblerus Club, a literary group that aimed to ridicule
pedantry. These friends contributed to two of Gay’s satirical plays: The What
D’ye Call It (1715) and Three Hours After Marriage (1717).
His
most successful play was The Beggar’s Opera, produced in London on Jan. 29,
1728, by the theatre manager John Rich at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre. It ran
for 62 performances (not consecutive, but the longest run then known). A story
of thieves and highwaymen, it was intended to mirror the moral degradation of
society and, more particularly, to caricature the prime minister Sir Robert
Walpole and his Whig administration. It also made fun of the prevailing fashion
for Italian opera. The play was stageworthy, however, not so much because of
its pungent satire but because of its effective situations and “singable”
songs. The production of its sequel, Polly, was forbidden by the lord
chamberlain (doubtless on Walpole’s instructions); but the ban was an excellent
advertisement for the piece, and subscriptions for copies of the printed
edition made more than £1,000 profit for the author. (It was eventually
produced in 1777, when it had a moderate success.) His Beggar’s Opera was
successfully transmitted into the 20th century by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
as Die Dreigroschenoper (1928; The Threepenny Opera).
“Honest”
John Gay lost most of his money through disastrous investment in South Sea
stock, but he nonetheless left £6,000 when he died. He was buried in
Westminster Abbey, next to the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and his epitaph was
written by Alexander Pope.
The Beggar's Opera
The Beggar’s Opera, a ballad opera in three acts by
John Gay, performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, London, in 1728 and
published in the same year. The work combines comedy and political satire in
prose interspersed with songs set to contemporary and traditional English,
Irish, Scottish, and French tunes. In it, Gay portrays the lives of a group of
thieves and prostitutes in 18th-century London. The action centres on Peachum,
a fence for stolen goods; Polly, his daughter; and Macheath, a highwayman. Gay
caricatures the government, fashionable society, marriage, and Italian operatic
style. Particularly evident are parallels made between the moral degeneracy of
the opera’s protagonists and contemporary highborn society.
He
certainly did nothing to conciliate the favour of the government by his next
work, The Beggar's Opera, a ballad opera produced on the 29 January 1728 by
John Rich, in which Sir Robert Walpole was caricatured. This famous piece,
which was said to have made "Rich gay and Gay rich", was an
innovation in many respects.
The
satire of the play has a double allegory. The character of Peachum was inspired
by the thief-taker Jonathan Wild, executed in 1725, and the principal figure of
Macheath reflected memories of the French highwayman, Claude Duval, whose
execution had created a sensation in London, and who exemplified the
flamboyance and gallantry of Gay's literary hero. Gay's decision to launch the
work was probably also influenced by the huge interest that Jack Sheppard, a
cockney housebreaker, had created in all things relating to Newgate Prison.
However, the character of Peachum was also understood to represent Robert
Walpole, who, like Wild, was seen as a public but morally dubious character,
and whose government had been tolerant of Wild's thievery and the South Sea
directors' escape from punishment. Under cover of the thieves and highwaymen
who figured in it was disguised a satire on society, for Gay made it plain that
in describing the moral code of his characters he had in mind the corruptions
of the governing class. Part of the success of The Beggar's Opera may have been
due to the acting of Lavinia Fenton, afterwards Duchess of Bolton, in the part
of Polly Peachum. The airs of the Beggar's Opera in part allude to well-known
popular ballads, and Gay's lyrics sometimes play with their wording in order to
amuse and entertain the audience.
The
play ran for sixty-two nights. Swift is said to have suggested the subject, and
Pope and Arbuthnot were constantly consulted while the work was in progress,
but Gay must be regarded as the sole author. After seeing an early version of
the work, Swift was optimistic of its commercial prospects but famously warned
Gay to be cautious with his earnings : "I beg you will be thrifty and
learn to value a shilling."
Later career
He
wrote a sequel, Polly, relating the adventures of Polly Peachum in the West
Indies; its production was forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain, no doubt through
the influence of Walpole. This act of "oppression" caused no loss to
Gay. It proved an excellent advertisement for Polly, which was published by
subscription in 1729, and brought its author several thousand pounds. The
Duchess of Queensberry was dismissed from court for enlisting subscribers in
the palace. In 1730 Gay's substantially rewritten version of his 1713 play The
Wife of Bath appeared at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, lasting for three
nights.
The
Duke of Queensberry gave Gay a home, and the duchess continued her affectionate
patronage until Gay's death in London on 4 December 1732. He was buried in
Westminster Abbey. The epitaph on his tomb is by Pope, and is followed by Gay's
own mocking couplet:
Life
is a jest, and all things show it,
I
thought so once, but now I know it.
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