John Gay

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n80045862

Gay, John (1685–1732), poet and playwright, was born in Barnstaple, north Devon, on 30 June 1685, probably in the High Street, the last of the five children of William Gay (d. 1695) and Katherine Hanmer (d. 1694). The Gays had been both powerful and numerous in the town's history and the poet's great-grandfather Anthony Gay was mayor in 1638; but by the time of the poet's birth, both the town and the family's role in it had declined. Gay recalled, in Rural Sports, that he ‘ne'er ... brighten'd plough shares in paternal land’ and seems to have had a deep sense of this lost patrimony. His parents had both died by the time he was ten, and he and the other children were looked after by their uncles.

Gay attended Barnstaple grammar school where he soon came under the influence of the vainglorious but charismatic Robert Luck. The poet's uncle John Hanmer, an inspired and gifted preacher, was the leader of the Castle Meeting; but Gay had little interest in divinity. Luck fired his enthusiasm for drama which Hanmer, and those who ran the town, thoroughly deplored; the borough accounts show 20s. ‘paid to players to rid the town of them’ (North Devon Athenaeum, 3792, no. 229/5) but Luck encouraged the boys at the school to read and imagine acting in the plays of Terence and Plautus. Among Gay's schoolfellows at Barnstaple were Aaron Hill and William Fortescue, both of whom played a part in his later life. After leaving school Gay did not go to university, unlike many of his family, as there was no money to send him there. Instead he entered the drapery trade which his family knew well; he left Barnstaple to become apprentice to the silk mercer John Willet in the New Exchange, London.

Early years in London and first publications

Apart from one letter sent to his kinsman Nicholas Dennis, very little is known about Gay's early years in London, but he did not flourish in the drapery trade. The next time there is more definite information about him is May 1708 when he published the poem Wine, full of a sharp juvenile wit in parodying the parody of Milton, John Philips's poem The Splendid Shilling. ‘He can only hope to be considered as the repeater of a jest’ was Johnson's comment, but the poem offers a lively indication of the way Gay's wit worked. As a literary mentor he relied on Aaron Hill who was currently running the periodical question and answer sheet the British Apollo. Gay appears to have toiled away on the paper for about two years, contributing a promotional poem ‘To the learned ingenious Author of Licentia Poetica Discuss'd’, (fellow contributor William Coward) which even modest hints at mockery do little to revive.

On 3 March 1711 Gay published The Present State of Wit, displaying a genuine pleasure in reproving himself for having ‘quite forgot’ the British Apollo; this, he explains, is a journal known only in ‘the city’, not Westminster, where the present pamphlet is self-consciously printed. With its conspicuous praise for Addison and Steele The Present State of Wit bears all the hallmarks of a name-dropping literary neophyte, a style he repeated six months later in his dedicatory verses ‘On a Miscellany of Poems’. Also in Bernard Lintot's Miscellany he published his translation ‘The Story of Arachne’ which suggests some personal associations. Arachne he presents as, like himself, a humble provincial (‘No famous town she boasts, or noble name’; 1.11), who, in the images she weaves, presents the violence and deceit of power. Furious at her presumption, Pallas transforms her into a spider, which was to become an image of Gay's life. ‘It is a miserable thing to live in suspense’ wrote Swift, ‘it is the life of a spider’ (Swift, Journal, 2.508–9).

The first mention of Gay in Pope's correspondence is in 1711, and from the start he adopted a proprietorial tone. ‘Gay they would call one of my eleves’ he later boasted, ignoring the fact that he was actually three years younger than his ‘pupil’. Gay was always willing to assist in Pope's literary feuds, and the first instance occurred that summer, with Dennis's Reflections on Pope's ‘Essay on Criticism’ which included a section referring to Pope as a ‘hunch-backed toad’. Gay immediately wrote The Mohocks, a one-act tragicomical farce, dedicated ‘To Mr D***’ who had pronounced Paradise Lost ‘the greatest poem that was ever written by man’ (J. Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, 1704). Gay happily parodies Milton in this ‘play’, which appears never to have been designed for a performance, and includes mocking imitations of Dryden, Shakespeare, and contemporary newspapers. It is his first attempt to create a literary freak show, and is interesting, though few of the jests now work. He returned to the Mohock theme in a contemporary parody ‘A Wonderful Prophecy’ aimed at the French Camisards.

Lintot paid Gay £2 10s. for the copyright of The Mohocks, which indicates the kind of meagre income he could then expect. Accordingly, in the autumn of 1712 he took a position as the secretary and domestic steward to the elderly duchess of Monmouth, whose first husband had been beheaded in 1685. The duties of the post were not onerous, and Gay was able to continue with his writing, producing Rural Sports in January 1713; but one article in the terms of his employment was humiliating, namely that he was forced to wear the household livery of blue cloth laced with silver loops. In the prologue to The Shepherd's Week he affects to ridicule this, but the shame of it was real.

Dedicated to Pope, Rural Sports is the first of Gay's mature poems to adopt the ambiguity of tone which was to become characteristic of his work. While ostensibly a ‘peace’ poem, written to celebrate the treaty of Utrecht, it finds, beneath the apparent calm of a rural landscape, any number of scenes of natural warfare. Scenes of killing, performed as part of the rural lore, predominate, and, in the 1720 version of the poem, are even increased. Concentrating on such details as the fisherman's artful lures, Gay takes deceit as his subject, and tenderly dissects it to reveal a predatory instinct as deeply rooted in the country as the town. Back in London in the spring he contributed part of the essay on an ‘Obsequium Catholicon’ to Steele's newly founded Guardian, for which Steele thanked him a few weeks later by writing an enthusiastic puff for his play The Wife of Bath. Pope had the previous December published his own modernization of The Wife of Bath's Prologue, and a smutty fondness for Chaucer was something that he and Gay shared. Unfortunately the play lacked animation, and ran for only one, two, or three performances (there is some dispute about which). In 1730 Gay had another attempt at the play, producing a much smoother version which this time had some success. Lintot paid him £25 for the copyright of the first version of the play, and £75 more for its 1731 update; this, together with the £56 6s. Gay had taken on his benefit night represented quite a haul. But by this time Gay had tasted wealth with his Beggar's Opera, and such sums did not satisfy him. He always referred to The Wife of Bath as his ‘damned play’.

The failure of The Wife of Bath at its first outing may partly be accounted for by the furore that surrounded Addison's Cato, which preceded it on the stage at Drury Lane. Thereafter, though often depending on Addison and Steele for work, Gay usually managed to mingle some satire within whatever he was writing. In his next major poem, The Fan, he artfully animates Addison's mock-serious tone in The Guardian. Discussing female fashion, Addison had confessed that he ‘could scarce forbear making use of my hand to cover so unseemly a sight’ (The Guardian, 100) when faced by a pair of female breasts. Gay takes this and gives it life in The Fan, describing how Cephalus, provoked by the wanton display of Aurora's charms ‘his modest hand upon her bosom warms’ (2.158); the satire is in the apparently innocent verb. It has been suggested that Gay may have taken his hostility further, and while contributing verses like ‘A Thought on Eternity’ to Steele's Poetical Miscellany, was also writing anonymous satires from a tory perspective, in The Examiner. The case cannot be proved, but it is very like this man who always hated the dependence that he lived on.

The middle years

In the spring of 1714 the Scriblerus Club began to meet, a small like-minded group of friends including Gay, Pope, Swift, John Arbuthnot, the queen's physician, Thomas Parnell, the Irish poet, and Lord Oxford, the lord treasurer. Here, for the first time, Gay found himself at the heart of the literary and political establishments, and psychologically it had a profound effect. In April he published The Shepherd's Week, one of his poems that retains its sense of surprise and glee for a modern age. The ‘Proeme’ and part of the poem are concerned with maintaining the ridicule of Ambrose Philips which Pope had begun in The Guardian, no. 40; Gay insists on writing in a pseudo-archaic dialogue, which is ‘explained’ in a glossary, at the foot of each page. These glosses are masterpieces of false learning: the gloss on ‘quient’ for example, which is used, he says, ‘in the same Sense, as Chaucer hath done in his Miller's Tale ... (by which he means Arch or Waggish) and not in that obscene Sense wherein he useth it in the Line immediately following’ (Monday, 1.79). The use of fake archaic and dialect terms, pedantically annotated; the coy erotic hints; the pseudo-folklorish superstitions; the banal repetitions and pretentious glossary are all deliberately chosen to draw attention to the false simplicity of Philips's verses. Yet amid all this Gay inserts some genuinely lyrical moments, before bathetically undermining them, reminding us of the rhythmic beauty of the country, quite separate from the town and its ambitions.

The Shepherd's Week was Gay's best work so far, but dedicating it to Bolingbroke proved a disastrous error. At the end of July, Bolingbroke seized power from the earl of Oxford, but only four days later Queen Anne died, and with her perished tory hopes of power. ‘What a world is this’, complained Bolingbroke, ‘and how does fortune banter us’ (Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, 2.101). Meanwhile Gay had left the duchess of Monmouth and was in Hanover, where he acted as secretary to the earl of Clarendon. He owed this position to Swift, and such was his speed of departure that Swift cynically suspected that his money would be ‘put off till the day after he went’. Arbuthnot however wrote on 26 June that ‘Gay had a hundred pounds in due time, [and] went away a happy man’ (ibid., 2.36). In this appointment Gay transcribed Clarendon's official correspondence, made friends with Henrietta Howard, and wrote to Arbuthnot earnestly to send over some copies of his books to show Princess Caroline, or else ‘I shall lose my credit’ (Letters of John Gay, 13). He had no time to establish himself, however, for with Queen Anne's death his embassy was over. Swift and Pope hurried to leave London, where Oxford was arrested, and Bolingbroke fled to France to lead the Jacobite conspirators.

Pope urged Gay to write ‘something’ on the new royal family to gain some patronage, but his Letter to a Lady was not published until November, long after he and they were in England. As a poem it is a comic failure, so obsessed with the thought of ‘preferments’ that ‘scarce I could produce a single strain’ (1.128). Lintot paid him £5 7s. 6d. for the copyright, and the poem went through four editions that year. But by Christmas he told Charles Ford that he still had ‘not been interrupted by any place at court’ (Letters of John Gay, 16). His next work, The What d'ye Call it, is one of his happiest performances, an afterpiece which revels in its own freakishness. Subtitled ‘a Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce’ it is a magnificent hybrid which received twenty performances that year, and made him over £100. Making use of the ‘play-within-a-play’ structure, it is set in a country justice's hall and uses that setting for a comic of mock-tragic forms. There are parodic attacks on Ambrose Philips, Thomas D'Urfey, Nicholas Rowe, Joseph Addison, and many other current playwrights; but whereas Rowe liked it, and happily used this afterpiece for his own lampooned plays, Addison resented its attack and (it appears) used his position as secretary to the council of regents to prevent Gay's advancement. The What d'ye Call it is fast, assured, and wonderfully funny; though neglected for two centuries, it was frequently revived in the twentieth century. ‘I hope my performance may please the Dean’ (that is, Swift), Gay wrote to Parnell in Ireland (Letters of John Gay, 21). Replying, Swift was moved to ask whether Gay had ever thought of ‘a Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves there?’ It was a dozen years before Gay took up the hint.

Gay's next poem, Trivia, was published on 26 January 1716; Lintot paid him £43 for the copyright, and Pope reckoned that the poem ‘may be worth £150 to him in the whole’. This poem, a walk through the streets of London, strikes an ambivalent tone. The poem's subject is a fearless ‘walker’, yet, as Swift wrote to Gay much later ‘A coach and six horses is the utmost exercise you can bear’; Gay offers fastidious advice for maintaining a cleanly image, yet depicts filth and waste as the mythological source for a flourishing industry. Trivia is a town georgic and its ‘hero’ is a bootboy with whom Gay found a certain amount in common; for though he attended the levees of the Hanoverian placemen, laughed at their witticisms, and flattered them with verses, he never felt at home. Throughout the spring of 1716 he and Pope enjoyed the fellowship of the earl of Burlington, and Gay wrote (but did not publish until 1720) his comical Epistle to Burlington, subtitled A Journey to Exeter, which is full of informal details about his life: his woeful attempts at portraiture, and his ecstasy when dressed, for a night, in the maid's dowlas smock. A letter that he wrote at much the same time to the Blount sisters takes further his habit of comical self-abasement, being curiously written in the persona of an emasculated horse. Becoming involved, through Pope, with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, he wrote The Toilette, an utterly inoffensive ‘court poem’ filled with deft and gentle ironies; but when Lady Mary's attitude to Pope shifted to overt hostility, he suffered for it.

Gay's next major work, the play Three Hours after Marriage, opened at Drury Lane on 16 January 1717 to a barrage of criticism, most of it intended not for Gay, or for the play itself. Ten days before it opened the rumour was that ‘Pope is coming out with a play in which every one of our modern poets are ridiculed’ (Letters of Thomas Burnet, 119–20), and between January and March at least eight pamphlets appeared attacking the play's alleged obscenity and vindictiveness. Naïvely Gay had admitted, in the advertisement, receiving ‘the assistance’ of ‘two of my friends’ (Pope and Arbuthnot); when the storm broke, he wrote Pope a fulsome apology, promising his ‘obstinate silence’ about his role. But the damage had been done, and the play effectively damned. Only recently, on re-reading all these pamphlets, has it been possible to determine that there was a deliberate attempt to damn the play as Pope's work. The fact that it ran to packed houses for seven nights was not sufficient to save it at the time, but has been enough to guarantee it respectable modern productions. Dennis figured in act I as Sir Tremendous, ‘the greatest critic of our age’, while John Woodward, the natural scientist, was burlesqued throughout in the role of Fossile. Two suitors (Plotwell and Underplot) to Townley, Fossile's new wife, disguise themselves as a crocodile and mummy in order to have access to her, while Phoebe Clinket attempts to write a play on Deucalion's Flood. The eight pamphlets provide a stage history that proves the play was anything but a flop. Plotwell, played by Colley Cibber, didn't realize that the part ridiculed himself, and Penkethman, in the role of the crocodile, caused a riot of hilarity. The chief pamphlet attacking the play, The Confederates by J. D. Breval, contains several allegations, including the rumour (almost certainly false) that Gay received £400 from the maids of honour not to sacrifice it the first night. In fact he received £16 2s. 6d. from Lintot on 4 May as copy money for the three-act version of the play, a five-act version being printed for W. Whitestone in 1758.

Gay strove to make up his income by translating part of book IX of Ovid's Metamorphoses for Sir Samuel Garth, a task which he should have found easy to judge by his copy of Mattaire's Horace in the Forster collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. For a more settled life he cultivated the friendship of William Pulteney, who, having just resigned from government, promised a continental jaunt. A sudden parliamentary assault occurred, with William Pulteney and Walpole attacking William Cadogan, and it seems probable that Gay used the pseudonym James Baker to aid his new patron. But the assault failed and by the summer of 1717 Gay was travelling with the Pulteneys in France.

Pulteney was repaid for the trip to France by a rhymed epistle, which takes as its theme the superiority of all things English to all things French. At much the same time Gay amused himself writing a poem on William Lowndes, ‘author’ of the Land Tax Bill, in which he ironically reckons Lowndes the most successful writer of the age, given that his compositions rake in over £1 million per year. The following year he joined Pope in a visit to Stanton Harcourt, near Oxford, and joined him in sentimentally describing two young lovers killed by lightning, though he might privately have taken a more cynical view. Living as a perpetual nomad, as the house guest of others, he had the habit of ingratiation, and his own views are hard to judge. He wrote the libretto of Acis and Galatea at this time, and several miscellaneous verses, but the essential texture of his life is difficult to gauge as he proved very dilatory about keeping letters received. In the summer of 1719 he was in Dijon where he had gone, in part, on a remedial cure for the colical disorder which troubled him for the rest of his life. In a letter from there to Mrs Howard he relates how, the name of ‘Gay’ being mentioned, he disowned all knowledge of himself—an indication of the isolation he experienced. While away he wrote his five-act pastoral tragedy Dione which, according to the lord chamberlain's records, he had ready for the Drury Lane managers on 16 February 1720. But the play was never staged and is best remembered now for Johnson's comment that ‘a pastoral of an hundred lines may be endured, but who will hear of sheep and goats, and myrtle bowers and purling rivulets, through five acts?’ Gay was in a grim mood, and about this time he wrote his epitaph:

Life's a jest; and all things show it.

I thought so once; but now I know it.

Gay now had recourse to his old friends, and under Pope's management ‘cabals were formed our Johnny's debts to clear’. Poems on Several Occasions, the subscription edition of his poems which resulted, indicates that he had many friends among the great, headed by the prince and princess of Wales. Of the 364 names Burlington and Chandos both subscribed for fifty copies, followed by Pulteney who took twenty-five. Bathurst, Henry Pelham, the earl of Warwick, and James Craggs all took ten copies, Walpole took two, the duke of Newcastle took two, and Spencer Compton, speaker of the House of Commons, took three. Suddenly wealthy, Gay invested in the South Sea Company and saw his money rise and rise. By the end of June he was even cherishing the dream of becoming a landowner in Devon. He wrote Mr Pope's Welcome from Greece to congratulate his friend on completing his six-year labour of translating the Iliad, and to thank the friends who had subscribed to his poems, yet for some reason preferred not to publish it. Among poems first appearing in Poems on Several Occasions are his ‘Epistles’ to William Pulteney and to Paul Methuen, and several minor poems, including the charming sea shanty ‘Sweet William's Farewell to Black-Ey'd Susan’.

On 18 July the lords Burlington and Bruce were attacked and robbed, whereupon Burlington applied to Jonathan Wild. Within a few months Wild identified and tracked down James Wright, and received £25 for his trouble, all of which was observed by Gay. Meanwhile in September, South Sea stock began to slide, and by the end of the month had crashed. Gay was severely hurt by the fall of stock and, in October, replied with some asperity to a dunning letter from his publishers. By the autumn, however, it appears that, thanks to Pope's intervention, he had not lost everything, and for his original investment of £1000 it seems that, a year later, Gay was able to realize something over £400. His Panegyrical Epistle to Mr Thomas Snow, published on 8 February 1721 (before these rescue packages were finalized), demonstrates him viewing the episode not with the rancour of a ruined man but the wry humour of a stoic comedian.

Gay spent much of the spring and early summer at Chiswick, reporting that ‘I live almost altogether with my Lord Burlington’, and passed the late summer at Bath, treating his ‘colical humour’ and becoming very melancholy at the death of the young earl of Warwick; ‘I lov'd him’, he told a friend (Letters of John Gay, 39). Warwick's death, without leaving a will, was a serious disappointment to Gay, who set about finding another aristocrat to protect him. By September he had found the duchess of Queensberry, who was to be a loyal ally for the rest of his life. Back in London he wrote An Epistle to her Grace Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, an entirely formulaic panegyrical exercise which indicates his hunger for some kind of court patronage. He spent the summer of 1722 again at Bath, and was able to resume his lodgings at the earl of Burlington's property in Piccadilly in November. Swift invited him to move to Dublin where he might live more cheaply, but just at that time his hopes of patronage paid off. He was made a commissioner of the state lottery, which brought him £150 a year, and also obtained free lodgings at Whitehall. Feeling much happier he spent the summer at Tunbridge Wells again as a guest of the Burlingtons. He sent amusing letters to Mrs Howard and wrote The Quidnuncki's, drawing familiar comparisons between statesmen and baboons. On 15 January 1724 his new play The Captives opened at Drury Lane, thanks largely to Mrs Howard's influence, and though the play had few points to recommend it, ran for seven nights. This brought Gay an estimated £1000; together with his £150 from the lottery, his free lodgings, and his habit of travelling as the guest of aristocratic friends, this meant that he was at last financially secure. But he had made a lot of compromises to achieve such security, and, as he wrote to Mrs Howard, ‘I have not and fear never shall have a will of my own’ (Letters of John Gay, 47).

The Beggar's Opera, and after

In June the following year Gay joined a house party at Lord Bathurst's place at Riskins Park, and proved a less proficient fisherman than his pronouncements in Rural Sports might have suggested. He was angling for bigger fish, however, and spent the summer hovering near the court hoping for a place. In the summer of 1725 he resolved to make a final bid by writing a book of Fables for the four-year-old Prince William (later the ‘Butcher of Culloden’). Meanwhile, in the spring of 1726 Swift sailed back to England bearing the manuscript of Gulliver's Travels, and at once there was a new earnestness among the tory forces. But Swift had not the energy for all this excitement, and eventually settled with Gay for a short period in August; this marked a turning point in Gay's career. From this time Gay not only abandoned light courtly verse in favour of the major works on which his reputation now depends; he also changed his pattern of correspondence, and almost three-quarters of his surviving letters for the last six years of his life were written to Swift.

Gay's Fables, much delayed by waiting for Wootton and Kent to print the plates, were finally published in March 1727, and have had long-running success, going through more than 350 editions, mostly before 1900. Their popularity relies less on ironic wit than on their anthropomorphic and proverbial charm, but at court his female friends were delighted. Mrs Howard promised that ‘by my consent you shall never be a hare again’ (Letters to and from Henrietta, 1.284), a reference to Fable L, the last one, in which Gay symbolically represents himself as a female hare, threatened by baying hounds. Swift arrived in England again that summer, and was immediately surrounded by a frenzy of tory hopes as George I died at Osnabruck in June and was succeeded by George II. But Walpole's cunning quickly re-asserted the whig position and Swift was troubled both by deafness and by news of Stella's fatal illness. He left on 18 September and, within the week, Gay had his long promised reward, the position of gentleman usher to the two-year-old Princess Louisa.

Gay was deeply disappointed to be offered such an ignominious position, and declined it. To Pope he wrote ‘there is now what Milton says is hell, “darkness visible”. O that I had never known what a court was!’ To Swift he said ‘now all my expectations are vanished; and I have no prospect, but in depending wholly upon myself’ (Letters of John Gay, 65–8). In the same letter to Swift he refers to his next effort, the famous Beggar's Opera, which, he says, is ‘already finished’ (ibid.). Swift was glad, but advised Gay to treat the opera carefully; ‘I beg you will be thrifty and learn to value a shilling’, he counselled. ‘Get a stronger fence about your £1,000, and throw the inner fence into the heap’ (Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, 3.250). The Beggar's Opera, which finally opened at Lincoln's Inn Fields on 29 January 1728, was a phenomenal success, enjoying a run of sixty-two nights in its opening season, and inspiring a host of imitations, parodies, and Beggar-mania bric-à-brac, ranging from playing cards to fans and fire screens. Such fame has generated many stories, from the Universal Spectator's confident assertion that ‘Mr Gay was not the sole author of The Beggar's Opera’ to Charles Macklin's comment in his Memoirs that ‘there was no music originally intended to accompany the songs’ (1804, 60). However, the very originality of the opera's hybrid form should convince us that it was Gay's own work; one of the best-known accounts, which insists the audience reaction was uncertain until Lavinia Fenton, in the part of Polly, sang ‘O ponder well!’ in act I, sounds reasonably credible. She went on to become the duke of Bolton's mistress at £400 a year (according to a jaundiced Gay), and Hogarth painted one of the opera's prison scenes (III.xi) with her gazing into her admirer's eyes. Gay made £693 13s. 6d. from the production of The Beggar's Opera, together with 90 guineas for the copyright of that and The Fables; he treated the money wisely, although his friends all asserted that he would waste it. Three years later he boasted to Swift that his fortune amounted to ‘above three thousand four hundred pounds’, which was a vast amount.

The Beggar's Opera had several consequences, one of which was the death of the vogue for Italian opera in England. This was not Gay's intention, as he had many friends for whom opera was a way of life; but it may point to a significant breakup of his relationship with Burlington, the chief shareholder and leading figure-head of the Royal Academy of Music. Four years later Gay wrote to Swift that he had ‘not been admitted’ within Burlington's walls ‘this year and a half’ and his claim ‘for what reason I know not’ (Letters of John Gay, 72) is less than candid. His circumscribed use of operatic music in The Beggar's Opera is not a wholesale rejection, however: almost a third of its airs are taken from Purcell, Handel, Giovanni Bononcini, and Richard Leveridge, and he does not enter into the disputes between Handel and Faustina Bononcini, or between the rival singers Faustina and Francesca Cuzzoni. But his main sources are the ballads and folk-songs collected by D'Urfey in his Wit and Mirth (1719–20) which cast a far more beguiling light on the vanities of life. Similarly, the opera has always been taken to be a satire on Walpole; Swift wrote to Gay from Dublin ‘Does W[alpole] think you attended an affront to him in your opera? Pray God he may’. But though Gay may have revelled in the notoriety this reputation gave him, it is not clear that any of the characters in the opera satirize the prime minister. Hazlitt's comment on the opera is more succinct: ‘The moral of the piece was to show the vulgarity of vice’ (W. Hazlitt, Works, 1930–34, 4.65–6).

Removal to the country, and death, 1730–1732

From this time Gay's relationship with Pope, who remained on good terms with Burlington, becomes more distant. ‘Mr Pope talks of you as a perfect stranger’ wrote Swift in 1730 (Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, 3.380). Gay spent the summer in Bath working on Polly, which he referred to as the ‘second part of the Beggar's Opera’, and which grew to have a very dangerous reputation among the opposition. But the government had other plans, and, once Gay was back in London, he learned on 12 December that Polly ‘was not allowed to be acted, but commanded to be suppressed’. There was much protest among the Craftsman group of politicians, and Gay boldly took the step of publishing the opera unperformed, having some 10,000 copies printed at his own expense. His gamble paid off; he made a total of £1200 and the duchess of Queensberry was banished from court for soliciting subscriptions there, among them from the young duchess of Marlborough, who gave £100. In the event, Polly is not a dangerous opera, but innocuous and largely conventional, though its surroundings were deeply disturbing. Gay was ejected from his Whitehall lodgings and simultaneously became severely ill. He was taken to the Queensberrys' house in Burlington Gardens where Arbuthnot declared, only partly facetiously, that he was ‘one of the obstructions to the peace of Europe’ and ‘the darling of the city’.

From this point on Gay lived mainly with the Queensberrys in rural isolation. In January 1730 he tried out his redrafted Wife of Bath on the stage at Lincoln's Inn Fields, but was disappointed by the result. ‘My old vamped play got me no money, for it had no success’ (Letters of John Gay, 88), he told Swift in March. Thereafter he continued to write, producing Achilles, The Distressed Wife, and The Rehearsal at Goatham, but made little serious attempt to have them staged, writing now for private satisfaction and not public renown. He made perfunctory efforts to purchase a house, at Marble Hill, and to marry a wife, Anne Drelincourt (d. 1775), heir of the wealthy dean of Armagh (she brought £30,000 when she married Viscount Primrose in 1739), but these were only pipe dreams, and gradually he settled into a pampered life as a permanent house guest of the Queensberrys at Burlington Gardens in London, or Amesbury, Wiltshire. ‘A state of indolence is what I don't like’ (ibid., 93), he told Swift, yet he made little serious endeavour to change it, and, writing again in March 1731 admitted ‘I am very happy in my present independency’ (ibid., 105). Throughout the summer he occupied himself with a new volume of Fables, though most of them ‘are of a political kind; which makes 'em run into a greater length than those I have already published’ (ibid., 122). Significantly, in these last