One of Pope's epitaphs on Gay tells only half the truth:

    Favourite of the muses,
He was led by them to every elegant art:
    Refined in taste,
And fraught with graces all his own:
  In various kinds of poetry
      Superior to many,
      Inferior to none.¹

The muses were, in fact, cruelly capricious in their favours, alternately wafting Gay to pinnacles of brilliance and leaving him to flounder through a slough of well-intentioned tedium. They decreed that his masterpieces should be inimitable—even by Gay himself. Most exasperating of all was their habit of slipping away without letting him know they had gone: the man who could proudly offer Polly as a sequel to The Beggar's Opera, or follow Fables II, clearly found it difficult to assess the quality of his own output.

The unevenness of Gay's work, combined with the apparently effortless elegance of his successes, gave the impression that everything came by chance. Dr. Johnson, doubtless perplexed by this haphazard performance and annoyed by the necessity of reading (or finding excuses not to read) so much that was second-rate, treated Gay as a minor figure who happened to please the public taste from time to time. According to Johnson, the success of The Shepherd's Week was partly accidental: 'the effect of reality and truth became conspicuous, even when the intention was to shew them groveling and degraded.' He dismissed The What D'Ye Call It as beneath critical attention: 'Of this performance the value certainly is but little; but it was one of the lucky trifles that give pleasure by novelty.' Inevitably, The Beggar's Opera became 'this lucky piece'. Trivia confronted Johnson with a degree of excellence he was unable to ignore: 'To Trivia may be allowed all that it claims: it is spritely, various, and pleasant.' But Johnson still found a way to imply that Gay did not deserve all the credit: 'The subject is of that kind which Gay was by nature qualified to adorn.' In other words, Gay could not help writing Trivia, because that was what he was born for. Johnson gives the impression that he would have rated Gay more highly if he had been a more consistent writer, even if that consistency had been achieved at the expense of originality. He quoted with approval the female critic who relegated Gay to 'a lower order', but the real problem was Gay's inability to stay at one level long enough to be assigned to any order at all.²

Efforts to overthrow Johnson's verdict culminated fifty years ago with the publication of William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), after which it has been possible to take Gay seriously without undue critical embarrassment. Some of his works, especially The Beggar's Opera, have received a great deal of respectful attention; and his tercentenary provided a welcome opportunity for making up deficiencies in other areas. However, a natural tendency to concentrate on Gay's best work has only increased general bewilderment at the muses' flighty conduct. In order to understand Gay properly, it is necessary to find out what he was trying to achieve when he was writing badly. 'Badly', of course, is a relative term when applied to Gay: even Dione displays some fugitive lyrical charm. Still, no one would attempt to deny that some of his works are better than others. The standard of his drama is particularly prone to fluctuation, exemplified most clearly by his failure to consolidate the position he gained by The Beggar's Opera. John Fuller sees Gay's later drama as the result of a pious but regrettable sacrifice of wit to responsibility:

Like Pope, Gay 'stoop'd to Truth', but his growing preoccupation with sexual mores and with political corruption may seem at times a poor exchange for the imaginative riches of Scriblerian farce and burlesque.³

I should like to argue for a broader definition of 'Scriblerian' to encompass Gay's later drama, and help to account for its patchiness by showing that its faults and virtues owe just as much to Scriblerian influences as his earlier work. Gay's problems are a question of manner rather than matter: sexual mores, after all, loom large in such successes as The What D 'Ye Call It and Three Hours after Marriage, and combine with political corruption to dominate The Beggar's Opera. Nor can it be reckoned an un-Scriblerian activity to follow Pope (not to mention Swift and Arbuthnot) into the realms of serious moral satire. Gay's troubles arose when he attempted to deal with common Scriblerian preoccupations in a way that was unsuited to his chosen form. An examination of Polly, Achilles and The Distress'd Wife will show where his difficulties lay.

Achilles, posthumously produced in February 1733, was condemned for tedium: an article in the Daily Courant (16 February 1733) charitably maintained that it was an unfinished piece, completed by a committee of Gay's friends, since 'Mr. Gay could not deviate into so much Dulness'.⁴ Exception was also taken to the vulgarity (sometimes amounting to indencency) of the lyrics. This often caused more offence in the playhouse than in the closet, where readers could enjoy low humour without having their own virtue or gentility called into question. The most conspicuous deficiency of The Distress'd Wife, another posthumous production, is the character drawing. As a comedy of manners, it arouses expectations of realism and consistency that are disappointed in audience and readers alike. In a letter to Elizabeth Young (28 September 1743), James Thomson observed that Lady Willit's 'Affectations are drawn so monstrous, they are not the Affectations of a Woman of Sense and Wit but of a Fool.' Miss Friendless's acceptance of the aging Lord Courtlove distressed Thomson who had 'expected, from her sensible and serious Turn, that she would have disdained the Proposal, and rather lived in a Cottage with some Person she loved'.⁵ Fuller detects a 'touch of primitivism'⁶ in these cavils, but even in these days of post-structuralist sophistication, traditional character criticism still haunts the theatre, refusing to be exorcized by repeated incantations that the text's the thing. However unscrupulously the dramatist uses a character as a moral exemplum or a convenient plot device, the actor insists on investing the part with a recognizable human identity, as does the theatrically minded reader of plays. Polly was a special case: it was banned before rehearsal in December 1728 and not performed until 1777. This may not have been an unqualified disaster for Gay. One can only imagine how an uninitiated first-night audience, all agog for the highly publicized sequel to the longest running show in history, would have responded to Macheath's impenetrable blackface disguise, Polly's transvestite heroics, and the interminably self-righteous noble savages. But one would much rather not.

In each instance, Gay required his cast to give bodily form to notions that were plausibly expressed in other Scriblerian texts (his own included) but which looked disconcertingly flimsy on stage. Idealistic moral, economic and political theory abounded; so did predictable diatribes on corrupt practice. Nominally happy endings were contrived by proposing impracticable solutions to insoluble problems. This made life awkward for the actors, and worse for the actresses, who carried the additional burden of exemplifying Scriblerian ideas about women. The Scriblerians were not conspicuously misogynist, by contemporary standards; they were capable of feeling, and expressing, genuine admiration for the virtues, charms and intellectual achievements of individual women. But they tended to view the sex as a whole with a mixture of suspicion and contempt that reflected the most drearily conservative doctrines of female inferiority—except for the occasions when they added a further twist of their own devising. And Gay, as usual, took his colour from his company.

However inadequate Pope's Epistle to a Lady (1735) may seem as an account of women in general, there is no disputing its accuracy as a survey of women in Gay's drama:

  In Men, we various Ruling Passions find,
In Women, two almost divide the kind;
Those, only fix'd, they first or last obey,
The Love of Pleasure, and the Love of Sway.
That, Nature gives; and where the lesson taught
Is but to please, can Pleasure seem a fault?
Experience, this; by Man's oppression curst,
They seek the second not to lose the first.
(207-14)⁷

Gay's women employ various subversive strategies to gain their ends; the most commonly effective is the cultivation of an attractive surface, as enjoined in Achilles by the court lady Artemona:

Think of Dress in ev'ry Light;
  'Tis Woman's chiefest Duty;
Neglecting that, our selves we slight
  And undervalue Beauty.
That allures the Lover's Eye,
  And graces every Action;
Besides, when not a Creature's by,
  'Tis inward Satisfaction.
(III, viii, 7-14)⁸

The end of the song suggests that most women are so consumed by vanity that beauty has ceased to be a means and become an end in itself.

Achilles provides a hospitable niche for this idea, since the plot hinges on the notion that preoccupation with finery is a distinguishing sexual characteristic. The young warrior prince Achilles, disguised as a girl at the behest of his mother, who wishes to keep him out of the Trojan War, is living at the court of Scyros. In order to expose him, Ulysses and Diomedes assume the rôle of merchants, peddling cloth, jewels, weapons and armour. The girls are fascinated by the adornments; the boy blows his cover by seizing a sword. If Achilles had shared his companions' concern with fashion, or any of the girls had been capable of taking an intelligent interest in Bronze Age metallurgy, the scheme would have misfired. An apparent exception to the feminine rule is Deidamia, Achilles's bedfellow, who is so worried by other matters that she pays hardly any attention to the merchants' wares. This anxiety, however, is still articulated in terms of dress; she is afraid that Achilles's indifference to clothes will betray his sex and consequently ruin her reputation—which cannot, in any case, last much longer, since her pregnancy is becoming visible to observant eyes, despite her attempts to hide it under her gown.

Achilles and The Distress'd Wife show women attending to their chiefest duty in a woefully unbusinesslike manner. Lady Willit in the latter play runs up huge bills without caring that her husband will be unable to pay them: 'Was there ever a Man, who grew to be of any Consequence, who did not run out?—Would you have Credit, and not make use of it?' (I, ii, 58-61). Incurring debt was regarded as antisocial; George Lillo makes this point in The London Merchant (1731), when the exemplary Mr. Thorowgood instructs his apprentice

to look carefully over the files to see whether there are any tradesmen's bills unpaid and, if there are, to send and discharge 'em. We must not let artificers lose their time, so useful to the public and their families, in unnecessary attendance. (I, i, 55-9)⁹

Prompt payment was not a virtue required only from the bourgeoisie; William Darrell, gentleman and Jesuit, inveighed against debtors in The Gentleman Instructed (1704), a conduct book ostensibly directed to the nobility:

Now when a Creditor must be eternally upon the Trot to come up to his Debtor, and ply at all the Coffee-houses for Intelligence of his Haunts, the Irons cool at home, Trade sinks, Work is at a Stand, and a Bankrupt treads upon his Heels. For how shall a Merchant pay his Debts, who receives none? Now, Sir, here is lucrum cessans on the one hand, and damnun emergens on the other, and in the Sight of God you stand responsible for both: They will be put to your Accounts, and you must either repair 'em here, or suffer for 'em hereafter.¹⁰

Lillo and Darrell condemned debt as a general evil; the specific link between women and irresponsible expenditure appears more characteristic of Swift, who expresses his usual views with only a slight increase of his customary venom when he takes on the mask of the projector in A Modest Proposal (1729):

… the Body of a plump Girl of fifteen, who was crucified for an Attempt to poison the Emperor, was sold to his Imperial Majesty's prime Minister of State, and other great Mandarins of the Court, in Joints from the Gibbet, at Four hundred Crowns. Neither indeed can I deny, that if the same Use were made of several plump young girls in this Town, who, without one single Groat to their Fortunes, cannot stir Abroad without a Chair, and appear at the Play-house, and Assemblies in foreign Fineries, which they never will pay for; the Kingdom would not be the worse.¹¹

Scriblerian economics also underlie another constant in female consumerism as perceived by Gay: women prefer imported goods to native manufacture. As Artemona observes in Achilles: 'There must be something pretty in every thing that is foreign' (III, x, 64-5). In the same play, Philoe rejects a length of cloth, even though she likes the design, because it is locally made. She is like the women of quality in eighteenth-century Dublin 'who seldom wear any of our own Goods, Except impos'd on them under the Name of Foreign Works'.¹² The tastes of Artemona, Philoe and Lady Willit are typical of the female extravagance condemned by Swift in his Answer to Several Letters from Unknown Persons (1729):

Is it not the highest Indignity to human nature, that men should be such poltrons as to suffer the Kingdom and themselves to be undone, by the Vanity, the Folly, the Pride, and Wantonness of their Wives, who under their present Corruptions seem to be a kind of animal suffered for our sins to be sent into the world for the Destruction of Familyes, Societyes, and Kingdoms; and whose whole study seems directed to be as expensive as they possibly can in every useless article of living, who by long practice can reconcile the most pemicious forein Drugs to their health and pleasure, provided they are but expensive; as Starlings grow fat with henbane: who contract a Robustness by meer practice of Sloth and Luxury: who can play deep severall hours after midnight, sleep beyond noon; revel upon Indian poisons, and spend the revenue of a moderate family to adorn a nauseous unwholesom living Carcase.¹³

Unfortunately for Gay, a playwright cannot indulge his imagination as freely as a pamphleteer; in bringing these creatures on stage, he did not realize that his audience expected to see women, and Swift had provided him with a formula for monsters.

Of course, the Scriblerians were not the first to take this view of women: it had long been proverbial that 'far fetched and dear bought is good for ladies.' Lady Dainty shows similar proclivities in Colley Cibber's comedy, The Double Gallant (1707), but she is provided with a discerning friend who refuses to share her perverse tastes:

Lady Dainty. How came you, dear Sylvia, to be reconcil'd to any thing in an India House: You us'd to have a most barbarous inclination for our own odious Manufactures.

Sylvia. Nay, Madam, I am only going to recruit my Tea Table: As to the rest of their Trumpery, I am as much out of humour with it as ever.…

Lady Dainty. Well, thou art a pleasant Creature, thy distast is so diverting!

Sylvia. And your Ladyship is so expensive, that really I am not able to come into it.

Lady Dainty. Now, 'tis to me prodigious! how some Women can muddle away their Money upon Houswifry, Children, Books, and Charities, when there are so many well-bred Ways, and foreign Curiosities, that more elegantly require it—I have every Morning the Rarities of all Countries brought to me, and am in love with every New thing I see. (III)¹⁴

Cibber makes many of his most telling dramatic effects by juxtaposing different types of women; Scriblerian satire usually reaches the conclusion that all women are the same.

This is not to say that any one woman will be recognizably herself from one moment to the next: 'varium et mutabile semper/femina' (Virgil's Aeneid, IV, 569-70). Pope's Epistle to a Lady expresses this paradox:

Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
'Most Women have no Characters at all'.
Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,
And best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair.…
 Come then, the colours and the ground prepare!
Dip in the Rainbow, trick her off in Air,
Chuse a firm Cloud, before it fall, and in it
Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute.
(1-4, 17-20)¹⁵

If women are such shifting—not to say shifty—characters, how can their mental processes be recorded? The Rape of the Lock (1714) takes an appropriately indirect approach, working by allusion—almost by allegory. According to David Fairer, the poem 'is concerned with the imagination as a glorious, amoral, irresponsible and alluring thing, a paradoxical cluster of adjectives as apt for Belinda as for the sylphs'.¹⁶ To say that the sylphs represent Belinda's imagination is not far from saying that they represent Belinda. Pope's language suggests that they are spectacular, impalpable, and not too reliable:

Loose to the Wind their airy Garments flew,
Thin glitt'ring Textures of the filmy Dew;
Dipt in the richest Tincture of the Skies,
Where Light disports in ever-mingling Dies,
While ev'ry Beam new transient Colours flings,
Colours that change whene'er they wave their Wings.
(II, 63-8)¹⁷

Dramatists have made theatrical capital from female unpredictability for centuries, despite the danger that the 'infinite variety' which sounds so enchanting when Enobarbus describes its effect on Cleopatra's admirers might degenerate into maddening indecisiveness when it actually appears on stage. Forced to rely on the talents of a flesh-and-blood performer, unaided by a glamorizing aura of sylphs, they take certain precautions to ensure that their women do not appear merely demented. It is easy for narrative poets, such as Dryden in Cymon and Iphigenia (1700), to work on the assumption that it is a woman's privilege to change her mind:

  Then impotent of Mind, with alter'd Sense,
She hugg'd th' Offender, and forgave th' Offence,
Sex to the last.
(366-68)¹⁸

Dramatists, however, have no opportunity for explaining developments with helpful asides in propria persona. They try to make sure that their characters' words and actions are self-explanatory, which accounts for their reluctance to show behaviour that has no apparent explanation at all. Women who vacillate on stage often do so on purpose, as a means of manipulating the men who are supposed—officially, at any rate—to control their destiny. Hippolita, in Wycherley's The Gentleman Dancing-Master (1672), pretends to change her mind in order to test her lover's sincerity. Millamant, the supreme exponent of inconsistency as sexual strategy, uses her lightning-swift changes of mood to keep Mirabel off balance, perplexed, and duly besotted in Congreve's The Way of the World (1700).

When a dramatist shows a woman who is genuinely unable to make up her mind, her confusion often serves as a distress signal, to indicate an anxiety that she is unable to discuss with the other characters. The audience is usually put in possession of enough information to interpret her behaviour correctly, even when she does not appear to be aware of its significance herself. Lady Lurewell in Farquhar's Sir Harry Wildair (1701) is a typical case: exacting, capricious, and thoroughly unreasonable, she makes life miserable for herself and her entire household, but is unable to define the cause of her discontent:

Lady Lurewell. Oh, Mr. Remnant! I don't know what ails these stays you have made me; but something is the matter, I don't like 'em.

Remnant. I am very sorry for that, madam. But what fault does your ladyship find?

Lady Lurewell. I don't know where the fault lies; but in short, I don't like 'em; I can't tell how; the things are well enough made, but I don't like 'em.

Remnant. Are they too wide, madam?

Lady Lurewell. No.

Remnant. Too strait, perhaps?

Lady Lurewell. Not at all! they fit me very well, but—Lard bless me! can't you tell where the fault lies?

(II, i, 58-70)¹⁹

The fault lies with her recent marriage to Colonel Standard. The new stays, with their association of close restraint on the female physique, represent the marriage bond; her dislike shows that she has not yet reconciled herself to the adjustments she will have to make in her way of life. The stays do fit her, however, and there is no objective reason why she should not be perfectly comfortable: Colonel Standard is a good match and they are destined, after a few ups and downs, to live happily ever after. The audience might not be able to decode all these subtleties at first hearing, but they have certainly been fed enough data to be able to deduce that the lady's troubles are marital, not sartorial, in origin.

Lady Willit, on the other hand, produces virtuoso exhibitions of dithering for dithering's sake, as in a scene with her maid Fetch:

Lady Willit. BLESS me!—How can any Mortal be so awkward! [Fetch combing her Hair.]— Dost think I have no Feeling?—Am I to be flea'd alive?—Go—begone. [going.] Come hither. [returning.]—Who do you think is to dress me?—Tell 'em I'll have the Tea-kettle ready this Instant. [going.]—Is the Wench distracted?—What, am I to sit all Day long with my Hair about my Ears like a Mermaid? [returning.]—Now, I'll be sworn for't, thou hast not spoke for the Tea-water all this while, though I order'd it an Hour ago.

Fetch. Not by me, Madam.

Lady Willit. So you tell me I lye—that's all. [going.]—What is the blundering Fool a doing?—Am I to be dress'd to Day or no? [returning.]—Bid the Porter bring me up the Book of Visits.—Why don't you go? [going.]—Must I bid you do the same Thing a thousand Times over and over again?—I am to have no Breakfast to Day, that I find you are determin'd upon.

(II, i, 1-17)

The first outbreak might be attributed to her natural agitation on learning that her husband means to take her back to the country, but Fetch's repeated protests imply that this is her normal modus operandi:

If it be not an unreasonable Request from a Servant, I could wish your Ladyship would know your own Mind before you speak;—'twould save you a great many Words, and me a great deal of Trouble. (IV, iv, 6-9)

A realistic interpretation might account for her behaviour by reference to various inner conflicts deducible from the text, such as the tension between her envy of Lady Frankair's flair for adultery and her fear of following her example. But Gay offers no explicit endorsement of this reading. Lady Willit's paranoid tone, if taken literally, could only issue from a neurotic state far too painful to be contained within the bounds of comedy. It is hard to resist the conclusion that Lady Willit dithers chiefly because Gay intends to make her a compendium of fashionable female failings.

This suspicion is confirmed by comparison with the girls in Achilles. The chief difference is that Lady Willit's condition is indistinguishable from mental illness, whereas Artemona and her companions appear to be labouring under some form of mental handicap. The moral is that all fine ladies are mad or stupid, as a just consequence of their selfishness, frivolity and affectation. Philoe suffers from the same sort of absent-mindedness as Lady Willit:

Servant. The Anti-chamber, Madam, is crowded with Trades-People.

Philoe. Did not I tell you that I wou'd not be troubled with Those impertinent Creatures?—But hold—I had forgot I sent for 'em—Let 'em wait.

(III, ix, 8-12)

When her mind is present, it serves her no better:

Ulysses. We have things of all kinds, Ladies. Philoe. Of all kinds!—Now that is just what I wanted to see.

(III, x, 19-21)

The precision of 'just' is ridiculously nullified by the hopelessly vague 'all kinds', so that the two halves of her speech cancel each other out. Language is similarly mistreated by Lesbia: 'This very individual Pattern, in a blue Pink, had been infinitely charming' (III, x, 52-3). Her words are debased coinage. To provide an equivalent for her ideas, she either pays out too many (hence the tautology of 'this very individual') or chooses an inappropriately high denomination (the extravagance of 'infinitely'). As for the 'blue Pink', it has the same self-negating quality as Philoe's utterance, suggesting that there may not be an idea behind it at all. It might refer to a pink so deeply tinged with blue that it verges on mauve, but the overall satiric tendency of the dialogue suggests that Gay was endeavouring to create a touch of exuberant nonsense, analogous to the modern 'sky blue pink with orange spots on'. All in all, Gay's brand of girl talk is far from convincing.

This is disappointing because elsewhere he writes about women and their clothes with sympathy, precision and infectious delight. Even the notion that ladies are mindless creatures, activated by forces of nature, can appear charming in a descriptive passage that does not require the reader to think in terms of individual women:

The Ladies gayly dress'd, the Mall adorn
With various Dyes, and paint the sunny Morn;
The wanton Fawns with frisking Pleasure range,
And chirping Sparrows greet the welcome Change:
Not that their Minds with greater Skill are fraught,
Endu'd by Instinct, or by Reason taught,
The Seasons operate on every Breast;
'Tis hence that Fawns are brisk, and Ladies drest.
(Trivia, I, 145-52)²⁰

A similar connection between female fashion and organic life appears in The Fan:

Should you the rich Brocaded Suit unfold,
Where rising Flow'rs grow stiff with frosted Gold;
The dazled Muse would from her Subject stray,
And in a Maze of Fashions lose her Way.
(I, 241-44)

The spontaneous vitality implied by 'unfold', 'rising' and 'grow', all associated with burgeoning vegetation, gives the impression that these flowers, worked to please the ladies, have been called into being by the natural laws that control the growth of real plants: not such an improbable hypothesis, if the same laws also govern the ladies' fancy. The use of 'frosted'—another natural process at work—strengthens the impression that fashion develops of its own accord without conscious human intervention, a phenomenon to be celebrated by the poet with the same respectful admiration as a sunset or a storm at sea. Then 'Gold' returns to the manufactured, inorganic reality, inviting the reader to participate with Gay in an ironic reappraisal of the relationship between nature and artifice.

If the poet handles his subject so felicitously, why does the dramatist blunder? Once more, the muses have been repelled by sound Scriblerian principles. 'Th'inconstant Equipage of Female Dress' (The Fan, I, 230) exemplifies the moral instability that Swift, Pope and Arbuthnot saw as a threat to civilization. Gay's court ladies are devoid of values; even aesthetic standards are unknown to them. 'Unless you have any thing that is absolutely new and very uncommon,' warns Artemona, 'you will give us and your selves, Gentlemen, but unnecessary Trouble' (III, x, 1-3). Taking novelty as a criterion of merit reduces every statement to nonsense sooner or later, as Swift demonstrates in A Tale of a Tub. He claims 'an absolute Authority in Right, as the freshest Modern, which gives me a Despotick Power over all Authors before me', but his work is avowedly 'calculated for this present Month of August, 1697',²¹ and not published till 1704, which discredits it on its own terms. The quest for novelty was traditionally perceived as a symptom of political decadence as well as intellectual chaos. In Catiline (1611) Ben Jonson associated it with the fall of Rome:

Can nothing great, and at the height
Remaine so long? but it's owne weight
Will ruine it? Or, is't blinde chance,
That still desires new states t'advance,
And quit the old? Else, why must Rome,
Be by it selfe, now, over-come? …
They hunt all grounds; and draw all seas;
Foule every brooke, and bush; to please
Their wanton tasts: and, in request
Have new, and rare things; not the best!
(I, 531-36, 569-72)²²

Diomedes, playing up to the ladies in Achilles, declares that 'Novelty is the very Spirit of Dress' (III, x, 13) but this is a contradiction in terms. 'Spirit' is a life-giving force, an eternal, unchanging essence: novelty cannot be the spirit of anything. It bestows an illusion of life that may keep the carcase twitching for a little while, but cannot preserve it from corruption. And the characters are as void of life as the ideas they represent.

Corruption—both sexual and political—is a key issue in Gay's drama, and he often links them so closely that they become indistinguishable. Women are potential bribes in political deals, such as Lady Willit's attempt to gain Lord Courtlove's patronage by offering him the hand of Miss Sprightly. They are also vulnerable to direct political manipulation. Some, like Miss Friendless and Polly, are offered as instances of incorruptibility, but doubts are raised by Miss Friendless's decision to secure independence by marrying Lord Courtlove (marriage being the only form of independence to which a woman of the period could reasonably aspire) and the prudential thrust of Polly's arguments in favour of virtue as a sound investment. They suggest that it is woman's chiefest duty to keep an eye to the main chance:

Frail is ambition, how weak the foundation!
Riches have wings as inconstant as wind;

My heart is proof against either temptation,
Virtue, without them, contentment can find.
(Polly, III, xv, 38-41)

Most women, like Mrs. Ducat, are blatantly out for whatever they can get:

I will have my humours, I'll please all my senses,
I will not be stinted—in love or expences.
I'll dress with profusion, I'll game without measure;
You shall have the business, I will have the pleasure.
(Polly, I, viii, 9-12)

Her maid, Damaris, employs the language as well as the skills of the politician in the cause of female solidarity:

I am employ'd by master to watch my mistress, and by my mistress to watch my master. Which party shall I espouse? To be sure my mistress's. For in hers, jurisdiction and power, the common cause of the whole sex, are at stake. (I, x, 3-7)

Women were commonly supposed to be natural Jacobites, but the Scriblerians appear to have believed that every woman was at heart a Whig: not an Old Whig, or an Opposition Whig, but an unscrupulous Walpolean Whig, venal from her laced shoes to her powdered hair. Women were ambitious and materialistic; money, power and influence at court lay in the gift of the Whig government. Another inducement to she-Whiggery was the widespread female tendency to prefer the town to the country. The expensive, glamorous amusements of London society were a dangerous distraction from the responsibilities of the landed gentry who were the natural upholders of the Tory interest. Only an exceptional woman, whose inborn proclivities were suppressed by common sense and a virtuous education, could be trusted. Dr. Arbuthnot showed the two types in action in Law is a Bottomless-Pit, one of the pamphlets constituting The History of John Bull (1712), where Bull's first wife (the Whig-influenced Godolphin ministry) is a precursor of Lady Willit, while her successor (Harley's Tory ministry) behaves more like Martha Blount. The first was 'an extravagant Bitch of a Wife … a luxurious Jade, lov'd splendid Equipages, Plays, Treats and Balls, differing very much from the sober Manners of her Ancestors, and by no means fit for a Tradesman's Wife'. The second was 'a sober Country Gentlewoman, of a good Family, and a plentiful Fortune; the reverse of the other in her Temper'.²³

Gambling provided a powerful analogy between sexual and political temptation. Barter in The Distress'd Wife hints that Lady Willit's virtue is endangered by this pursuit:

Barter. Does she game as deep as ever?
Sir Thomas. You know she does.
Barter. And can you be so unreasonable as to put her out of the
Way of so innocent an Amusement?
(I, i, 61-4)

There is no need for more than a hint, when the danger is defined so clearly, time and again, in the literature of the period, a good example being the predicament of Lady Gentle in Cibber's The Lady's Last Stake (1707). A wife who lost heavily might be tempted to pay her debts of honour with her body rather than confess her extravagance to her husband. The masculine equivalent, endangering public virtue, was speculating on the stock market, according to George Berkeley in his Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721):

Money is so far useful to the public as it promoteth industry, and credit having the same effect is of the same value with money; but money or credit circulating through a nation from hand to hand without producing labour and industry in the inhabitants, is direct gaming.²⁴

Barter rejects Lord Courtlove's offer of inside information from government sources with a crushing rebuke:

But then one exorbitant Fortune of this sort hath made at least a thousand Beggars.—'Tis the most fraudulent, the most pemicious Gaming, under a more specious Denomination; and those who practise it, disgrace the Profession of a Merchant. (IV, xiv, 47-51)

It is unlikely that eighteenth-century merchants were quite so highly principled off stage, but Gay was prepared to sacrifice credibility, yet again, to moral edification.

Scriblerian ideals, however, were not always a deterrent to the muses. Even Gay's habitual hostility to Walpole, which slows down the action so badly in Polly, is turned to good theatrical account when government espionage is used to provide the catastrophe of The Distress'd Wife. Although the play opens with Sir Thomas Willit's resolution to give up his quest for a government employment and return to the country, he does not act on his decision until he accidentally reads a letter directed to Lady Willit, revealing that she has been getting money from his steward on the sly. A blunder by the Post Office brings about his enlightenment: the Clerk in the Inland Secretary's Private Office has opened the letter and neglected to seal it again. Intercepting the mail of suspected criminals and political opponents was longstanding government practice; according to Barter, "Tis a Grievance that is become so general, that no Particular will take it upon him to complain' (V, iv, 27-8). Pope and Swift were both convinced that their correspondence was subjected to these flattering attentions and said so in their letters.²⁵ Dr. Johnson thought Pope was suffering from an inflated sense of his own importance: 'All this while it was likely that the clerks did not know his hand.²⁶ Whatever the true state of affairs, it must have given the Scriblerians great satisfaction to envisage government policy defeated by its own weapons. It would have given them even greater satisfaction to know that John Lefebure, who became Foreign Secretary to the Post Office around 1718 and held that key post until his death in 1752, was a Jacobite mole.²⁷ This was one of many sardonic flourishes with which life has insisted on embellishing Scriblerian irony.

The Scriblerian attitude to humour was also a healthy influence on Gay's drama, encouraging him to uphold the tradition that comedy ought to be funny. The Scriblerian collaboration, Three Hours after Marriage, represents a reaction to the encroaching vogue for sentimentality: so do Achilles, The Distress'd Wife and even parts of Polly. Comparison between The Distress'd Wife and Cibber's The Provoked Husband (1728) shows Gay to advantage in this respect. Cibber based The Provoked Husband on Sir John Vanbrugh's unfinished A Journey to London. According to Robert D. Hume, The Provoked Husband is 'an important and undervalued play', which offers highly effective solutions to the marital problems under examination; Gay, on the other hand, 'was to end his The Distress'd Wife (1734) by having an extravagant wife hauled off to the country, an unsatisfying ending to a weak play'.²⁸ Cibber certainly treats his subject more seriously, in the main plot at least, attempting a convincing reconciliation between husband and wife, but not everyone was impressed. Henry Fielding gave his opinion in Tom Jones (1749):

The Puppet-show was performed with great Regularity and Decency. It was called the fine and serious Part of the Provok'd Husband; and it was indeed a very grave and solemn Entertainment, without any low Wit or Humour, or Jests; or, to do it no more than Justice, without any thing which could provoke a Laugh. The Audience were all highly pleased. A grave Matron told the Master she would bring her two Daughters the next Night, as he did not shew any Stuff; and an Attomey's Clerk, and an Exciseman, both declared, that the Characters of Lord and Lady Townly were well preserved, and highly in Nature. (XII, 5)²⁹

Gay's comedy offers no obeisance to provincial respectability. He tries to maintain, and even intensify, the comic force of Vanbrugh's original sketch. Vanbrugh gives the town-loving wife, Arabella, a sensible friend who tries to persuade her that it is possible to enjoy both the town and the country, with due moderation:

Clarinda. I would entertain my self in observing the new Fashions soberly, I would please my self in new Cloaths soberly, I would divert my self with agreeable Friends at Home and Abroad soberly. I would play at Quadrille soberly, I would go to Court soberly, I would go to some Plays soberly, I would go to Operas soberly, and I think I cou'd go once, or, if I lik'd my Company, twice to a Masquerade soberly.

Lady Arabella. If it had not been for that last Piece of Sobriety, I was going to call for some Surfeitwater. (II, i, 167-74)³⁰

Even with the surfeit-water to wash it down, Cibber found this dose of sobriety excessive, and reduced it drastically. Gay strikes a blow for laughter by removing the sensible friend altogether and substituting the effervescent Miss Sprightly, who has her own very strong reasons for preferring country life, but makes no attempt to confute Lady Willit. What the play loses in coherence it gains in vitality. James Thomson objected that 'Miss Sprightly's Wit is affected, and has not that amiable Softness and gentle Character which ought to recommend the Sprightliness of your Sex.'³¹ This is high praise: a persual of the sentimental melodrama Edward and Eleanora (1739), in which Thomson indulged to the full his taste for female softness, will confirm the reader's good opinion of Miss Sprightly.

The muses entertained no objection to morality, so long as it was compatible with good drama. It was when Gay forgot his need of them that they repaid his neglect by sneaking off. In an age of scholarly, cultivated gentleman dramatists, Gay had to remember how important it was to be a man of the theatre as well. He was always sure of attaining a reasonable degree of success when he kept established dramatic precedent in view; he achieved his masterpieces when he narrowed and sharpened his focus still further, to concentrate on the idea of theatre itself. Gay is at his best when he explores, and apparently defies, the nature of dramatic convention. The What D'Ye Call It and The Beggar's Opera engage the audience's emotions from within a framework that seems calculated to alienate them. He is not a conjuror, relying on concealment and illusions, but a magician, who can get his effect while leaving his apparatus in full view. This is a typically Scriblerian trick: A Tale of a Tub makes its point with a pyrotechnic display of controlled pointlessness; The Dunciad celebrates, in great poetry, the conditions that, according to its author, make great poetry impossible.

Gay was the only Scriblerian to bring this technique to the stage, which explains the paradox that he was never more Scriblerian than when he was most himself. Achilles and The Distress'd Wife are, in structural terms, conventional dramas; even Polly, despite the promise of the Introduction, dwindles into a straightforward ballad opera, lacking the ironic complexities provided in The Beggar's Opera by the re-entry of the Beggar and the Player at the end. His later material was just as rich in Scriblerian associations, but he lacked the independent perspective that had previously enabled him to take command of his form. Christopher Smart understood the necessity, for all the Scriblerians, of the clear view that precedes the satiric kill. His observations would have made a more appropriate epitaph than Pope's:

Let Eliada rejoice with the Gier-eagle who is swift and of great penetration.

For I bless the Lord Jesus for the memory of GAY, POPE and

SWIFT³²

Notes

¹ Quoted in The Poetical Works of John Gay (London, 1804 (C. Cooke)), I, 13. This inscription, although never finally used, was commonly quoted. See Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 5 vols. (London, 1753), IV, 258.

² Quotations from Johnson from George Birkbeck Hill (ed.), Lives of the English Poets (Oxford, 1905), II, 269, 271, 276, 283-84, 282.

³ 'Introduction', John Fuller (ed.), John Gay: Dramatic Works, 2 Vols. (Oxford, 1983) I, 2.

⁴ Quoted in DW, I, 58.

⁵ Alan Dugald McKillop, James Thomson: Letters and Documents (Lawrence, Kansas, 1958), p. 168.

⁶DW, I, 65.

⁷ F. W. Bateson (ed.), Epistles to Several Persons (Moral Essays), 2nd edn. (London and New Haven, 1961), p. 67. Vol. III, ii of the Twickenham Edition of The Poems of Alexander Pope.

⁸ Act, scene, and line references are to the texts of Gay's plays in DW, from which all quotations are taken (roman for italics in Airs).

⁹ William H. McBumey (ed.), The London Merchant (London, 1965), p. 12.

¹⁰The Gentleman Instructed in the Conduct of a Virtuous and Happy Life, 5th edn. (London, 1713), III, 374.

¹¹ Herbert Davis (ed.), The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift (Oxford, 1939-75), XII, 113-14.

¹²Dublin Intelligence, 14 January 1729.

¹³ Davis, XII, p. 80.

¹⁴The Double Gallant; or, The Sick Lady's Cure, 2nd edn. (London, 1707), pp. 27-8.

¹⁵ Bateson, pp. 46, 49-50.

¹⁶ 'Imagination in The Rape of the Lock, EC, 29 (1979), 54.

¹⁷ Geoffrey Tillotson (ed.), The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, 3rd edn. (London and New Haven, 1962), pp. 163-64. Vol. II of the Twickenham Edition of The Poems of Alexander Pope.

¹⁸ James Kinsley (ed.), The Poems of John Dryden (Oxford, 1958), IV, 1750.

¹⁹ A. C. Ewald (ed.), The Dramatic Works of George Farquhar (London, 1892), I, 259.

²⁰ Line references are to the texts of Gay's poems in Vintar Dearing (ed.), with the assistance of Charles E. Beckwith, John Gay: Poetry and Prose, 2 Vols. (Oxford, 1974), from which all quotations are taken.

²¹ Davis, I, 81, 26.

²² C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (eds.), Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1925-52), V, 452-53.

²³ Alan W. Bower and Robert A. Ericson (eds.), The History of John Bull (Oxford, 1976), pp. 12-13, 16.

²⁴ A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (eds.), The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne (London, 1948-57), VI, 71.

²⁵ See George Sherburn (ed.), The Correspondence of Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1956), III, 431-32 (Pope and Bolingbroke to Swift, 15 September 1734); IV, 231-32 (Pope to the Earl of Orrery, 27 March 1740); and Harold Williams (ed.), The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift (Oxford, 1963-65), V, 119-20 (Swift to Pope and Bolingbroke, 8 August 1738).

²⁶ Hill, III, 211.

²⁷ See Eveline Cruickshanks, Political Untouchables: The Tories and the '45 (London, 1979), p. 47. For details of Post Office procedure, see Kenneth Ellis, The Post Office in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1958), p. 64; for the official version of John Lefebure's career, see ibid., pp. 66-7.

²⁸ 'Marital Discord in English Comedy from Dryden to Fielding', Modern Philology, 74 (1976-77), 263.

²⁹ Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers (eds.), The History of Tom Jones (Oxford, 1974), II, 637-38.

³⁰ Bonamy Dobree (ed.), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1927), III, 150.

³¹ McKillop, p. 168.

³² Karina Williamson (ed.), The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, I (Jubilate Agno) (Oxford, 1980), p. 26.