SOURCE: "The Significance of Gay's Drama," in English 'Drama: Forms and Development-Essays in Honor of Muriel Clara Bradbrook, edited by Marie Axton and Raymond Williams, Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 142-63.

[In the following essay, Erskine-Hill considers the whole of Gay's dramatic corpus to illuminate Gay's experimentalism and the development of his most famous work, The Beggar's Opera. Erskine-Hill focuses on Gay's tendency to mix and subvert familiar generic forms to create entirely new types of theatre.]

John Gay's comedy The Distress'd Wife is the last and least-known of his full-length plays. Among those but once reprinted since the eighteenth century, it is a useful vantage-point from which to view Gay's dramatic achievement. The great original success of The Beggar's Opera, and continuing attention paid it in our time, have obscured the interest of the other plays, the relation of these to the Opera, and the larger significance of the canon.¹ I want to consider these matters, and to convey to the reader the experimental combination of forms, idioms and attitudes, and the humour and humanity, to be found in most of Gay's work for the theatre.

Gay wrote just two plays which espoused the formal dramatic orthodoxies of his time: his blank verse tragedy The Captives (1724) and The Distress'd Wife (written but probably not completed in his last years, and published in 1743). Only in the latter did Gay ever practise the form of the so-called Restoration comedy of manners. Yet this form was the most prominent and successful in Gay's lifetime; it had the approval of the great Congreve, had been flexibly adapted by Farquhar to the rendering of provincial life, and, stylised as it may seem to us with the hindsight of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novel, it was the literary realism of its age.² In The Distress'd Wife. as in other plays in the tradition of the comedy of manners, the language of the drama has a plausible relation with its fiction, judged by realist criteria. A terse, pointed and mainly polite prose is to be found in much of Gay's drama, but only here would it have been accepted by a contemporary audience as approximately the idiom they might hear in the specified setting.

The Distress'd Wife throws into relief the non-realist origins of all Gay's earlier drama. If we look at the earliest, The Mohocks. A Tragi-Comical Farce (1712), we infer from the subtitle an attraction towards parodic form. Indeed the farce comprises three kinds of literary language, of which the least conspicuous, the idiom of beau Gentle ('I vow and protest Gentlemen, I just now came from my Lady Pride's in the City' I.ii.181-2³), derives from the fopling figures of the comedy of manners. Most conspicuous is the mock-epic manner of the Mohocks themselves, a seemingly innocent amalgam of the more elevated blank verse of Milton and Dryden, interspersed with Rochesterian echoes:

Thus far our Riots with Success are crown'd,
Have found no stop, or what they found o'ercame;
In vain th' embattell'd Watch in deep array,
Against our Rage oppose their lifted Poles..

May constant Impotence attend his Lust;
May the dull Slave be bigotted to Virtue;
And tread no more the pleasing Paths of Vice
(I.i.1-4, 51-3)

High style goes with high-handedness and licence, homely with the humble and lawful. But the latter idiom, like the Mohocks' in I.i, undergoes extreme exaggeration, and Gay goes to school to Shakespeare (not for the last time in his plays) to strike the right note of lubberly yet warm farce. Dogberry, Verges and the Watch, and the mechanicals of A Midsummer Night's Dream, are all suggested by Gay's Watch, while Peter Cloudy is allowed one near-Falstaffian moment:

d'ye see, Mr. Constable, here is this Pole, Mr. Constable—I'll engage that this Pole—Mr. Constable, if it takes a Mohock in the right Place—it shall knock him down as flat as a Flounder, Mr. Constable—Pole is the word, Sir—I, one Night, Mr. Constable, clap'd my Back against the Watch-house, and kept nine Mohocks, with their Swords drawn, at Pole's length, broke three of their Heads, knock'd down four, and trim'd the Jackets of the other six.

(I.ii.93-8)⁴

Each kind of language is exaggerated so as to make us aware, not just of a social decorum of high and low styles, but of the problem of style itself; it is as if the boldly discrepant styles of 1 and 2 Henry IV, or Dryden's Don Sebastian, have been drawn, in comic game, so far apart that each questions not only the others but itself. In this respect The Mohocks derives not from the relatively mimetic mode of the comedy of manners, but the critical farce of Buckingham's Rehearsal. Yet with a difference. The manner of Buckingham's Bayes is reductive farce, while Gay's first scene enters with verve into the vein it mocks: mock-epic to Buckingham's burlesque. Buckingham's commentators are terse and dry compared with the child-like muddling of Gay's Watch. And while in The Rehearsal Bayes is hardly received into the gentlemanly milieu of Smith and Johnson, the Mohocks are eventually assimilated into the ignominious deference of the Watch. The movement of the piece is one of descent from the high style and pretensions of the Mohocks in 1.1 to the point at the end where the Emperor declares (aside): 'Faith, 'tis high time for us to sneak off (I.iii.108). The Mohocks is in this way similar to Mac Flecknoe or Rochester's Disabled Debauchee: all three works have a calculated movement from high to low, and from it their, admittedly various, comedy in large measure arises.

But the movement of the piece focuses on something not yet mentioned: on sex—on the intent of the Mohocks to ravish, cuckold and castrate, and on the happy survival of Joan and Peter Cloudy's marriage. The warm and virtuous bawdry of Peter's plea to Abaddon:

my Ears or my Nose is wholly at your Worship's Service; but pray, good, dear, loving Sir, don't let poor Gillian lose her only Comfort

(I.ii.141-3)

may suggest a double entendre in Gillian (Joan's) later reproach that Peter 'throws away upon two Wenches in one Night, [Weeping] what with good Huswifery would have satisfied his poor Wife for a Fortnight' (I.iii. 102-4), and certainly constitutes the prosperous outcome of the piece. The bubble of high language and high action has been pricked; the Mohocks fall to fearful and undignified men, like the Watch; Peter and Joan are intact; and the final dance concludes the comic form of the farce.

The happy note of The Mohocks is maintained in the intrigue and disguise of Gay's next play, The Wife of Bath (1713). But this is comedy of intrigue and disguise with a difference. While in his Prologue Gay insists that men and women in Chaucer's day were not more innocent than those of his own time—'They knew the World as well as You and I'—his play differs from any contemporary model. It ignores realistic illusion by presenting itself happening, as it were, in the interstices of the famous Canterbury Tales, in an inn on the pilgrims' road to Canterbury. It is avowedly 'literary' in the sense that it offers the audience the pleasure of seeing on stage characters such as the Franklin and the Wife of Bath.⁵ The poet Chaucer himself appears in the intrigue, where he uses his poetic skills to gain the woman of his choice. And though the style of the play is certainly more homogeneous than the contrasting exaggerations in The Mohocks, there are within it very sharply distinct idioms of both prose and verse.

The fopling type is again the most obvious connection with seventeenth-century comedy, and it is in relation to this type that the varieties of the rest of the play are best displayed. The idiom of the poetaster Frank Doggrell is effectively juxtaposed with the blunt English bawdry of the Wife of Bath and the distinctly pre-Waller lyricism of Chaucer. Doggrell is the successor of beau Gentle and the speaker of the most self-consciously polite and modern idiom of the play:

My Name is originally of French Extraction, and is written with a D, and an Apostrophe—as much as to say, De Ogrelle, which was the antique Residence of my Ancestors. (p. 2)

At the end of the play, tricked into marriage with a woman's woman, he becomes the frank Doggrell he has always resisted being. The Wife of Bath can then exclaim that his new wife's 'Great Uncle, in the Fifty Ninth Degree, was Groom of the Privy Stool to William the Conqueror—ha, ha, ha—'(p. 62).

This contrast, within the range of Restoration comedy, is the basis for others best demonstrated from the characteristic lyrics of the play. Here is the vein of the sophisticated D'Ogrelle (read aloud by Chaucer in a bored voice):

STANZAS, upon a Fair Lady making me Happy.

     Ye Gods! did Jove e'er taste such Charms,
     When prest in fair Alcmena's Arms,
                 O ye Immortal Pow'rs …
Dogg. Hold, hold, Sir,—Mark the Harmony,
  Sir;—and the easie Cadence that falls through the whole Stanza.
(p. 45)

Here is the Wife of Bath: 'The Maiden and the Batchelor,/Pardie … are simple Elves' (p. 27); or again:

There was a Swain full fair,
 Was tripping it over the Grass,
And there he spy'd with her Nut-brown Hair,
 A Pretty tight Country Lass.
  Fair Damsel, says he,
  With an Air brisk and free …
(p. 55)

And here is the lyric incantation of Chaucer the feigned Magus:

Swiftly, swiftly haste away,
And my inverted Wand obey:
Let no hurly-burly rise;
Nor Storms the Face of Heav'n disguise;
Let the Winds in silence lye,
Nor dreadful Lightnings streak the Skye …
(p. 39)

These are more various literary idioms than simply rude and polite. The polite Restoration is assimilated into the vein of Doggrell, and Gay uses his medieval setting to tap different and older literary sources (in Chaucer's lines we may note the Shakespearean 'hurly-burly' and faint reminiscence of the Dirge in Cymbeline) by means of which the polite is placed. Different styles almost seem to call themselves in question, and not only through song. Even that prose which, with greater or lesser degree of bluntness or affectation, is the shared idiom of most characters becomes comically problematic when spoken by Canterbury pilgrims:

Myrtilla. Love naturally flows into Poetry. I admire, Sir, that your Muse was never so obliging as to throw away a few tender things upon the Lady to whom you are so generous as to bestow your Heart.

Chaucer. Really, Madam, I never write Elegy.

(p. 47)

It would have sounded quite different in the milieu of The Distress'd Wife.

The Wife of Bath has been regularly dismissed.⁶ It has been said that Doggrell is a mere mouthpiece for Gay; how can this be true of a character whose affectation the comedy progressively deflates? It has been said that most of the figures are roles not personalities; by this criterion much early Shakespearean and Jonsonian comedy could be condemned. It has been said that its plot is 'broken-backed', the interest 'continually divided between the Florinda-Merit and Chaucer-Myrtilla episodes'.⁷ It has indeed a double and not very streamlined plot, but intrigue and disguise bring the two parts farcically together. Thus Doggrell, pressed but unwilling to marry Florinda (who prefers Merit), pays court to Myrtilla (who is about to take the veil). Lured into thinking he has enjoyed a liaison with Myrtilla (it was the Wife of Bath disguised as a nun), he is further tricked into the belief that he has achieved clandestine marriage with Myrtilla (it was Myrtilla's maid disguised as a nun). Chaucer wins Myrtilla through disguise as an astrologer. It may be seen that Doggrell and the Wife of Bath, one as gull and the other as plotter, bring together the two strands of the play. It can also be seen that their liaison formally joins the downright and the affected in idiom and outlook, as we find when she asks him next morning how he got on:

Dogg. Ah, Madam,—the most lovely of her Sex! kind, tender and obliging!—to find her pretty Lips the very Fountain of Wit, threw me in a perfect Extasie;—Harmony dwells in her Voice, and Zephyrs wanton in her Breath

Wife. Was you thereabouts my Man of Might,—'twas I advised you, my Lad … a rare Pupil i'fackins!—Her Breath sweet as balmy Zephyrs! 'Slidikins,—I begin to think my self young again—

(p. 54)

This comedy of juxtaposition is admirably built up to the successful theatre of the conclusion. Doggrell, still congratulating himself on his good fortune, resolves to keep cool in the face of Franklin's wrath—'I'll hum a Tune, and receive the Storm with all the Patience of an ancient Philosopher'. He hums a very Popean pastoral while Franklin rages up and down:

Dogg. Fa, la, la, la …
     For Damon stay'd;—Damon the loveliest Swain;
Frank. Bred up a Child under my own Wing, as a Body might say—
Dogg. And she the fairest Nymph of all the Plain.
Frank. Mad! stark staring Mad!—Why Frank, Sirrah
Dogg. Thus she complains, while all the Feather'd Throng,
Frank. Death, and Confusion!
(pp. 59-61)

Doggrell doubly invites his come-uppance when he warns the Wife not to be familiar with his spouse (the maid Busy) and thus learns the latter's true identity:

Dogg. Oh most egregious Error! Embarrass'd with a Chamber-maid, when I bid fair for a Countess!

Frank. Dal te ral, tal lal [Sings]
(p. 62)

Doggrell's glittering bubble is burst, and Franklin can sing his 'Dal te ral' to D'Ogrelle's earlier 'Fa, la, la'.

The play concludes in reconciliation. Jack hath his Jill. Merit wins Florinda, Chaucer Myrtilla, Doggrell, reconciled to Busy, can congratulate Chaucer, and the Wife seems likely to marry Franklin: 'Give me thy Hand then, old Nestor—I will defy the World to shew another such like Couple, in the decline of their Age. Ours is a meer Italian Autumn, that even excells the Spring in its variety of Beauty' (p. 63). In this atmosphere 'all turn Mediators' and the comedy ends with a dance more inclusive than The Mohocks'. But again the comic form has been a process of deflation. Again (though to a lesser degree) the drama has been rich in linguistic contrast, though too happy to scourge fools out of their humour. Doggrell loses Myrtilla but not his beau idiom, and the play, self-consciously literary as it is, manages to slip free from the patterns of Restoration comedy (which it nevertheless makes use of in part) and sail simply towards a sweeter final reconciliation than any other drama by Gay.

The pastoral mode in The Mohocks was the confused prose of the Watch. This was succeeded in The Wife of Bath by that of Franklin's servants Anthony and William (II.i), but another version of pastoral in the play was the strain of Doggrell's Popean eclogue in IV.iii. That couplet vein, considerably fraught with workaday particulars and earnest incongruity, becomes the chief mode of Gay's next play, The What D'Ye Call It: A Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce (1715). Again it is worth pausing upon the title. What D 'Ye Call It comments wittily on the subtitle—what indeed?—but also alludes to Shakespeare. It carries As You Like It and … What You Will a step further (as Mr P. E. Lewis has pointed out), while the subtitle reminds us of Hamlet (II.ii.424-30). Parodic sophistication is thus announced more conspicuously than before, and this is further stressed by the way the couplet vein of the play itself is set off by the more or less realistic rustic prose of a substantial induction. Alerted by Gay's Preface (lines 111-14) we easily connect Gay's rustics preparing their play with the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream (see III.i. 195 for the probable source of Gay's Peascod). In a sense the real pastoral of the play is the induction, contrasting almost as strongly with the verse of the play itself as the prose of the Watch contrasted with the hyperbolical vein of the Mohocks. We are again alerted to the relative arbitrariness of literary forms and decorums.

The induction also makes it clear that the play is a piece to order. As Sir Roger demands of his steward: 'And is the play as I order'd it, both a Tragedy and a Comedy? I would have it a Pastoral too; and if you could make it a Farce, so much the better—and what if you crown'd all with a spice of your Opera?' (lines 43-7). Sir Roger is the strongest link between induction and play, since his role as master is the same in each. He has ordered: now he can preside. By Sir Roger's 'hint' the play has so fitted the parts to his own tenants that 'ev'ry man talks in his own way!' (lines 53-5). He, Sir Humphry and Justice Statute sit at the table throughout the first act (perhaps throughout the play) with pipes, tobacco and tankard, and, appropriately enough, never speak without drinking. Their mastery gives them the advantage of being inside and outside the action at the same time; they propose for themselves the best of both worlds, with claret into the bargain.

The couplet vein of The What D'Ye Call It is quite remarkable. It has astonishing pace and verve; Gay deploys it in expressive variety of form and tone with the brilliance of a virtuoso, and a very notable subtlety of effect. Its most conspicuous feature, burlesque, is indeed responsible for some of the funniest moments, but the laughter is not dismissive. There are points when Popean pastoral is allowed its overt emotion:

KITTY

Dear happy Fields, farewell; ye Flocks, and you
Sweet Meadows …
(II.viii.1-2)

When she turns to her rake, 'Companion of my Cares', anyone familiar with Gay's age of burlesque and mockepic prepares to laugh at the low and ludicrous to come; yet what follows is not simply funny:

'Tis to thy Help I owe this Hat and Gown;
On thee I've lean'd, forgetful of my Work,
While Tom gaz'd on me, propt upon his Fork.
(II.viii.6-8)

We have only to compare this with Pope's burlesque of Ambrose Phillips in Guardian 40 to realise that Gay's humour does not preclude a real pathos in Kitty's artless literalism, which also has the merit of giving us a precise picture. When, in the next line, a more elevated note is regained—

Farewel, farewel; for all thy Task is o'er—

rake, hat, gown and fork are taken up by the emotive pastoral vein to which they delicately lend substance.

Or let us look at the most famous and funny burlesque moment, brilliantly successful on the stage: Timothy Peascod's dying speech as he prepares to be shot for desertion. The literary joke comes over first as the couplet rhetoric ('O Fellow-Soldiers, Countrymen and Friends' II.i.5) plunges on into artless detail:

I play'd at Nine-pins first in Sermon time:
I robb'd the Parson's Orchard next; and then
(For which I pray Forgiveness) stole—a Hen.

(But these crimes are not merely low and ludicrous if we remember eighteenth-century penalties.)

I. COUNTRYMAN.

Come, 'tis no time to talk.—

II. COUNTRYMAN

.… Repent thine III,
And Pray in this good Book.—[Gives him a Book.]

PEASCOD

… I will, I will.
Lend me thy Handkercher—The Pilgrim's Pro
[Reads and weeps.]
(I cannot see for Tears) Pro - Progress—Oh!
- The Pilgrim's Progress - Eighth - Edi -t- on
Lon-don-prin-ted - for - Ni-cho-las Bod-ding-ton
With new ad-di-tions never made before.-
Oh! 'tis so moving, I can read no more.
[Drops the Book.]
(I.i. 12-14, 21-30)

I have spoken of Kitty's artless literalism; here we have literalism specifically pointed. What is it that we laugh at? Certainly the banal details of the imprint and the idea that Tim should call them moving. But we see that in this situation anything would move him; he weeps really for his own death. To do this is not purely risible by any means. Gay has used the exaggerations of farce to create a most peculiar blend of hilarity and pity. At the same time the buoyant song of the couplets, every sob in place, runs its course like a nimble athlete taking each obstacle in his stride to complete his lap. Altogether a strange sense of the separateness of the constituent elements is achieved: printed object distinct from the emotions it appears to evoke, pity distinct from laughter, couplet-form distinct from potential disorder of laughter or tears. This is highly sophisticated and self-conscious farce. It warrants every term of the subtitle.

Sir Roger, however, wanted not merely a tragi-comipastoral farce, but 'a spice of your Opera' as well. Here too Gay keeps the promise of his induction. In II.viii Mrs Bicknell, playing Kitty, sung the ballad "Twas when the seas were roaring' which Gay also published separately, and which Handel may already have set. It is the climax of Gay's lyric performance in the drama. Kitty's situation is first intimated in the induction ('Ay, I have felt Squire Thomas's love to my cost'); in the play itself, in ways we have already seen, her situation is lyrically if humorously expounded, but in the ballad it is raised to a pure lyric intensity. This is another of Gay's salient formalistic contrasts, and may be thought to bring farcical rusticity to the brink of the tragic:

All melancholy lying,
 Thus wail'd she for her dear;
Repay'd each blast with sighing,
 Each billow with a tear;
When, o'er the white wave stooping,
 His floating corpse she spy'd;
Then like a lily drooping,
 She bow'd her head, and dy'd.
(II.viii.55-62)

Not without its own exaggeration, this operatic moment effectively puts Kitty beyond the reach of patronising laughter. (Her final lines in this scene seem to me to be funny in a purely 'literary' way—parodying Belvidira's madness at the end of Venice Preserved—and not to affect her status as a dramatic figure.)

One of the effects of Gay's writing is that we sympathise with as well as laugh at the rustics.⁸ This is endorsed by the speech Gay liked enough to copy out and send to Parnell on 29 January 1715 ('O Tyrant Justices …')⁹ and indeed by the structure of the play as a whole. Like The Beggar's Opera, The What D'Ye Call It is suddenly checked before the end: its fictionality is suspended, 'what's our Play at a stand?' and the parson refuses to mount Sir Roger's 'stage pro tempore' to marry Kitty and Filbert. Hurried parleying induces him to marry the two in the parlour—'So natural!' as the unsuspecting Sir Roger says—and thus the play is turned against the despotic patron who had ordered tragedy, comedy, pastoral and farce altogether, yet also a drama so like the existing order of things that each could talk in his own way. Kitty, the steward's daughter, whom Squire Thomas had seduced in real life, but who was only to be married to him (playing Thomas Filbert) in fiction, is now by the contrivance of the steward married to him in fact. Thus art turns unexpectedly on the patron; it refuses to be both acceptably fictional and acceptably factual: conscious of fact, it turns back upon fact to rectify it, and thus paradoxically vindicates its independence as fiction. Like The Wife of Bath, The What D'Ye Call It ends with marriage, here promoted by that 'plaguy dangerous thing' a stage play, but the concluding dance excludes Sir Roger who has stormed off in a passion.

The What D'Ye Call It was Gay's first stage success. We know something of how it was played and what people thought. Gay considered it to be 'out of the way of the Common Taste of the Town' (Gay to Caryll, 3 March 1715) and at first it bewildered. Some could sit through a performance and still not agree with the majority that it was meant to be funny. Pope's anecdote about the deaf Henry Cromwell who, 'hearing none of the words and seeing the action to be tragical, was much astonished to find the audience laugh' tells us that the play was performed in tragic manner, at least in part, as the frontispiece to the editions (insufficient evidence on its own) also suggests.¹⁰ Gay himself was especially pleased with the performances of Penkethman as Peascod, Mrs Bicknell as Kitty and Miss Younger as the little girl Joyce. It is probable that the overall theatrical effect was mock-heroic, not burlesque, and that manner and gesture remained dignified even when the words were low. Some of the surreal touches—the chorus of sighs and groans, and the ghost of the unborn child—would not of course have been so apparent to the audience as to the reader. One way and another the play made people uneasy; they felt it was getting at something but didn't know what. Griffin and Theobald read it as a 'jest upon the tragic poets'; others, noting the authorship, thought it a 'satire on the late war' (the impressment of country folk for military service).¹¹ Each response holds a part of the truth, but the brilliance of Gay's achievement lies most in his having evolved from a hint in Hamlet a dramatic structure which dissolves the hierarchy of dramatic forms, disorients by making its audience sympathise where they also ridicule, and, integrally with these effects, promotes a most unhierarchical marriage.

Griffin and Theobald thought Pope had a hand in The What D'Ye Call It, and a phrase in one of Gay's letters suggests some assistance from Pope and Arbuthnot.¹² With his next play, Three Hours After Marriage (1717) they certainly assisted, and were regarded and lampooned as confederates. With Cibber playing Plotwell, Penkethman Underplot and Mrs Bicknell Phoebe Clinket, Three Hours was performed on seven consecutive nights at Drury Lane to a tumultuous and controversial reception. On the second night, as a 'neutral' member of the audience recorded, 'the play was acted like a ship tost in a tempest'; the evidence is, however, that by the time Cibber got the play withdrawn the favourable party was prevailing, and general applause being given.¹³ While there were extrinsic reasons for the play's excited and in part hostile reception, there were intrinsic ones also, for the play is perhaps the most avant-garde comedy of eighteenth-century England.

Gay called The What D'Ye Call It a farce, but Three Hours a comedy.¹⁴ The later play has not less of the absurd than the former, yet the designation reliably suggests a close relation with seventeenth-century comedy. It is in that pattern that the play seems to be set at the start, and to focus on the hasty marriage of a woman of the town to the elderly doctor and collector Fossile, a figure descended from Congreve's Foresight, and probably a lampoon on the contemporary Dr Woodward. Stock expectations concerning young wives, old husbands and prolific cuckoldry have been aroused when Phoebe Clinket, Fossile's niece and a poetess, enters, pens stuck in her hair, and preceded by her maid bearing a writing desk on her back. The first lines she recites concern the imminent death of Nature (p. 5), and proceed, as Ian Donaldson rightly observes, to deploy an image from Horace's De Arte Poetica and Ovid's Metamorphoses traditionally associated with natural confusion and literary enormity. Pope was later to give the allusion brilliant setting in The Dunciad.¹⁵ 'A rare Affected Creature' (as Mrs Townley calls her), Phoebe is an extension of the Doggrell figure into the realms of near-fantasy. The juxtaposition of a standard comedy-of-manners setting with (as it turns out) a tragedy on The Universal Deluge is the first of the surreal effects of this drama.

The recitation of The Universal Deluge is next mingled, in most effective stage farce, with the efforts of Plotwell and Mrs Townley to communicate surreptitiously with one another under cover of reciting their parts:

Town. [As Pyrrha] Thou seest me now
 sail'd from my former Lodgings
                 Beneath a Husband's Ark

Plotw. [As Deucalion] Through all the Town
 with Diligent Enquiries, I sought my
                  Pyrrha—
Clink.           Beyond all Patience! the
 Part, Sir, lies before you; you are never
                 to perplex the Drama with
 Speeches Extempore.
Plotw.             Madam, 'tis what the top-Players often do.
(p. 16)

The comedy works outwards from the intermingling of two orders of fiction (Deucalion's Flood unnervingly penetrating the world of Townley and Plotwell) to reflect upon the relation of fiction and fact. The whole sequence is working up to the open recognition that it is Colley Cibber, a 'top-Player', who is thus made to admit his own practice. The audience, having perceived that the part of Deucalion really discloses Plotwell, suddenly sees that the part of Plotwell really discloses Cibber, there on the stage playing Plotwell playing Deucalion. In this way the drama comically explores the very idea of dramatic fictions.

In the admirable scene that follows, the tragedy, now feigned to have been written by Plotwell lest its female authorship inhibit its reception, is submitted for the approval of Sir Tremendous (Dennis) and two players. Its opening (Phoebe Clinket now reads) discloses an immense flood with cattle and men swimming, steeples rising above the waters and 'with Men and Women perching on their Weather-Cocks'. Sir Tremendous perceives an improbability:

Sir Trem. Begging your Pardon, Sir, I believe
  it can be proved, that Weather-cocks are of a modern Invention.
(p. 21)

As anachronism after anachronism is excised (to the protests of Phoebe that 'Were the Play mine, you should gash my Flesh, … any thing sooner than scratch my Play' p. 22) the pace madly accelerates:

Sir Trem. Such Stuff! [strikes out.]
  abominable! [strikes out.] most execrable!
Ist Play. This Thought must out.
2nd Play. Madam, with Submission, this Metaphor.
1st Play. This whole Speech.
Sir Trem. The Fable!
Clink. To you I answer—
Sir Trem. The Diction!
Clink. And to you—Ah, hold, hold—I'm butcher'd, I'm massacred. For Mercy's
       Sake! murder, murder! ah [faints.]
(p. 24)

The sequence farcically asks the question: what is a play? Everything is struck out. What can be left? Only a metaphysical emptiness. But the play has no existence outside the disordered imagination of its author, hence the propriety of her fainting at the moment she does. The scene, with a kind of Alice Through the Looking Glass logic, comically exposes the notions of dramatic 'Vray-semblance' and neo-classical regularity.

A later scene, the most celebrated or notorious of the play, is even richer in farcical humour and sophisticated literary awareness. Here Plotwell and Underplot woo Mrs Townley, the first disguised as a Mummy, the second as an Alligator:

Plotw. Thus trav'ling far from his Egyptian Tomb,
     Thy Antony salutes his Cleopatra …
     [Underplot in the Alligator crawls
  forward, then rises up and embraces her.]
Under. Thus Jove within the Serpent's scaly Folds,
     Twin'd round the Macedonian Queen.
Townley Ah! [shrieks.]
Plotw. Fear not, Madam. This is my evil
 Genius Underplot that still haunts me. How the Devil got you here?
(pp. 58-9)

As in the earlier scene, the pace soon accelerates to what F. W. Bateson has well called 'a crescendo of absurdity'.¹⁶,

Plotw. Madam, I am a Human Creature. Taste my Balsamick Kiss.
Under. A Lover in Swaddling-Clouts! What is his Kiss, to my Embrace?
Plotw. Look upon me, Madam. See how I am embroider'd with Hieroglyphicks.
Under. Consider my beautiful Row of Teeth.
Plotw. My Balmy Breath.
Under. The strong joints of my Back.
Plotw. My erect Stature.
Under. My long Tail.
Townley Such a Contest of Beauty! How shall I decide it?
(p. 60)

In this scene Gay is closer to Jonsonian comedy (we may remember Volpone rising from his bed to woo Celia, and the uncasing of Sir Politic Would-Be) than in any other of his plays. The logic in the fantasy works wonderfully, the two disguises expressing different amorous advantages, Plotwell having the sweet kiss, the erect stature and the embroidered garb, Underplot the embrace, the strong back and the long tail. Plotwell is the polite lover, Underplot the bawdy seducer. The names of the two lovers convey not only different roles within dramatic fictions, but different aspects of them; here again the drama thinks about the composition of dramas. The Mummy has the conventional stiffness and sweetness of the overplot, the Alligator the underplot's propensity to rise vigorously from below and carry away the interest. (The farce is so fertile here that when, on the fourth night of performance, Penkethman playing Underplot fell backwards into the Mummy-case and got stuck, the audience may have seen some point in it; certainly the fifth-night audience demanded a repetition.¹⁷)

Gay brought this stage Dunciad to resolution with perhaps the most adroit and suggestive of all his concluding reconciliations. Mrs Townley is reclaimed by a previous husband; Fossile who desired posterity without a wife, can keep her baby. Phoebe Clinket, in a beautifully conventional end-of-comedy speech, puts it thus:

Clink. Uncle, by this Day's Adventure, every one has got something. Lieutenant
     Bengall has got his Wife again. You a fine Child; and I a Plot for a Comedy; and I'll this Moment set about it.
(p. 80)

What will this comedy be like? Very much, no doubt, like what the audience has just seen. Thus the fantasies of Three Hours After Marriage. A Comedy bend back to link with the fantasies of The Universal Deluge. A Tragedy, like a serpent biting its own tail. If, before, we thought the mad imagination of Phoebe Clinket was 'placed' in the play, Gay in the concluding lines removes that assurance. Have we not, perhaps, been witnessing her new comedy?

Gay's next two dramas mark a break from the sophisticated literary combinations we have been exploring. Dione. A Pastoral Tragedy (published in 1720 but never performed) is straightforward in a way the earlier plays are not. 'Pastoral Tragedy' has, of course, none of the comic paradox of the subtitles of The Mohocks or The What D 'Ye Call It, and works entirely within one literary mode: the pastoral eclogue in couplets, expanded in such a way as to comprise a sustained action. The skilful and often moving quality of the verse has often been noted. The Captives (1724), a relative success in the theatre, is in some ways similar. Written in the muted and flexible blank verse deriving from All For Love, The Mourning Bride and Cato, this tragedy never questions its own conventions by combination or contrast. In one important respect, however, these two plays mark an advance on what has gone before, and a development to be sustained in Gay's future drama. While the dramatic figures of the earlier plays were on a diminutive scale, capable of being easily manipulated into ingenious and surprising patterns by the dramatist, the chief figures of Dione and The Captives are on a full human scale, and are sufficiently sustained in a single dramatic mode as to induce a measure of identification on the part of the audience. Dione in particular, who has the cruelly ambiguous role of Viola in Twelfth Night—disguised as a man commissioned to woo for another the man she is herself in love with—certainly invites this interest, while in The Captives something of the same is true of the imprisoned prince Sophernes, his wife Cylene, and Phraortes the king. It is further notable that both these plays are studies of fidelity in love. In The Captives, too, it is corruption in high places that menaces a fidelity which could survive even military defeat and capture. Gay has built up the sketchy magistrates of The Mohocks, and the petty but believable tyrant Sir Roger in The What D'Ye Call It, into the figure of Phraortes the gullible though good king. Perhaps for the first time in Gay's drama, certainly the last, authority effectively aids fidelity.

In several ways, then, these little-known plays point ahead to the best known. To turn from The Captives to The Beggar's Opera (1728) is by no means to be returned simply to the manner of the experimental farces and comedies, for the human scale is maintained, as is the preoccupation with fidelity. Yet The Beggar's Opera is a return to a mixed dramatic form. And here it is necessary to affirm what is perhaps still a minority view about the Opera, expressed by Bertrand Bronson in what seems to me the best criticism we have on a drama by Gay.¹⁸ 'There is little probability that Gay intended a serious attack on Italian opera … The Beggar's Opera may more properly be regarded as a testimonial to the strength of opera's appeal to John Gay's imagination than as a deliberate attempt to ridicule it out of existence'. This makes sense if we remember The What D'Ye Call It. The farce became operatic when Kitty sang "Twas when the seas were roaring', which Handel set. (The setting is used again in the Opera, II. ix.) The effect of that song was to set Kitty's experience in a new light, to release from a diminutive and sometimes ridiculous figure a lyrical emotion which the structure of the drama could not otherwise have conveyed. If it mocked operatic form it did so in a context where every dramatic form was mocked. The life of The Beggar's Opera lies also in its deployment of contrasting but equally valid and equally questionable modes. It does not follow The Rehearsal in mocking one mode to endorse another.

This point may be referred to the parting of Polly and Macheath at the end of Act I. While many of the airs are taken from high opera, Purcell, Handel, Buononcini and others, these settings happen to be popular. But when Macheath sings:

Were I laid on Greenland's Coast,
And in my Arms embrac'd my Lass;
Warm amidst eternal Frost,
Too soon the Half Year's Night would pass
(I.xiii.31-4)

it is not apparent that the choice of 'Over the Hills and far away' is ridiculing either Italian operatic form, operatic form, or the reality of the lovers' emotion. It may, certainly, be building on the English Dramatic Operas to create a more popular English operatic mode than had existed before: that is to claim something different. In this instance the poetry too—'Warm amidst eternal Frost'—has an affirmative intensity denied by the terse, polished, worldly idiom of Macheath's preceding prose: 'You might sooner tear a Pension out of the Hands of a Courtier, a Fee from a Lawyer, a pretty Woman from a Looking-glass, or any Woman from Quadrille' (I.xiii.27-9). The Beggar's Opera is most obviously a mixed form because Gay has abandoned recitative, thus leaving himself free to employ much highly unoperatic colloquialism. Having thus, in the song, established a mode strikingly different from the prose of a cynical world, Gay is able, in Polly's symmetrical response, to hint at a prospect from the world of crime and punishment: transportation.¹⁹

Were I sold on Indian Soil,
Soon as the burning Day was clos'd,
I could mock the sultry Toil …
(I.xiii.35-7)

The operatic plighting of troth, and the corrupt world of robbers and receivers, are momentarily held side by side in the song. That is not all. Contemporary responses to Gay's drama show how ready audiences were to detect literary allusion.²⁰ Bronson's suggestion that this scene remembers the parting of the lovers Floridante and Elmira in Handel's Floridante (1721) is eminently plausible, but it is surely clear from the way Gay's scene itself works that it is hardly 'ridiculing it out of existence'.

In Three Hours After Marriage we noticed how a part of the comedy arose from the contrast of different levels of fiction with what a historical actor (Cibber) actually did. In the famous quarrel of Polly and Lucy (II.xiii) a similar effect is achieved, if not quite with the outrageous practicality which used the actor in question to admit his own fault on stage. The quarrel in the Opera unmistakably alludes to the notorious stage quarrel of the two rival singers Faustina and Cuzzoni, in Buononcini's Astyanax (1727). Equally certain is the allusion to Handel's Alessandro (1726) which had been written to give each of the two celebrities an equally good part, as Lisaura and Rossane vie with each other for the great conqueror's love. A contemporary witness of the Opera detected an allusion to the same matter, though in this case in the form of the earlier drama by Lee.²¹ Once again three levels of 'reality' play off against one another: Faustina and Cuzzoni, whose real quarrel broke the fiction of Astyanax; Polly and Lucy (were Miss Fenton and Miss Egleton really quarrelling, the first audience could have wondered); and the rival lovers in Handel and Lee, an allusion which, as Bronson observes, 'makes something of an Alexander out of Macheath'.²²

The relation between prose and song is the whole art of the Opera, and is of course far more various than these instances suggest. If its chief feature is the contrast between the prose of familiar corruption—'Indeed, indeed, Brother, we must punctually pay our Spies, or we shall have no Information' (II.x.39-41)—and the lyric of high intensity or tenderness—the Twelfth Night-like vein of 'Love with Youth flies swift away,/ Age is nought but Sorrow' (II.iv.37-8)—there are plenty of songs whose mordant satiric pace reinforces our sense of the world that the prose renders. There are moments too when the roles are reversed, as at that politically crucial point where the buoyant singing about court treachery to the tune of Lillibullero is succeeded by Macheath's ringing avowal: 'But we, Gentlemen, have still Honour enough to break through the Corruptions of the World' (III.iv.6-17). For the moment (it will not be sustained) Macheath has moved into the part of the true patriot, Craftsman, or Tory satirist, dedicated to saving his country by bringing down corrupt government.²³

Perhaps it may be said that while Gay's earlier comedies playfully use different conventions to question and undermine one another, in the Opera an equally analytic and experimental skill deploys them to question and make one another good. This may be one mark of the Opera's relatively greater stature. Yet nobody who compares The What D'Ye Call It with the Opera can fail to see certain formal similarities. In each a 'criminal' about to be executed attempts to face death with courage only to break down (Peascod by attempting to run away, Macheath by drinking until his 'Courage is out'). In each he is confronted by mistress and 'baseborn child'—in the Opera to an almost farcical degree. In each play the extreme artifice of the main action is thrown into relief through being set in a wider framework—Sir Roger and the steward, the Beggar and the player—and in each case the drama comes to an unexpected yet supremely fit conclusion as inner and outer fictions collide. The conclusion of the Opera is problematic in that it is a 'happy' ending in which every problem raised by the drama is conspicuously unsolved. Peachum and Lockit are not 'brought to the gallows', the fate of Polly and Lucy remains in suspense, Macheath sneakingly acknowledging his marriage in an aside to Polly, but putting off its public announcement.

Much recent criticism of Gay has stressed his importance as a social critic and as one of that courageous group of satirists who assailed the Hanoverian court and the Walpole regime. I am far from dissenting from this view, though my present argument has been of a different kind. It is, however, necessary to bring this issue into focus as we turn to Gay's last works for the theatre, Polly (published 1729), Achilles (1733), The Distress'd Wife and The Rehearsal at Goatham (published 1754). 'John Gay: Lightweight or Heavyweight?' is a question that has recently been posed.²⁴ The dichotomy is misleading. It associates 'serious' with the grave, earnest and even ponderous, and links 'entertaining' with the trivial. Gay is a serious critic both of life and art, but what makes his criticism tell is precisely his deft and lighthearted manner. A devastating reflection in the buoyant gaiety of a song, or the turn of a swift sentence—these are his means, but not his only means. His light but mordant touch is the effect also of the protean nature of his dramatic structures. The carefully poised instability of his comic form, as I have tried to display it, lends lightness to his reflections: a moral parallel or a political allusion is suddenly perceived, only to be whisked away as the kaleidoscope of his perspective is deftly thrown into a new configuration.

With Polly, however, Gay does move in the direction of a more straight-forward kind of moral play. The action of Polly is not fully framed, like that of the Opera; it has an induction of Poet and Players but they never reappear at the end. We are thus led into the central fiction, culminating in the execution of Morano (Macheath), and the union of the faithful Polly to the virtuous Indian prince Cawwawkee, as into a truth-telling mode that is never challenged. It is in this respect closer to The Captives than The What D'Ye Call It, Three Hours or the Opera. There is good evidence that in Polly Gay sought to create a more stable moral fiction than the Opera, with a clear and firm conclusion.²⁵ Polly, virtuous and faithful, true to the now unromantically criminal Macheath to his death, can finally be joined to a virtue worthy of her own. This does not mean, in my view, that Polly is drastically inferior to the Opera.²⁶ It is rather a kind of moral riposte to the Opera and to be judged as such. Macheath is here the criminal hero of unglamorous middle age; not an Alexander of the underworld but the Antony of an opulent West, Jenny his Cleopatra, tempting him to abandon the empire of the Indies for love ('Let us seize the ships then, and away for England' II.ix.58-9). Polly is his suffering Octavia. This parallel, explicit more than once, is the governing metaphor of the play. The Opera gave us the old world, Polly the new; in the Opera Polly is threatened with poisoning by Lucy, in Polly with seduction by Jenny; in the Opera suspense over Macheath's death is ended by a reprieve, in Polly by execution; in the Opera the conclusion is indeterminate, in Polly it is clear.

The 1730 revision of The Wife of Bath is another sign of Gay's move away from an experimental, formally self-questioning drama. A full discussion of the changes would be of interest,²⁷ but it is clear from the conversion of Franklin into Plowden, Chaucer into Sir Harry Gauntlet, and the excision of the more archaic and interesting poetry, such as Chaucer's spell and the Wife's ballad of love-making, that Gay now wished to bring his early play closer to the comedy-of-manners form. This version perhaps deserves Allardyce Nicoll's judgement that The Wife of Bath 'owes more to the dramas of the time of Charles II than to any others'²⁸ and is the less interesting for it.

Gay's course towards a plainer moral form of drama is interestingly complicated by his last opera, Achilles (posthumously performed in 1733). The truth-bearer is now not Dione or Polly in men's clothing but the youthful Achilles in woman's clothing, placed in that disguise in the corrupt court of Lycomedes by Thetis, to keep him from the Trojan War. The form is that of situational farce, the theme fidelity to a purpose. Achilles is, as it were, the Manly, the Plain Dealer in a world of gossip and intrigue. And the shock at hearing Gay's polite modern prose in the mouths of the Canterbury Pilgrims is outdone by the same parlance being given to a Homeric hero and his divine mother:

Ach. Were I allow'd to follow my Inclinations,
  what wou'd you have to fear? - I
    shou'd do my Duty, and die with
  Honour. - Was I to live an Age I cou'd do no
    more.
Thet. You are so very obstinate, that really,
  Child, there's no enduring you. - Your
    Impatience seems to forget that I am a Goddess …
(I.i.52-6)

True to himself, Achilles as Pyrrha gets a court lady with child and rebuffs with great violence the amorous advances of the king. In a well-contrived resolution, Ulysses disguised as a merchant precipitates the definitive betrayal of Achilles's masculine and martial character. The comic conclusion is a celebration of honesty to Nature—

Nature breaks forth at the Moment unguarded; Through all disguise she herself must betray—

(III.xii.79-80)

the dance celebrates both Achilles' marriage and his departure for the Trojan War, and marks also the fall of the corrupt minister Diphilus whose 'paltry flattery' brought about the king's humiliation at Achilles' hands. The quite recherche unrealism of the opera's action lightly and charmingly endorses the heavyweight virtues embodied in Achilles. Though the quality of the songs is notably inferior to those of The Beggar's Opera and Polly, Gay's third and final opera is a work of real merit, and considerable stage potential.

And so we return to The Distress'd Wife, and come to The Rehearsal at Goatham. Both plays labour their moral judgement, and while the idea of the latter had possibilities for experimental farce, these are undeveloped in the rough dramatic sketch about the censorship of Polly which has come down to us. The Distress'd Wife is more considerable, and the first act has an overt moral desperation quite new in the drama of Gay. Viewed as a whole the relative realism of its mode falls into the pattern of a fable of false stewardship and marital betrayal. There is no combination or questioning of modes. Sir Thomas, a country gentleman whose wife entangles him in the web of court deception and connives with his treacherous steward to gamble away his inheritance, struggles to preserve his integrity and be master of his household again. (In the context of the Tory writers' assault on Walpole and Queen Caroline the political implications are reasonably clear.)²⁹ Gay's last plays are serious works at least, and each contains speeches which help us appreciate what is implied in the dazzling formalistic indirection of his earlier drama.

Sir Headstrong. [on the innocent Romantic puppet-show at Goatham]:
Such audacious Wretches should starve, who, because they are poor,
are so insolently honest in every thing they say, that a rich Man
cannot enjoy his Property in quiet for'em.
Pother.           We must keep these
  Wretches down. 'Tis right to keep Mankind in
Dependance.
(pp. 37-8)

This exchange may stand, in summary, for 'John Gay: Social Critic'.³⁰ It underlines Gay's true pastoral perspective upon power and wealth, which his plays repeatedly though never steadily or continuously offer their audience. Gay is not proposing an alternate social structure; he may hardly be thought to oppose hierarchy as such, yet no part of the operation of hierarchy escapes his radical mockery and free judgement. But Gay the social critic is part only of Gay the dramatist. Here is the culminating speech of the strong first act of The Distress'd Wife, Sir Thomas in soliloquy:

Where shall one look for Honesty?—Who hath it?—Or of what use is it to the Owner?—'Tis a Restraint upon a Man's Fortune; 'tis a Curb upon Opportunity, and makes either a Publick or private Trust worth nothing. What's its Reward?—Poverty—Is it among the Rich? No. For it never keeps Company with Avarice, Luxury and Extravagance.—Is it among the Vulgar? No. For they act by Imitation—Who can one Trust?—If I trust my servant I tempt him.—If I trust my friend I lose him.—If I trust my Wife, for the quiet of the Family She looks upon it as her Duty to deceive me.

'Tis then our selves, who by implicit Trust, Tempt Servants, Friends and Wives to be Unjust.

(pp. 21-2)

This is a little more complicated than the exchange from The Rehearsal at Goatham. Gay writes here with understanding of a person who cannot relate truth and falsity in a single coherent picture of society. In the Falstaffian self-interrogation on Honesty (cf. the soliloquy on Honour in 1 Henry IV) there lurks a deeper paradox concerning the complicity of the judging mind in what it judges. The possibility of a moral life seems questioned. The soliloquy asks the question: 'Where shall one look for Honesty?' and touches on the question: 'How shall one look for Truth?' It may be thought that it is dubiety on this score which underlies the formal experimentation, the contrasting and questioning of modes, and the kaleidoscopically shifting perspectives of Gay's best comedy. Far from seeing man in 'One clear, unchanged and universal light' (An Essay on Criticism, line 71), these plays are aware that the thing perceived depends on the approach of the perceiver; Kitty in The What D'Ye Call It is tragi-comi-pastoral, farcical and operatic. As the genre is applied so the truth will be found. The writer who feels this must, like Gay, seek to construct his plays out of several genres, making them work together while yet letting the audience sense the separateness of the constituent parts, as versions of reality.

Gay stands in a special place in English drama. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had exhausted the available dramatic forms, in the sense that an early eighteenth-century dramatist could not but be aware of their full and successful exploitation in the hands of his predecessors. Though the comedy of manners was by no means dead, as the drama of Sheridan, Goldsmith and Boucicault attests, English drama was not to find new forms until the Irish playwrights of the twentieth century. This may account for the restless character of Gay's dramatic achievement—'Will he, alone, not imitate himself?' asks the Prologue to Achilles—and its curious Janus-faced position. On the one hand it seems fin-de-siecle: the amused, sophisticated parody of greater masters, the lively farce after the great century's drama was done. On the other hand, as Gay seems to have recognised, his restless combination of different forms, idioms and subjects was innovatory, and to that extent it is not absurd to detect a modernistic indeterminacy in some of his best drama. Gay was after all one of the Scriblerus Club, whose deep humanistic respect for classical forms combined with an inventively parodistic freedom in their handling to produce A Tale of a Tub and The Dunciad, those formally problematic and multi-perspectived masterpieces.

I don't wish to weaken a case which may already seem to be verging on the wildly anachronistic, but I suggest that Gay's peculiar dramatic achievement can helpfully be seen in the light of some remarks of Serenus Zeitblom on the early work of Leverkuhn in Mann's Dr Faustus: '… this disillusioned masterpiece … already bore within itself the traits of parody and intellectual mockery of art, which … so often emerged in a creative and uncanny way … All the superficial lot simply called it witty and amusing. In truth parody was here the proud expedient of a great gift threatened with sterility by a combination of scepticism, intellectual reserve, and a sense of the deadly extension of the kingdom of the banal'.³¹ Needless to say, Gay is no Leverkuhn, Schönberg or Mann. The grandiosity of Zeitblom's formulation is inappropriate to England's least pretentious writer. These qualifications made, Mann's words do, I suggest, help us to recognise something of the larger significance of Gay's theatre, corresponding to the fin-de-siecle face of modernism. Gay's gift and situation had something in common with Leverkuhn's 'great gift'. But it is to another great twentieth-century German author we must turn for applicable words expressive of the other face of modernism: Brecht developing some remarks on The Beggar's Opera and The Threepenny Opera. 'The new school of play-writing must systematically see to it that its form includes "experiment". It must be free to use connections on every side; it needs equilibrium and has a tension which governs its component parts and "loads" them against one another'.³² This well describes some of Brecht's most famous plays (not just The Threepenny Opera). It would be a good description of the best drama of Gay. It makes it clear that Brecht did not just find in The Beggar's Opera the raw material for a new kind of play. It means rather that, surprising as it may seem, there are some radical affinities between the eighteenth-century and the twentieth-century playwright.

Notes

¹ Mr P. E. Lewis has written: 'Another look at John Gay's The Mohocks, Modern Language Review, LXI-II (1968), 790-3; 'Gay's burlesque method in The What D'Ye Call It', and 'Dramatic burlesque in Three Hours After Marriage', Durham University Journal, LX (1967-8), 232-9 and LXIV (1971-2), 13-25. These are helpful studies. I differ from them in thinking that the category of literary burlesque alone is insufficient for the explication and appreciation of Gay's drama. Mr. Lewis's very well judged critical study of The Beggar's Opera (1976), published by Edward Arnold appeared too late for inclusion in my discussion.

² I am speaking of the lifetime of Gay (1685-1732). This is not yet the period of Richardson and Fielding, but it may be thought that the fictions of Defoe merit the term 'realism'. Without doubt certain scenes in Defoe evoke the word 'realistic' but it is doubtful if the same is true of his fictions as a whole. Where they reach beyond a limited subjectivity (Crusoe or Moll) it is in the direction of a providential and ultimately metaphysical order. Restoration comedy, on the other hand, offers something of a secular and objective scrutiny of a number of different individuals in a social pattern, which I take to be a requisite of realism.

³ With the exception of The Beggar's Opera and perhaps of Three Hours After Marriage none of Gay's plays has been satisfactorily edited. In quotation I have: (i) used John Gay, The Beggar's Opera, ed. P. E. Lewis (Edinburgh, 1973), the best modern edition of the Opera; (ii) cited the accessible Poetical Works of John Gay, ed. G. C. Faber (Oxford, 1926) for all other plays whose complete texts are included in that volume; and (iii) in the case of the plays not so included (The Wife of Bath, Three Hours After Marriage, The Distress'd Wife and The Rehearsal at Goatham) cited the first editions, giving page references. I have sometimes reversed the founts in Gay's use of Italic, and regularised abbreviations of characters' names.

⁴ The debt to Much Ado About Nothing has been noted by W. H. Irving, John Gay: Favorite of the Wits (Durham, North Carolina, 1940), p. 66 and F. S. Boas, An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Drama, 1700-1780 (Oxford, 1953), p. 169.

⁵ Gay and Pope were both working in the aftermath of Dryden's revival of interest in Chaucer. See Irving, John Gay, pp. 77-8 for the immediate context of the comedy.

⁶ The play exists in two versions, 1713 and 1730; it is radically revised in the later version. F. W. Bateson, English Comic Drama, 1700-1750 (Oxford, 1929), p. 82 and P. M. Spacks, John Gay (New York, 1965), pp. 131-2, are especially contemptuous.

⁷ The judgement of Irving, John Gay, p. 79, who is, however, much the most interesting critic on this play.

⁸ Bateson, English Comic Drama, p. 83, has well said that 'the parody itself becomes creative and develops into a miniature comedy of sentiment of singular attraction'—though this oversimplifies—and Boas, Eighteenth-century Drama, p. 173, notes that Kitty's grief finds 'moving expression' in the ballad.

⁹The Letters of John Gay, ed. C. F. Burgess (Oxford, 1966), pp. 17-18.

¹⁰ Pope to Caryll, 3 March 1715; Letters of John Gay, p. 19.

¹¹ Benjamin Griffin and Lewis Theobald, A Complete Key to the Last New Farce The What D'Ye Call It (London, 1715); Pope to Caryll (see n. 10 above).

¹² Gay to Parnell, 29 January 1715 (see n. 9 above).

¹³ George Sherburn, 'The fortunes and misfortunes of Three Hours After Marriage', Modern Philology, XXIV (1926-7), 102-5; this essay is an admirable account of the play's performance and reception.

¹⁴ Gay to Parnell (see n. 9 above) and the title-page of Three Hours After Marriage.

¹⁵ Ian Donaldson, The World Upside-Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding (Oxford, 1970), pp. 185-6. Donaldson's chapter on Gay in this book is much to be recommended.

¹⁶ Bateson, English Comic Drama, p. 87.

¹⁷ Sherburn, 'Three Hours After Marriage, p. 102.

¹⁸ B. H. Bronson, 'The Beggar's Opera, first published in Studies in the Comic (Berkeley, 1941); reprinted in Restoration Drama: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. John Loftis (New York, 1966), pp. 298-327; see p. 314. As Bronson observes, the significance of Gay's having written the libretto for Handel's Acis and Galatea cannot be forgotten.

¹⁹ This is observed by William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1950), pp. 241-2.

²⁰ This is clear from the suspicious/hostile attitude of Griffin and Theobald in A Key … to The What D 'Ye Call It, and from the appreciative attitude of a paper on The Beggar's Opera submitted to The Craftsman on 23 April?1728, by 'W.B.' The whole paper is of great interest for the contemporary reception of the Opera, and especially its recognition that an allusion to another author is not necessarily a mockery of him. W.B. writes of 'pleasant Parallells with some of our most celebrated Dramatic Authors, who at ye same Time must not be understood to suffer by this jocular Treatment, no more than ye great Virgil by Cotton's Travesty, or the mightiest Homer by Dr Swift's exquisite pleasantry in his Battel of Books … At ye Quarrelling Scene of Peachum and Lockit, I could not help thinking on Brutus and Cassius, but without lessening my Respect for those Ancient Heroes, or the incomparable Shakespear, and Porcia must likewise excuse me, if I remembered her, when Polly sends Filch to the Old Bailey to learn what he coud of Macheath.

The Rival Queens seem Rivald again in Polly & Lucy who contend as earnestly for their little Robbr as Statira & Roxana did for the Great Plunderer of the World'. (Cholmondeley (Houghton) MSS. 74. 48. These are the papers of Sir Robert Walpole at present deposited in the Cambridge University Library.) The Craftsman was close to the Scriblerus Club writers, and such literary criticism as was submitted to it may be thought to have some authority.

²¹ Nathaniel Lee, The Rival Queens, Or The Death of Alexander The Great (London, 1677), alluded to in the Craftsman MS. cited above.

²² Bronson, 'The Beggar's Opera, p. 309.

²³ I am indebted for this valuable insight to Mr J. S. Bull, of the Department of English Literature, University of Sheffield.

²⁴ Arthur Sherbo, 'John Gay: lightweight or heavyweight?', The Scriblerian (November 1975).

²⁵ Gay's standard, though plausible, affirmation to Swift concerning the moral seriousness of Polly (Gay to Swift, 18 March 1729; Letters, p. 78) is interestingly endorsed by what his patroness, the Duchess of Queensberry, told Mrs Larpent on the occasion of the opera's first performance on 19 June 1777. Mrs Larpent, described by one who has studied her papers as 'a rather dull, puritanical young lady' noted in her journal that she was 'extremely pleased to go with the Duchess of Queensberry to see this Opera, which from the protection she gave its author Gay, & from the spirit of those times, occasioned her dismission from Court … the moral [of the opera] is nothing remarkably pointed, altho' the Duchess told me, that on Gay's being accused of immorality in the end of ye Beggar's Opera, some Nobleman (I really think Lord Bath but I am not certain) said "Why Gay you have only transported him pursue him, & bring him to punishment -" & see says she "how finely he has wrought out the tale".' (L. W. Conolly, 'Anna Margaretta Larpent, The Duchess of Queensberry and Gay's Polly in 1777', Philological Quarterly, LI.4 (October 1972), p. 956).

²⁶ Most critics consider it so; see especially Irving, John Gay, pp. 270-1 and Spacks, pp. 159-61. The trouble is that, because Polly is a narrative continuation of the Opera, it has been assumed that Gay wished to write a formally similar work, and that since Polly is not formally similar it must be a failure.

²⁷ Irving, John Gay, pp. 78-80 offers some comparative remarks.

²⁸A History of Early Eighteenth-Century Drama (Cambridge, 1925), pp. 157-8. In half a sentence, however, Nicoll considers it 'a good comedy'.

²⁹ For this theme in the attack on Walpole, see my book, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope (London, 1975), pp. 243-59, especially p. 244.

³⁰ The phrase is the title of the study by Sven Armens (New York, 1954).

³¹ Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter (London, 1949), pp. 151-2.

³²Brecht on Theatre, edited and translated by John Willett (London, 1964), p. 46.