is the career of the famous highwayman Jonathan Wild, who died at Tyburn Hill on May 4, 1725. Certainly, curiosity about Wild may well have motivated Gay to explore more deeply the workings of the London criminal element.

Polly (pb. 1729), a sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, never graced the London stage during its author’s lifetime. Sir Robert Walpole, the prime minister, had quickly recognized the assaults against himself and his party in The Beggar’s Opera; thus, he ordered the duke of Grafton, as Lord Chamberlain, to deny a license for the production of Polly. Obviously, he feared more of the same. Gay published his play, however, and sales were brisk because of the Whig ministry’s refusal to permit a stage production—an event that did not take place until 1777. Shortly after Gay’s death, his last opera, Achilles (pr., pb. 1733), appeared on the stage for eighteen performances. However, its reception was cool, and general opinion held the piece to be hardly deserving of serious attention. The eight remaining plays published by Gay received varying degrees of critical response.

In May, 1711, Gay had published a two-penny pamphlet titled The Present State of Wit, in a Letter to a Friend in the Country, an account of contemporary periodical literature in England, with emphasis upon The Tatler and The Spectator.

John Gay’s prominent stature within the literary and social circles of eighteenth century England requires no complex explanation. Indeed, his associations with his literary peers, especially among the outspoken Tory satirists of the early years of Walpole’s ministry, were far deeper than mere political or professional ties. Pope, Swift, and John Arbuthnot regarded him with the utmost love and respect. Even Walpole, whom he attacked, appointed him to the post of commissioner of lotteries, granted him an apartment at Whitehall Palace, and influenced Queen Caroline to offer him a household post. Lewis Melville, who fairly early in the twentieth century compiled a collection of Gay’s letters and surrounded it with biographical bits and pieces, maintained that Gay’s friends—Lord Burlington, Lady Suffolk (Henrietta Howard), the duke and duchess of Queensberry—all placed their houses and their purses at the poet’s disposal in an effort to compete for the pleasure of his company. Never, noted Melville, was a man of letters so pampered and petted.

Gay was, however, more to the Augustans than simply another social ornament or intellectual gadfly with a superficial talent for conversation and letters. Consider the degree to which his works held the interest of English readers and English theater audiences after his death in 1732. There were productions and revivals of his operas and recurrent editions of the Poems on Several Occasions, the Fables, Trivia, The Shepherd’s Week, and even The What D’ye Call It (pr., pb. 1715). Throughout the century, readers of his poems and plays realized the timelessness of his social criticism. What those same readers may have forgotten, however, is that as a poet Gay remained carefully within the outward conventions of his day, never extending his art beyond his interest or his ability. He turned his back on the epic and focused, instead, on burlesque—on minute descriptions, light satire, and jocular song. He seemed more interested in following contemporary caricaturists than in emulating the strict Latin models of the first Augustan Age.

Gay gathered strength from the wit, the sparkle, and even the venom of his friend’s personal dislikes and distastes, all of which helped him to refine his realistic humor. Thus, The Shepherd’s Week reflects the bite of Pope’s attack against Ambrose Philips’s Pastorals, while there are more than coincidental associations between Trivia and Jonathan Swift’s ultrarealistic “Description of the Morning” and “A Description of a City Shower,” as well as some Tatler and Spectator fragments on the same general topic from Sir Richard Steele and Joseph Addison. Nevertheless, Gay never achieved intellectual or even poetic and satiric equality with Pope or Swift, principally because of his own poetic temperament. There are scholars of the period who maintain that he was only a songster—a very good one, to be sure, but still not a poet. Such a reaction may be too harsh, for he did hold his own among his contemporaries who sought to portray everyday life; he could harness current coffeehouse rumor and drawing-room gossip into readable poetry—with much the same success as the skilled novelists did later in the century. He knew the temper of the times: the city, its people, and its activities. He read the weekly gazettes and news sheets that graphically reproduced the sounds, smells, and irrational moments of a supposedly rational age.

Gay thus catered to and transcribed the Augustan era. His poetry—as did that of Swift, Pope, Matthew Prior, John Dennis, and Thomas Parnell—provided a mirror for society; but his particular glass was polished bright and clear, perhaps not as prismatic as those of his colleagues. His poetry caught hypocrisy in mid-air and hurled it back in the face of his reader: the flattery, the filth, the amusement, the exaggeration. Again, he sought not the higher grounds of epic and lyric for his work, but chose to remain at eye level—to write verse about town, club, street, tavern, coffeehouse, theater, bear pit, and drawing room. As a poet, Gay was genuine, and the degree to which society accepted his verse indicates that he met the criteria for art and satisfied the demands of the intellect.