John Gay

born 30 June 1685, Barnstaple, Devon, died 4 December 1732, London. English poet and dramatist.

Life

John Gay was from an old but impoverished family and he was orphaned at the age of ten, so his uncle – a minister – became his guardian. He graduated from the grammar school in Barnstaple before he started his education at a silk mercer’s in London but he soon abandoned this occupation. Instead, he became a secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth in 1712 as well as to Lord Clarendon later on. This helped him establish connections with London’s high society.

He was good friends with Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and John Arbuthnot - who were all members of the Scriblerus Club as was Gay himself - and he also was a fellow student of composer George Frideric Handel. There was a lot of mutual influence between them; for instance, Pope is said to have influenced Gay’s poetic style while Gay wrote the libretto for Handel’s pastoral opera Acis and Galatea (1718). Gay’s plays often included musical parts written by himself, too.

During the 1710s he wrote and produced several plays, fables, operas and poems of varying success but nevertheless he still had numerous patrons. Among them the Duke and the Duchess of Queensberry, who supported Gay until his death and with whom he lived for his last two years, are especially noteworthy.

Although he had become secretary to the British ambassador of the court of Hanover, Gay’s social aspirations were put to an end when Queen Anne I died in 1714, the following era (of George I) continuing the trend of a decline in the monarch’s power and an increase in the ministers’ influence instead.

Works

In 1713, his first major poem, Rural Sports, dealing with the topics of hunting and fishing and the countryside, was published. As a rather extensive work, it was published in two short books.

His most prominent work, however, is The Beggar’s Opera (1728) which was designed to “mirror the moral degradation of society and […] to caricature the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole and his Whig administration” (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009). The opera was quite a success and ran for sixty-two nights, though not consecutively. The Beggar’s Opera is considered the first successful ballad opera which paved the way for other ballad operas and operettas.

Although Gay made some profit from his literary and theatrical works, he was not a rich man and in consequence he was still dependent on his patrons to some extent; not least because he lost quite an amount through his investments in South Sea stock.

Death

John Gay never married and did not leave any children when he died. Gay was buried in the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey next to Geoffrey Chaucer. His epitaph was written by Pope, followed by a quote from the Beggar’s Opera which reads, “Life is a Jest, and all Things show it: I thought so once and now I know it”.

Selected Works

• Rural Sports, a poem (1713)
• The Shepherd’s Week, a series of six pastorals (1714)
• Three Hours after Marriage, a comedy and a collaborative work with Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot (1717)
• Fifty-one Fables in Verse, a collection of beast fables (1727)
• The Beggar's Opera (1728)
• Polly, the sequel to the Beggar’s Opera the performance of which was forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain, supposedly at Walpole’s behest (1729)

Sources

• Bareket, Donna, and Eisendraht, Anne, and Selig, Deborah. “Biography of John Gay.” The Beggar’s Opera. 2002. University of Michigan. 3 November 2009 http://www.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/beggars_opera>.
• "John Gay." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 2 November 2009 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/227376/John-Gay>.
• "John Gay." Encyclopedia Britannica. 11th ed. Cambridge: CUP, 1910. 541. 3 November 2009 <http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/gay/gaybio.htm>.