John gay playwright

John Gay (30 June – 4 December ) was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. [2] He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera (), a ballad opera. [3]. John Gay (born June 30, , Barnstaple, Devon, Eng.—died Dec. 4, , London) was an English poet and dramatist, chiefly remembered as the author of The Beggar’s Opera, a work distinguished by good-humoured satire and technical assurance.

Poet and playwright John Gay was born in Devon to an aristocratic though impoverished family. Unable to afford university, Gay went to London to apprentice as a draper instead. While in London, he began writing journalism, including the pamphlet The Present State of Wit (), a survey of contemporary periodicals and authors. JOHN GAY (), English poet, was baptized on the 16th of September at Barnstaple, where his family had long been settled.

He was educated at the grammar school of the town under Robert Luck, who had published some Latin and English poems. John Gay was born in Barnstaple, Devon, and baptised on 16th, September He was the youngest child of William Gay and Katherine Hanmer. They also had an older son and two daughters, another daughter dying shortly before John's birth.

He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera , a ballad opera. The characters, including Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum, became household names. Gay was born in Barnstaple, England, and was educated at the town's grammar school. On leaving school he was apprenticed to a silk mercer in London, but being weary, according to Samuel Johnson, "of either the restraint or the servility of his occupation", he soon returned to Barnstaple, where he was educated by his uncle, the Rev.

John Hanmer, the Nonconformist minister of the town. He then returned to London. The dedication of his Rural Sports to Alexander Pope was the beginning of a lasting friendship. Pope had urged him to undertake this task in order to ridicule the Arcadian pastorals of Ambrose Philips, who had been praised by a short-lived contemporary publication The Guardian, to the neglect of Pope's claims as the first pastoral writer of the age and the true English Theocritus.

Gay's pastorals achieved this goal and his ludicrous pictures of the English country lads and their loves were found to be entertaining on their own account. Gay had just been appointed secretary to the British ambassador to the court of Hanover through the influence of Jonathan Swift when the death of Anne, Queen of Great Britain, three months later put an end to all his hopes of official employment.

In , probably with some help from Pope, he produced What d'ye call it? It left the public so ignorant of its real meaning that Lewis Theobald and Benjamin Griffin published a Complete Key to what d'ye call it to explain it.

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In appeared his Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London, a poem in three books, for which he acknowledged having received several hints from Swift. It contains graphic and humorous descriptions of the London of that period. What is most interesting about the poem, however, is not the fact that it depicts the city with photographic accuracy, but that it acts as a guide to the upper, and upper-middle class walkers of society.

In taking a mock-heroic form, Gay's poem was able to poke fun at the notion of complete reformation of street civility, while also proposing an idea of reform in terms of the attitude towards walking. In January he produced the comedy, Three Hours After Marriage, which was thought to be grossly indecent without being amusing and a failure.

He had assistance from Pope and John Arbuthnot, but they allowed it to be assumed that Gay was the sole author. In that year James Craggs, the secretary of state, presented him with some South Sea stock. Gay, disregarding the advice of Pope and others of his friends, invested all his money in South Sea stock, and, holding on to the end of the South Sea Bubble, he lost everything.

The shock is said to have made him dangerously ill. His friends did not fail him at this juncture. He was a frequent visitor with Pope, and received unvarying kindness from William Congreve and John Arbuthnot. In he wrote for six-year-old Prince William, later the Duke of Cumberland, Fifty-one Fables in Verse, for which he naturally hoped to gain some preferment, although he has much to say in them of the servility of courtiers and the vanity of court honours.

He was offered the situation of gentleman-usher to the Princess Louisa, who was also still a child. He refused this offer, which all his friends seem to have regarded as an indignity. He had never rendered any special services to the court. He certainly did nothing to conciliate the favour of the government by his next work, The Beggar's Opera, a ballad opera produced on the 29 January by John Rich, in which Sir Robert Walpole was caricatured.

This famous piece, which was said to have made "Rich gay and Gay rich", was an innovation in many respects. The satire of the play has a double allegory. The character of Peachum was inspired by the thief-taker Jonathan Wild, executed in , and the principal figure of Macheath reflected memories of the French highwayman, Claude Duval, whose execution had created a sensation in London, and who exemplified the flamboyance and gallantry of Gay's literary hero.

Gay's decision to launch the work was probably also influenced by the huge interest that the Jack Sheppard, a cockney housebreaker, had created in all things relating to Newgate Prison. However, the character of Peachum was also understood to represent Robert Walpole, who, like Wild, was seen as a public but morally dubious character, and whose government had been tolerant of Wild's thievery and the South Sea directors' escape from punishment.