Saturday 30 June 2012

June's Famous Devonian

June’s famous Devonian is John Gay (30 June 1685 – 4 December 1732) who was born in Barnstable. He is most famous as being the author of The Beggar’s Opera, a work distinguished by good-humored satire and technical assurance.[1] John Gay is credited with the first success of the ballad opera genre.[2]


John Gay. [3]
Gay attended the Grammar School in Barnstable and upon leaving school he was apprentices to a silk mercer in London. Disliking the work, Gay left the merchant to work briefly for Arthur Hill, who became manager of a theatre company. In 1712, in his late twenties, Gay was a secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth and even worked as a secretary to Lord Clarendon.[4] His first important poem, Rural Sports, appeared in 1713. This is a ‘descriptive and didactic work’ in two short books dealing with hunting and fishing, but containing also ‘descriptions of the countryside and meditations on the Horatian theme of retirement’.[5]


The Beggar's Opera. [6]

The Beggar’s Opera was produced in London on the 29th January 1728 by John Rich at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre and ran for 62 performances. Narrated by the beggar himself, it is a story of thieves and highwaymen and centers around love triangle between the highwayman Macheath, his fence's daughter Polly and the jailer's daughter Lucy (who is pregnant with his child). It was intended to ‘mirror the moral degradation of society and, more particularly, to caricature the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole and his Whig administration’.[7] It soon became very popular and throughout the Eighteenth Century and was staged ‘just about everywhere in the English speaking world where room could be found to put up a stage’.[8]
''Sure men were born to lie, and women to believe them!''
John Gay (1685-1732), British dramatist. Lucy, in The Beggar's Opera, act 2, sc. 13.

Gay lost most of his money after investing in the disastrous South Sea Stock, leaving behind £6,000 when he died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Life is a jest, and all things show it.
I thought it once, and now I know it.

(John Gay's self-written epitaph).[9]



[1] Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Version, ‘John Gay’, 2012. [Online] Available from: www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/227376/John-Gay. (Accessed 26/05/12).
[2] Eighteenth Century English Website, ‘The Beggar’s Opera’, 2002. [Online] Available from: www.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/beggars_opera/. (Accessed 26/05/12).
[3] Wikipedia, ‘John Gay’, 2012. [Online] Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gay. (Accessed 26/05/12).
[4] Eighteenth Century English Website, ‘The Beggar’s Opera’, 2002. [Online] Available from: www.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/beggars_opera/. (Accessed 26/05/12).
[5] Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Version, ‘John Gay’, 2012. [Online] Available from: www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/227376/John-Gay. (Accessed 26/05/12).
[6] Daily Post (London, England), Wednesday, February 14, 1728; Issue 2620.
[7] Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Version, ‘John Gay’, 2012. [Online] Available from: www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/227376/John-Gay. (Accessed 26/05/12).
[8] Winton, C. (1993) John Gay and the London Theatre, The University of Kentucky Press, Lexington, KY : 169.
[9] The Contemplator’s Short History of John Gay and the Beggar’s Opera, 2012. [Online] Available from: www.contemplator.com/history/johngay.html. (Accessed 26/05/12).

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