The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Gay, John

Born Sept. 1685, in Barnstaple; died Apr. 12, 1732, in London. English poet and playwright.

Gay’s Fables (two volumes, 1727-38) were successful. He also wrote the plays What D’Ye Call It (1715) and Three Hours After Marriage (1717, in collaboration with A. Pope and J. Arbuthnot) and the tragedy The Captives (1724). Gay’s fame is based on his comedy The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and its sequel Polly (1729). With these plays Gay created the genre of the so-called ballad opera, in which he combined parody with political and social satire. In the 20th century B. Brecht drew upon Gay’s work in The Threepenny Opera (1928).

WORKS

The Poetical Works. London, 1926.

REFERENCES

Istoriia angliiskoi literatury, vol. 1, issue 2. Moscow-Leningrad, 1945.
Istoriia zapadno-evropeiskogo teatra, vol. 2. Moscow, 1957.
Armens, Sven M. John Gay, Social Critic. New York, 1954.
Spacks, P. M. John Gay. New York, 1965.

IU. I. KAGARLITSKII

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References in periodicals archive

John Gay was already an established poet and a successful playwright.

The life and times of Black-EY'd Susan: the story of an english ballad

Grub Street dramatists capitalized on John Gay's success by writing their own versions, and the process of rewriting has continued to the present.

John Gay's 'The Beggar's Opera' 1728-2004: Adaptations and Re-Writings

"If only from a political point of view," EWIC co-chairman John Gay told Human Events, "permanence for a big chunk of the people who have been here illegally has to be part of the [Bush] deal."

Bush Amnesty Looms for Illegal Aliens

Dianne Dugaw assigns much of the appeal eighteenth-century John Gay's songs enjoyed (and continued to enjoy in oral tradition) to their political and social critique.

Ballads into books: the legacies of Francis James Child

Nick Dear and Stephen Warbeck drag John Gay's famous Beggar's Opera of 1728 kicking and screaming into the 21st Century with the Millennium Dome as a backdrop.

Theatre: Shows - Oh, beggar off!

When John Gay began a heroic parody on "ladies Fashion"

John Gay's The Fan and the "Paper War" of 1713

Beggar's Holiday of 1946 teamed Latouche with Duke Ellington for an updating of John Gay's Beggar's Opera and featured an interracial cast--a revolutionary concept at that time.

THE LYRICIST NOBODY KNOWS

Polly, ovvero L'opera del milionario consists of a three-act play and a lengthy appendix (a translation of the entire work, Polly by John Gay [1685-1743], on which it was based).

Polly, ovvero L'opera del milionario

The splendid image of Smithfield Market (designed in the 1860s by Horace Jones) is by John Gay, whose photographs illustrate the book.

Alchemy and invention

In recent years, two important revaluations of Gay have appeared: the first, a collection of essays, edited by Peter Lewis and Nigel Wood, John Gay and the Scriblerians (1988) and the second, a fresh look at Gay the dramatist, John Gay and the London Theatre by Calhoun Winton (1993).

John Gay: A Profession of Friendship. A Critical Biography

John Gay's reputation tumbled as literary criticism metamorphosed in the eighteenth century from a descriptive project to a determinant of taste and values.

Dangerous Sissy: gendered "lives," John Gay and the literary canon

The idea of the basic oppositions manifesting themselves at the surface level of the text in various ways is the leit-motif of the present paper, in which we will attempt to propose a simple, polar model of a text grammar on the basis of the graceful material of John Gay's little masterpieces.

The deep structure of narrative element in neoclassical fable