Deep Play: John Gay and the Invention of Modernity

In his groundbreaking article “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class,” E. P. Thompson cites a letter from John Gay as an example of the critique of high government by analogy to low culture: “I know that if one would be agreeable to men of dignity, one must study to imitate them, and I know which way they get Money and places. I cannot wonder that the talents requisite for a great Statesman are so scarce in the world since so many of those who possess them are every month cutoff in the Prime of their Age at the Old Bailey.” Taking her cue from Thompson, Diane Dugaw’s Deep Play offers a prime example of the richness possible within the still developing approach of historical cultural criticism. With methodological roots in Thompson, Raymond Williams, Clifford Geertz, and Michel Foucault, modified and redirected by insights from Eva Kosofsky Sedgwick, Barbara Stafford, Linda Hutcheon, Mary Poovey, and others, Dugaw builds upon the representations and analyses of John Gay by notable readers like Patricia Meyer Spacks, Calhoun Winton, and Margaret Doody, primarily by considering the thickly layered cultural contexts within which Gay’s works situate themselves. In particular, Dugaw brings to our understanding of Gay her comprehensive knowledge of popular music and dance, illustrating the ways in which the double capacity of works like The Beggar’s Opera is created formally. This occurs as high and low cultural forms mirror one another to generate analytical critiques of the oppositions (urban/rural, male/female, rich/poor, colonist/subaltern, and so on) which structure both emergent modern subjectivity and the social life of the early eighteenth century. The book is thoroughly researched, lucidly organized and written, and delightfully replete with engravings, sheet music, and even dance diagrams.

Deep Play is divided into two major sections, the first of which, “Metaleptic Methods,” offers a rationale for, and description of, the ways in which Dugaw apprehends and comprehends Gay’s work. Gay’s self-representations, his critical rise and fall, and the concomitant alterations over subsequent generations of both the editions of his work and the attitudes of his biographers—along with the adaptations of The Beggar’s Opera by twentieth-century playwrights Brecht, Havel, and Ayckbourn—establish Gay’s complexity, slipperiness, and peculiar resonances and relavancies for modernity. The section concludes with a consideration of several early poems—Rural Sports (1713), The Shepherd’s Week (1714), Trivia (1717), and The Birth of the Squire (1720)—which illustrate the “deep play” of Gay’s works which participate in contemporary literary controversies (e.g., the debate over pastoral, the Ancients v. Moderns quarrel) while also offering analysis and critique of social and political issues (enclosure, Walpole, urbanization). In particular, Dugaw points to the ways in which these works begin Gay’s lifelong engagement with, and representation of, the changing semiotics of social distinction and the predatory human relations concomitant with emergent capitalism. She also explores the consistency with which Gay situates himself as a sort of ethnographic, though consciously self-implicated observer, with sympathies for the victims of radically unequal power relationships.

The second part, “Mapping the New Order: Rank and Mobility, Gender and Sexuality, Culture and Nature,” brings popular culture to bear upon Gay’s works: associating the tradition of mumming and the ballad tradition with The What-d’Ye-Call-It and Three Hours after Marriage, considering the representation of gender and social distinction by the conjunction of mock-pastoral with opera in Acis and Galatea, recuperating for us the ballads (and their resonances) in the ballad operas, The Beggar’s Opera, Polly, and Achilles, analyzing the ways in which the semiotics of country dancing implicates the audience in Polly, and, finally, examining Gay’s Fables in light of the continuing thematic concerns theretofore established.

Dugaw’s title, Deep Play, suggests that our apprehension of Gay’s work has been limited by the diminishment of our capacity to respond to his contemporary cultural cues and contexts and by our attempts to analyze his work in terms primarily of the paradoxical double capacity. In discussing the dances in Polly, she reminds us that it is entirely likely (if the play had not been banned, a caveat she omits) that the majority of the audience would have themselves danced some of the dances before them on the stage. Therefore, they would have responded with a sort of tissue memory, i.e., with their bodies, which would both implicate themselves in the “country” of the “country dances” and the body politic. Thus, Dugaw’s volume reminds us of the responses that are no longer readily available to us and provides us with some richly detailed examples. For instance, she offers the history of “Over the Hills and Far Away,” an old Scottish melody first published in D’Urfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy (1706) and associated (by publication and by shared melody) with “Verses upon Raising Recruits” from Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706). The melody was then adapted to both Jacobite and Whig ballads and subsequently to a song called “The Hubble Bubbles” after the South Sea Bubble. Finally, it supplied the tune for Air 16, sung by Polly and Macheath, in The Beggar’s Opera. Resonating with so many largely partisan issues, the tune, as Dugaw suggests, has multiple double capacities, with one double capacity playing off against another and thus resisting any reductionist analysis.

As it applies the context of folk materials to Gay’s work, the book maintains a lively emphasis upon issues of race, gender, and empire, as well as on the more obvious one of social distinction. Again, the application of context makes these issues in Gay’s work both apparent and complex: Dugaw, to recuperate a phrase, makes Gay rich. The organization of the volume by biographical chronology offers a way to see the development of both Gay’s sensibility and his analysis. The book thus manages quite a lot: recuperation and application of lost context, literary biography, social history, methodological innovation, and some close readings. None of these tasks are performed exhaustively: A reading of a play, for instance, is devoted largely to one or two songs, the complex explications of which both establish a way of responding to the play and provide a paradigm for further analysis. In most cases, Dugaw gives us everything we need in order to proceed on our own. The one exception is the withholding of the primary evidence which Dugaw must surely have accumulated but not incorporated: For instance, I would be most grateful for an appendix with even the most abbreviated table offering more information about the history of the songs in the ballad operas so that I could pursue Dugaw’s method of appreciating Gay without having to re-do the vast primary research that she certainly has already done. The provision of such an appendix would be an act of extraordinary generosity, of course; but it would make available to students of the eighteenth century materials that Dugaw establishes, without a doubt, to be essential.