Джон Гей: Ағылшын ақыны және драматургі

English poet and playwright (1685–1732)

John Gay (30 June 1685 – 4 December 1732) was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera (1728), a ballad opera. The characters, including Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum, became household names.

Gay was born in Barnstaple, England, last of five children of William Gay (died 1695) and Katherine (died 1694), daughter of Jonathan Hanmer, "the leading Nonconformist divine of the town" as founder of the Independent Dissenting congregation in Barnstaple. The Gay family "fairly comfortable though far from rich" lived in "a large house, called the Red Cross, on the corner of Joy Street". The Gay family was "of respectable antiquity" in North Devon, associated with the manor of Goldsworthy at Parkham and with the parish of Frithelstock (where the senior line remained, resident at the priory Cloister Hall with its lands, until 1823) and became "powerful and numerous" in the town, "established among Barnstaple's leading families for generations". Gay's great grandfather, Anthony Gay, served as Mayor; his wife, Elizabeth, was daughter of the merchant and three time Mayor of Barnstaple, Richard Beaple. Gay was educated at the town's grammar school. On leaving school his elder brother, Jonathan, an Army officer, having inherited the family property Gay 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 (1713) to Alexander Pope began a lasting friendship with him. In 1714, Gay wrote The Shepherd's Week, a series of six pastorals drawn from English rustic life. Pope had urged him to undertake this 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 claim to be 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.

In 1714 Gay was appointed secretary to the Earl of Clarendon the new British ambassador to the Electorate of Hanover through the influence of Swift. However the death of Queen Anne three months later put an end to his hopes of official employment.

In 1715, probably with some help from Pope, Gay produced The What D'Ye Call It?, a dramatic skit on contemporary tragedy, with special reference to Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd. This appeared on 23 February 1715 as an afterpiece at Drury Lane to Nicholas Rowe's tragedy Jane Shore. It left the public so ignorant of its inner meaning that Lewis Theobald and Benjamin Griffin published a Complete Key to What D'Ye Call It to explain it. The play also featured a ballad, Twas When the Seas Were Roaring, co written with George Frideric Handel, which became popular in its own right. In 1716 appeared his Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London, a poem in three books, for which he acknowledged receiving several hints from Swift. It contains graphic and humorous descriptions of the London of that period, depicting the city with photographic accuracy and acting as a guide to the upper class and upper middle class walkers of society. By 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 1717 he produced a 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 1718 he collaborated with Handel on the masque Acis and Galatea for which he supplied the libretto.