Gay, John

Gay, John (1685–1732), published Rural Sports (1713), on the model of his friend Pope's Windsor Forest, and The Fan, which is in the mockheroic style of The Rape of the Lock. The Shepherd's Week (1714) was the first poem to show his real ability. His first play, The What D'ye Call it, a satirical farce, was produced in 1715, and Trivia appeared in 1716. With Pope and Arbuthnot he wrote a comedy, Three Hours after Marriage, acted in 1717. He became an inmate of the household of the duke of Queensberry, who was to be his literary executor. The first series of his popular Fables appeared in 1727, but real success came with The Beggar's Opera (1728) and its sequel Polly (1729). These two plays contain many of Gay's best-known ballads, but ‘Sweet William's Farewell to Black-Eyed Susan’ was published in Poems (1720) and ‘Twas when the seas were roaring’ is from his first play. He also wrote, c.1718, the librettos of Handel's Acis and Galatea (pub. 1732) and Achilles, an opera produced at Covent Garden in 1733. His poem in ottava rima ‘Mr Pope's Welcome from Greece’ (1776) was written to celebrate his friend's finishing his translation of The Iliad; it gives a vivid picture of the members of the Scriblerus Club. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, accompanied by his own epitaph:Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, and now I know it.