Introduction

Mr Pope brought some of The What D'Ye Call It in his own handwriting to Cibber . When it was read to the players, Mr Pope read it though Gay was by. Gay always used to read his own plays. Cibber after this, seeing a knife with the name of J. Gay upon it, [asked,] 'What, does Mr Pope make knives, too?'

(Colley Cibber, 1748)

AUTHORS are out of fashion. In pronouncing the death of the author, modern critical theory has done its best to end the personality cult of the godlike autonomous creator of his own fictional world.1 Texts are not singular, but plural; they exist in a state not of being but of becoming. Infinitely indefinite, their meanings are not fixed immutably by some original authorial fiat but evolve and change continually within a collaborative discourse of writer and readers alike. The author does not stand outside his (or her) work, but is subsumed within it; identity becomes text and an author's name on a title-page has only the status of another fictive sign, within the text's free play of signifiers.

Given the prevalence of this view, it is surprising that John Gay has not attracted more critical attention. For Gay is the invisible author, a kind of human pseudonym, not so much a ghost-writer as a ghost that is written. Hostile witnesses, like Cibber, chose to regard him as little more than a cipher, dismissing his name on a title-page as a mere Popeian subterfuge. Gay was frequently represented not merely as Pope's ally, but as his alias, his willing scapegoat, or, in a favourite well-worn simile, as a burly Ajax shielding a malevolent and diminutive Teucer. In his verse farce The Confederates (1717), J. D. Breval (who spiced his satire by himself adopting the pseudonym 'J. Gay') pictured Pope gloating secretly over his skill in making Gay take responsibility for the 'failure' of their play Three Hours after Marriage.

Safe from the cudgel, [I] stand secure of praise;

Mine is the credit, be the danger Gay's.

With monotonous regularity Gay was, and still is, denied responsibility for his 'own' works. In 1730 the Universal Spectator confidently assured its readers that 'Mr Gay was not the sole author of The Beggar's Opera', ascribing some of its best-known airs to either Pope or Swift. Other songs were attributed variously to Lord Chesterfield and Sir Charles Hanbury Williams; while the idea of having music in the opera was ascribed not to Gay at all, but to John Rich, the Duchess of Queensberry, and a 'junto of wits'.2 Similarly, in 1733, the Daily Courant asserted that Gay's posthumous play Achilles was in fact the product of an unlikely theatrical collaboration between Bolingbroke, Pulteney, Sir William Wyndham, the Duke of Queensberry, Arbuthnot, and Pope. 'Mr Gay', it pronounced, 'could not deviate into so much dulness', offering insult in the guise of praise. Like the Tatler's 'Isaac Bickerstaff' or the Guardian's 'Nestor Ironside', the name 'John Gay' seemed to identify not an individual but a clubland institution.

Time and inadvertency merely compounded this expropriating habit. In his Dictionary Johnson found a lexicographical niche for Gay under 'motion', citing these lines from the ballad ''Twas when the seas were roaring.'

Cease, cease thou cruel ocean,

And let my lover rest:

For what's thy troubled motion

To that within my breast?

But when Noah Webster took over the same quotation for his Dictionary, he attributed it to Gray, not Gay. The lines themselves were ones which William Cowper particularly liked, but he too found it difficult to believe that Gay had written them unaided; he was 'well informed', he claimed, that 'the most celebrated association of clever fellows this country ever saw', namely Swift, Arbuthnot, Pope, and Gay, had all contributed to their composition.3 The tradition of condescending to Gay's own literary achievements is obvious in Johnson's 'Life of Gay'.

Gay was the general favourite of the whole association of wits; but they regarded him as a playfellow rather than a partner, and treated him with more fondness than respect.4

Undoubtedly Gay was largely responsible for perpetuating this image of himself as a genial literary nonentity. Authorship implies authority; yet Gay's most characteristic literary persona is both self-effacing and self-mocking. A man who gives his works titles like Trivia and The What D'Ye Call It seems determined to subvert his own claims to serious literary recognition. Moreover, Gay was a natural collaborator, and several of his best-known works were both inspired in their inception and polished before publication by his fellow Scriblerians, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Swift. Where other authors seek to stamp the mark of their individual identity indelibly on every page, Gay chose the anonymity of a composite literary persona. Throughout his life he played the role of unassuming friend, a man so instinctively deferential in his tastes and opinions that he seemed almost to surrender his own identity. 'What will become of me I know not', he once confessed to a friend, 'for I have not and fear never shall have a will of my own.'5 Naturally submissive, he would present himself in the role of aide-de-camp or acolyte. 'Gay they would call one of my élèves,' Pope liked to boast, ignoring the fact that he was actually three years younger than his 'pupil'.6 Early on in their relationship Pope assumed the habit of deploying Gay as a willing literary lieutenant, happy to fight his battles (physical, as well as verbal) by proxy. In the dedication to The Mohocks Gay delivered a gratuitous snub to the critic John Dennis for no other reason than that Pope was feuding with him at the time. Three years later it was Ambrose Philips that Pope was feuding with, and Gay cheerfully chipped in with his mock-pastoral burlesque The Shepherd's Week. 'It is to this management of Philips that the world owes Mr. Gay's pastorals,' Pope declared, as if showing off his clever pupil's work.7

Gay's response to such charges was itself typically self-effacing. In the advertisement to Trivia (1716) he wrote: 'The world, I believe, will take so little notice of me, that I need not take much of it.' He even affected to regard such gibes as a form of back-handed compliment. The critics, he suggested, had 'allowed me an honour hitherto only shown to better writers: that of denying me to be the author of my own works'. If anything, he seemed almost to encourage, rather than prevent, such misattributions. In the advertisement to Three Hours after Marriage he boasted of 'the assistance I have received in this piece from two of my friends' (i.e. Pope and Arbuthnot); but when, in the event, the honour of having their names joined with Gay's turned to disgrace, he promptly volunteered for the scapegoat role. 'I will (if any shame there be)', he told Pope, 'take it all to myself.'8

Even in a period when anonymous and pseudonymous publication was the norm, Gay's authorial diffidence is unusual. Submerged in 'Scriblerus', 'Barnivelt', and 'Baker', manipulated by Pope, hijacked by Breval, and transliterated into Gray, his 'own' literary identity seems at best a rhetorical fiction. Though Swift's name seldom appeared on a title-page, his distinctive voice, however disguised in the assumed persona of a Bickerstaff, Draper, or Gulliver, was its own authoritative signature. Gay's name actually appears on more title-pages than Swift's; yet his authorial identity is far less strongly defined. Throughout his life Gay experienced an acute social diffidence, a lack of confidence which inhibited him from laying a direct claim to the dignity and status of a distinctive public identity. His treatment of his letters is indicative. Pope's Correspondence, like Swift's, fills five fat scholarly volumes; both men (but Pope especially) took care to marshal an official version of their letters as a public monument to their literary careers. But Gay's Letters (even with the inclusion of some new items published for the first time in this biography) barely fill one slim volume. Pope assembled his letters both as exhibitions of epistolary art and, judiciously edited, as a form of self-justifying autobiography. But Gay, whose personal letters are themselves often collaborative compositions, made no attempt to create a public memorial from these private professions of friendship.

Just eighteen months before his death, Gay made a strange assertion to Swift:

You and I are alike in one particular, (I wish to be so in many), I mean that we hate to write upon other folk's hints. I love to have my own scheme and to treat it in my own way.9

Since Swift himself had provided Gay with the 'hint' for The Beggar's Opera, he was more than a little surprised by this claim. He wrote back to suggest that while it was 'past doubt that everyone can best find hints for himself . it is possible that sometimes a friend may give you a lucky one...