6 - Spectacular Opposition: Suppression, Deflection and the Performance of Contempt in John Gay's Beggar's Opera and Polly

Summary

Life's a jest, and all things show it;

I thought so once, but now I know it …

John Gay wrote the above lines in a letter to Alexander Pope, and it appears on his monument as an epitaph. Whereas his friend Jonathan Swift claimed saeva indignatio in death, the cheerful Gay's last message seems to express contemptus mundi. It coincides in spirit with a letter he wrote to Swift just after the first publication of his Fables. ‘I expect nothing, & am like to get nothing’, Gay writes, then, further down the page, ‘[t]he contempt of the world grows upon me, and I now begin to be richer and richer, for I find I could every morning I wake be content with less than I aim'd at the day before’. My aim in this chapter is to explore whether there is anything more than a conventional ironic gesture in Gay's epitaph, or defensive false modesty in a letter to a more famous friend. In particular, I will explore whether contempt is a dominant passion in his notorious ballad operas of the late 1720s, The Beggar's Opera and Polly. The two plays were separated at birth for very different stage histories, the former being an unprecedented hit that ran for an entire winter season and the latter being banned on stage to circulate only in print until performed in 1777. Since then Beggar's Opera has been a staple of the English stage and Polly largely neglected. In 1728–29, however, the two plays were an almost continuous political event central to a broad programme of satirical dissent against the regime of Sir Robert Walpole. Rather than treating them as qualitatively different – a great work focused on London low life and a minor work set among pirates and plantations in the West Indies – this chapter will read them as they might have been understood, at least by supporters of the Viscount Bolingbroke's Patriot Opposition, as a single political and dramatic arc. That is, to put it bluntly, a spectacular arc of mocking contempt for the first and longest-serving prime minister.