"Deep Play": John Gay and the Invention of Modernity

"Deep Play": John Gay and the Invention of Modernity. By Dianne Dugaw. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Pp. 322, acknowledgments, prologue-epilogue, illustrations, musical notation, charts, notes, bibliography, index. $48.50 cloth) Once upon a time, literature professors really knew what college students really did not know. They knew how to read literature in Latin and Greek. The study of literature written in the vernacular-English-gained a toehold in university curricula only at the end of the nineteenth century. But by the mid-twentieth century the designers of the English canon had all but banished both Classics and oral literature, and subsequently introduced a panoply of critical methodologies that reinvented the wheel. Bringing it all back home, fortunately, is Dianne Dugaw's "Deep Play": John Gay and the Invention of Modernity. In jargon-free language, Dugaw applies and expands folklore methodology in order to analyze the work of a dead white British male author. Bertrand Bronson likewise brought to eighteenth-century literature a wide-ranging expertise in matters of folklore, music, visual art, social science, and indeed Classics (1968), but Bronson published his insights only in discrete essays, where Dugaw has here arranged hers sequentially into a unified whole that sets the standard for future scholarship at this interstice of academic disciplines. Dugaw's prologue establishes the ramifications of the phrase deep play. Clifford Geertz analyzes deep play in reference to Balinese cockfighting (1973), with no apparent awareness that highwayman Macheath uses the same phrase to summon thieves to high-stakes gambling. Throughout Dugaw's book, each chapter focuses on one work or a few related works by John Gay, in each case establishing methodology applicable beyond Gay and beyond the eighteenth century. Dugaw structures the book not chronologically but rather in an order that both engages specialists in Gay's milieu and also welcomes readers who, say, merely know Beggar's Opera and would like to know more. Chapter one compares Gay's breakthrough ballad opera to three twentieth-century reworkings including, of course, the one by Bertolt Brecht inevitably recalled as The Mack the Knife Play, demonstrating that comparative analysis in terms of texture, text, and context, so basic to folklore methodology, lies behind "reception aesthetics" familiar to contemporary literary scholars (Jauss 1982, Holub 1984). In chapter two, Dugaw provides nonspecialists with Gay's full biography, tracing its metamorphosis across two centuries in words and also in visual portraits of the author, especially the atypical one in which Gay appears whimsically, boyishly, coyly . . . well, gay. Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779-1781) gave wide circulation to this visual image and to a biography that trivialized Gay's accomplishments. Chapter three brings readers to folklore genres: Gay's references to proverbs, games, customs, riddles, beliefs, and folk metaphors, similes, charms and verses. Of two songs composed by Gay, one a lover's farewell and the other a gallows lament, Dugaw shows that Gay intentionally shaped songs that have indeed survived in oral tradition-his "Dark-Eyed Susan," for example, having been collected in 1989 by Newfoundland folklorist Neil Rosenberg (88). "Official Culture," as opposed to unofficial culture, occupies chapter four. Gay had just a grammar-school education, yet his familiarity with Latin texts, in this instance Virgil's Eclogues, surpasses that of many literary scholars today. With precise attention to textual details in four mock-pastorals, such as use of he for both a fisherman and a fish snagged, Dugaw shows how Gay's rural background and daily life in London intertwine with classical precedents to mock the emergent dichotomy between high culture glorified and low culture denigrated. …