Bluegrass Messengers

Folklore and John Gay's Satire- Dugaw 1991

Folklore and John Gay's Satire
by Dianne Dugaw
Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 31, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1991), pp. 515-533

[Dianne Dugaw is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon and author of Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989). She is presently writing a book on the satire of John Gay.]

Folklore and John Gay's Satire
DIANNE DUGAW

In the last eclogue of John Gay's The Shepherd's Week (1714), Bowzybeus, "giddy" with drink, sings to the "Lads and Lasses"
about him "with a Note so shrilling sweet and loud." His subjects are the genuine stuff of popular discourse: on the one hand, the natural world of "Owles" and "Glow-worms," "Turnips" and "Will-a-Wisps," and on the other, the realm of lower-class culture
with its "Fairs and Shows," "Lott'ries," "Thimbles," "Rings of Gold," "Balsoms," "Ague spells," and long-popular stories, psalms, and ballads. [1] The singing and fiddling Bowzybeus speaks from the experience and perspective of the lower orders of rural
eighteenth-century England. From the outset of The Shepherd's Week, Gay identifies Bowzybeus as an alter-ego. This identification, or, more particularly, Gay's pervasive and transformative use of the traditional and "underclass" realm of Bowzybeus, is the subject of this essay.

A profusion of traditional lore in the work of John Gay has gone largely unexamined by scholars. [2] Born in Devonshire in 1685, Gay is known as the friend of Swift and Pope, as a lesser poet in his own right, and as the inventor of ballad opera, forerunner of today's musical comedy. His Beggar's Opera (1728) was the most popular play of the Georgian era and still draws audiences nearly three centuries later. However, Gay has always remained enigmatic, somehow just beyond the critics' reach. The folklore at work in his poems and plays opens a new window onto some of the most puzzling features of his sensibility. Typically, a popular form-a custom, belief, ballad, or motif-serves as a site for Gay, whose own discourse then develops, with greater complexity and satiric purpose, issues and attitudes raised by the form itself. This essay surveys the traditional motifs and forms that mark Gay's drama and poetry, and then examines as an example of his method the  fable of The Ravens, the Sexton, and the Earth Worm. Gay constructs this poem around a long-prevalent folk ballad which, as
a referent, not only contributes to the resonance of the poem, but actually sets up a complex network of irony and association that infuses the satire.

Throughout his works Gay appropriates elements of popular discourse in three ways: (1) as references and subtexts that set up
ironic backdrops for his own compositions-for example, using the tune of a bawdy popular song as the air for a text of his own; (2) as ways of characterizing and bringing into tangible life common people and their world; and (3) as thematic and structural
templates that shape both the message of his satire and its method. [3] These three uses of popular materials together create in Gay's satire a parodic questioning of the social order that is not only profound, but remarkably forward-looking in its awareness of class. Traditional forms in Gay's works include songs and ballads, customs, beliefs, proverbs, riddles, games, and folk drama, as well as such deeper structures as themes and motifs. [4]

1. Traditional Subtexts
Gay uses popular, lower-class forms to set up parodic mirrorings which propel his satire of social systems and their power relationships. His reliance on contemporary airs for the songs in The Beggar's Opera and other plays is well known.[5] Indeed, critics distinguish the ballad opera as a form by this interjection of "low" materials performed by the "lowlife" characters in whose world the drama is set. The "lowness" of the airs-their whistling familiarity as popular songs-functions integrally to create the complex texture of Gay's parodic "Newgate Pastoral." This underlayer of popular song tradition percolates up through Gay's
own song texts, imbuing the entire drama so that the recast songs often pointedly evoke their subtexts: Chevy Chase, Cold and Raw, Over the Hills and Far Away.[6] For example, Air IX sung in The Beggar's Opera by Polly and her mother gains mightily in innuendo by the tune's usual text which renders the "toying" and "kissing," "teasing" and "pleasing" of Gay's text with conspicuous explicitness. The tune's original verse, which remains as a subtext filtering through the song, illuminates Gay's satire on Polly's naivete, particularly in relationship to her mother. Sung by Polly and her mother, Gay's text goes as follows:

Mrs. Peachum. 0 Polly, you might have toy'd and kist.
By keeping Men off, you keep them on.
Polly. But he so teaz'd me,
And he so pleas'd me,
What I did, you must have done.[7]

Air IX's original text, The Willoughby Whim, concludes with the following sisterly dialogue which renders less coyly such "teazing" and "pleasing":

Molly. My Father you told you'd go to Kirk,
When Prayers were done, where could you be?
Jenny. Taking a Kiss of the Parson and Clerk,
And of other young Laddys some two or three.
Molly. Oh Jenny, Jenny, what wilt thou do,
If Belly should swell, where wilt thou be?
Jenny. Look to your self for Jockey is true,
And whilst Clapper goes will take care of me.[8]

Not only does Gay's invocation of the popular song cast light on Polly's ingenuousness, but it does so in pointed relationship to her mother. "What I did, you must have done," Polly declares. With ironic resonance, the impertinent motherhood of The Willoughby Whim filters up through Gay's text constructing an intricate comment upon the predicament of the naive Polly, juxtaposed to her markedly more "knowing" mother. Gay's text stands to its progenitor as does the guileless Polly to Mrs. Peachum. The song's subtext thus sets up a complex network of associations that satirize this relationship and its social context.

Interestingly enough, for all the critical attention to The Beggar's Opera, the genuinely traditional nature of its musical
underlayer has gone largely unrecognized, probably because most students of Gay are not folklorists. Moreover, the division that folklorists themselves at one time imagined between oral and printed songs likewise masked the traditional character of Gay's subtexts. The songs in The Beggar's Opera flourished in tradition and in print as well: on cheap broadsides sold on the streets-and hawked by people like Bowzybeus-and in collections like Thomas D'Urfey's bestselling Pills to Purge Melancholy.[9]

To an observer unfamiliar with the complex matrix of eighteenth-century song culture, the airs of The Beggar's Opera evoke only the fashionable popularity of D'Urfey's songbooks. However, traditional borrowings elsewhere in Gay's work make clear that these songs represent a longstanding substratum of lower-class culture which he consistently and knowingly turned to his own purposes.

2. Traditional Forms Characterizing Common People
Song traditions are not the only popular materials that texture Gay's works. His dramatic and poetic portraits of lower-class
people always include traditional speech forms and beliefs: proverbs, riddles, and superstitions of all kinds. These he employs
to render his rustics believable and tangible. While proverbial speech is not the exclusive province of the lower orders, Gay
pointedly marks his commoners by their voicing of longstanding conventions of wisdom, custom, and belief which never find their way into his depictions of "higher" characters.[10] In The Shepherd's Week (1714), the love-smitten Lobbin declares: "True speaks that ancient Proverb, Love is blind" ("Monday," line 99).[11] Similarly, the Quaker Tabitha in The Espousal (1720) declares proverbially: "The only present love demands is love" (line 55).12 In The Wife of Bath (1713; 1730) the characters Alison and Franklyn carry on an exuberant flyting of proverbs still current in tradition: Alison. One Wedding, the proverb says, begets another: What think you, old Heart of Oak, shall Experience supply the want of Youth?-come, let you and I for
once verifie the old Saying-give me thy Hand, Old Boy.

Franklyn. Hold, hold, Dame, Marry in haste and repent in leisure-There is a Proverb for your Proverb. ...
Alison. Slidikins!-Old, old!-pray do not measure my Corn with your Bushel, old dry Bones. ...
Franklyn. A very pretty Excuse!-Old Birds are not caught with Chaff, Friend.
(I.i.293-304)[13]

Such elements of folk speech pepper Gay's works, bringing to life his uncourtly speakers and the cultural substratum they represent. Gay employs other forms of traditional lore, filling his poems and plays not only with superstitions of all kinds, but with bits and pieces of traditional games, legends, and customs as well. In The Shepherd's Week (1714) Marian bespeaks the familiar and still current folk taboo against giving sharp objects as gifts: "But Woe is me! Such Presents luckless prove, / For Knives, they tell me, always sever Love" ("Tuesday," lines 101-102). [14] Elsewhere The Shepherd's Week supplies a virtual catalogue of seasonal customs of courtship and love divination: securing a lock of a sweetheart's hair ("Thursday," lines 21-24)[15]; scattering a "Bag of Hemp-seed" at Midsummer's Eve to prompt the sight of a "True-Love" (lines 27-34)[16]; setting a snail in ashes overnight to "write" the initials of one's sweetheart's name (lines 49-59)[17]; tossing apple parings (lines
91-96) which similarly fall into the shape of initials. [18] Other love portents in The Shepherd's Week include the marriage-foretelling first encounter one has on Valentine's morning ("Thursday," lines 39-44); various prognosticating treatments of hazel-nuts ("Thursday," lines 61-66), peascods ("Thursday," lines 69-72), and apple seeds ("Thursday," lines 99-105); and the still-remembered loverhyme about the kindly Lady Bug: "Fly, Lady-Bird, North, South, East or West. / Fly where the Man is found that I love best" ("Thursday," lines 86-87). [19]

However, Gay takes a complex stance with regard to such folk beliefs, particularly those that might be characterized as "superstitions." In no way does he sentimentalize them or their adherents as antiquarians in search of "cultural survivals" would do a century or so later. Knowledgeable of traditional lore and eager to use it, Gay is nevertheless detached, ironic, sometimes even mocking in his references. In Trivia the speaker determinedly sets himself apart from the superstitious realm of "cred'lous Boys" and "prattling Nurses," admonishing his readers sternly: "All Superstition from thy Breast repel" (lines 175-77). But this momentary interdiction only barely belies the poet's familiarity and manifest fascination with folklore of all kinds, particularly as this traditional discourse characterized common people and made possible his own parodic satire of a world divided by class.

Gay's attitude toward the "low" material in his works has continued to perplex critics. Overlooking his identification with Bowzybeus and the intricate ways this sympathy is played out, they see the satire as deriding such commoners. Hoyt Trowbridge, for example, declares, "Like Shakespeare's artisans, shepherds, and squires, Gay's rustics have a certain naive charm, but from the sophisticated urban point of view which Gay (like Shakespeare) expected in his readers, these dairymaids and swineherds are ludicrous-delightful but absurd."[20] However, as Trowbridge's article itself demonstrates, Gay's satire in The Shepherd's Week targets not these rustics so much as "the sophisticated urban point of view" enacted in the pastoral controversy swirling among the London literati of 1714. The situation is considerably more complex than Trowbridge would have it, particularly when we place the "low" materials and characters in The Shepherd's Week alongside those that appear over and over again throughout Gay's works. Often-and The Shepherd's Week supplies a good example-  Gay facetiously undercuts his rustics and his own disingenuously naive voice as rustic bard. Nonetheless, he simultaneously validates both in his more thoroughgoing dismantling of "the urban point of view" from that marginal rural perspective. In fact, Gay's satire
engineers a profound decentering that not only conveys actualities of underclass life and people, but looks on critically from that vantage point.[21] Those works of Gay which use popular themes and structures as scaffolds for their own satire reveal this more profound investment in traditional discourse.

3. Traditional Structures as Templates
In addition to culling popular discourse for such individual items, Gay turned to it for organizing patterns. In a number of
works, folk themes and paradigms direct the keen social message of his satire. Some works owe their very framework to popular forms. His first produced play, The Wife of Bath (1713), pivots on the longstanding courtship custom, the "Dumb supper" which later sparked Keats's poetic imagination in "The Eve of St. Agnes."[22]

Another early work that exemplifies this appropriation of a
traditional mode is The What D'Ye Call It, a two-act playlet of
1715. Critics have called this genre-confounding little piece many
things: satire, farce, melodrama, parody. Gay himself subtitled it
"A Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce."23 In fact, The What D'Ye Call It
is a cleverly reworked folk mummer's play of the Wooing variety,
which Gay recast to his own satiric purpose. In it he exposes the
abuses found not only in polite theater and literature, but (more
seriously, it would seem) in the fabric of political and social life as
well. Looking on from the point of view of those manor house
tenants who would enact a Christmas mumming, Gay's play holds
up to scrutiny the squirearchy's abuse of its tenants, particularly
women. Along the way, the play also indicts the class-based
recruitment abuses of the Georgian army to which such mummers
would be subject in real life.24 Thus Gay appropriates a lower-class
form to parody and satirize ruling power and abuse.

In a similar fashion, Gay based Polly, his 1728 sequel to The
Beggar's Opera, on the conventional Female Warrior motif of
popular balladry. Built upon this pattern, Gay's play undermines
the gendered heroic ideal upon which the motif, the popular
ballads, and the whole European ideology of heroism depend. In
Polly Gay's venturing heroine wakes up to find herself inhabiting
a Female Warrior narrative as her story unfolds along the lines of
the conventional ballads. As I have shown elsewhere, Gay's
transformation of the motif provides the key to Polly's sweeping indictment
of Walpole's England and of European culture in general.25 (Small
wonder the play was banned and remained unstaged for nearly half
a century.)
Gay's is a parodic sensibility given to exposing social and moral
disjunction by means of the formal incongruities created by
travesty. When Gay bases an entire work upon a popular form, as
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DIANNE DUGAW
he does the plays just mentioned, he engineers a profound
decentering of view that necessarily heightens the social nature of
his comment. The fissures he exposes are not only formal,
linguistic, and aesthetic, but unmistakably material as well: social,
economic, and political. Gay's tradition-based travesties mock,
question, and satirize in terms of social structures. A late fable
illustrates this decentering transformation of traditional modes
and materials that Gay so favored.
The Ravens, The Sexton, and the Earth Worm (1738), the last of
Gay's posthumously published fables, flippantly takes up the
familiar theme of the vanity of human self-importance and social
power in the face of death.26 With that equivocation at which Gay
excels, the fable treats this topos at the same time parodically and
elegiacally as the poem undertakes the very leveling it bespeaks.
Throughout, Gay sets up oppositions which subvert expected
forms of social power and value. Overturning our expectations,
authority and power shift to the customarily unempowered sides of
these opponent pairings: a woman and her (presumably male)
flatterer, women and men, beggars and kings, crows and gentlemen,
a horse and a squire, an earthworm and a sexton-and, of
course, the overriding opposition always at work in beast fables,
animals and humans. But these oppositions are themselves unstable.
Eventually each pairing dissolves into the next as Gay
exposes the irony, illusion, and vanity-as well as the injusticeof
these very structures of power and class. Facetiously the poem
spirals down the Chain of Being and ends with a parodic graveside
image: a solemn earthworm delivers a mock pronouncement on
the death of a fat squire.
The poem opens with the speaker's flattering address to "Laura,"
a beautiful woman "singular" in her disdain for the kind of praise
for which the verses keep reaching. This first section commends
Laura for being so beautiful as to attract its "tribute" of praise, yet
so "virtuous" as to reject it. The relationship of Laura and her
genteel flatterer is the first of the poem's many oppositions.
Confessing Laura's contumely, the speaker says:
If you the tribute due disdain,
The muse's mortifying strain
Shall, like a woman, in mere spite
Set beauty in a moral light.
(lines 19-22)
Certainly spiteful morality equivocates; a spiteful woman in a
moral context is a facetious reversal. The poem's course is set. The
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"virtue" of Laura's indifference to flattery exposes and overturns
the vain poetic gaze of her insistent (male) flatterer. From this
initial opposition, the poem circles and recircles the theme of
human vanity until it concludes in the worm's "sage opinion."
Toward the end of the preliminary address to Laura, the poem
explicitly takes up its dialectic in terms of gender. Into what has
been a conspicuous scene of feminized beauty, the speaker suddenly
interjects both images of masculinity and the language of stratification
and tyranny. Feminized Nature and masculinized Society
are at odds. "What's beauty?" the poem asks, still invoking the
realm of the woman, Laura (line 55). The answer: "A flow'r that
fades as soon as blown?" Then, the genderizing and power-coded
shift: "What's man in all his boast of sway? / Perhaps the tyrant of
a day." Here follows a flurry of socially resonant words: "laws,"
"monarch," "regal line," "raised," "force," "pow'r," "destin'd."
As they tumble into verse, these signifiers of a stratified society fall
into a final fervent warning that prompts the fable within Gay's
fable: "Consider, man, weigh well thy frame; / The king, the
beggar is the same" (lines 69-70). Unblinking, the satire fixes on
relationships of power. Moreover, an ongoing insinuation of
popular materials into the poem accentuates this maneuver: the
subaltern-"the beggar"-becomes not only an empowered subject
in this leveling "moral," but its source and voice as well.
The tale proper at the poem's center begins by paraphrasing a
long popular ballad. This reference brings with it a constellation
of popular texts and parodic maneuvers that, drifting up from the
realm of Bowzybeus, encircle and enrich Gay's permutation of the
story. His fable begins:
Beneath a venerable yew,
That in the lonely church-yard grew,
Two Ravens sate. In solemn croak
Thus one his hungry friend bespoke.
Methinks I scent some rich repast,
The savour strengthens with the blast;
Snuff then; the promis'd feast inhale,
I taste the carcase in the gale.
Near yonder trees the farmer's steed,
From toil and ev'ry drudg'ry freed,
Hath groan'd his last. A dainty treat!
To birds of taste delicious meat!
(lines 73-84)
This little conversation of hungry crows pondering a dead
carcass paraphrases The Three Ravens, a traditional English
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DIANNE DUGAW
ballad which first appeared in print in 1611, apparently already a
very old song.27 Since that time, the song has persisted in Anglo-
American song tradition in a complex array of forms-most of
them parodies-right up to our own day. The following eighteenthcentury
version was known to sheep-shearers and harvest workers
in Lincolnshire:
There was three ravens in a tree,
As black as any jet could be.
A down a derry down
Says the middlemost raven to his mate,
Where shall we go to get ought to eat?
'It's down in yonder grass-green field
There lies a squire dead and killd.
'His horse all standing by his side,
Thinking he'll get up and ride.
'His hounds all standing at his feet,
Licking his wounds that run so deep.
Then comes a lady, full of woe,
As big wi bairn as she can go.
She lifted up his bloody head,
And kissd his lips that were so red.
She laid her down all by his side,
And for the love of him she died.28
Conspicuously, this representative version of the original ballad
depicts a stable and accepted social order: the ruling squire
mourned by horse, hawks, and hounds-his public possessions as
hunter-warrior, and by his pregnant woman-his domestic possession
as husband. Of course, even in such straightforward,
unparodic forms of the ballad, the ravens threaten this order by
their scavenging presence and by the parody interjected into the
scene by their speaking beaks. Nonetheless, the song renders in
approving terms the key elements of this hierarchy. Its vanity is
precisely the point of Gay's undermining poem.
Gay's fable of hungry crows transforms the original along
several lines of social comment. First, his language is redolent of
high society: "rich repast," "savour," "snuff," "taste," "steed,"
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JOHN GAY'S SATIRE
"dainty treat," "delicious meat." His carrion-feeding ravens wear
the waistcoat and breeches of eighteenth-century England's manor
houses, a pointed marriage of beast and human context, to be sure.
Moreover, the fable immediately opposes to its Gentlemen-Crows
a realm "beneath," as these well-mannered ravens matter-of-factly
project the probable identity of their upcoming feast: "the farmer's
steed, / From toil and ev'ry drudg'ry freed." Into the ballad
borrowing Gay injects a pointed social critique as his fable's world
splays into opposing realms: preying Gentleman-Crows, oppressive
farmers, and overworked horses whose "drudgery" only death
can relieve. With his familiar maneuver of opposition, Gay divides
his ballad reference in terms of class, calling to our attention an
oppression defined explicitly in terms of social position and work.
In citing the Three Ravens, Gay situates his own fable within a
history of burlesque associated with the old ballad. Indeed, he
invokes a song whose tradition bristles with social satire. Burlesque
forms of the ballad, more widespread and popular than the
original and almost as old, irreverently overturn the order and
solemnity of their prototype. The first of these burlesques to reach
print seems to be the Scottish Twa Corbies which appears in
Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1803), like its
prototype, an old and widely dispersed song. The crows in this
parody observe the slain knight's subjects abandoning him at the
first opportunity:
'His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.29
But Gay's transformation of the Three Ravens has even more
telling affinity to another comic permutation: a burlesque which
reduces the squire to a horse (as Gay's ravens mistakenly do at
first). This burlesque of the ballad seems not to have been printed
before the middle of the nineteenth century. However, the song's
form reveals an association-presumably longstanding-with
mock sermons, a popular tradition extending back to the late
Middle Ages and a folk form in which the ballad still flourishes
today.30 Here is the song as it appears in a nineteenth-century
minstrel show songster, the performance a parody of hymnsinging:
SPOKEN (slowly and precisely).
There were three crows sat on a tree,
And they were black as black could be.
Brothers, sing!
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DIANNE DUGAW
QUARTETTE.
There were three crows sat on a tree,
And they were black as black could be.
SPOKEN.
One of them said unto his mate,
"What shall we do for grub to eat!"-
Brothers, sing!
QUARTETTE.
One of them said unto his mate,
"What shall we do for grub to eat?"
SPOKEN.
There lies a horse on yonder plain,
Whose bod-y has been late-ly slain.
Brothers, sing!
QUARTETTE.
There lies a horse on yonder plain,
Whose bod-y has been late-ly slain.
SPOKEN.
Let's perch ourselves on his back-bone,
And pick his eyes out, one by one!
Brothers, sing!
QUARTETTE.
Let's perch ourselves on his back-bone,
And pick his eyes out, one by one!
SPOKEN.
The devil thought to in-jure me,
By cutting down my apple-tree,
Brothers, sing!
QUARTETTE.
The devil thought to in-jure me,
By cutting down my apple-tree.
SPOKEN.
He did not in-jure me at all,
For I had apples all the fall.
Brothers, sing!
QUARTETTE.
He did not in-jure me at all,
For I had apples all the fall.31
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JOHN GAY'S SATIRE
This burlesque mocks the church custom of "lining out" a hymn
(also known as "deaconing"). Current since the seventeenth
century, "lining out" involves the speaking of each line of a hymn
by the song leader before it is sung by the congregation.32 Such
"deaconing" versions of the Three Ravens continue to be featured
today in the longstanding folk jest tradition, the parodic sermon.33
In his fable, Gay's parody of the Three Ravens leads explicitly to
the ecclesiastical realm. Quickly the image of the overworked horse
shifts to that of a parish Sexton who, busy at his gravedigging
"trade," overhears the ravens' "chat." Again, Gay fixes his eye on
hierarchy and work. Death gives this Sexton in the employ of the
church "no farther thought, / Than merely as the fees he brought"
(lines 87-88). Temporarily distracted by the ravens, he demands
that these "Blockhead" crows "learn more respect." (Such a man as
the Sexton would sing the original ballad with the dutiful hawks
and hounds.) What these birds smell is no horse's carcass-(This is
no parodic ballad!)-but rather the "somewhat fat... squire, that
yon fair hall possest." "Where's the dignity of man?" the Sexton
demands. Gay's chatty ravens-class-conscious parodies of the
ballad parody-busily take up the Sexton's question and decide
that, as to the dignity of man, in the matter of tasty carcasses, dead
horses are in fact preferred to fat squires. An argument ensues
between these "disputing friends." In the Squire's stratified
society, Gay stages an ironic and most undignified quarrel of
"taste" with regard to "the dignity of man."
The ravens refer the "case" to an authoritative arbiter, an
Earthworm who, "huge of size, unroll'd / His monstrous length"
(lines 126-27): "to th' experience of his jaws / Each states the merits
of the case" (lines 129-30). With great solemnity, Gay's parodic
judge undertakes the mock sermon's cousin among stock parodies,
the mock legal argument. Peter Burke describes these widely
popular parodies of the forms of institutional power:
Parodies of legal forms were almost as common as ecclesiastical
parodies [such as mock sermons]. There were mock
proclamations, mock trials, such as the trial of Carnival (or,
in England), The whole trial and indictment of Sir John
Barleycorn: most common of all, there were mock testamentsthe
cock's, the Pope's, the Devil's, Philip II's, Frederick the
Great's, and many more.... [T]he creators of popular culture
took over ready-made forms from the official culture of the
church and the law.34
With matchless self-importance, Gay's mock judge delivers an
utterly leveling verdict: the worm distinguishes not at all between
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DIANNE DUGAW
human and equine carcasses. Death confounds all hierarchy: "The
prince," "the judge," "The rich, the poor, the great, the small, /
Are levell'd. Death confounds 'em all."35 Nor are the worm and his
fellow "reptiles" so deluded as to imagine that the "real good of
man" were a matter of "taste." Rather, value is "virtue" that
"Mounts with the soul we know not where." Thus, the parodic
worm returns the poem to its opening, to "virtue"-and to ironic
negation. As Gay hinted at the outset, "virtue," rather than being a
positive entity such as "goodness" or-even more to the point-
"righteousness," is instead a nonentity, a renunciation: Laura
refuses to be fooled; she will not feed on flattery, the carrion of
language.
Brought to worm-level, Gay's fable voices a profound and selfimplicating
skepticism. Leaving the scavengers' dispute unresolved,
the worm's parting remarks are the most castigating of all,
indicting as they do the Sexton and the preying social structure
which commands his allegiance.
So good-man Sexton, since the case
Appears with such a dubious face,
To neither I the cause determine,
For diff'rent tastes please diff'rent vermine.
(lines 55-58)
The loyal Sexton is identified: he is but a "diff'rent vermine."
Moreover, in a manner typical of Gay, the fable encircles itself in
this deepening spiral. Its proposition from the outset-the
"dignity" and superiority of "man" framed within a "moral
light"-erodes utterly through the course of the poem, particularly
as it resembles the vulturism of the deluded Sexton. All power
arrangements stand mocked and indicted as the verse makes its way
from the courtly realm of female beauty and male tyrants, on
through the ballad-based fable which eventually undoes itself
when "dignity" is found nowhere in sight, least of all in the
Sexton's churchyard. Thus, the facetious little poem spirals down
the social system, undoing all forms of carrion-feasting and powerparsing
artifice, even its own.36
In The Ravens, the Sexton, and the Earthworm, as in so many of
Gay's works, elements of the Bowzybean context of popular
traditions pervade the satire. They are crucial to both his method
and his sensiblity. A bricoleur with these materials, Gay borrows
from them and builds with them from the very center of a work.
Indeed, the structure and scope of his satire can hardly be
appreciated without identifying these stones, tiles, boards, and
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JOHN GAY'S SATIRE
beams that make it up. In just this way, The Ravens, the Sexton,
and the Earthworm absorbs popular parodic traditions-mocking
ballads, sermons, and legal arguments. As it does, it frames and
points in a single direction their gestures of leveling reversal. It
turns the irreverent stance of the ballad parody into a deeply and
consciously held moral position. Such borrowings from the
underclass realm of Bowzybeus stand at the very heart of John
Gay's satire.
NOTES
"'Saturday" of The Shepherd's Week, lines 45-120 in Vinton A. Dearing
and Charles E. Beckwith, eds., John Gay: Poetry and Prose, 2 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1974), 1:120-23. Gay identifies himself with Bowzybeus in
lines 87-90 of the "Prologue"(p. 95). All quotations from poems by Gay are
from this edition.
2Defining "traditional lore" or "folklore" is a complex task. For this
discussion, the following general definition will suffice. In Funk and
Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, ed. Maria
Leach, 2 vols. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1949-50), 1:399, Theodore
Gastor writes:
Folklore is that part of a people's culture which is preserved,
consciously or unconsciously, in beliefs and practices, customs and
observances of general currency; in myths, legends, and tales of
common acceptance; and in arts and crafts which express the temper
and genius of a group rather than of an individual. Because it is a
repository of popular traditions and an integral element of the
popular "climate," folklore serves as a constant source and frame of
reference for more formal literature and art; but it is distinct
therefrom in that it is essentially of the people, by the people, and for
the people.
See pp. 398-408 for extensive discussion of the topic. For a preliminary
consideration of Gay and tradition, see Gene Wiggins, "The Uneasy Swain:
Folklore in John Gay," Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 46, 3 (September
1980): 45-62.
3These last in particular reveal the depth of Gay's reliance on popular
forms, a depth which sets him apart from other writers of the period whose
borrowed folk materials function rather at the surface of their texts. One
thinks, for example, of Swift's Description of a City Shower, or of Richardson's
Sir Charles Grandison.
40n these forms and terms, see Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of
Folklore, 1:106-11, 431-39, and 1032-50, and 2:753, 761, 902-906, and 938-44.
5For a survey of scholarship on this subject, see Edgar Roberts's remarks in
John Gay, The Beggar's Opera, ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Edward Smith
(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1969), pp. xxviii-xxix.
528
DIANNE DUGAW
60n these tunes and their provenance, see Claude M. Simpson, The British
Broadside Ballad and Its Music (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1966),
pp. 96-101, 687-92, and 561-63.
7The Beggar's Opera, I.viii.79-83 in John Gay, Dramatic Works, ed. John
Fuller, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 2:15. All quotations from
plays by Gay are from this edition.
8The Willoughby Whim in Thomas D'Urfey, ed., Wit and Mirth: or Pills
To Purge Melancholy, 6 vols. (London: W. Pearson for J. Tonson, 1719-20;
rpt. New York: Folklore Library Publishers, 1959), 1:169.
gBertrand Harris Bronson, a scholar eminently versed in the study of
folksong, supplies a number of telling examples of this ironic interplay
between texts in The Beggar's Opera and the popular words originally linked
to the tunes that Gay used. See his essay "The Beggar's Opera" in Facets of the
Enlightenment: Studies in English Literature and Its Contexts (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1968), pp. 62-68. However, because his
purpose is to link Gay's play and Italian operas of the 1720s, Bronson does not
pursue the question of the provenance of these popular songs beyond their
appearance in D'Urfey's collection. For an overview of broadside balladry, see
Simpson's introduction in British Broadside Ballad, pp. ix-xvii. For discussion
of D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth, see Cyrus Day's introduction to the 1959 edition,
pp. i-xii. For a reconsideration of the interplay of print and oral forms in
Anglo-American folksong, see Dianne Dugaw, "Anglo-American Folksong
Reconsidered: The Interface of Oral and Written Forms," Western Folklore
43, 2 (April 1984): 83-103.
10In Gay's time, proverbs were associated with the underclass. In a letter
from 25 July 1741 Lord Chesterfield recommends that his son avoid "old
sayings" and "common proverbs" which were "proofs of having kept bad and
low company . . . that you had never kept company with anybody above
footmen and housemaids." See Bonamy Dobree, ed., The Letters of Philip
Dormer Stanhope, Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, 6 vols. (London and New
York: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1932; rpt. London and New York: AMS Press,
1968), 2:461.
liStill current, this proverb is L506 in Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of
the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann
Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1950), p. 396. See also F.P. Wilson, rev., The
Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p.
490; Wolfgang Mieder, The Prentice-Hall Encyclopedia of World Proverbs
(Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1986), p. 286; and B.J. Whiting, Early
American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,
1977), p. 269.
'This is L515 (p. 397) in Tilley. See also Wilson, p. 491.
'3These are W231 (p. 715), H196 (p. 293), C663 (p. 120), and B396 (p. 50) in
Tilley. See also Wilson, pp. 490, 875, and 515; Mieder, pp. 521, 314, and 32;
and Whiting, pp. 477, 84, and 33. The dialogue or flyting is a typical folk
framework not only for proverbs, but also for such other traditional forms as
riddles and songs.
'4This widespread belief has been reported in the U.S., Canada, Great
Britain, and Germany. See Wayland D. Hand, ed., Popular Beliefs and
Superstitions from North Carolina, vols. 6 and 7 of The Frank C. Brown
Collection of North Carolina Folklore, 7 vols. (Durham, NC: Duke Univ.
Press, 1952-64), 6, no. 4650. Cf. no. 3579-80. See also Wayland D. Hand, Anna
Casetta, and Sondra B. Thiederman, eds., Popular Beliefs and Superstitions:
529
JOHN GAY'S SATIRE
A Compendium of American Folklore from the Ohio Collection of Newbell
Niles Puckett, 3 vols. (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981), 1, no. 4650, and 2, no. 13833,
13890, 16481, 16484, 16487, 22271, 22349-57, 22565-70, 22762, 26192, and
27437-38. These collections will be designated as Brown and Puckett.
'5See Brown, 6, no. 4234, 4134-35, 4146, and 4148.
'6See E. and M.A. Radford, Encyclopedia of Superstitions, Christina Hole,
ed. (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 1961), p. 189. The Radfords record
the following rhyme-which puts one in mind of Gay's-to accompany the
ritual: "Hempseed I sow, Hempseed, I grow. / He that is to marry me, / Come
after me and mow." See also Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of
England (London: Chatto and Windus, 1916; rpt. New York: B. Blom, 1968),
pp. 384-85.
'See Brown, 6, no. 4536-39; Puckett, 1, no. 12981-82; and Radford, p. 313.
'See Brown, 6, no. 4594-99; Puckett, 1, no. 12987-91; and Radford, p. 17.
'9See Puckett, I, no. 13023, 13567-60, 14284, 13555, and 13557-59; Brown, 6,
no. 4404, 4533, 4545, 4589-90, and 4639; and Radford, pp. 17, 212, 252, and
260-61. Nor are love portents the only components of custom and belief in
Gay's works. In Fable 37 (1727), a fretful widow ponders widely reported bad
omens: 'The salt is spilt... / My Knife and fork were laid across,/ On Friday
too!" (lines 6-9). Later, a traditionally feared raven makes an "ill-betiding"
appearance (lines 26-27, Gay, Poetry and Prose, 2:350-51). (See Brown, 6, no.
2879-80 and 3551, and 6, no. 5994, 5996-98, 6002, and 7289; and Puckett, 1, no.
3426, 15923-43, 16432, 16434, 16448, and 16491; and 2, 30680; and Radford,
p. 281.) Another "boding Raven" betokens death in The Shepherd's Week
("Friday," line 103) along with other traditional portents: "tolling bells"
(lines 99-100), "shrilling Crickets" and other "clicking" insects (lines 101-
102), and swarming bees (line 107). (See Brown, 7, no. 5320, 5337-38, and
5049; Puckett, 2, no. 28211-12, 28730, 28252-53, 28259, 28261-62, and 28279;
and Radford, pp. 39-40, 120, and 132.) Supernatural folklore likewise occurs
in Gay. Ghosts are signalled by "jingling of chains," blood-stained planks,
spectral identifications of murderers, bluish-burning candle-flames, the smell
of sulphur, and so on (Gay, Poetry and Prose, 1:198-200. An Answer to the
Sompner's Prologue of Chaucer (1717), lines 20-26 and 53-56; Poetry and
Prose, 1:223-26, A true Story of an Apparition (1720), lines 17-26, 74-76, 84,
and 94-124; and The Wife of Bath (1713), Dramatic Works, 1:101-71, III.i.79-
100. For traditional correspondents, see Brown, 7, 5710, 6, no. 3699-700, 3694-
96, 7, no. 5166, 5764, and 5082; Puckett, 2, 29665, 20593, 29607, and 26297.)
Fable 3 (1727) centers on beliefs about infant-stealing fairies (Puckett, 1, no.
3356-59). Fable 23 (1727) catalogues safeguards against witches: objects set
across a path, horseshoes nailed in the doorway, and the drawing of a witch's
blood (lines 29-34) (Brown, 7, no. 5562, 5634, 5627-28, and 5727; and Puckett,
2, no. 25957, 25977, 25986-87, and 26010). Gay shows an easy familiarity with
weather signs. "Pricking Corns" foretell rain in The Shepherd's Week
("Monday," line 28) and Three Hours after Marriage (1717) (2, 65) (Brown, 7,
no. 6414, 6641, and 6916; and Puckett, 2, no. 34140). High-flying swallows
signal clear weather in The Shepherd's Week ("Monday," lines 29-30)
(Brown, 7, no. 6245; Puckett, 2, no. 33841). In Trivia (1716) Gay repeats the
traditional tenets that weather on St. Paul's and St. Swithin's days predicts
future storms and warfare (lines 175-86) (Brown, 7, no. 6435; Puckett, 2, no.
34755; Radford, p. 277. For the legend of St. Swithin, see Marjorie Rowling,
The Folklore of the Lake District [Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield,
1976], p. 103). In The Shepherd's Week Gay notes, with facetious double
530
DIANNE DUGAW 5
entendre, the saying that when "the Heifers Tail" is "stuck aloft. . . Showers
. . . ensue" ("Monday," lines 25-26), parodying the saying that one knows of a
storm "if a cow raises her tail over her back and runs" (Harry M. Hyatt,
Folklore from Adams County Illinois, 2nd edn. [Hannibal, MO: Western
Printing and Lithographing, 1965], no. 727).
20Hoyt Trowbridge, "Pope, Gay, and The Shepherd's Week," MLQ 5, 1
(March 1944): 84.
21Patricia Meyer Spacks notes this complexity in John Gay (New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1965), pp. 39-40. Other studies of Gay's social criticism
touch on it as well, though none explores the strategic ways that Gay uses folk
forms. See Adina Forsgren, John Gay, Poet "of a Lower Order" (Stockholm:
Natur och Kultur, 1964), and Sven M. Armens, John Gay, Social Critic (New
York: King's Crown Press, 1954).
22Gay, Dramatic Works, 1:101-71. The Scene depicting this custom is III.i.
For an account of this traditional custom, see Vance Randolph, Ozark Magic
and Folklore, formerly titled Ozark Superstitions (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1947; rpt. New York: Dover, 1964), p. 179.
23Ian Donaldson discusses this ambiguity of genre in "'A Double Capacity':
The Beggar's Opera" in The World Upside Down: Comedy from Jonson to
Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 160-61.
24For discussion of the social satire in The What D'Ye Call It, see Forsgren,
pp. 187-94. For discussion of the folk "Wooing Play" (or "Plough Play"), see
E.K. Chambers, The English Folk-Play (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933),
pp. 89-123. See also Charles Read Baskervill, "Mummers' Wooing Plays in
England," MP 21, 2 (February 1924), pp. 225-72.
25For discussion of this ballad motif, see Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women
and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).
For analysis of Gay's use of the motif in Polly, see pp. 191-211. The play was
stopped in rehearsal in December of 1728. Published by Gay in a subscription
edition in 1729, it was not brought to the stage until George Colman's
production of 1777.
26Gay published his first set of fifty animal fables inscribed to Prince William
in 1727. At the end of his life he was at work on a second set. The sixteen fables
he completed for this set-each much longer than those in the earlier groupwere
brought to publication by the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry in 1738,
six years after Gay's death.
27Thomas Ravenscroft, Melismata. Musicall Phansies. Fitting the Court,
Cittie, and Countrey Humours (London: W. Stansby for T. Adams, 1611), no.
20.
28Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5
vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882-98; rpt. New York: Dover, 1965), 5:212.
29Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: J.
Ballantyne, 1803), 3:239. The entire text is:
As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane
The tane unto the t'other say,
'Where sall we gang and dine to-day?'
'In behint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new slain knight;
And nae body kens that he lies there,
But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.
531
532 JOHN GAY'S SATIRE
'His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.
'Ye'll sit on his white hause bane,
And I'll pike out his bonny blue een:
Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair,
We'll theek our nest when it grows bare.
'Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sail ken whare he is gane:
O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sail blaw for evermair.'
I have found no explicit evidence that Gay knew this burlesque, though it is
conceivable he could have known it, given his own familiarity with Scottish
songs as well as his close friendship with the Scottish and very musical John
Arbuthnot.
30I am grateful to Ian Russell for directing me to the parodic sermon in
English folk tradition in general and the vitality of Two Crows ballads in that
tradition. Of particular importance to me were his "The Parodic Sermon in
Oral Tradition," an unpublished paper presented at the American Folklore
Society Meeting in Philadelphia, October 1989; and "Parody and Performance"
in Michael Pickering and Tony Green, eds., Everyday Culture: Popular
Song and the Vernacular Milieu (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open
Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 70-104.
31Frank Brower's Black Diamond Songster and Ebony Jester (New York:
Dick and Fitzgerald, [c. 1863]), pp. 30-31. The ballad, titled "The Four
Vultures. A Burlesque Quartette," is prefaced by the description: "As sung by
Frank Brower, Ephe Horn, Nelse Seymour, and Charley Fox. (Always
received with shouts of laughter.)"
32J. La Trobe, The Music of the Church (Thames Ditton: R.B. Seeley and
W. Burnside, 1831), p. 198; J. Lightwood, Hymn-Tunes and their Story
(London: C.H. Kelly, 1905), pp. 80-81; and Nicholas Temperley, The Music
of the English Parish Church (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979),
p. 89.
3Of this genre, Russell observes:
In Medieval Europe, two strands of parodic sermon have been
identified . . . the one directed at the highly stylized rhetoric of the
monastery, mainly in Latin; the other essentially popular, directed at
the practices of village priests and wandering mendicants or friars,
usually in the vernacular.... Such parodic sermons shared common
themes: most were against women, marriage, and chastity, or were in
favour of indulgence, especially gluttony, drink, and sex. Many were
in the form of dramatic monologues.... The mock preacher would
often admonish his "congregation," appeal to them to confess their
sins and grant them absolution, and conclude with a request for
money. Many of these features are to be found in modern examples of
the form.
"The Parodic Sermon in Oral Tradition," pp. 1-2.
34Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Maurice
Temple Smith, 1978; rpt. Hants: Wildwood House, 1988), pp. 122-23. Burke's
clarification of the term "mock" in his discussion is important. He says:
"Perhaps the adjective 'mock' is misleading. It does not occur in most
DIANNE DUGAW 533
contemporary descriptions, which refer only to 'trials', 'testaments', and so
on. If we decide to use the term, we should at least be aware of its ambiguity. A
mock battle may be no more or no less than a battle with blunt weapons"
(p. 123). Thus, Burke identifies in these popular parodies an invocation of
form and of institutional context such as we find in Gay's fable. It is likely
that Gay had such popular parodies in mind.
35Such social leveling is the standard theme not only in traditional mock
legal arguments, but in mock funeral sermons as well. See Sander L. Gilman,
The Parodic Sermon in European Perspective: Aspects of Liturgical Parody
from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1974),
p. 55.
36For discussion of Gay's self-consciously "deconstructive" use of language
in the Fables, see Jayne Lewis, "The Voluble Body: Re-inventing the
Neoclassical Fable" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton Univ., 1988), pp. 440-521.