Abstract

John Gay’s The What D’Ye Call It: A Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce (1715) seems to contrast technologized forms of representation—symbolized within the play by printed objects (e.g., double-indexed collections of judicial opinions, prolix title pages, and broadsheet ballads)—over and against the dream of a pastoral form of natural communication. This natural communication is enacted upon the human body—for example, in the melancholic speeches and gestures of Gay’s rural characters—and is sometimes synonymous with performance (as when a father arranges the play’s play-within so as to enact a real marriage ceremony between his daughter and her seducer, thus marrying representation and reality as no other medium could). However, this essay ultimately argues that The What D’Ye Call It intends precisely to question any clear-cut binary between modern and traditional modes of expression, between a technologized print and a pastoral in harmony with nature. Indeed, via a printed “Key” to the farce (probably authored by Gay himself), via jokes perceptible only to readers (e.g., stage directions calling for a “Chorus of Sighs and Groans”), and via the revelation that the apparent division between literate and illiterate characters is not as simple as it seems, Gay posits the constructedness of nature itself, and intimates the rich interdependence of book-and body-based art forms—even at a moment when orality and the stage were allegedly giving way to print culture.

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