“Deep Play”: John Gay and the Invention of Modernity by Dianne Dugaw (review)

166 7 Cited hereafter by page number. Some copies were printed on fine paper, presumably for Whigs. 8 Richard Steele, Tatler, no. 3, ed. Donald F. Bond, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 32. Steele later apologized to Blackmore in Tatler, no. 14, ‘‘for my Raillery upon his Work,’’ asserting, ‘‘I aim’d no more in that Examination, but to convince him, and all Men of Genius, of the Folly of laying themselves out on such Plans as are below their Characters’’ (118). 9 As Bond noted (33, n. 12). Rosemary Cowler, ed., The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, vol. 2: The Major Works, 1725–1744 (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1986), notes that chapter 15 of Peri Bathous, ‘‘A Receipt to make an Epic Poem,’’ was originally Guardian 78, 10 June 1713 (271, n. 264). So it is not unlikely that Pope recalled Steele’s phrase in this context. 10 Blackmore would have expected his reader to hear an echo of Virgil’s ‘‘Ascanius, magnae spes altera Romae’’ (Aeneid, 12.168). The thought of Georg August as Ascanius must have especially amused Pope. 11 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbank Hill, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 240. 12 Churchill, 468. 13 Country Journal; or, The Craftsman. 8 June 1728. Unlike Oxford, which was dominated by High Tories, Cambridge was Whig and enjoyed the largess of the first two Georges. 14 The Dunciad 4, lines 203–274, TE 5:362–371. 15 ‘‘He had just entertained King George II at a banquet in the college during a royal visit from Newmarket which resembled that of his father in 1717, except that precautions were taken to fix in advance the amount of fees to be paid to the Regius Professor of Divinity for the creation of doctors, of whom the professor created no less than fifty-eight on this occasion’’(R. J. White, Dr Bentley: A Study in Academic Scarlet [London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965], 204). That ‘‘the visit of George II was to see the elderly master standing by the royal chair like a proud and yet humble servitor’’(112) should for Pope have secured Bentley’s prominent place among the sons of Dulness. 16 The Last and Greatest Art: Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack (Newark: Delaware, 1984), 173. 17 That Blackmore’s poem belongs to the ‘‘Advice-to-a-Painter’’ genre may have suggested Pope’s choice of verb, although Pope uses the poet and painter metaphor elsewhere, as in Eloisa to Abelard, line 366. 18 Frank Stack, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1985), 36– 37. He is seconded by James McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford, 2001), 163. 19 Selected Prose, ed. John Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1961), 159. University of Iowa BOOK REVIEWS DIANNE DUGAW. ‘‘Deep Play’’: John Gay and the Invention of Modernity. Newark: Delaware, 2001. Pp. 322. $48.50. Ms. Dugaw, who for the past two decades has been educatingusaboutpopularculture and the elite appropriation of it during the eighteenth century, has found an idealsubject in John Gay. In Deep Play she convincingly argues that his expert mixture of high and low presages modern concepts of class and culture that emerge from the dislocations 167 of a rising commercial society. After broader accounts of the role of print and orality and the debate over pastoral in Gay’s work, Ms. Dugaw examines his major texts in light of the popular and higher genres that they parody. The results are refreshing and revealing. By combining feminist , Marxist, and queer theory, Ms. Dugaw sensitively alerts us to missed genres and contexts. I wonder how I could have understood The What-d’Ye-Call-It without the benefit of her knowledge of Christmas mumming plays. Her reading of Polly gives a play often rendered invisible by the brilliance of The Beggar’s Opera a light of its own, as she shows how Gay uses dance to embody a triple analogy of purchaser/slave, husband/wife, and king/courtier. Her salutary attention to the multiple political resonances of the songs in The Beggar’s Opera newly illuminates what she sees as Gay’s distinctly unheroic but redeemably humane modernity. The deep...