John Gay

This novel provides a satirical portrait of high society in early eighteenth-century England. It centres on Henrietta, Countess of Marchmont, an upper-class orphan enduring a loveless marriage and imperilled by her first visit to...

This is a story of the difficult or tormented love-affairs of sensitive young people trying to construct their new and modern world. (Intellectually, they seek to reach back past the nineteenth century towards the eighteenth...

This tale is not continuous, but distributed in sections throughout the book. The romance couples make periodic contact with the Countess Brillante, a woman writer about whom Herbert's attitude is typically protean and hard to...

EH 's pastorals include some touching love-stories, but they also regularly reverse the gender situations traditional to the genre. It is pairs of nymphs (not pairs of shepherds) who are alike ambitious to excel in...

Commentators seem unanimously to have believed Pope 's pamphlet claim that he dosed Curll with an emetic to punish him for illicitly publishing Court Poems on 26 March 1716—though since Pope also claimed to have...

Not much is known about her mother, born Hannah Richards, who was a cousin of John Gay and who married HC 's father in 1742.

CC , at Henry Fielding 's Haymarket Theatre , appeared in male roles: as Macheath (John Gay ), Falstaff (Shakespeare ), George Barnwell (George Lillo ), and Lothario (Nicholas Rowe ).

Other poems address public or personal topics, sometimes blending the two together. One may assume that in her poems on political issues AC expressed her actual opinions, even while mindful of remaining acceptable. Her Serious...

EB offers original, discriminating praise for women's writing: Susanna Centlivre (her inspiration, she says), Eliza Haywood (though she regrets her exposure of women's faults), Aphra Behn , and Delarivier Manley , whom she calls the...

There appeared at Dublin an anonymous poem by MB : A Tale, Being an Addition to Mr. Gay 's Fables.

Here a mother teaching her children out of Gay's Fables, 1727, finds her fav'rite Son so moved by the tale of the hare and many friends that she has to assure him that if...

He concluded, let Mrs Howard know that I recommend you to the Queen , though he declined to supply a direct introduction to a potential royal patron. Two months later Gay wrote to Swift...