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Even if John Gay had never written his bestknown poems and plays--The Shepherd's Week (1714), Trivia (1716), Fables (1727), and The Beggar's Opera (1728)--we would know him through his friends, some of the wittiest and most influential writers, poets, courtiers, and politicians of early-eighteenth-century England. While he had friends in high places, however, Gay's familiarity with the life of the streets, the calculated ambiguity of his poetry, and his lack of success at court make him a congenial figure for the common reader. But John Gay has usually been denigrated, not respected, for his comparative powerlessness. According to Samuel Johnson, for example, in his Lives of the Poets (volume 2, 1779) Gay's friends "regarded him as a play-fellow rather than a partner, and treated him with more fondness than respect." Recently scholars and critics have challenged such a judgment, recognizing that Gay happened to excel at lyric poetry at a time when epic and satire were most prestigious, and valuing his generic inventiveness.
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