CHAPTER XI
1730
CORRESPONDENCE
There are few or no details to be discovered about Gay at this time, except such deductions as can be drawn from his correspondence.
JOHN GAY TO DEAN SWIFT.
"I am going very soon into Wiltshire with the Duke of Queensberry. Since I had that severe fit of sickness, I find my health requires it; for I cannot bear the town as I could formerly. I hope another summer's air and exercise will reinstate me. I continue to drink nothing but water, so that you cannot require any poetry from me. I have been very seldom abroad since I came to town, and not once at Court. This is no restraint upon me, for I am grown old enough to wish for retirement....
"I have left off all great folks but our own family; perhaps you will think all great folks little enough to leave off us, in our present situation. I do not hate the world, but I laugh at it; for none but fools can be in earnest about a trifle."[[1]]
Earlier in the year Gay had revised his earliest play "The Wife of Bath," which had been produced unsuccessfully at Drury Lane Theatre on May 12th, 1713, and the new version was staged on January 19 of this year [pg 116]at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. "My old vamped play has got me no money, for it had no success," the author wrote to Swift in the letter of March 3rd; to which Swift replied from Dublin sixteen days later: "I had never much hopes of your vamped play, although Mr. Pope seemed to have, and although it were ever so good; but you should have done like the parsons, and changed your text—I mean, the title, and the names of the persons. After all, it was an effect of idleness, for you are in the prime of life, when invention and judgment go together."