Play: The What d'Ye Call It?

Overview
John Gay's "The What d'Ye Call It?" (1715) is a short, energetic burlesque that skewers the fashionable tragic operas and theatrical affectations of early 18th-century London. Rather than offering a coherent heroic narrative, the piece stitches together exaggerated conventions of high drama, melodramatic declarations, overwrought passions, and implausible stage devices, so that the very language and mechanics of tragedy become the object of ridicule. The result is a playful, self-conscious lampoon that exposes how theatrical form can be absurd when taken to extremes.

Plot and Structure
The plot is deliberately slender and episodic, built from recognizable tragic ingredients, lovers in distress, jealous rivals, misapplied speeches and sudden reversals, but arranged so that their predictability becomes comic. Scenes resolve not by tragic insight but by farce: mistaken identities are revealed, solemn speeches are undercut by physical comedy, and any pretensions to high feeling collapse into ludicrous action. The structure imitates and then subverts the pacing of serious drama, inviting the audience to delight in the contrast between expected dignity and actual silliness.

Style and Satire
Gay employs mock-heroic language and burlesque techniques to deflate theatrical pomposity. Elevated rhetorical flourishes are placed beside trivial concerns, and poetic diction is used to describe ridiculous events, producing a comic dissonance. The play satirizes more than individual lines of dialogue; it targets tastes and habits, the obsession with Italianate opera, the cult of theatrical sentiment, and the audience's appetite for artificial display. Wit often arises from parodying rhetorical excess: the louder and grander the speech, the more obvious its emptiness.

Theatrical Techniques
Physical comedy, abrupt tonal shifts, and stage-business play central roles. Gay leans on stagecraft and pantomime devices familiar from popular entertainments, blending them with the formal markers of tragic performance. Songs and comic interludes puncture solemnity, and exaggerated stage directions become part of the joke. This hybrid of lyric, farce, and parody means the play rewards audience recognition of specific theatrical types and moments; laughter depends as much on savvy spectatorship as on slapstick.

Historical Context and Reception
Appearing when Italian opera and sentimental tragedy were ascendant in London, the play tapped into contemporary debates about taste, authenticity, and national theatrical identity. It addressed a public increasingly attuned to theatrical fashions and ready to mock excesses that seemed imported or artificial. Contemporary response treated it as a clever, playful skewering of trends; its briskness and topicality won appreciative audiences and helped to establish Gay as a witty commentator on popular culture.

Legacy
"The What d'Ye Call It?" stands as an early example of Gay's satirical talent and a precursor to later works that more fully combine social critique with popular forms. Its playful dismantling of dramatic convention anticipated the sharper social burlesque Gay would perfect in subsequent projects. The piece remains valuable for how it reveals the mechanics of theatrical taste: by exposing the artifice that underpins solemn performance, it invites a more skeptical, amused view of theatrical fashion.