Henry Carey (writer) - Carey As Dramatic Satirist

Carey As Dramatic Satirist

As a playwright, Carey was a significant figure in the re-emergence of satirical drama in the 1730s. After the success of Namby Pamby, Carey was favored by the older generation of Tory wits and the Scriblerus Club. After John Gay's invention of the ballad opera with The Beggar's Opera, Carey turned to writing musical burlesques. He wrote a great deal of music and some librettos for other playwrights during this period.

In 1732, J. F. Lampe, Thomas Arne, J. C. Smith and Henry Carey formed the English Opera project. Their goal was to revive serious opera in English. Together, they formed the English Opera Company, and Carey wrote two librettos, for Amelia (set by Lampe and acted at the Little Theatre at The Haymarket (an opposition playhouse favored by Henry Fielding)) and Teraminta (set by Smith and performed at Lincoln's Inn Fields). Amelia was a great popular success, but the opera company failed, and the project came to nought (Gillespie 128).

Having satirized the foreignness of opera, in 1734 Carey turned his attention to the poorly written, mass produced tragedy. Chrononhotonthologos was a parody of bombastic tragedy and, particularly, the very hack-written spectacle plays he had collaborated on at Drury Lane. The play was daring, for it was a satire of Caroline of Ansbach and George II of the United Kingdom. The Queen was attacked for her alliance with Robert Walpole and her general caprice. It also had a generous amount of music by Carey. If contemporary allies understood the criticisms inherent in the play, it was also possible to see it as a burlesque with nonsense verse. He followed that up with the ballad farce of The Honest Yorkshire-Man.

Interestingly, although Carey's attempt to revive serious, patriotic English opera did not work, his attempts at parody and satire in opera did. He had previously satirized the exoticism and emptiness of the English public's love of prima donna singers and castrati, but in 1737, he adapted The Dragon of Wantley from a Lincolnshire folk ballad into a full mock-opera. This literary adaptation was a step beyond adapting literary plays into ballads (as John Gay had done), for it began with a folk ballad and transformed it into opera. The play, with music by John Frederick Lampe, punctured the vacuous operatic conventions and pointed a satirical barb at Robert Walpole and his taxation policies. The play was a huge success. Its initial run was sixty-nine performances in the first season, which exceeded even The Beggar's Opera. The play debuted at the Haymarket, where its coded attack on Walpole would have been clear, but its long run occurred after it moved to Covent Garden, which had a much greater capacity for staging. Part of its satire of opera was that it had all of the words sung, including the recitatives and da capo arias (Gillespie 128). The play itself is very brief on the page, as it relied extensively on absurd theatrics, dances, and other non-textual entertainments. The Musical Entertainer from 1739 contains engravings showing how the staging was performed (Gillespie 128).

From 1737 to 1740, he wrote The Musical Century in one Hundred English Ballads in two volumes. Although Carey complained that his enemies were calling him "Ballad-maker," the work was praised later by Charles Burney, and in the 19th century opinion of Carey's clear, simple, and memorable ballad tunes went even higher. Also in 1738, he helped found the Fund for Decayed Musicians, and he produced Margery, or, a Worse Plague than the Dragon, a sequel to The Dragon of Wantley.

He had another popular success in 1739 with Nancy, or, The Parting Lovers, a patriotic play about a sailor leaving his beloved to fight against the Spanish. As with other works, Carey's point was primarily patriotic. Patriotic plays at the time were often demurrals of official policy and England's foreign entanglements. Nancy was set as well as written by Carey, and its main characters are a sailor, Nancy, and a Press Gang officer. The play broke new ground in explicitly treating a contemporary matter of social concern in song (Gillespie 128).

Carey's son, Charles, died in 1743, and Carey hanged himself at his home in London later that year.

While the anonymous account in The Gentleman's Magazine says that Carey had an annuity, he left a pregnant second wife (Sarah, whom he married between 1729 and 1733) and three dependent children, and both Hawkins and The London Stage say that he was despondent over financial difficulties. Grief over the death of his son is another possible explanation of his suicide, and Suzanne Aspden speculates that Carey suffered from paranoia, while others have suspected that he had depression or other maladies. His daughter Anne would become an actress and bear an illegitimate son, Edmund Carey, who would later be known as Edmund Kean.