[2] In 1636 he was appointed superior beadle (bedel) in arts and physic in Oxford University, and was in the same year one of the actors in Love's Hospital, or the Hospital for Lovers, a dramatic entertainment provided by William Laud when the king and queen were his guests at St. John's College (30 August 1636).
[1] Gayton studied medicine and received a dispensation from the parliamentary delegates for the degree of bachelor of physic 1 February 1648.
He composed verses for the pageant of Lord Mayor John Dethick, exhibited 29 October 1655, the first allowed since Oliver Cromwell was in power; when the performance took place Gayton was in a debtors' prison.
When convocation proceeded three days after his death to elect a new beadle, Gayton was denounced by the vice-chancellor, John Fell, as "an ill husband and so improvident that he had but one farthing in his pocket when he died".
It is a gossipy and anecdotal commentary in four books, in prose and verse, with quotations, social asides, and references to the theatre.
An expurgated, corrected, and abbreviated edition appeared in 1768 as Festivous Notes on the History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote; its editor, John Potter, described Gayton as "a man of sense, a scholar, and a wit".
[3] He also produced two Oxford broadsides, Epulæ Oxonienses, or a jocular relation of a banquet presented to the best of kings by the best of prelates, in the year 1636, in the Mathematic Library at St. Jo.