The Beggar's Opera

‘Hark! I hear the sound of coaches! The hour of attack approaches, To your arms, brave boys, and load.’ So sings Matt of the Mint, part of Macheath’s gang of thieves, and how the fashionable London audience laughed and applauded. Then afterwards they climbed into their carriages to drive home and perhaps wondered, just for a minute, whether they would be robbed by highwaymen because John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera had a cast of cheats, prostitutes and thief takers – all those the affluent audience drove past on their way home.

There were of course political and social parallels within the opera. The Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole was caricatured as ‘Robin of Bagshot, alias Gorgon, alias Bluff Bob, alias Carbuncle, alias Bob Booty’. He was also mocked in the amoral and hypocritical Peachum and the anti-hero Macbeth – the Adonis of thieves - with his womanising. Gay and his composer teased Handel with their old English songs and lyrics. The company of thieves go off to rob coaches to the march from Rinaldo. The Polly (wife to Macheath) Lucky Lockit (mistress to Macheath) rivalry mocked the dislike and competition between Handel’s two mega soprano stars Cuzzoni and Faustina.

Interestingly Gay can’t quite make the heroine Polly Peachum a prostitute (a step too far but this part made a star of Lavinia Fenton) she has to be innocent, generous and married and thus a disappointment to her parents. She is honest where they are duplicitous, trusting when they trust no one and married to their disgust. ‘If the wench does not know her own profit, sure she knows her own pleasure better than to make herself a property! My daughter to me should be, like a court lady to a minister of state, a key to the whole gang. Married! If the affair is not already done, I’ll terrify her from it, by the example of our neighbours.’

Is there a happy ending given this dark sardonic view of human nature and relationships? Well, there is an ending but then Gay quoted an epigram of Martial on the title-page of the libretto to warn his critics, ‘We know these things to be nothing.’

I listened to Sir Malcolm Sargent, Pro Arte Chorus and Pro Arte Orchestra (1955) recording in parallel with reading the play.

Edited by Edgar V. Roberts. Music edited by Edward Smith. (Regents Restoration Drama Series)

A depiction of the thieves, informers, prostitutes and highwaymen thronging the slums and prisons of the corrupt London underworld that exposes the dark side of a corrupt and jaded society.

Ain't nuthin' but a gangsta party. ( )

The Beggar's Opera is such an important piece of theatre, both now and at the time of its first performances, that it's hard to believe that any review I could write for it would suffice. Nevertheless, even if the only tangential exposure one has to it is through a pop standard written for a modern derivation -- "Mack the Knife," from the Threepenny Opera, of course -- I can't stress enough how marvelous the original remains, nearly 300 years later.

The plot of the play revolves around the scoundrel Macheath, a notorious thief who swears his love to two ladies: a fellow thief named Lucy, and poor Polly, daughter of the aptly-named Peachum, who takes advantage throughout of convoluted plots to inform on known thieves in order to collect a reward for their capture. The plot is surprisingly simple for all its double-crossing and scheming, but, as the ingenious finale proves, the plot is really besides the point.

Where the play shines is in its satirical characterization of the period. Peachum, as the crooked "thief-taker," is as guilty as any other villain in the play -- even the prime minister Robert Walpole, to whom many jokes and lays are slung. The lays, short songs performed to the tune of popular standards, remain fascinating jabs at the growing popularity of opera in the period, as is the frame of a poor beggar whose tale is performed for the audience's enjoyment.

By the end, all caution and couth has been thrown to the wind and the situations are left in complete disarray. The chaotic yet carefully constructed nature of the play is what allows it to endure: the sheer fact that it manages to stay together is a testament to the genius of Gay as a playwright. Sadly, little of his other work (including an ill-conceived sequel) lived up to the promise of The Beggar's Opera, but its enduring popularity alone makes it worthy of letting yourself become bemused in its brisk banter.