The Beggar's Opera

Gay, John. The Beggar’s Opera. 1728. Dover, 1999.
July has been my month for thieves, pickpockets, and denizens of mean streets, real and fanciful. I started the month by reading a recent fantasy novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, which inspired me to read Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, which brought me to John Gay, one of the early sources of it all. I have just embarked on Daniel Abraham’s new novel, The Age of Ash, another fantasy that begins with a detailed description of a three-person cutpurse team in action. Why does popular culture so love gangs of urban miscreants? There may be some wish-fulfillment in the dream of taking money from the undeserving rich. We admire the immoral efficiency of criminal show more gangs. Gay apologizes for not delivering poetic justice all around, but justice is just what we say we want, not what we really want. Even murder is fine if it is done with style. Murder, he says, is as “fashionable a crime as a man can be guilty of.” Lawyers are the worst criminals because they steal your “whole estate.” I have never seen the play produced and wonder how the doggerel and social stereotyping would play to a modern audience. But I could be wrong—we certainly like the updated versions. 4 stars. show less

By all accounts this play has aged horribly. I mean how many times and in how many variations can you read about women being called nearly every version of "woman with loose virtue?" But, despite this, the play works, very well, extremely well.

The reason for this, for me, is that the play never overindulges or comes off as exploitative in any way. It's a boisterous and funny look at a certain place in a certain time where (and when) the virtues of everyone were in question. And John Gay makes wonderful copy of this; as one of the greater overriding themes of the work, that corruption unifies the high and low of society, it's hilarious to see how similar human beings really are when it comes to doing wrong and falling far short of the show more ideals that religion and philosophy have codified. In addition to this Gay never seems to lose the controlling hand over his characters. They're all bastards, bitches, and rogues, but Gay never stops to obsess over who and what makes these people tick. The wonderful concomitant pacing truly allows you to go with the narrative and just enjoy the amorality.

So read this and enjoy it for what it is: a short but biting burlesque that elucidates beautifully how human weakness and professional corruption really knows no income. show less

Written in the early 1700's, The Beggar's Opera was a satirical play featuring the more unsavory aspects of society, from thieves and prostitutes to corrupt officials and an unjust law enforcement system. The play also poked fun at traditional Italian opera, by both simply being an anti-opera by nature and by using the characters to mimic some of the drama surrounding the opera scene, such as feuding actresses.

The play was fairly successful, though for conflicting reasons. It was hailed as both a revolutionary and insightful denouncement of corruption among all walks of life, while others saw it as simply offensive and indecent. Regardless, the play stood the test of time, and here I am reading it today.

Reading it today, however, show more doesn't have the same impact as it did at the time. While the physical play has stood the test of time, the meaning and purpose of it doesn't stand up quite so well. At least, I found it rather uninteresting. It's something to appreciate for it's historical merit, but not much else, I'm afraid. show less

‘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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Very strange to read this in the 21st century. These days everyone treats the poor/disadvantaged etc very nicely (well, everyone except Martin Amis). For his time, you might say the same of Gay, but every character in this book full of poor people is a criminal or scumbag of some other kind. So not so sympathetic. On the other hand, that's a good thing: there's no way you can depict the evils of poverty without making the impoverished at least a little offputting. If they're all nice and happy, what's the problem with impoverishment? But the opening and closing dialogues are very cutting parodies of Italian Opera, and the plot contrivances of both those operas and fictions in general, as well as the disproportion between the punishments show more the vicious poor and the vicious rich suffer. It's pretty funny, but I suspect it would be better on stage than on the page, and certainly some of the humor must be lost to history. show less

I also watched the 60's BBC production of this play, which helped flesh out the story a bit. This is an operatic play, so reading it without hearing the songs is a bit dull. This play is supposed to be light entertainment with a bit of social commentary thrown in, and it seems fairly successful, even for a modern audience, but it's not one of my favorite classic plays.