Goldsmiths College London

Department of English

Restoration & 18th-century Literature

EN50006A

Discuss some of the targets of the satire in ​The Beggar’s Opera.

Tutors:
Ms Phyllis Richardson & Dr Benjamin Woolley

Candidate:
Dylan C. Thomas

Submitted:
18 January, 2016
 Omnis mundi creatura
Quasi liber et pictura
Nobis est et speculum1

- Alain de Lille, Rhythmus de Incarnatione Christi​, c. 1170

SATIRE, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of
the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.

- ​Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

John Gay’s ​The Beggar’s Opera ​was a sensation when it premiered in 1728, running
for sixty-two consecutive nights, a record in England at the time. Essential to the success of
the opera was its multi-layered satire which Gay rendered in a compact and humorous way.
This satire is composed of three primary elements: the aesthetic, which parodied the Italian
operatic form then in fashion; the social, which pointed out the hypocrisy and vice within
English society; and the political, which concentrated its powers of observation on those
ruling the country. These three elements, essential to the meaning of the opera, exposed the
failings of England’s society as Gay saw them.

1. The Aesthetic: Italian ​opera seria

At the time of writing ​The Beggar’s Opera​ the Italian ​opera seria​ was ​en vogue​ in
London. For the first three decades of the eighteenth century the form dominated the English
stage2. Highly artificial and stylized, with its grotesque castrati, sensuous Italian vowels, and
implausible plots it exercised Gay’s sense of the absurd. It is no surprise then, that when Gay
came to compose ​The Beggar’s Opera3 he chose to parody aspects of the Italian form. The
effect is inc​ongruous, and one can imagine his audiences' cachinnation when t​hey recognised
among the earthy characters two of London’s famous Italian imports, the prime donne
Faustina and Cuzzoni. Alluding to an infamous rivalry between these two opera singers4, the
fictitious author of the play, the Beggar, tells us that,​ ‘as to the parts, I have observed such a
nice impartiality to our two ladies, that it is impossible for either of them to take offence.’5 In
the penultimate scene of the opera, Gay again alludes to the Italian form and its unlikely
happy endings. Despite the Beggar intending to conclude his play with a cautionary message
by ​Macheath’s hanging, the Player intervenes, arguing that ​‘The catastrophe is manifestly

1
“All creations, like books and pictures, mirror us”. ​The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse​, ed. by F. J. E. Raby (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 369-79.
2
​William A. McIntosh, 'Handel, Walpole, and Gay: The Aims of The Beggar's Opera', ​Eighteenth-Century Studies​, 7.4,
(1974), p. 421.
3
It was at the suggestion of the poet Jonathan Swift that Gay came to compose ​The Beggar’s Opera.​ Swift wrote to
Alexander Pope suggesting that Gay might write a piece based on the infamous Newgate prison in London, asking of Pope,
“​What think you of a Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves there?”
4
​John Gay, ​The Beggar's Opera,​ ed. by Bryan Loughrey and T. O. Treadwell (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 10.
5
​Ibid, ​Introduction​.
wrong, for an opera must end happily’.6 Samuel Johnson, writing forty-seven years after
Gay’s death in 1732, states that, ​‘this play [is] written in ridicule of the musical Italian
drama.’7 That Gay had done great damage to the opera is clear from Johnson’s account. He
continues, ‘it drove out of England (for that season) the Italian Opera, which had carried all
before it for ten years.’ 8 There would be little reason to question Johnson’s assessment of
Gay’s motives were it not that we know Gay ​had friendships with people intimately involved
with the Italian form, and not least because of his admiration for the composer Handel
himself.9 Gay’s personal view of the opera was far more nuanced than Johnson suggests; t​he
critic Peter Lewis remarks that:

Gay himself was musical and did not dislike Italian opera in the way that his more doctrinaire
neo-classical contemporaries did...Gay condemns not Italian opera but the completely uncritical
theatregoers who had turned it into a fashionable cult.10

This view is corroborated by the text of the opera when the Player​ explains his reason for
modifying the ending saying​, ​‘All this we must do to comply with the taste of the town.’11
Gay undoubtedly satirises the Italian opera, but despite this he does not mean to destroy it,
rather he uses it to mock the aesthetic decisions of its audiences. His satire is always directed
within, to the state of affairs of England and to the condition of her citizens; Gay’s concern is
not with music, but with people.

2. The Social: vice and hypocrisy

The most apparent targets of satire in ​The Beggar’s Opera ​are the inhabitants of
England. Gay describes the moral foibles of his countrymen and implies that all classes of
people behave similarly. His characters are branded with the names of their vices; among the
‘women of the Town’ we find licentiousness personified in a​ Mrs Coaxer, Mrs Vixen, Suky
Tawdry, and Molly Brazen. The Peachum family name alludes to the practice of informing
on fellow criminals, which the Peachums are themselves. Examples of Gay’s satirizing of
men’s and women’s attitudes to one another and the seemingly loveless institution of
marriage abound. When Peachum instructs his wife to persuade their daughter not to marry,
Mrs Peachum laments:

Why must our Polly, forsooth, differ from her sex, and love only her husband? And why must
Polly’s marriage, contrary to all observation, make her the less followed by other men? All men
are thieves in love, and like a woman the better for being another’s property.12

6
​Ibid, III.XVI.
7
​Samuel Johnson, ​Lives of the English Poets, Volume Two: Congreve to Gray​ (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1964).
8
​Ibid.
9
​Pat Rogers, 'Gay and the World of Opera', in ​John Gay and the Scriblerians​, ed. by Peter Lewis and Nigel Wood(New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).
10
​Peter Elfred Lewis, ​John Gay: The Beggar's Opera​ (London: Edward Arnold, 1976).
11
​John Gay, ​The Beggar's Opera​, ed. by Bryan Loughrey and T. O. Treadwell (London: Penguin, 1986), III.XVI.
12
Ibid, I.V.
These smutty elements, however, are merely devices to appeal to the lowest common
denominator of the audience whilst Gay smuggles in more piquant attacks directed at the
ruling classes. To focus on these parochialisms is to spend time looking for fruit where none
grows. What is pertinent is Gay’s treatment of what Dianne Dugaw calls the ‘satire of social
systems and their power relationships.’13 In Gay’s England a gentleman may murder for the
sake of convenience without fear of moral approbation, which Peachum illustrates when he
says that, ‘No gentleman is ever looked upon the worse for killing a man in his own defence;
and if business cannot be carried on without it, what would you have a gentleman do?’14
Whereas it is certain that a member of the lower classes will be hanged for the same crime;
Gay exposes hypocrisy as a prerogative of the ruling classes. That ‘fine gentlemen’ and the
‘very best families’ indulge in vice is the preeminent theme in his social satire. Not only are
the ruling classes participating in bad behaviour but they offer instruction in it:

A woman knows how to be mercenary, though she hath never been in a court or at an assembly.
We have it in our natures, papa.15

The first air of the opera functions like an overture, giving us the thematic motifs of the
action to come. Within it, Gay’s views on his countrymen are succinctly summed-up:

Through all the employments of life

Each neighbour abuses his brother;
Whore and rogue they call husband and wife:
All professions be-rogue one another.
The priest calls the lawyer a cheat,
The lawyer be-knaves the divine;
And the statesman, because he’s so great,
Thinks his trade as honest as mine.16

Here is confirmation that Gay’s satire is targeted at both the social and political, and ‘exposes
the irony, illusion, and vanity - as well as the injustice - of these very structures of power and
class.’17

3. The Political: corruption and ambivalence

The satirical political element in ​The Beggar’s Opera​ is the most subversive and
widely misunderstood. Critics have suggested that the character of Macheath represents the
prime minister of England at the time, Robert Walpole.18 Whilst both men share a penchant
for womanizing, nevertheless there is little substantial evidence to make a convincing case
that Macheath is a simulacrum of Walpole. The highwayman is little more than a
swashbuckling romance figure which his audiences would have found an amusing
anachronism. What Walpole would have had good reason to object to are the political
13
​Dianne Dugaw, 'Folklore and John Gay's Satire', ​Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900,​ 31.3, (1991), 515-533.
14
​Gay, (1986), I.IV.
15
​Ibid, I.VII.
16
Ibid, I.I.
17
​Dugaw, (1991).
18
​Gay, (1986).
implications of Gay’s satire. The complicity which Gay describes between the criminal world
and the judicial system is clearly expressed by the jailer Lockit’s dealings with Peachum the
‘fence’. When tallying up property stolen by Peachum’s gang​, Lockit bemoans the fact that,
‘the Coronation account19, brother Peachum, is of so intricate a nature, that I believe it will
never be settled.’20 Throughout his opera Gay describes a system where the lines between
officials and criminals are blurred, one which allows corruption to thrive. In his rendering of
lawyers, Gay’s animus reaches its zenith:

A lawyer is an honest employment, so is mine. Like me too

he acts in a double capacity, both against rogues and for ‘em;
for ‘tis but fitting that we should protect and encourage
cheats, since we live by them.21

Turning his attention to the corridors of power he describes Walpole’s ministry as ‘a gang’,
when Peachum declares, ‘my daughter to me should be, like a court lady to a minister of
state, a key to the whole gang!’22 Gay’s view of politicians was ambivalent at best, as seen
when in 1723 he wrote to his friend, Mrs Howard,

I cannot indeed wonder that the Talents requisite for a great statesman are so scarce
in the world since so many of those who possess them are every month cut off in the
prime of their age at the Old Baily.23

Despite Gay’s cynical view of politicians, Walpole himself is not being attacked in ​The
Beggar’s Opera,​ rather it is his stewardship of the country. The prime minister’s England is a
mismanaged corrupt land where the poor pay for their crimes with their lives, and the rich
with their gold. One of the final airs of the opera expresses this view succinctly:

​Since laws were made for every degree,

To curb vice in others, as well as me,
I wonder we han’t better company,
Upon Tyburn tree!
But gold from law can take out the sting;
And if rich men like us were to swing,
‘Twould thin the land, such numbers to string
Upon Tyburn tree!24

Satire is the beating heart which gives ​The Beggar’s Opera ​its vitality. Gay targets
three aspects of his environment, namely, the Italian opera, the social conditions which he
inhabited, and the political world which arranged that environment. His treatment of these
three elements works to expose the absurdity and hypocrisy of the world around him. Despite

19
The Coronation account was a list of property stolen on the ​coronation day of King George I.
20
​Gay, (1986), III.V.
21
Ibid, I.I.
22
Ibid, I.IV.
23
​William A. McIntosh, 'Handel, Walpole, and Gay: The Aims of The Beggar's Opera', ​Eighteenth-Century Studies,​ 7.4,
(1974), 415-433.
24
​Gay, (1986), III.XIII.
Gay coyly ​writing, ‘I am sure I have written nothing that can be legally supprest’, unless the
setting Vices in general in an odious light, and virtues in an amiable one may give offence’, 25
it is certain that he was aware of the fine line that he walked between subversive activity and
mere entertainment. The aesthetic, social, and political elements within ​The Beggar’s Opera
are to be viewed in that order of importance to Gay’s meaning. ​His framing of the drama
inside the confection of the Italian opera provides a comical ice-breaker for the bitter
accusations to follow​. His examination of the behaviour of society is a serious commentary,
though he does not blame the people for their condition. Critic ​Dianne Dugaw’s view that,
‘Gay’s satire engineers a profound decentering that not only conveys actualities of underclass
life and people, but looks on critically from that vantage point’,26 hits the mark perfectly.
F​inally, the political satire in ​The Beggar’s Opera ​is of the gravest significance. That the
blame for the​ condition of society lies at the feet of those in power is clear to Gay, and
Downie agrees when he writes that the opera ‘condemns the manners of contemporary
society, and implicitly blames those in power for the corruption of the people’27 In summary,
The Beggar's Opera​ combines aesthetic, social and political satire to make Gay's work one of
the most successful and bold in Augustan literature.

25
​Downie, J. A. 'Gay's Politics', in ​John Gay and the Scriblerians,​ ed. by Peter Lewis and Nigel Wood(New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1989).
26
​Dugaw, (1991).
27
​Downie, (1989).
___________________________________________________________________________

Bibliography

Dobrée, B., ​The Early Eighteenth Century: 1700-1740; Swift, Defoe, and Pope,​ 4th edn
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1990).

Downie, J. A., 'Gay's Politics', in ​John Gay and the Scriblerians​, ed. by Peter Lewis and
Nigel Wood(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).

Dugaw, D., 'Folklore and John Gay's Satire', ​Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900,​ 31.3,
(1991), 515-533.

Gay, J., ​The Beggar's Opera​, ed. by Bryan Loughrey and T. O. Treadwell (London: Penguin,
1986).

Hammond, B. S., ''A Poet, and a Patron, and Ten Pound': John Gay and Patronage', in ​John
Gay and the Scriblerians,​ ed. by Peter Lewis and Nigel Wood(New York: St. Martin's Press,
1989).

Johnson, S., ​Lives of the English Poets, Volume Two: Congreve to Gray​ (London: J. M. Dent
& Sons, 1964).

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Lewis, P. and Wood, N., ​John Gay and the Scriblerians,​ (New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc.,
1989).

McIntosh, W. A., 'Handel, Walpole, and Gay: The Aims of The Beggar's Opera',
Eighteenth-Century Studies,​ 7.4, (1974), 415-433.

Novak, M. E., ​Eighteenth-Century English Literature,​ ed. by A. Norman Jeffares, 2nd edn
(London: Macmillan, 1985).

Rogers, P., 'Gay and the World of Opera', in ​John Gay and the Scriblerians,​ ed. by Peter
Lewis and Nigel Wood(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).