The Beggar's Opera is a ballad opera

Ballad opera

The term ballad opera is used to refer to a genre of English stage entertainment originating in the 18th century and continuing to develop in the following century and later. There are many types of ballad opera...

 in three acts written in 1728 by John Gay

John Gay

John Gay was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera , set to music by Johann Christoph Pepusch...

 with music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch

Johann Christoph Pepusch

Johann Christoph Pepusch , also known as John Christopher Pepusch and Dr Pepusch, was a German-born composer who spent most of his working life in England....

. It is one of the watershed plays in Augustan drama

Augustan drama

Augustan drama can refer to the dramas of Ancient Rome during the reign of Caesar Augustus, but it most commonly refers to the plays of Great Britain in the early 18th century, a subset of 18th-century Augustan literature...

 and is the only example of the once thriving genre of satirical ballad opera to remain popular today. Ballad operas were satiric

Satire

Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

 musical plays that used some of the conventions of opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

, but without recitative

Recitative

Recitative , also known by its Italian name "recitativo" , is a style of delivery in which a singer is allowed to adopt the rhythms of ordinary speech...

. The lyrics of the airs in the piece are set to popular broadsheet ballads, opera arias, church hymns and folk tunes of the time.

The Beggar's Opera premiered at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre

Lisle's Tennis Court

Lisle's Tennis Court was a building off Portugal Street in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London. Originally built as a real tennis court, it was used as a playhouse during two periods, 1661–1674 and 1695–1705. During the early period, the theatre was called "the Duke's Playhouse", or "the...

 on 29 January 1728 and ran for 62 consecutive performances, the longest run in theatre history up to that time. The work became Gay's greatest success and has been played ever since. The original production was so successful that John Rich

John Rich (producer)

John Rich was an important director and theatre manager in 18th century London. He opened the New Theatre at Lincoln's Inn Fields and then the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden and began putting on ever more lavish productions...

, the manager of the theatre, was able to build a new theatre, the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, forerunner of the Royal Opera House

Royal Opera House

The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The...

. In 1920, The Beggar's Opera began an astonishing revival run of 1,463 performances at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, London, which was one of the longest runs in history for any piece of musical theatre

Musical theatre

Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...

 at that time.

The piece satirised Italian opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

, which had become popular in London. According to The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

: "Gay wrote the work more as an anti-opera than an opera, one of its attractions to its 18th-century London public being its lampooning of the Italian opera style and the English public's fascination with it." Instead of the grand music and themes of opera, the work uses familiar tunes and characters that were ordinary people. Some of the songs were by opera composers like Handel

George Frideric Handel

George Frideric Handel was a German-British Baroque composer, famous for his operas, oratorios, anthems and organ concertos. Handel was born in 1685, in a family indifferent to music...

, but only the most popular of these were used. The audience could hum along with the music and identify with the characters. The story satirised politics, poverty and injustice, focusing on the theme of corruption at all levels of society. Lavinia Fenton

Lavinia Fenton

Lavinia Powlett, Duchess of Bolton , known by her stagename as Lavinia Fenton, was an English actress.She was probably the daughter of a naval lieutenant named Beswick, but she bore the name of her mother's husband. She was thought to have been born in Charring Cross, and had been a child...

, the first Polly Peachum, became an overnight success. Her pictures were in great demand, verses were written to her and books published about her. After appearing in several comedies, and then in numerous repetitions of The Beggars Opera, she ran away with her married lover, Charles Paulet, 3rd Duke of Bolton.

Origin and analysis

The original idea of the opera came from Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...

, who wrote to Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...

 on 30 August 1716 asking "...what think you, of a Newgate

Newgate

Newgate at the west end of Newgate Street was one of the historic seven gates of London Wall round the City of London and one of the six which date back to Roman times. From it a Roman road led west to Silchester...

 pastoral

Pastoral

The adjective pastoral refers to the lifestyle of pastoralists, such as shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasturage. It also refers to a genre in literature, art or music that depicts such shepherd life in an...

 among the thieves and whores there?" Their friend, Gay, decided that it would be a satire rather than a pastoral opera. For his original production in 1728, Gay intended all the songs to be sung without any accompaniment, adding to the shocking and gritty atmosphere of his conception. However, a week or so before the opening night, John Rich, the theatre director, insisted on having Johann Christoph Pepusch

Johann Christoph Pepusch

Johann Christoph Pepusch , also known as John Christopher Pepusch and Dr Pepusch, was a German-born composer who spent most of his working life in England....

, a composer associated with his theatre, write a formal French overture (based on two of the songs in the opera, including a fugue

Fugue

In music, a fugue is a compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject that is introduced at the beginning in imitation and recurs frequently in the course of the composition....

 based on Lucy's 3rd act song "I'm Like A Skiff on the Ocean Toss'd") and also to arrange the 69 songs. Although there is no external evidence of who the arranger was, inspection of the original 1729 score, formally published by Dover Books, demonstrates that Pepusch was the arranger.

The work took satiric aim at the passionate interest of the upper classes in Italian opera, and simultaneously set out to lampoon the notable Whig

British Whig Party

The Whigs were a party in the Parliament of England, Parliament of Great Britain, and Parliament of the United Kingdom, who contested power with the rival Tories from the 1680s to the 1850s. The Whigs' origin lay in constitutional monarchism and opposition to absolute rule...

 statesman Robert Walpole

Robert Walpole

Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, KG, KB, PC , known before 1742 as Sir Robert Walpole, was a British statesman who is generally regarded as having been the first Prime Minister of Great Britain....

, and politicians in general, as well as the notorious criminals Jonathan Wild

Jonathan Wild

Jonathan Wild was perhaps the most infamous criminal of London — and possibly Great Britain — during the 18th century, both because of his own actions and the uses novelists, playwrights, and political satirists made of them...

 and Jack Sheppard

Jack Sheppard

Jack Sheppard was a notorious English robber, burglar and thief of early 18th-century London. Born into a poor family, he was apprenticed as a carpenter but took to theft and burglary in 1723, with little more than a year of his training to complete...

. It also deals with social inequity on a broad scale, primarily through the comparison of low-class thieves and whores with their aristocratic and bourgeois "betters."

Gay used Scottish folk melodies mostly taken from the poet Allan Ramsay

Allan Ramsay (poet)

Allan Ramsay was a Scottish poet , playwright, publisher, librarian and wig-maker.-Life and career:...

's hugely popular collection The Gentle Shepherd

The Gentle Shepherd

"The Gentle Shepherd" is a pastoral by Allan Ramsay first published in 1725 and dedicated to Susanna Montgomery, Lady Eglinton. The original manuscript was given to Lady Eglinton....

(1725) plus two French tunes (including the carol 'Bergers, Ecoutez La Musique!' for his song 'Fill Every Glass'), to serve his hilariously pointed and irreverent texts. The renowned composer, John Christopher Pepusch, composed an Ouverture and arranged all the tunes shortly before the opening night at Lincoln's Inn Fields on 28 January 1728. However, all that remains of Pepusch's score are the Ouverture (with complete instrumentation) and the melodies of the songs with unfigured basses. Various reconstructions have been attempted, and a 1990 reconstruction of the score by American composer Jonathan Dobin has been used in a number of modern productions.

Gay uses the operatic norm of three acts (as opposed to the standard in spoken drama of the time of five acts), and tightly controls the dialogue and plot so that there are surprises in each of the forty-five fast-paced scenes and 69 short songs. The success of the opera was accompanied by a public desire for keepsakes and mementos, ranging from images of Polly on fans and clothing, playing cards and fire-screens, broadsides featuring all the characters, and the rapidly published musical score of the opera.

The play is sometimes seen to be a reactionary call for libertarian values in response to the growing power of the conservative Whig party. It may also have been influenced by the then-popular ideology of Locke that men should be allowed their natural liberties; these democratic strains of thought influenced the populist movements of the time, of which The Beggar's Opera was a part.

The character of Macheath has been considered by critics as both a hero and an anti-hero. Harold Gene Moss, arguing that Macheath is a noble character, has written, "[one] whose drives are toward love and the vital passions, Macheath becomes an almost Christ-like victim of the decadence surrounding him." Contrarily, John Richardson in the peer-reviewed journal Eighteenth-Century Life has argued that Macheath is powerful as a literary figure precisely because he stands against any interpretation, "against expectation and illusion."

The Beggar's Opera has had an influence on all later British stage comedies, especially on nineteenth century British comic opera

Comic opera

Comic opera denotes a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending.Forms of comic opera first developed in late 17th-century Italy. By the 1730s, a new operatic genre, opera buffa, emerged as an alternative to opera seria...

 and the modern musical

Musical theatre

Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...

.

Adaptations

As was typical practice of the time in London, a commemorative "score" of the entire opera was assembled and published quickly. As was common, this consisted of the fully arranged overture followed by the melodies of the 69 songs, supported by only the simplest bass accompaniments. There are no indications of dance music, accompanying instrumental figures or the like, except in three instances: Lucy's "Is Then His Fate Decree'd Sir" – one measure of descending scale marked "Viol." –; Trape's "In the Days of My Youth", in which the "fa la la chorus is written as "viol."; and the final reprieve dance, Macheath's "Thus I Stand Like A Turk", which includes two sections of 16 measures of "dance" marked "viol." (See the 1729 score, formerly published by Dover).

The absence of the original performing parts has allowed many producers and arrangers to have free creative reign. The tradition of personalized arrangements, dating back at least as far as Thomas Arne's later 18th century arrangements, continues today, running the gamut of musical styles from Romantic to Baroque: Austin, Britten, Sargent, Bonynge, Dobin and other conductors have each imbued the songs with a personal stamp, highlighting different aspects of characterization. Following is a list of some of the most highly regarded 20th-century arrangements and settings of the opera.

• In 1920, the baritone Frederic Austin
  Frederic Austin
  Frederic Austin was an English baritone singer, a musical teacher and composer in the period 1905–30. He is best remembered for his restoration and production of The Beggar's Opera by John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch, and its sequel, Polly, in 1920–23...
  
   newly arranged the music (and also sang the role of Peachum) for the long-running production at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith
  Hammersmith
  Hammersmith is an urban centre in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham in west London, England, in the United Kingdom, approximately five miles west of Charing Cross on the north bank of the River Thames...
  
  . In 1955 this version was recorded by conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent
  Malcolm Sargent
  Sir Harold Malcolm Watts Sargent was an English conductor, organist and composer widely regarded as Britain's leading conductor of choral works...
  
   with John Cameron as Macheath and Monica Sinclair
  Monica Sinclair
  Monica Sinclair was a British operatic contralto, who sang many roles with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden during the 1950s and 1960s, and appeared on stage and in recordings with Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, Sir Thomas Beecham, Sir Malcolm Sargent, and many others...
  
   as Lucy.
• In 1928, on the 200th anniversary of the original production, Bertolt Brecht
  Bertolt Brecht
  Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
  
   (words) and Kurt Weill
  Kurt Weill
  Kurt Julian Weill was a German-Jewish composer, active from the 1920s, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht...
  
   (music) created a popular new musical adaptation of the work in Germany entitled Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera
  The Threepenny Opera
  The Threepenny Opera is a musical by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, in collaboration with translator Elisabeth Hauptmann and set designer Caspar Neher. It was adapted from an 18th-century English ballad opera, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and offers a Marxist critique...
  
  ). In this work, the original plot is followed fairly closely (although the time is brought forward over a hundred years) but the music is almost all new, and specially composed.
• In 1948, Benjamin Britten
  Benjamin Britten
  Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...
  
   created an adaptation with new harmonisations and arrangements of pre-existing tunes. Additional dialogue was written by the producer, Tyrone Guthrie
  Tyrone Guthrie
  Sir William Tyrone Guthrie was an English theatrical director instrumental in the founding of the Stratford Festival of Canada, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, at his family's home, Annaghmakerrig, in County Monaghan, Ireland.-Life and career:Guthrie...
  
  . Peter Pears
  Peter Pears
  Sir Peter Neville Luard Pears CBE was an English tenor who was knighted in 1978. His career was closely associated with the composer Edward Benjamin Britten....
  
   was the first singer of Macheath.
• The opera was made into a film version in 1953
  The Beggar's Opera (film)
  The Beggar's Opera is a 1953 Technicolor film version of John Gay's 1728 ballad opera directed by Peter Brook and starring Laurence Olivier, Dorothy Tutin, Stanley Holloway and others. Olivier and Holloway do their own singing in this film, but Dorothy Tutin and several others were dubbed...
  
  , and starred Laurence Olivier
  Laurence Olivier
  Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM was an English actor, director, and producer. He was one of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century. He married three times, to fellow actors Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright...
  
   as Captain Macheath.
• In 1975, Czech
  Czechoslovakia
  Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
  
   playwright (and future president) Václav Havel
  Václav Havel
  Václav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic . He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally...
  
   created a non-musical adaptation.
• In 1977, the Nigerian Nobel Prize-winning playwright and dramatist Wole Soyinka
  Wole Soyinka
  Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka is a Nigerian writer, poet and playwright. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, where he was recognised as a man "who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence", and became the first African in Africa and...
  
   wrote, produced and directed Opera Wonyosi (publ. 1981), an adaptation of both John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera; most of his characters as well as some of the arias are from the two earlier plays.
• In 1981 Richard Bonynge
  Richard Bonynge
  Richard Alan Bonynge, AO, CBE is an Australian conductor and pianist.Bonynge was born in Sydney and educated at Sydney Boys High School before studying piano at the Royal College of Music in London. He gave up his music scholarship, continuing his private piano studies, and became a coach for...
  
   and Douglas Gamley
  Douglas Gamley
  Douglas Gamley was an Australian film composer, who worked on British and American films.He was particularly influenced by Modest Mussorgsky, creating a full orchestral version of his Pictures at an Exhibition, and adapting his Night on Bald Mountain for his score for Asylum...
  
   arranged a new edition for The Australian Opera (now Opera Australia
  Opera Australia
  Opera Australia is the principal opera company in Australia. Based in Sydney, its performance season at the Sydney Opera House runs for approximately eight months of the year, with the remainder of its time spent in the The Arts Centre in Melbourne...
  
  ). It was recorded the same year with Joan Sutherland
  Joan Sutherland
  Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, OM, AC, DBE was an Australian dramatic coloratura soprano noted for her contribution to the renaissance of the bel canto repertoire from the late 1950s through to the 1980s....
  
  , Kiri Te Kanawa
  Kiri Te Kanawa
  Dame Kiri Jeanette Te Kanawa, ONZ, DBE, AC is a New Zealand / Māori soprano who has had a highly successful international opera career since 1968. Acclaimed as one of the most beloved sopranos in both the United States and Britain she possesses a warm full lyric soprano voice, singing a wide array...
  
  , James Morris and Angela Lansbury
  Angela Lansbury
  Angela Brigid Lansbury CBE is an English actress and singer in theatre, television and motion pictures, whose career has spanned eight decades and earned her more performance Tony Awards than any other individual , with five wins...
  
  .
• The opera was adapted for BBC television in 1983. This production was directed by Jonathan Miller
  Jonathan Miller
  Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE is a British theatre and opera director, author, physician, television presenter, humorist and sculptor. Trained as a physician in the late 1950s, he first came to prominence in the 1960s with his role in the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe with fellow writers and...
  
   and starred Roger Daltrey
  Roger Daltrey
  Roger Harry Daltrey, CBE , is an English singer and actor, best known as the founder and lead singer of English rock band The Who. He has maintained a musical career as a solo artist and has also worked in the film industry, acting in a large number of films, theatre and television roles and also...
  
   in the role of Macheath, Stratford Johns
  Stratford Johns
  Stratford Johns, born Alan Edgar Stratford-Johns, was a popular British stage, film and television actor who is best remembered for his starring role as Detective Inspector Charlie Barlow in the innovative and long-running BBC police series Z-Cars, created by Troy Kennedy-Martin.-Early life:Johns...
  
   as Peachum, Gary Tibbs
  Gary Tibbs
  Gary Tibbs is a bass guitarist and actor, who appeared in the film Breaking Glass, alongside Hazel O'Connor....
  
   as Filch, and Bob Hoskins
  Bob Hoskins
  Robert William "Bob" Hoskins, Jr. is an English actor known for playing Cockney rough diamonds, psychopaths and gangsters, in films such as The Long Good Friday , and Mona Lisa , and lighter roles in family films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Hook .- Early life :Hoskins was born in Bury St...
  
   as the Beggar. The "happy" ending was changed so that Macheath is hanged instead of being reprieved.
• In 1984 in the play (and later film) A Chorus of Disapproval
  A Chorus of Disapproval
  A Chorus of Disapproval is a 1988 British film adapted from the Alan Ayckbourn play of the same title, directed by Michael Winner. Among the movie's cast are Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Irons, Richard Briers, and Alexandra Pigg....
  
  by Alan Ayckbourn
  Alan Ayckbourn
  Sir Alan Ayckbourn CBE is a prolific English playwright. He has written and produced seventy-three full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their...
  
  , an amateur production of The Beggar's Opera is a major plot driver and excerpts are performed.
• In 1986 in the Brazilian musical film Ópera do Malandro (American title Malandro), by Ruy Guerra
  Ruy Guerra
  Ruy Alexandre Guerra Coelho Pereira is a film director, screenwriter, film editor, and actor in Brazil. Guerra was born a Portuguese citizen in Lourenço Marques in Moçambique, when it was still a colony of Portugal....
  
   (director) and Chico Buarque
  Chico Buarque
  Francisco Buarque de Hollanda , popularly known as Chico Buarque , is a singer, guitarist, composer, dramatist, writer and poet...
  
   (writer and composer).
• In 1990, American composer Jonathan Dobin created a performing edition for the Ten Ten Players in New York City. The edition contains orchestrations for all 69 songs from the extant skeletal score and fleshes out the choruses, dances and intervening ritornelli in a baroque style. The New York Times wrote, "only a trace of Pepusch's score has survived… the music was reconstructed in a convincing period style by Jonathan Dobin, the ensemble's harpsichordist".
• In 1998, the all female Japanese troupe, Takarazuka Revue
  Takarazuka Revue
  The Takarazuka Revue is a Japanese all-female musical theater troupe based in Takarazuka, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. Women play all roles in lavish, Broadway-style productions of Western-style musicals, and sometimes stories adapted from shōjo manga and Japanese folktales. The troupe takes its name...
  
  , produced an adaptation titled Speakeasy. The play was Maya Miki's retirement play.
• In 2008 the Sydney Theatre Company
  Sydney Theatre Company
  The Sydney Theatre Company is one of Australia's best-known theatre companies operating from The Wharf Theatre near The Rocks area of Sydney, as well as the Sydney Theatre and the Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre....
  
   of Australia and Out of Joint Theatre Company
  Out of Joint theatre company
  Out of Joint is a British and international touring theatre company based in London. It specialises in the commissioning and production of new writing, interspersed with occasional revivals and classic productions....
  
   co-produced a version entitled The Convict's Opera written by Stephen Jeffreys
  Stephen Jeffreys
  Stephen Jeffreys is a British playwright.His plays include Like Dolls or Angels ; Carmen 1936 ; Valued Friends ; The Clink ; The Libertine - also a screenplay filmed with Johnny Depp; A Going...
  
   and directed by Max Stafford-Clark
  Max Stafford-Clark
  Maxwell Robert Guthrie Stewart Stafford-Clark is an English Theatre Director.-Life and career:He went to school at Felsted and Riverdale Country School in New York City. He has worked as a theatre director since he left Trinity College, Dublin.His directing career began as associate director of...
  
  . This version is set aboard a convict ship bound for New South Wales
  New South Wales
  New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
  
  , where convicts are putting on a version of The Beggar's Opera. The lives of the convicts partly mirror their characters in The Beggars' Opera, and modern popular songs are performed throughout the piece. 'The Convict's Opera' began touring the UK in early 2009.
• Vanishing Point
  Vanishing Point (Theatre Company)
  Vanishing Point Theatre company was founded in 1999 by Matthew Lenton. It makes theatre that is modern, visually dazzling and technically stunning. Its themes are often darkly comic and surreal, combining a childish, dreamlike fairy tale feel with adult nightmarish stories.Vanishing Point's work...
  
   created a modern production of The Beggar's Opera in 2009 for The Royal Lyceum Theatre
  Royal Lyceum Theatre
  The Royal Lyceum Theatre is a 658 seat theatre in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, named after the Theatre Royal Lyceum and English Opera House, the residence at the time of legendary Shakespearean actor Henry Irving. It was built in 1883 by architect C. J. Phipps at a cost of UK£17,000 on behalf...
  
   and Belgrade Theatre
  Belgrade Theatre
  The Belgrade Theatre is a live performance venue seating 858 and situated in Coventry, England. It was the first civic theatre to be built after the Second World War in Britain and as such was more than a place of entertainment...
  
  , Coventry, set in a near-future apocalypse world. It features music from A Band Called Quinn
  A Band Called Quinn
  A Band Called Quinn are an electronic indie rock band from Glasgow, Scotland. Founder members Bal Cooke and Louise Quinn met whilst working for a performance art company in Glasgow. Other long term members are Robert Henderson and Steven Westwater...
  
  .
• Beginning on 27 November 2010, an adaption of The Beggar's Opera, called "One Wife Too Many" was staged at the Nowra Players in regional New South Wales, Australia.
• In July/August 2011 YAP Theatre Company staged a new adaptation of The Beggar's Opera in Swindon and London, UK, with an updated script by Matt Fox and a new musical arrangement by Jessie Thompson.
• The original opera was performed in an 18th century setting at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park
  Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park
  Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, in the City of Westminster, London, is a permanent venue with an annual sixteen-week summer season. It was founded in 1932 by Sydney Carroll and Robert Atkins.-The theatre:...
  
   in summer 2011, in a production directed by Lucy Bailey
  Lucy Bailey (director)
  Lucy Bailey is a British theatre director, notable as the founder of the Gogmagogs chamber-music group and the Print Room theatre in West London...
  
  .

Roles

Mr. Peachum – powerful first class man/ controls who gets sent to the gallows
Lockit – jail keeper
Macheath – captain of gang of robbers
Filch – the Peachum's loyal and squeamish servant
Jemmy Twitcher	Macheath's Gang
Crook-Finger'd Jack
Wat Dreary
Robin of Bagshot
Nimming Ned – ("Nimming" meaning thieving)
Harry Padington
Matt of the Mint
Ben Budge
Beggar
Player
Mrs. Peachum
Polly Peachum
Lucy Lockit
Diana Trapes
Mrs. Coaxer	Women of the Town
Dolly Trull – ("Trull" meaning prostitute)
Mrs. Vixen
Betty Doxy – ("Doxy" meaning slut)
Jenny Diver
Mrs. Slammekin
Sukey Tawdrey
Molly Brazen

jailor
drawer
constables

Synopsis

Peachum, a fence

Fence (criminal)

A fence is an individual who knowingly buys stolen property for later resale, sometimes in a legitimate market. The fence thus acts as a middleman between thieves and the eventual buyers of stolen goods who may or may not be aware that the goods are stolen. As a verb, the word describes the...

 and thief-catcher, justifies his actions. Mrs. Peachum, overhearing her husband's blacklisting of unproductive thieves, protests regarding one of them, Bob Booty (the nickname of Robert Walpole

Robert Walpole

Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, KG, KB, PC , known before 1742 as Sir Robert Walpole, was a British statesman who is generally regarded as having been the first Prime Minister of Great Britain....

). The Peachums discover that Polly, their daughter, has secretly married Macheath, the famous highwayman

Highwayman

A highwayman was a thief and brigand who preyed on travellers. This type of outlaw, usually, travelled and robbed by horse, as compared to a footpad who traveled and robbed on foot. Mounted robbers were widely considered to be socially superior to footpads...

, who is Peachum's principal client. Upset to find out that he will no longer be able to use Polly in his business, Peachum and his wife ask how Polly will support such a husband "in Gaming, Drinking and Whoring". Nevertheless, they conclude that the match may make sense if the husband can be killed for his money. They leave to carry out this errand. However, Polly has hidden Macheath.

Macheath goes to a tavern where he is surrounded by women of dubious virtue who, despite their class, compete in displaying perfect drawing-room manners, although the subject of their conversation is their success in picking pockets and shoplifting. Macheath discovers, too late, that two of them (Jenny Diver, Suky Tawdry) have contracted with Peachum to capture him, and he becomes a prisoner in Newgate prison. The prison is run by Peachum's associate, the corrupt jailer Lockit. His daughter, Lucy Lockit, has the opportunity to scold Macheath for having agreed to marry her and then broken this promise. She tells him that to see him tortured would give her pleasure. Macheath pacifies her, but Polly arrives and claims him as her husband. Macheath tells Lucy that Polly is crazy. Lucy helps Macheath to escape by stealing her father's keys. Her father learns of Macheath's promise to marry her and worries that if Macheath is recaptured and hanged, his fortune might be subject to Peachum's claims. Lockit and Peachum discover Macheath's hiding place. They decide to split his fortune.

Meanwhile, Polly visits Lucy to try to reach an agreement, but Lucy has decided to poison her. Polly narrowly avoids the poisoned drink, and the two girls find out that Macheath has been recaptured owing to the inebriated Mrs Diana Trapes. They plead with their fathers for Macheath's life. However, Macheath now finds that four more pregnant women each claim him as their husband. He declares that he is ready to be hanged. The narrator (the Beggar), notes that although in a properly moral ending Macheath and the other villains would be hanged, the audience demands a happy ending, and so Macheath is reprieved, and all are invited to a dance of celebration, to celebrate his wedding to Polly.

Selected musical numbers

• Can Love Be Controlled By Advice? (Polly)
• Let Us Take To The Road (Chorus of Highwaymen)
• When Gold Is At Hand (Jenny Diver)
• At The Tree I Shall Suffer (Macheath)
• How Cruel Are The Traitors (Lucy)
• How Happy Could I Be With Either (Macheath)
• In The Days Of My Youth (Mrs Diana Trapes)
• The Charge Is Prepared (Macheath)

Reaction

The Beggar's Opera was met with widely varying reactions. Its popularity was documented in The Craftsmen with the following entries:

"This Week a Dramatick Entertainment has been exhibited at the Theatre in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, entitled The Beggar's Opera, which has met with a general Applause, insomuch that the Waggs say it has made Rich very Gay, and probably will make Gay very Rich." (February 3, 1728)

""We hear that the British Opera, commonly called The Beggar's Opera, continues to be acted, at the Theatre in Lincoln's-Inn Fields with general Applause, to the great Mortification of the Performers and Admirers of the Outlandish Opera in the Haymarket." (February 17, 1728)

Two weeks after opening night, an article appeared in The Craftsman, the leading opposition newspaper, ostensibly protesting at Gay's work as libellous and ironically assisting him in satirising the Walpole establishment by taking the government's side:

It will, I know, be said, by these libertine Stage-Players, that the Satire is general; and that it discovers a Consciousness of Guilt for any particular Man to apply it to Himself. But they seem to forget that there are such things as Innuendo

Innuendo

An innuendo is a baseless invention of thoughts or ideas. It can also be a remark or question, typically disparaging , that works obliquely by allusion...

's (a never-failing Method of explaining Libels)… Nay the very Title of this Piece and the principal Character, which is that of a Highwayman, sufficiently discover the mischievous Design of it; since by this Character every Body will understand One, who makes it his Business arbitrarily to levy and collect Money on the People for his own Use, and of which he always dreads to give an Account – Is not this squinting with a vengeance, and wounding Persons in Authority through the Sides of a common Malefactor?"

The commentator notes the Beggar's last remark: "That the lower People have their Vices in a Degree as well as the Rich, and are punished for them," implying that rich People are not so punished.

Criticism of Gay's opera continued long after its publication. In 1776, John Hawkins wrote in his History of Music that due to the opera's popularity, "Rapine and violence have been gradually increasing" solely because the rising generation of young men desired to imitate the character Macheath. Hawkins blamed Gay for tempting these men with "the charms of idleness and criminal pleasure," which Hawkins saw Macheath as representing and glorifying.

Sequel

In 1729, Gay wrote a sequel, Polly, set in the West Indies: Macheath, sentenced to transportation, has escaped and become a pirate, while Mrs Trapes has set up in white-slaving and shanghais Polly to sell her to the wealthy planter Mr Ducat. Polly escapes dressed as a boy, and after many adventures marries the son of a Carib chief.

The political satire, however, was even more pointed in Polly than in The Beggar's Opera, with the result that Prime Minister

Prime minister

A prime minister is the most senior minister of cabinet in the executive branch of government in a parliamentary system. In many systems, the prime minister selects and may dismiss other members of the cabinet, and allocates posts to members within the government. In most systems, the prime...

 Robert Walpole leaned on the Lord Chamberlain

Lord Chamberlain

The Lord Chamberlain or Lord Chamberlain of the Household is one of the chief officers of the Royal Household in the United Kingdom and is to be distinguished from the Lord Great Chamberlain, one of the Great Officers of State....

to get it banned, and it was not performed until fifty years later.

External links

• Annotated e-text of The Beggar's Opera with extensive bibliography
• Vocal score used in 1920 Lyric Hammersmith revival
• Numerous photos and design drawings from The Beggar's Opera, with Sir Laurence Olivier as Captain Macheath