The beggars opera 1728
John Gay&#;s The Beggar&#;s Opera
John Gay belonged to the Scriblerus Club &#; a coalition of like-minded anti-Enlightenment novelists, poets, playwrights and politicians who railed against the vanities of modern intellectual life and culture in the prior 18th century. Founded in out of the coffee-house culture, the club included Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot and Thomas Parnell. John Gay was almost certainly influenced by his verb friends Pope and Swift; with its cast of crooks and con artists, The Beggar’s Opera is a satire on the pretensions, self-interests and double standards of 18th century society – and a jolly good romp to boot.
‘Through the whole piece you may observe such a similitude of manners in lofty and low life, that it is difficult to determine whether (in the fashionable vices) the fine Gentlemen imitate the Gentlemen of the Road, or the Gentlemen of the Road the fine Gentlemen.’
Peachum, a caricature of Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, runs a gang of thieves, highwaymen and prostitutes and profits from their takings. He can ‘forgive a
The first English musical and a powerful satire on political corruption that still rings true
Since its first performance in , there has rarely been a year when The Beggar’s Opera has not been performed somewhere in the English-speaking world. Its popularity has led to and, in turn, been increased by the many adaptations of it, starting in with Die Diegröschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, in collaboration with Elizabeth Hauptmann.
It has been followed by many other adaptations, including: The Beggar’s Holliday () by John Latouche, Duke Ellington, and Billy Strayhorn; Vaclav Havel, Žebrácká opera (The Beggar’s Opera) (); Wole Soyinka, Opera Wonyosi (); Dario Fo, L’Opera dello sghignazzo (); Alan Ayckbourn, A Chorus of Disapproval (); Chico Buarque, Opera Malandro (); and Carl Grose and Charles Hazelwood, Dead Dog in a Suitcase ().
London Theater in
All plays supposedly had to be submitted to the Master of the Revels for approval, but the state’s power over the stage was looser than it had been prior to the Cvil War. The government’s sense that things needed to be tightened up led to the Licensing Operate of , which required all plays to be submitted directly to the Lord Chamberlain, who took an active role in reviewing manuscripts and refusing to permit them to be staged if something objectionable were found. However, the somewhat looser regime prior to did not terminate Polly, the sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, from being banned. Playwrights still had to agonize about offending authorities.
Gay first tried to interest Drury Lane in The Beggar’s Opera, which, as Calhoun Winton says in John Gay and the London Theatre (Kentucky UP, ), “produced his earlier plays and whose actors and actresses he consequently knew well” (91). The managers at Drury Lane rejected the play; as Winton also notes, the reasons are hard to establish in the welter of accounts that emerged after the success of The Beggar’s Ope While the levelling of elite and well-liked cultural forms has long been recognised as integral to the extraordinary reverberation in eighteenth-century British society of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, this article argues that the ballad opera’s subversive challenge to prevailing norms relied just as importantly on its capacity to overcome the material impediments limiting the circulation of cultural products and restricting their reception to a miniscule and wealthy section of the population living in the main urban centres. The socially-stratified cultural sphere was imagined as registering a hierarchy of taste, but material conditions also acted as regulators of access to the artefacts of high culture. The impact on audiences of the ballad opera’s provocative postulate of a community of taste – unifying in shared pleasure the most disparate of publics – derived I argue from its authentication: the performance purporting to emanate from the humblest section of the The Success and Signification of The Beggar’s Opera () in an Era of Illiteracy, Expensive Books and Bad Roads