SOURCE: "The Beggar's Opera in Theatre History" and "The Opera as Work of Art," in John Gay and the London Theatre, University Press of Kentucky, 1993, pp. 87-108; 109-27.

Hearing of Stella's illness, Swift had departed for Dublin in September 1727. Before he left he had read scenes from The Beggar's Opera, which was finished, if we can trust the text and dating of Gay's letter to him,' by late October 1727. How long had it been in active preparation, one may ask, actually in the stage of composition, and what influenced Gay in writing it?

Many years before, in the Scriblerian days of 1716, Swift had written to Pope about what Gay might do: "what think you of a Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves there?"² Swift presumably meant a pastoral poem, a comic urban pastoral of the sort he himself wrote in "Description of the Morning." Trivia itself is close to a Newgate pastoral poem at times; the scene in that work quoted earlier of the apprentices' football game is a kind of Shepherd's Week episode in urban dress. Gay was certainly capable of writing a Newgate pastoral if he wished to do so.

His instinct was for the stage, however, as Swift's was not. Gay had been writing ballads intended for or employed in stage performance off and on over the years, as we have seen; most recently and importantly "Newgate's Garland" for Thurmond's pantomime, Harlequin Sheppard in 1724. He had been in and around music for a long time, from his years as an apprentice, from the days of Aaron Hill and the British Apollo,³ and especially from the beginning of his association with Handel. An eighteenth-century legend, which I have not been able to verify, says that Gay could play the flute, that is, what we could call the recorder.⁴ Although there is no reason to believe that he had musical training, he was on the other hand a most sophisticated listener with considerable experience at adapting words to musical settings. He had a good poetic ear and a good musical ear; the combination does not occur so frequently as one might suppose. As far as the musical side of his experience is concerned, he was fully ready by 1727 to compose a ballad opera, a genre that he was in the process of inventing.

As for literary "influences," that happy hunting ground of scholars who believe that playwrights write plays by surrounding themselves with books, from which they make appropriate selections, as for these, in spite of assiduous searching, not much has turned up. Richard Brome's A Jovial Crew, or The Merry Beggars, a Caroline comedy that was revived frequently after the Restoration and that the Drury Lane company had been playing for more than twenty years, has often been mentioned as it features songs and deals with beggars. But it has nothing whatever to do with The Beggar's Opera (which after all includes only one beggar: the author poet). Set in the country and full of rural jokes, jollity, and folklore, A Jovial Crew is much closer to The Wife of Bath in spirit than to the Opera. It was adapted in 1731 as a ballad opera, after the success of Gay's work, and had a long stage life of its own, but the influence is all the other way around.⁵ Christopher Bullock's A Woman's Revenge, or A Match in Newgate, produced in 1715—Bullock was one of the actors who defected from Drury Lane to Rich's company that year—depicts bawds and criminals in Newgate, but the parallels of plot and character are not at all convincing, and neither A Jovial Crew nor A Woman's Revenge resembles the Opera in language, of dialogue or song. It is entirely possible, however, even probable, that Gay as an ambitious dramatist saw both of these plays, as an aspiring cinematographer today would screen every film he could lay hands on. With the London repertory theatres, one could see most of the standards every season or two, recognizing that the form in which one saw a particular play was that which the managers had given it: Nahum Tate's adaptation of Lear with a happy ending, for example.

To correct impressions of drama altered for the playhouse, one could buy the play in its original form. Printed versions of almost all the plays produced on the London stage were available at the booksellers, soon after or during opening night. In imitation of the 1709 Rowe edition of Shakespeare, collected editions of plays were also becoming increasingly common—even pirated editions from The Hague, with London on the title page. All this was catering for the rising literacy rate in London and the provinces, and the evolving provincial and colonial book trade that supplied a growing literate public.⁶ The books were available to Gay if he had wished to use them.

Beyond that, though, on the subject of literary influence, beyond his own important participation in Harlequin Sheppard, one comes back to the astute comment of Gay's most recent biographer: "All we need to say is that a succession of such plays no doubt forced him to recognize the possibilities of the subject and to speculate on his own ability to handle it."⁷

It was probably in the summer of 1727, with Swift and Pope at hand to remind him of reality, when Gay finally understood substantial preferment was not likely to come in his direction. After the king's sudden death in June some persons were out of employment and others were in. One person most securely in was Sir Robert Walpole, who was cultivating the new queen and making himself indispensable to the new king.⁸ As Irving has pointed out, Gay's friend Henrietta Howard, the king's mistress, the classic Other Woman, did not stand to be much help to him with the king's wife. Pope himself called on Walpole in August, and Pope was in touch with his and Gay's good friend, William Fortescue, who saw the first minister frequently. Pope and Fortescue were both sensitive men, good readers of others' intentions. They must have known that Walpole was not going to bestir himself on Gay's account and that without Sir Robert's acquiescence, at the least, little in the way of place or profit was going to be his.

Pope's and Swift's attitude toward Gay's place-seeking perhaps differed somewhat at this particular juncture. Swift had committed himself in Gulliver's Travels as a satirist of Walpole's political methods—and everyone recognized what he was up to.⁹ Pope was still trimming his sails a bit in 1727; in fact, as recently as 1725 he had accepted a two-hundred pound grant from the Treasury, that is, from Walpole's government though technically from the King,¹⁰ which he kept discreetly quiet about. Both Swift and Pope, however, still hoped that Gay might receive something from the Court and were angered when he was, as he and they thought, fobbed off with the appointment as Gentleman Usher to the baby princess. Why, asks Bertrand Goldgar, a scholar who has studied this issue carefully, were Gay and his friends so shocked that he did not find favor? After all, Gay had no family connections, not much money, little political acumen. "The answer seems to be … that as 'men of wit' they regarded patronage as their due and honestly expected those in power to support them regardless of 'party,' and as humanists they expected poets, the teachers of virtue, to play some role in the circles of power."¹¹ Such dreams of influence might possibly have proved true when Robert Harley was a Scriblerian and also Lord Treasurer—though Swift the realist was capable of a good deal of self-deception when it came to practical politics—but it was certainly not true in 1727.¹² Fortunately, as his friends recognized, Gay possessed artistic talent that in proper combination with circumstance could amount to genius, and he was about to make use of that talent.

Some time in that early summer of 1727, then, Gay probably began working seriously on The Beggar's Opera. The Fables had occupied him through the spring, and, as we have seen Fable 50, "The Hare and many Friends," itself reflects his conviction that friends in high place would not help him in the day of trouble. It was time to help himself. He may have written the work rapidly, and even though Pope and Swift were around it was not to be a collaborative effort. Pope, speaking to Spence a few years later, was careful to underline that fact: "He began on it, and when first he mentioned it to Swift the Doctor did not much like the project. As he carried it on he showed what he wrote to both of us, and we now and then gave a correction or a word or two of advice, but 'twas wholly of his own writing. When it was done, neither of us thought it would succeed. We showed it to Congreve, who after reading it over, said, 'It would either take greatly, or be damned confoundedly."¹³

By October he had apparently finished the Opera. It was an odd kind of work he had produced, not much like anything else in the drama, but the genius that informs it is distinctly a Scriblerian kind of genius, combining social satire, political satire, and literary burlesque, as Pope was combining the same ingredients just at this time in the first version of The Dunciad, and as Swift had recently done in Gulliver's Travels. The three works are utterly different, but they are recognizably kin, too.

Once he had written it, he was faced with getting the piece onto the stage. It was tough going to have a new play produced in one of the two patent theatres in those days, even for an experienced dramatist like Gay.¹⁴ Drury Lane, which had produced his earlier plays and whose actors and actresses he consequently knew well, was the obvious place to start. Because of its subsequent astonishing success, the first production of The Beggar's Opera is so beclouded with theatre gossip, partisan comment, and parti pris recollection as to make certainty about what actually happened almost impossible to come by. Colley Cibber always appears center stage as the Dunce who turned down the hit of the century for Drury Lane, in a fit of pique or vanity. But Cibber was only one of three managers there; Wilks and Barton Booth must have turned it down, too, or at least have agreed with Cibber's decision. Why did they do so?

Naturally Cibber does not dwell on, or even mention the decision in his Apology, which must constitute a principal source, maddeningly organized and discursive though it be, for what was going on in the London theatres during his lifetime. There is no evidence at all, however, there or elsewhere to support the contention that the Drury Lane managers in general or Cibber in particular were displeased with Gay at this time. They had, after all, kept his pastoral turkey The Captives running for seven performances in 1724, against the strenuous competition of Lincoln's Inn Fields. The What D'Ye Call It was in their repertory, ready to make money for them when audience taste for farces returned. On balance the three managers probably regarded Gay with about the same enthusiasm as that with which they regarded living dramatic authors in general, that is to say, guarded, lukewarm. Dead writers were preferable because one did not have to pay them for author's benefit nights or listen to their annoying complaints about the production. John Gay, in their eyes, was a typical living author; no better than the rest, perhaps, but no worse.

Nor is there much to say for the supposition, frequently voiced, that Tory political satire in the Opera frightened the Whiggish triumvirate of managers. The Opera was swept up after its production into the political storm, along with everything else written by Gay and the other Scriblerians, but this was later, in the period between 1728 and 1730 to which Bertrand Goldgar has given the title, "The Triumphs of Wit," the triumphant wit being that of the Scriblerians, of course.¹⁵ In truth, The Beggar's Opera does not embody much specific political satire, Tory or Whig. Received opinion is always difficult to counter or alter, but in this case received opinion wants changing. The biographer W. H. Irving, so right on so many judgments about Gay is simply mistaken when he asserts that "Gay proposed to make his play somewhat of a theatrical Craftsman," that is, a vehicle of propaganda for the Tory and dissident Whig opposition.¹⁶

It was later converted into such a vehicle, as we shall see, by among others Swift in The Intelligencer and by The Craftsman itself, but this was after the fact, several weeks after the opening. There are, to be sure, political references salted here and there through the play that would have drawn laughs. Peachum's reference, for example, in I.iii, to "Robin of Bagshot, alias Gorgon, alias Bluff Bob, alias Carbuncle, alias Bob Booty." This bit of verbal exuberance—note its resemblance to the list of aliases seen earlier in the Introduction to Harlequin Sheppard—is invariably footnoted heavily, and explained in ponderous academic lectures as a reference to Robert Walpole, which of course it is. But the dialogue that follows effectively draws the teeth of the satire:

Mrs. Peachum. What of Bob Booty, Husband? I hope nothing bad hath betided him. You know, my Dear, he's a favourite Customer of mine. 'Twas he made me a Present of this Ring.

Peachum. I have set his Name down in the BlackList, that's all, my Dear; he spends his Life among Women, and as soon as his Money is gone, one or other of the Ladies will hang-him for the Reward, and there's forty Pound lost to us for-ever. (I.iv.l-7)

So much for Bluff Bob, who has one line of dialogue in the entire opera. If Gay intended Bob Booty for political satire with Walpole as the satiric victim he was remarkably inept in his dramaturgy. And likewise with Macheath, who is also often said, following The Craftsman's guidance, to represent Walpole. The male lead, the hero, who enjoys to the end the steadfast love of both Lucy Lockit and Polly Peachum? Macheath as Walpole as satiric victim? The identification will not bear dramatic analysis. In Polly, it can be argued; but not in The Beggar's Opera.

The script presented to the three managers, assuming it resembled the version that finally appeared in print, had almost nothing in it to frighten Cibber and his colleagues, nothing that would have sent a Court Whig out of the theatre at the first interval. And in point of fact the Court Whigs paid to see The Beggar's Opera when it was produced, along with everyone else. It was not topical satire that kept the Drury Lane managers from accepting Gay's proposal. What then was it?

An informed guess is that the script Gay showed Cibber, Wilks, and Booth impressed those theatre professionals as being too out-of-the-way, too experimental, too nonstandard for commercial success. It was a whatd'ye call it. They had a point: The Beggar's Opera is out-of-the-way, experimental, and nonstandard. That is part of its glory: its dazzling originality; it is as original in its own way as Gulliver's Travels or the Dunciad. But the very originality must have worked against its chances with the managers, who could have said: "Interesting, yes. Original, no doubt about that. But risky. Will it take?" Leo Hughes has made the cogent suggestion that they may have been right, "that the history of Gay's ballad opera—and therefore of ballad and comic opera in general—might have been different if Cibber and his partners at Drury Lane had accepted the play."¹⁷ The Drury Lane audience did not expect or relish novelty: one went to Lincoln's Inn Fields for novelty. The audience at Drury Lane had greeted the realistic pantomime Harlequin Sheppard, which included Gay's satirical ballad, with "a universal hiss." It is entirely possible that they might have hissed The Beggar's Opera, too, as being out of place at Drury Lane.

Another aspect that may have discouraged Cibber and his colleagues is also a part of the Opera's glory: its musicality. The title proclaims it to be an opera. Opera is what was being produced at the King's theatre in the Haymarket, at enormous expense, opera in Italian, but opera all the same. Drury Lane employed music and musicians—though less than had been so twenty years earlier—and had even been venturing hesitantly into pantomime, as we have seen, in response to Rich's success with the form at Lincoln's Inn Fields. The company could accommodate the occasional song but to take on a piece with at least one song in every scene may have seemed daunting to a group of actors and actresses who had been together for a quarter-century or more and who were beginning to look their age. The music was not difficult, Gay could have told them, mostly popular tunes, but even so there was a great deal of it, and Drury Lane, the managers may have decided, was simply not a musical theatre, not a place for an opera, a beggar's or anyone else's.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the Drury Lane company was flourishing in the autumn of 1727, while Lincoln's Inn Fields wilted. The Coronation took place on 11 October, with all its pageantry. Everyone who was Anyone was in Town. Competition at the two theatres was fierce. Like duellers, on 4 November both houses played Rowe's old warhorse favorite, Tamerlane, toe to toe, as it were. Challenging simultaneously Italian opera at the King's Theatre and pantomime at Rich's house, Drury Lane mounted a production of Henry VIII in honor of the recent succession of George II, which incorporated important elements of spectacle as Benjamin Victor reported: "on the Account of their present Majesties Coronation, a pompous representation of [Henry's] Ceremony was introduc'd into that play."¹⁸ With copious advertising, Henry VIII became the hit of the new season. The King, Queen, the Princess Royal, and Princess Carolina attended a performance on 7 November and, according to The British Journal of 11 November, "seemed very well pleased with the Performance."

Fighting Shakespeare with Shakespeare, Rich ran The Jew [i.e., The Merchant] of Venice against Henry VIII on 13 November and grossed only eighty-six pounds plus shillings, just thirty-six pounds over the house charges of about fifty.¹⁹ The Daily Post reported that day that Henry VIII "with the magnificent Coronation of Queen Anna Bullen, … still continues to draw numerous Audiences, which is owing to the Excellency of the Performance, and the extraordinary Grandeur of the Decorations."²⁰Macbeth, with Quin in the title role, grossed a meager thirty-one pounds at Lincoln's Inn Fields on 17 November, not even enough to pay the house charges. In desperation Rich mounted a pantomime Harlequin Anna Bullen in December, which fizzled.²¹ The money poured into Drury Lane. It was in this prosperous context, then, that the managers read Gay's script of The Beggar's Opera, and told him no. It was a decision they would soon come to regret.

At some point in the negotiations for production, Gay's friends Catherine and Charles Douglas, Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, seem to have come to his assistance. A likely time would have been after the Drury Lane managers had turned him down. Gay would find that the Queensberrys did not at all resemble those fair-weather friends of the Hare in "Fable No. 50," who abandoned him to the hunter in his day of trouble. They were both young, he not yet thirty and she even younger, and they had been married only since 1720. Catherine Douglas was a Hyde, second daughter of the fourth Earl of Clarendon and granddaughter of the historian. Charles had succeeded his father, the second duke, in 1711, and had inherited estates in England and vast acreage in the border country of Scotland, along with the pink sandstone castle at Drumlanrig built by his grandfather, the first duke. This young noble couple would prove to be Gay's loyal, lifelong friends, ready to stand by him even if friendship cost them considerably in terms both social and financial.²²

Precisely what The Beggar's Opera cost the duke and duchess, if anything, before its opening is difficult to assay. The duchess may have guaranteed some or all of the costs of production to John Rich; the evidence for this is uncertain.²³ Robert D. Hume, writing of young Henry Fielding's entry into the theatrical world, is skeptical about the potential influence of the nobility on theatre managers. Authors, he writes "cadged introductions and recommendations from … persons of social distinction—though whether such recommendations really helped is doubtful."²⁴ Still, Rich was in dire financial straits and a guarantee might conceivably have attracted his eye, which was on the main chance as always. Benjamin Victor, a principal source for information about the production, does not refer to any subsidy. He notes, however, that the Drury Lane managers "peremptorily rejected this Opera." "Nay, it was currently reported that the happy Manager [Rich], who perform'd it, gave it up after the first Rehearsal, and was with some Difficulty prevailed on to make the Trial."²⁵ Rich may or may not have been reluctant to take the Opera on, but he certainly would have appeared reluctant if the duchess had agreed to foot the bill. Any difficulties in rehearsal would have allowed him to raise the ante, like a Peachum from Gay's opera. Rich also had the continuing problem of competition from Drury Lane to nag his days and nights. The other house had followed up its triumph with Henry VIII by reviving Vanbrugh's The Provok'd Husband, as edited and altered by Cibber. Critics protested, but audiences loved it: beginning 10 January 1728 it ran for twenty-eight nights successively, an unprecedented hit. This was enough in itself to make any rival manager nervous. Could the unknown comic opera by Gay face up to this sort of competition? Rehearsals continued.

Lavinia Fenton, destined for theatrical immortality, was selected to play Polly Peachum, though she had barely two years' experience on the stage. Rich had cast Fenton as Cherry in The Beaux Stratagem during the previous season; she had also played Ophelia and appeared as an entr'acte singer and dancer. Someone right for the ingenue part of Cherry who could sing would be right for Polly as well. Thomas Walker, strictly a journeyman actor to this date, was chosen for the part of Macheath instead of James Quin, the leading actor of the company, who apparently rejected the role.²⁶ The other parts Rich filled out with the regulars of his company, not a distinguished group of actors, but adequate. As its stage history affirms, adequate actors will do well in The Beggar's Opera, good actors will do superbly.

But this was in the future. Right down to opening night there was every reason for Rich and his company to have second thoughts about presenting a new production. Drury Lane's The Provok'd Husband was demolishing competition. The premiere of John Sturmy's Sesostris grossed only sixty pounds on opening night (17 January) at Lincoln's Inn, dragged on for a second author's benefit of forty-seven pounds on the 23rd and closed forever on the 27th of January 1728.²⁷The Beggar's Opera was next up. It was not a promising atmosphere for Gay's new play.

The author and his friends were naturally apprehensive. Congreve's judgment (that "It would either take greatly, or be damned confoundedly") was scarcely an opinion to calm Gay's nerves, and the tension communicated itself to Congreve, too. Pope wrote Swift: "John Gay's Opera is just on the point of Delivery. It may be call'd (considering its Subject) a Jayl-Delivery. Mr. Congreve (with whom I have commemorated you) is anxious as to its Success, and so am I; whether it succeeds or not, it will make a great noise, but whether of Claps or Hisses I know not. At worst it is in its own nature a thing which he can lose no reputation by, as he lays none upon it."²⁸ This is a friend talking to a friend about another friend, but one guesses that Gay longed more fervently for his opera's success than was evident to Pope. The theatre had been the locus of his principal literary ambitions for more than fifteen years; he had, he felt, been publicly humiliated by the Court. What better way, what other way to settle accounts than by writing a successful play?

About six o'clock on the night of Monday, 29 January 1728, as was the custom, the author appeared at the theatre, hoping for the best. Pope, and an entourage of friends also turned up at Lincoln's Inn Fields, along with, the Daily Journal later reported, "a prodigious Concourse of Nobility and Gentry."²⁹ Gay had of course peddled tickets genteelly to all his friends; this was also customary. Seated in their box seats, Gay and his associates awaited the verdict of the Town with trepidation, as the orchestra launched into the overture, composed and conducted by the competent musical director of Lincoln's Inn Fields, Dr. John Christopher Pepusch. As Pope later recalled it to Spence:

We were all … in great uncertainty of the event, till we were very much encouraged by overhearing the Duke of Argyle, who sat in the next box to us, say, "It will do—it must do! I see it in the eye of them." This was a good while before the first act was over, and so gave us ease soon, for that Duke, beside his own good taste, has as particular a knack as any one now living in discovering the taste of the public. He was quite right in this, as usual. The good nature of the audience appeared stronger and stronger every act, and ended in a clamour of applause.³⁰

Benjamin Victor's recollection confirms the tension, and also confirms that indecision on the part of the audience so torturing to a cast, especially on opening night: "On the first Night of Performance, its Fate was doubtful for some Time. The first Act was received with silent Attention, not a Hand moved; at the End of which they rose, and every Man seemed to compare Notes with his Neighbor, and the general Opinion was in its Favour." This must have been about the time the Duke of Argyle delivered the memorable aside that Pope and Gay picked up in the next box, but "silent Attention" is not enough. Victor continues: "In the second Act they broke their Silence, by Marks of their Approbation, to the great Joy of the frighted Performers, as well as the Author; and the last Act was received with universal Applause."³¹ Act II opens with the great tavern scene, the musical and dramatic strategy of which will be discussed in the following chapter. Act I closes with the quiet love duet of Macheath and Polly, "Parting," as Gay's stage direction indicates, "and looking back at each other with fondness; he at one Door, she at the other" (I.xiii.70-73). It is a notably understated act closing, one that does not draw much applause in modern productions. Victor's recollection accords with the dramatic logic of the Opera.

In the first week Gay's fortune was assured. On Thursday I February the Daily Journal reported succinctly on "Mr. Gay's new English Opera, written in a Manner wholly new, and very entertaining, there being introduced, instead of Italian Airs, above 60 of the most celebrated old English and Scotch tunes.… [N]o Theatrical Performance for these many Years has met with so much Applause." The opposition newspaper, The Craftsman, which would soon undertake its explication of the Opera's latent political comment, contented itself in the initial week with recording on 3 February for the first time that witticism that has become standard: The Opera "has met with a general Applause, insomuch that the Waggs say it has made Rich very Gay, and probably will make Gay very Rich."³² It is worth reiterating that the re-education campaign of the opposition, the program of finding and pointing out specific political propaganda, did not begin until The Beggar's Opera was securely established as a hit.

By 15 February Gay was feeling sufficiently confident to write Swift a letter that signalizes his triumph and also reflects the deep satisfaction he was receiving from that triumph. It is worth quoting in full:

Dear Sir/I have deferr'd writing to you from time to time till I could give you an account of the Beggar's Opera. It is Acted at the Playhouse in Lincoln's Inn fields, with such success that the Playhouse hath been crouded every night; to night is the fifteenth time of Acting, and 'tis thought it will run a fortnight longer. I have order'd Motte to send the Play to you the first opportunity. I made no interest either for approbation or money nor hath any body been prest to take tickets for my Benefit, notwithstanding which, I think I shall make an addition to my fortune of between six and seven hundred pounds. I know this account will give you pleasure, as I have push'd through this precarious Affair without servility or flattery. As to any favours from Great men I am in the same state you left me; but I am a great deal happier as I have no expectations. The Dutchess of Queensberry hath signaliz'd her friendship to me upon this occasion in such a conspicuous manner, that I hope (for her sake) you will take care to put your fork to all its proper uses, and suffer nobody for the f[uture] to put their knives in their mouths.

Gay's comment on the generosity of the duchess is apparently the ultimate source of later speculation about her subsidizing rehearsals, but it could refer to many other manifestations of the noble lady's warm heart. The advice to Swift on minding his table manners is of course a delightful aside between old friends. Gay continues:

Lord Cobham says that I should [have] printed it in Italian over against the English, that the Ladys might have understood what they read. The outlandish (as they now call it) Opera hath been so thin of late that some have call'd that the Beggars Opera, & if the run continues, I fear I shall have remonstrances drawn up against me by the Royal Academy of Musick. As none of us have heard from you of late every one of us are in concern about your health. I beg we may hear from you soon. By my constant attendance on this affair I have almost worried myself into an ill state of health, but I intend in five or six days to go to our Country seat at Twickenham for a little air. Mr. Pope is very seldom in town. Mrs Howard frequently asks after you, & desires her compliments to you; Mr. George Arbuthnot, the Doctor's Brother is married to Mrs. Peggy Robinson. I would write more, but as to night is for my Benefit, I am in a hurry to go out about business. / I am Dear Sir / Your most affectionate / & obedient Servant / J. Gay³³

"I have push'd through this precarious Affair without servility or flattery." It is as if Gay is seeking to underline his independent action to Swift, whom he knew to have been skeptical about his search for preferment.

Gay sold the copyright to John Watts, for an unknown but no doubt substantial sum. Watts was by then the leading publisher of dramatic authors. He began publishing editions on 14 February, "To which is Added, The MUSICK Engravd on COPPER-PLATES," as the title page of the first edition indicated. Watts must have had to push his engravers and printers hard to produce the edition just sixteen days after the opening but it was well worth the effort: edition followed edition, in varying states which have puzzled bibliographers ever since.³⁴

Gay's remark to Swift about this being his benefit night and having to see about his business may stem from the slim returns of the first author's benefit, which dipped mysteriously from opening night (£169 to £161), then leaped to £175 on the fifth night. On his benefit night on 8 February the take was again down to £165, even though the Daily Journal that day commented the show "meets with that universal Applause, that no one third Part of the Company that crowd thither to see it, can get Admittance." These were spectacular receipts—the opening of Sesostris in January, it will be remembered, grossed only sixty pounds, barely enough to cover the house charges. Although Rich's books are difficult to interpret, it may be that he was at first skimming some off the top for his own use, as it were, before reporting the gross on benefit nights to Gay. This, then, would account for Gay's anxious attention to business on benefit night: so that he could verify the totals himself.³⁵

Rich was shoehoming that happy third part of the crowd into every square inch of space he could clear. On the 23rd of March, for example, the Opera grossed £194, with 238 spectators in the boxes, 98(!) on the stage, 302 in the pit, 65 in the slips (extensions of the boxes), 440 compressed into the first gallery, 196 in the second gallery, and 2 paying customers in a category not yet explained by scholarship, but the comfort of which imagination can conjure up: "pidgeon holes."³⁶ A total of 1,341 in the audience. For comparison, a year earlier on 13 March 1727 Rich had taken in £133 for a performance of Hamlet with Quin in the title role playing to 891 in the audience—7 on the stage and no one in pidgeon holes. A routine performance of The Beggar's Opera came out 50 percent ahead, in terms of both audience and receipts.

Precisely how much came to Gay of these receipts is impossible to say: his own estimate in mid-February to Swift of between six and seven hundred pounds may or may not be accurate. If he had his wits about him and insisted on additional benefit nights or some similar arrangement, it is on the low side. The figure to precise pounds, shillings, and pence that is quoted so confidently by both his latest biographer and editor has no relationship to reality, however, and will not be given further life here.³⁷

Consecutive performances of the Opera continued through February and early March. On 22 February the Royal Family attended a command performance: their entourage took up twenty-eight box seats, plus a place for a Yeoman of the Guard in the pit.³⁸ The company performed it on the 7th of March and gave it a brief rest, offering James Carlisle's The Fortune Hunters, "Carefully Revis'd, with Fenton as Nanny." The star system was working: receipts for the revival were a most satisfactory £131. But the temptations of the Opera's gross were too much, and it was back on the stage the following Monday. Drury Lane, meanwhile, was attempting to counter Gay's success, which had overshadowed even the bonanza of The Provok'd Husband. In a rare deviation from previous form, the Drury Lane managers produced a new play: young Henry Fielding's Love in Several Masques. This intrigue comedy was given its first performance on 16 February 1728, in the very teeth of the Opera's success and ran only four nights, "neither a success nor a fiasco."³⁹ After this Cibber and his colleagues returned to the tried and true, running repertory standards: Hamlet, The Funeral, The Way of the World, The Man of Mode. The success of Gay's Opera would soon shake both Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields out of their extreme conservatism by encouraging competition for new work, but that was still in the future.

Now Rich could watch the money roll in, and the Opposition could be about showing how The Beggar's Opera, correctly interpreted, represented a frontal attack on Sir Robert Walpole and his ministry. Swift wrote Gay on 26 February, in reply to Gay's account of the Opera's success: "Does W[alpole] think you intended an affront to him in your opera. Pray God he may, for he has held the longest hand at hazard that ever fell to any Sharpers Share and keeps his run when the dice are changed."⁴⁰ The strength of Swift's feeling about Walpole is not in dispute, but this letter, which is frequently cited as proof that Gay did intend an affront to Walpole in the Opera, seems on the contrary to be evidence that he did not. Swift had read at least part of the Opera in manuscript; he asks Gay if Walpole thinks that Gay intended an affront. Surely if Swift had known that Gay intended an affront he would have written "knew you intended" or "believed you intended." The comment appears to be, rather, a query set off by The Craftsman's famous blast of 17 February—which Swift could have seen by 26 February. Swift seems to be telling Gay that Walpole may have taken offense where no offense was intended, and that Gay should be happy about it.

The sequence of events that the opposition set in motion to convince the public that the Opera was anti-Walpole propaganda is interesting in its own right as an effective use of the print medium in politics. How far Gay himself was involved is a matter for conjecture, but his financial interests were at least carefully protected, and there is every reason to believe that he knew what was going on. The Craftsman, after its initial, good-humored comment about Rich and Gay on 3 February, waited until the opera was well established, the printed edition had been placed on sale, and Gay had received his benefit for the fifteenth performance to publish on 17 February the richly ironic letter by "Phil. Harmonicus" to The Craftsman's putative editor, "Caleb D'Anvers." Harmonicus identifies The Beggar's Opera as "the most venemous [sic] allegorical Libel against the G[overnmen]t that hath appeared for many Years past." He explains that Macheath represents Walpole, and that Peachum and Lockit also represent Walpole and his brother Horatio. "Harmonicus" demonstrates how to read the Opera for innuendo, of which he finds plenty.

A few weeks later, in the middle of March, Harmonicus's letter was republished as part of a little guide or do-it-yourself kit for Walpole-bashing, appended to the "second edition" of Christopher Bullock's Woman's Revenge.⁴¹ Bullock, one of a family of actors, had died in 1722 but his widow Jane was the highest paid female actor on the Lincoln's Inn payroll in the late 1720s and republication of the play may have brought her some copy money. What the customers presumably wanted, however, was the reprinted letter, here appearing as A Compleat Key to the Beggar's Opera, by "Peter Padwell of Paddington, Esq;" a "Town Pastoral to Mrs. Polly Peachum"—a verse satire with Walpole the satiric victim—and, significantly, Gay's "Newgate's Garland." The opening lines of the "Garland's" last stanza with a reference to William Wood and the Irish coinage scandal, which Swift had celebrated in The Drapier's Letters, would have evoked echoes in Dublin:

What a Pother has here been with Wood and his Brass,
Who would modestly make a few Half-pennies pass?

Perhaps they did evoke such an echo. Jonathan Swift in the other island was about to reinforce the attacks on Walpole, with his own satiric touch. Swift employs a somewhat different strategy from that of the "Key," although also an ironic one, for his Irish audience in an essay published in the Dublin Intelligencer in May 1728. The essay is to be seen in the context of Swift's pamphlet battles with the Walpole ministry and their Irish representatives, of which the Modest Proposal (1729) would be the crowning jewel. Swift simply coopts Gay for his side. He, Swift, writes satire, he contends, only for personal satisfaction. "If I ridicule the Follies and Corruptions of a Court, a Ministry, or a Senate, are they not amply paid by Pensions, Titles, and Power: while I expect, and desire no other Reward, than that of laughing with a few Friends in a Corner?" He continues, "My Reason for mentioning Courts, and Ministers (whom I never think on, but with the most profound Veneration) is, because an Opinion obtains, that in the Beggar's Opera there appears to be some Reflections upon Courtiers and Statesmen, whereof I am by no Means a Judge."⁴²

Unlike Phil. Harmonicus, Swift does not spell out the Reflections for his audience. Rather, he contends that Gay's merit and his fourteen years' attendance at Court have been overlooked and he has "failed of Preferment," which of course was true. "It must be allowed, That the Beggar's Opera is not the first of Mr. Gay's Works, wherein he hath been faulty, with Regard to Courtiers and Statesmen. For to omit his other Pieces, even in his Fables, published within two Years past, and dedicated to the Duke of Cumberland, for which he was promised a Reward, he hath been thought somewhat too bold upon the Courtiers." Swift here sends the readers of the Fables back to their volumes, to seek out innuendoes that to that moment no one had recognized. After a discussion of recent attacks on the morality of the Opera, Swift in his inimitable backhanded manner focuses attention on the transvaluation of values dramatized in the work: "This Comedy contains likewise a Satyr, which without enquiring whether it affects the present Age, may possibly be useful in Times to come. I mean, where the Author takes the Occasion of comparing those common Robbers of the Publick, and their several Stratagems of betraying, undermining and hanging each other, to the several Arts of Politicians in Times of Corruption" (p. 36). Times of Corruption. Not these times, not the present Age, of course. It is the rhetorical device of praeteritio, saying by affecting not to say; one of Swift's favored techniques. "Disingenuous," Bertrand Goldgar has termed Swift's arguments in The Intelligencer.⁴³ Disingenuous they are, but ingenious.

Benefiting from the political guidance of The Craftsman and Swift, audiences now knew when to laugh and when to glance significantly at politicians in the theatre boxes. It all added to the fun, and Gay had provided the perfect cue with Lockit's song in Act II:

    When you censure the Age,
    Be cautious and sage,
Lest the Courtiers offended should be:
   If you mention Vice or Bribe,
   'Tis so pat to all the Tribe;
Each crys—That was levell'd at me.
(II.x.21-26)

By this time vendors were selling mezzotint engravings of Lavinia Fenton and Thomas Walker as Polly and Macheath; Gay sent Swift, at Swift's request, a pair of these predecessors of publicity shots. Gay was in an ebullient mood, writing the Dean in March:

On the Benefit day of one of the Actresse's last week one of the players falling sick they were oblig'd to give out another play or dismiss the Audience, A Play was given out, but the people call'd out for the Beggar's Opera, & they were forc'd to play it, or the Audience would not have stayd. I have got by all this sucess between seven & eight hundred pounds, and Rich, (deducting the whole charges of the House) hath clear'd already near four thousand pounds. In about a month I am going to the Bath with the Dutchess of Marlborough and Mr. Congreve, for I have no expectations of receiving any favours from the Court.⁴⁴

The two lovers and Gay found a production of the Opera playing in Bath when they arrived there. Swift as an author was annoyed at the disproportionate size of Rich's bonanza, writing Gay that "I think that rich rogue Rich Should in conscience make you a present of 2 or 3 hundred Guineas." It was time for Gay to provide for himself: "Ever preserve Some Spice of the Alderman [i.e., financial acumen] and prepare against age and dulness and Sickness and coldness or death of friends. A whore has a ressource left that She can turn Bawd: but an old decayd Poet is a creature abandond."⁴⁵ With the politicization of the Opera Gay must himself abandond." himself Gay must abandon all hope of preferment, as he knew. The Government wisely chose not to attempt to refute the innuendoes—that would have been fulfilling Lockit's prediction in his song—but decided to move against the work on moral and aesthetic grounds. Dr. Thomas Herring, chaplain at Lincoln's Inn, preached a sermon in March against the morality of The Beggar's Opera, contending that the favorable presentation of criminals in the work would encourage crime.

Pope and Gay recognized that Herring's sermon was a political plant—Swift said as much in his Intelligencer essay—but his contentions were taken seriously, then and later. Daniel Defoe, perhaps still smarting from his encounter with the Mohocks, complained in a pamphlet that "Every idle Fellow, weary of honest Labour, need but fancy himself a Macheath or a Sheppard, and there's a Rogue made at once."⁴⁶ Samuel Johnson felt compelled to refute such criticism in his "Life of Gay" in Lives of the Poets: "The play, like many others, was plainly written only to divert, without any moral purpose, and is therefore not likely to do good; nor can it be conceived, without more speculation than life requires or admits, to be productive of much evil. Highwaymen and housebreakers seldom frequent the playhouse."⁴⁷

The next chapter will examine the moral content, if any, of The Beggar's Opera, but it is a fact that, Johnson to the contrary notwithstanding, many people continued for a long time to brood about its tendency to deprave. A biographer of Gay writing in the 1820s presented a long discussion of Herring's sermon, concluded that he was correct, and regretfully summed up Gay's career after the Opera's success this way: Gay "had a pleasing turn for poetry," but "unhappily falling into the hands of Swift and Pope and their set, he was promoted into a walk, which rendered his talents a snare to himself, and in general a nuisance to his fellow creatures … Let his example prove a warning to others, and it will not have been in vain."⁴⁸

Another line of attack on The Beggar's Opera by the government's followers was aesthetic: that the opera was a debased form of entertainment. This could be and sometimes was associated with the charge of immorality. The London Journal of 23 March 1728, for example, viewed the declining interest in opera as a symptom of failing aesthetic taste: "I would not be thought here to speak with any Prejudice or III-will to the Beggar's Opera, in which I am willing to allow there is a great deal of true low Humour." Just what the audiences, unfortunately, wanted. These charges were perhaps motivated primarily by politics, but they had a residual sting and no doubt some persuasive effect.

Those of the aristocracy who took a dim view of the stage found their opinions amply confirmed that spring. The Duke of Bolton attended a performance of the Opera on Monday, 8 April, when Gay also had a box seat there.⁴⁹ The Duke came to the next two performances and brought his duchess to the Opera on Saturday 13 May. On 22 June The Craftsman reported, "To the great Surpize of the Audience, the Part of Polly Peachum was performed by Miss WARREN, who was very much applauded; the first Performer being retired, as it is reported, from the Stage." Retired indeed: "The D[uke] of Bolton," Gay informed Swift, "I hear hath run away with Polly Peachum, having settled 400£ a year upon her during pleasure, & upon disagreement 200f a year."⁵⁰ Lavinia Fenton was "now in so high vogue," Gay had written Swift, "that I am in doubt, whether her fame does not surpass that of the Opera itself."⁵¹ Lavinia had struck paydirt; eventually the duke would make her his duchess, but these were unseemly doings, even for the nobility. A good many individuals, in all classes, felt that the theatre was no better than it should be. Perhaps some kind of systematic censorship was in order.

The Daily Journal got the matter right when it wrote of "Mr. Gay's new English Opera" in the issue of 1 February 1728. Like all great works of art, The Beggar's Opera possesses differing meanings for different members of the audience—every audience; its significance will not be exhausted in any single discussion. However, the three terms used by the Journal, new, English, and opera, provide convenient guideposts to what it was that Gay delivered to the reluctant—and soon to be gay—John Rich.

There is nothing entirely new in the theatre, of course. Readers of this book will remember that the use of music, popular and/or traditional music, was a strategy Gay had adopted at the very beginning of his dramatic career, with the songs in The Mohocks, and had continued in most of his later plays except for his tragedies. He had worked with—and learned from—Handel on Acis and Galatea. Handel's setting for "'Twas when the Seas were roaring" from The What D'Ye Call It was being reprinted for popular sale—Gay would employ the tune again in the Opera. Most recently he had written a ballad for performance in the pantomime Harlequin Sheppard, sung to an old favorite tune, "The Cut-Purse," or "Packington's Pound," which he would also use again in the Opera. One imagines Gay humming tunes to himself as he wrote. Music was never far from the center of his artistic creativity.

Notes

¹ Pope edited the letter extensively before publishing it: see The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 2:454-56.

² Pope, Correspondence, 1:360.

³ See Rosamond McGuiness, "The British Apollo and Music," in Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History 2 (1987): 9-19. I am indebted to Yvonne Noble for this reference.

⁴ This has been an especially frustrating inquiry. Both Fiske and Irving assume it as fact, without providing documentation. I have no quarrel with the assumption but would feel more secure if I knew of a contemporary reference to Gay's playing the flute.

⁵ See Fiske, English Theatre Music, 105.

⁶ See Shirley Strum Kenny, "The Publication of Plays," in London Theatre World, 309-36; and John Feather, The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 44-68.

⁷ William Henry Irving, John Gay Favorite of the Wits (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1940), 236.

⁸ J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole The King's Minister (London: Cresset, 1960), 157-61.

⁹ Betrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1976), 51: "from the beginning [Gulliver's Travels'] political allusions were obviously understood."

¹⁰ Public Record Office [of Great Britain], T. 29/25, p. 26: "200£ to Mr. Pope as his Mat Encouragemt to his translacion of Homers Odyssey and to the Subscripcons making for the same." Other Treasury documents having to do with this gift are in T. 60/12, p. 391; and T. 52/52/33, p. 324.

¹¹ Goldgar, 67.

¹² In addition to Goldgar, see Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969), 116-28.

¹³ Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osbom, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 107.

¹⁴ To appreciate just how tough, see Robert D. Hume's tables in Henry Fielding and the London Theatre 1728-1737 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 15, 105.

¹⁵ Goldgar, 64-86.

¹⁶ Irving, 238.

¹⁷ Hughes, The Drama's Patrons (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1971), 102.

¹⁸ [Benjamin Victor], Memoirs of the Life of Barton Booth, Esq; (London: John Watts, 1733), 13. "Pompous" was of course a term of praise with Victor.

¹⁹ Figures are based on Rich's accounts in the Harvard Theatre Collection, shelfmark fMS Thr 22, from which the London Stage statistics are drawn. This account book includes much information not published in LS and there are discrepancies between the information it contains and the published figures.

²⁰ Not seen. Here as quoted in London Stage.

²¹ The Rich accounts (n. 19) show that after the first night the bill with the pantomime made the house charges only once.

²² Biographical information from G. E. C[okayne]., Complete Peerage England, Scotland, Ireland. … rev. ed., 12 vols., by V. Gibbs, H. A. Doubleday, G. H. White, and R. S. Lea (London: St. Catherine Press, 1910-59) and personal observation.

²³ Schultz, 2, accepts the eighteenth-century legend much too uncritically, and he has been followed by scholars, including Fuller, since. Cooke's Memoirs of … Macklin (pub. 1804), on which this story and other Opera legends are based, is shot through with demonstrable error and must be used with great caution. See the article on Macklin in Biographical Dictionary.

²⁴ Hume, Henry Fielding, 21.

²⁵ Benjamin Victor, The History of the Theatres of London and Dublin, 3 vols. (London: T. Davies, 1761-71) 2:153.

²⁶ This, too, is part of that tangle of theatrical gossip which surrounds the Opera, but it does seem likely that Quin could have had the role if he wanted it. He took it in a 1730 revival.

²⁷ Here and elsewhere shillings and pence are eliminated in totals from Rich's accounts (which record them to the halfpenny).

²⁸ Pope, Correspondence, 2:469.

²⁹Daily Journal, issue of 1 February.

³⁰Anecdotes, 107-8.

³¹ Victor, 2:154.

³²The Country Journal: Or, The Craftsman; copy used here and hereafter in the microfilm series of Early English Newspapers.

³³The Letters of John Gay, ed. C. F. Burgess (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 70-71.

³⁴ Including the most recent editor, John Fuller, who adopts the novel technique of discussing "some of the significant variants" (Dramatic Works, 374) without, however, specifying which some. This, it goes without saying, is worse than discussing none of the significant variants, because it presents the unwary user a bibliographical minefield: that undiscussed significant variant may be of the highest significance. P. E. Lewis, The Beggar's Opera (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1973), strives valiantly but does not succeed in discriminating among the differing states of the first editions and declines to introduce the music into his edition, saying (42) that "is a task for a musicologist." A critical edition of the Opera, with music, is a prime desideratum. Dr. Yvonne Noble has one in preparation.

³⁵ There is no other apparent correlation with, say, day of the week, for the mysterious fluctuations in receipts. Common sense suggests that Rich was packing every possible body into every performance, and this is corroborated by the Daily Journal's statement.

³⁶ I accept the London Stage totals here, though they do not seem to add up correctly for the box and stage attendance when one divides the reported cash totals by the admission price. The fragile condition of the account book, which has so far made any kind of duplication impossible, inhibits detailed study.

³⁷ Fuller, 1:46, following Irving, 254. See Appendix B.

³⁸ The places of the Royal Family and entourage are all carried as "orders" in Rich's accounts, a puzzling category omitted from the London Stage calculations. Free seats?

³⁹ Hume, Henry Fielding, 26-33.

⁴⁰ Pope, Correspondence, 2:475.

⁴¹ Schultz, 368, cites the Book List for March in the Monthly Chronicle, which I have not seen, as authority for the publication date of 14 March. The play itself appears to be a reissue of the 1715 edition with new prelims and, of course, the appended anti-Walpole material.

⁴² Swift, Irish Tracts, 1728-1733, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), 34.

⁴³ Goldgar, 70.

⁴⁴Letters, 72.

⁴⁵ Pope, Correspondence, 2:482.

⁴⁶Second Thoughts Are Best (1729), quoted in Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), 518. It is interesting that Defoe associates Sheppard with Macheath, in view of Gay's ballad on Sheppard.

⁴⁷The Lives of the Poets, ed. G.B. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 2:278.

⁴⁸ James Plumptre, "Life of John Gay," Cambridge University Library, Manuscript Add. 5829. Plumptre dates his summary comment September 19, 1821.

⁴⁹ From Rich's account book, which sometimes names ticket holders.

⁵⁰Letters, 76.

⁵¹ Pope, Correspondence, 2:479.