It is, of course, for The Beggar's Opera that Gay is remembered in the twentieth century, even among people with no particular interest in eighteenth-century poetry or drama. The play was revived in a rather romanticized London production with great success in 1926; its music was later adapted and presented by Benjamin Britten; in 1963 the Royal Shakespeare Company produced it once more, with great attention to realistic detail, and with a vivid sense of the play's topicality in modern England, once more riddled with scandal in high places. Made into a movie starring Laurence Olivier, The Beggar's Opera still returns to art theaters; it has been reissued in formats ranging from an inexpensive student paperback to a splendid reproduction of the 1729 edition; a new recording recently presented all its music and much of its speech.

Probably nothing, however, has brought Gay's work so much to popular attention as the fact that The Beggar's Opera was the basis for Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera, which relied on it for broad plot structure, for many of its characters, and even for some of its music. The Brecht play, which had a record-breaking run off-Broadway, seems lively and singularly relevant; it has led some readers to new awareness of comparable qualities in Gay's opera, which conveys so highly sophisticated a structure of qualifications that its subject almost seems to be the nature and necessity of qualification in life. In its awareness of the immense difficulty of civilized existence, it speaks directly to our own time.

The relevance of The Beggar's Opera to the twentieth century was underlined by its most recent London production, a Brechtian version in which slight textual alterations stressed the applicability of Gay's satire to such modern phenomena as the Profumo affair (e.g., "I, Madam, was once kept by a Tory."). In a "preview" published in the Manchester Guardian the day before the play's London opening, Philip Hope-Wallace speculated about the modern effect of the comedy. "Will anyone be shocked now?" he asks, and concludes that it is "a question of age perhaps." "I should think," adds Hope-Wallace, "this indestructible old bag of other men's tunes and its comedy within a comedy would be exactly to modern taste and once again become the talk of the town."¹

He was, however, rather too optimistic. Although the play's audiences were clearly amused and refreshed by the satiric energy of the "opera" in Peter Wood's production, which employed an elaborate and ingenious set, stylized action, broad parody, and deliberate techniques of "alienation," the newspaper critics were less enthusiastic. They revived the issues of the eighteenth century: the Sunday Times commentator, alone in liking the play, praised Polly, like his predecessors two hundred years before, as "an unquenchable sunbeam in a world of tumultuous shadows."2 Other critics returned to the question of morality. "Morality does not suit an eighteenth-century comedy," wrote David Pryce-Jones, "particularly one so sensitive as The Beggar's Opera, where all the lessons to be learnt are implied and all the criticism is self-contained."3 Kenneth Tynan had similar objections: "What should be implied is shrieked aloud."4 The problem remains: how can moral satire be made clear and convincing without becoming too blatant? Gay solved that problem largely through his conception of the play; the modern producer, by trying to stress through setting (the play takes place on a prison ship), realistic costume, and stylized action the indictment of social conditions implicit in The Beggar's Opera, apparently made that indictment less palatable.

In considering the Fables we discovered that the nature of their form helped Gay to achieve success. The same is true of The Beggar's Opera: the special variety of dramatic form that Gay here chose was maximally useful in solving the problems that plagued him. He had long experimented with various uses of disguise in drama; now he developed a form almost completely dependent on disguise. He could actually introduce himself directly into his play, given the disguise (and a very significant one it is, considering his preoccupation with money) of beggar.

The importance of this mask as a distancing device becomes apparent when we compare the Introduction of The Beggar's Opera with that of its sequel, Polly. The first words of the Beggar in the earlier play are these: "If Poverty be a Title to Poetry, I am sure Nobody can dispute mine. I own my self of the Company of Beggars; and I make one at their Weekly Festivals at St. Gile's. I have a small Yearly Salary for my Catches, and am welcome to a Dinner there whenever I please, which is more than most Poets can say" (I, 135). The charm of this speech comes chiefly from the fact that the poet thinks of himself mainly as beggar, only secondarily as poet; from this perspective he can treat the financial need characteristic of poets with saving irony. He does not appear to take himself or his poetry very seriously; extolling the pleasures of beggarhood, he thus makes a telling comment on the difficulties of being a poet (his point, of course, is that the beggar is more independent than the typical poet). But he manages to avoid pathos and distasteful self-concern: his self-esteem is, for a change, appealing rather than unattractive.

His counterpart in Polly, on the other hand, is called not beggar but poet. The disguise is much thinner, and the language of the character reflects his greater closeness to the actual nature of the author: "A Sequel to a play is like more last words. It is a kind of absurdity; and really, sir, you have prevailed upon me to pursue this subject against my judgment.… I know, I must have been looked upon as whimsical, and particular, if I had scrupled to have risqued my reputation for my profit; for why should I be more squeamish than my betters? and so, sir, contrary to my opinion, I bring Polly once again upon the stage" (II, 3). This is Gay speaking virtually in his own voice. After the wit of the first sentence, the speech degenerates into a sort of apology which upon analysis becomes increasingly distasteful. The point seems to be that the author is, in fact, offering this play for the sake of personal profit, but that his mode of admitting this is intended to remove all onus from him. He retains the rather unpleasant tone of moral superiority with no evidence of any real claim to such elevation. One important effect of the series of disguises in The Beggar's Opera is to make all pretensions to superiority into jokes; nothing in Polly reveals the Poet's claim as ludicrous. But the joke is necessary; the perspective it provides is a major—perhaps the major—source of strength in The Beggar's Opera.

Of course the disguise of Beggar for the author is only the first of many masks in The Beggar's Opera; all serve similar purposes of implicit commentary. The other disguises in the play are more complicated and less obvious than the introductory one, and they are difficult to define. Is one to say, for example, that Macheath is essentially an aristocrat in the disguise of a highwayman? Or is it more accurate to say that the highwayman in the play disguise themselves to themselves as aristocrats? Here is a sample of dialogue among Macheath's gang:

Ned: Who is there here that would not dye for his Friend?

Harry: Who is there here that would betray him for his Interest?

Matt: Show me a Gang of Courtiers that can say as much.

Ben: We are for a just Partition of the World, for every Man hath a Right to enjoy Life.

Matt: We retrench the Superfluities of Mankind. The World is avaritious, and I hate Avarice. A covetous fellow, like a Jack-daw, steals what he was never made to enjoy, for the sake of hiding it. These are the Robbers of Mankind, for Money was made for the Free-hearted and Generous, and where is the Injury of taking from another, what he hath not the Heart to make use of?

(I, 163-64)

These are aristocrats indeed: honorable, loyal, governed by principle; and if the principles seem to partake largely of rationalization, surely this fact makes the gang seem no less aristocratic. We get a different, but equally convincing, view of the highwayman as aristocrat from the Peachums, who, as William Empson has demonstrated, represent the bourgeois perspective in the play.

Mrs. Peachum: I knew she was always a proud Slut; and now the wench hath play'd the Fool and married, because forsooth she would do like the Gentry. Can you support the Expense of a Husband, Hussy, in gaming, drinking and whoring? … If you must be married, could you introduce no-body into our Family but a Highwayman? Why, thou foolish Jade, thou wilt be as ill-us'd, and as much neglected, as if thou hadst married a Lord!

Peachum: Let not your Anger, my Dear, break through the Rules of Decency, for the Captain looks upon himself in the Military Capacity, as a Gentleman by his Profession.

(I, 149)

Earlier, before the marriage is revealed, the Peachums discuss Macheath's wealth and prospects. They agree that he keeps good company and associates with the gentry, but this tendency is a weakness: he cannot expect to win at the gaming tables without the education of a fine gentleman. "What business hath he to keep Company with Lords and Gentlemen?" Mrs. Peachum concludes: "he should leave them to prey upon one another" (I, 142). To be aristocrats means, then, in this world, not to be men of honor and principle, but to be men who prey on one another.

William Hazlitt, assuming the identity between aristocrat and gentleman, finds Macheath heroic indeed:

Macheath should be a fine man and a gentleman, but he should be one of God Almighty's gentlemen, not a gentleman of the black rod. His gallantry and good-breeding should arise from impulse, not from rule; not from the trammels of education, but from a soul generous, courageous, good-natured, aspiring, amorous. The class of the character is very difficult to hit. It is something between gusto and slang, like port-wine and brandy mixed. It is not the mere gentleman that should be represented, but the blackguard sublimated into the gentleman. This character is qualified in a highwayman, as it is qualified in a prince. We hope this is not a libel.⁵

This image of Macheath as nature's nobleman is appealing, but the play will not allow us to rest content with it. Just at the point where we may be tempted to say that the highwaymen are true aristocrats, the nobility false ones, we discover that Macheath, for example, despite his prating of honor, is as capable of treachery, as proud of his seductions and their ultimate effect in populating Drury Lane (the resort of prostitutes) as his "betters" could conceivably be.

Similarly, our vision of Polly is made to fluctuate wildly. Eighteenth-century audiences wept and applauded at Polly's song, "Oh ponder well! be not severe," responding to its pathos and to her as a pathetic heroine. She has, to be sure, all the postures of the traditional romantic lead: her frequent evocations of the idea of love, her parroting of the notions of playbooks (although, to be sure, her admission of their source rather tempers the potency of such notions), her quite unjustified faith in Macheath's loyalty and her unwillingness to betray him—all these characteristics are conventionally admirable. But the first words of this Polly, who insists on her sentimentality and her virtue, spoken to her father, are, "I know as well as any of the fine Ladies how to make the most of my self and my Man too. A Woman knows how to be mercenary, though she hath never been in a Court or at an Assembly. We have it in our Natures, Papa" (I, 147).

This is not, to be sure, a direct statement of Polly's own feelings: she wishes at the moment to obscure her actual marriage to Macheath by pretending to conform precisely to her father's standards. But she has the lesson a bit too pat for comfort: it is easy to suspect that she really partakes of these values. After all, the truth is that she does, as she claims, have such visible marks of the captain's favor as a watch. The song she sings immediately after this speech ("Virgins are like the fair Flower in its Lustre") emphasizes the commodity view of virginity; when, later in the play, Polly comes into contact with Lucy, who has loved not wisely but too well, her sense of superiority rests on the fact that she has been smart enough to make a better bargain than Lucy: marriage for virginity. William Empson documents her feverish interest in hanging, the extent to which she seems almost to desire what she most fears, Macheath's death by hanging, the only form which death takes in this play.

All this is not to say that Polly lacks charm; she is, of course, the play's most appealing character. But it is the nature of this play that its most charming personages are frequently undercut, while its least attractive figures have moments of such moral clarity that we can hardly reject them. Thus the senior Peachums, underhanded, self-seeking, treacherous as they are, can convince us momentarily that the evils they abundantly demonstrate are merely natural concomitants of good business practice: they have the airs, the language, the self-esteem of successful businessmen; and our moral detestation of them cannot be quite secure—particularly if we perceive their resemblance to modern representatives of the business world. All the characters of The Beggar's Opera could be transferred to a new plot about the participants in a television quiz-show scandal with little change in their natures or their comments. The play leaves us with no secure stance; in place of one perspective from which to view the characters, it offers many. These characters do not come on stage in the casing of a mummy or a crocodile. They are disguised even from themselves; they do not know what they really are. As a consequence it becomes difficult for us to know what they are. This is a far more subtle use of the disguise motif than Gay ever made before or later; it dramatizes the almost metaphysical implications of the device.

II

If the shifting self-disguises (Polly as her father's daughter, as sentimental heroine, as wronged wife; Macheath as honorable gentleman, as dishonorable seducer; the Peachums as practical business people, as despicable profiteers in vice) afford one mode of constant qualification in the play, another is provided by the patterns of imagery which run through songs and prose alike. William Empson has discussed brilliantly and in some detail the imagery of hanging and its ramifications. Two other themes of the imagery are almost equally obvious: money and animals. And the three patterns in conjunction provide interesting commentary on one another.

The image of human beings as animals, a favorite of Gay's, becomes in The Beggar's Opera a subtle and complicated device. Lockit's direct summary of the motif is well-known: "Lions, Wolves, and Vulturs don't live together in Herds, Droves or Flocks.—Of all Animals of Prey, Man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his Neighbour, and yet we herd together.—Peachum is my Companion, my Friend—According to the Custom of the World, indeed, he may quote thousands of Precedents for cheating me—And shall I not make use of the Privilege of Friendship to make him a Return?" (I, 196). In tone and emphasis this speech is wonderfully characteristic of the play. It parodies the note of self-satisfaction we hear so often in these characters: Lockit is smug over the "superiority" of man, demonstrated by his sociability, to other vicious animals with an immediate exposition of precisely what this sociability means in practice. But the play provides many more specific statements of the similarity between men and animals.

It seems—although there are many exceptions—that the women in the play are somewhat more likely to think of love in animal terms, while the men connect love directly with money. Mrs. Peachum sees the "simple Maid" as a moth, constantly playing about the flame until, if she is not made a wife, her honor's singed. ("If Love the Virgin's Heart invade" [I, 143]). Polly describes the virgin as a flower, with her lovers as bees and butterflies ("Virgins are like the fair Flower in its Lustre" [I, 147]). Later, in a sentimental song, she likens herself to a turtledove ("The Turtle thus with plaintive crying" [I, 156]). Again, immediately after Macheath, masculine and money-oriented, has compared his love for her to that of a miser for his shilling, she compares hers for him to that of a boy for his sparrow ("The Miser thus a Shilling sees" [I, 162]). Jenny Diver, one of the trulls, sees Macheath as a cock attended by hens ("Before the Barn-door crowing" [I, 171]).

All these images, with the possible exception of Polly's boy-sparrow one, are comparatively innocent, although in the total context of the play they seem less so than we might expect. Gradually, though, the connections between human love and the animal world become increasingly sinister. Macheath, betrayed by women, shifts the bird imagery to a new realm: "Women are Decoy Ducks; who can trust them! Beasts, Jades, Jilts, Harpies, Furies, Whores!" (I, 173). When Lucy confronts her betrayer, Macheath, in prison, she sings a song which makes him the trapped rat and her the good housewife who throws it to the dog or cat ("Thus when a good Huswife sees a Rat," [I, 177]). Polly, still dwelling on bird imagery, compares herself to a female, Macheath to a male swallow, in a song whose point, Empson suggests, is that she is eagerly awaiting Macheath's death ("Thus when the Swallow, seeking Prey" [I, 186]).6 Then Lucy sees herself as a fox, Macheath as another ("I like the Fox shall grieve" [I, 193]). The final two songs in this sequence of animal lyrics are worth quoting in full. The first is sung by Lockit to Peachum, as he suggests that Macheath can be trapped by keeping an eye on Polly:

What Gudgeons are we Men!
Ev'ry Woman's easy Prey.
Though we have felt the Hook, agen
We bite and they betray.
The Bird that hath been trapt,
When he hears his calling Mate,
To her he flies, again he's clapt
Within the wiry Grate.
(I, 201-02)

The second is sung alternately by Polly and Lucy:

Polly: A Curse attends that Woman's Love. Who always would be pleasing.

Lucy: The Pertness of the billing Dove, Like tickling, is but teazing.

Polly: What then in Love can Woman do? Lucy: If we grow fond they shun us. Polly: And when we fly them, they pursue: Lucy: But leave us when they've won us.

(I, 209)

The songs comment tellingly on the sentimentality of some of the previous uses of bird imagery. Lockit's lyrics are particularly explicit, juxtaposing the image of men as "poor fish" to be hooked by women with an even more sinister picture of female birds as decoys to trap the males. All attempts to glamorize the notion of human beings as animals or birds must ultimately fail; this is degrading imagery, and Lockit, for the moment at least, sees it quite explicitly as such. (It is also Lockit, incidentally, who provides the most menacing animal image of the play: "Like Pikes, lank with Hunger, who miss of their Ends,/They bite their Companions, and prey on their Friends" [I, 197].) Polly and Lucy, from the opposite, feminine, point of view, perceive the same truth: they may try to romanticize their roles, but the actuality is hard and inescapable.

The pattern of animal imagery, in other words, provides its own commentary. Moving in general from benign to vicious images, it also moves from the unself-conscious, romantic, and conventional to a more cynical and analytical use of the same sort of material. And the later usages reflect back on the earlier ones, causing us to feel that innocence in this world (whatever innocence Polly truly had at first) can be equated only with ignorance, that romanticism is a resource only for those who know nothing of reality.

The notion of human beings as animals is further illuminated by frequent metaphorical and literal remarks about money. Love and money are, of course, closely related: Filch's first song establishes the nature of the relationship:

'Tis Woman that seduces all Mankind,
By her we first were taught the wheedling Arts:
Her very eyes can cheat; when most she's kind,
She tricks us of our Money with our Hearts.
For her, like Wolves by night we roam for Prey,
And practise ev'ry Fraud to bribe her Charms;
For Suits of Love, like Law, are won by Pay,
And Beauty must be fee'd into our Arms.
(I, 139)

This song not only summarizes the masculine point of view toward "love," as it exists in the world of the play; it also suggests the relation between human emphasis on money and the notion of human beings as animals. Men become wolves, Filch says quite explicitly, because of the feminine demand for money. And since, as other songs and comments in the play make abundantly clear, virtually every human enterprise depends upon money, it is quite apparent that man can hardly escape reduction to animality.

Mrs. Peachum is the only woman in the play who states explicitly that women themselves are commodities of equivalent value to money. She sees the maid as "like the golden Oar,/Which hath Guineas intrinsical in't"; the precise value of the ore is unknown until it is minted. The wife, on the other hand, is "like a Guinea in Gold,/Stampt with the Name of her Spouse"; although she no longer has the advantage of being of incalculable value, she acquires a new benefit: that of being an accepted medium of exchange, "current in every House" (I, 145). "The first time a Woman is frail, she should be somewhat nice methinks, for then or never is the time to make her fortune" (1, 151). This is Mrs. Peachum's morality, and, if no other woman quite states it, there is little evidence that anyone has an essentially different standard. Polly sees Macheath as her "treasure"; she also seems to have had a good sense of the value of her virginity, though she would not use such crass terms as her mother.

"You might sooner tear a Pension out of the Hands of a Courtier, a Fee from a Lawyer, a pretty Woman from a Looking-glass, or any Woman from Quadrille.—But to tear me from thee is impossible!" This is Macheath's idea of a fitting protestation of love to Polly (I, 160), who, in the play's comedy, accepts it quite blandly as such. More consistently than anyone else, he connects love with money. His metaphor of Polly as the shilling, himself as the miser, seems surprising: more often he values women in terms of guineas: "A Man who loves Money, might as well be contented with one Guinea, as I with one Woman" (I, 166). And again, "I must have Women. There is nothing unbends the Mind like them. Money is not so strong a Cordial for the Time" (I, 167).

Hazlitt may include Macheath's "amorousness" among his virtues, but this particular aspect of the captain's high regard for women is hardly attractive. The trulls he has sent to Drury Lane share his values: one praises another because, "Though her Fellow be never so agreeable, she can pick his Pocket as cooly, as if Money were her only Pleasure. Now that is a Command of the Passions uncommon in a Woman!" (I, 170). After one of them betrays the captain (for money), they argue over their "accounts": how many hanged men should be laid to the credit of each (I, 174). Macheath himself is greeted in prison by Lucy, whom he has seduced and left pregnant; one of her songs to him ends:

Whoever steals a Shilling,
Through Shame the Guilt conceals:
In Love the perjur'd Villain
With Boasts the Theft reveals.
(I, 178)

And there is justice in her complaint. Macheath convinces her that he plans to marry her, but she is unable to soften her father's heart. Macheath suggests that in such a case a bribe is indicated: "Money well tim'd, and properly apply'd, will do any thing" (I, 184). His next song elaborates the point, concluding that the way to win a woman is to offer her money: "That Reason with all is prevailing" (185). "In the Account of Love you are in my debt," Macheath tells Lucy (192). "Owe thy Life to me," Lucy replies. But as Macheath points out a bit later, "Death is a Debt,/A Debt on demand" (217)—and a gentleman always pays debts of this sort, if not those of love.

Of course these examples in the play do not even begin to exhaust the discussion of money, its function and its effects. But the ways in which money is connected with love—or with what passes for love in the play—are particularly indicative of the total corruption of the world described here. Filch makes a living by "helping the Ladies to a Pregnancy against their being called down to Sentence" (198)—by eighteenth-century law pregnant women could not be hanged. Sven Armens comments accurately on this fact: "Here sexual intercourse, which can be the warm expression of true love, has been most thoroughly debased. Even lust itself has been undermined. Love is moral and practical; lust is immoral and impractical; but begetting illegitimate children in order to cheat justice combines immorality with a sort of practicality. This is sex as simply business for all concerned; a breed farm for criminals represents the complete perversion of the chivalric code of courtly love."⁷

Except for Polly, sex seems to be hardly more than business for anyone in the play; even Lucy, who claims to be desperately in love, is capable of bargaining over her sexual rights. The Peachums consider their daughter a business asset; Polly herself can deal with her virginity as a commodity; Macheath makes little distinction between the pursuits of love and of money; Lockit thinks of love and money as equivalent material for bargaining. The money-love imagery sums up and emphasizes the nature of a society completely dominated by money—for frequent references in the play insist that lawyers, courtiers, doctors—all the world—care only for money; and Lockit and Peachum, those companions in crime, fall out before our eyes over their profits.

"Money well tim'd, and properly apply'd, will do any thing." "Of all Animals of Prey, Man is the only sociable one." Considered in conjunction, these two thematic statements explain and reflect upon one another. The cause of man's preying and of his sociability, as expounded in this play, is money. Or, conversely, the reason that money will do anything is that man is an animal of prey. his prey is only incidentally other human beings, ultimately it is money. Fierce punitive measures dispose of the weak, the poor, the unlucky in such a society: this brings us to the matter of hanging, the source of the third major pattern of imagery. Love, death, and money; human beings reducing themselves to a subanimal level—it sounds a somber play indeed. And of course it is somber—but funny as well; for the involved structure of cross-commentary, keeping the reader constantly a little off-balance, forces him to see the ridiculous as well as the horrible aspects of each situation.

The ending of the play is a perfect instance of the way in which this particular double view (of the world as both horrifying and ridiculous) is maintained. Macheath is about to be hanged when the player of the Introduction protests to the beggar-author that an opera must end happily. The beggar agrees to cry a reprieve for Macheath; the player approves: "All this we must do, to comply with the Taste of the Town" (223). Sven Armens summarizes the implications of this piece of action by observing, "The moral of the play is dismissed as the town in its ethical degradation dismisses morality."8 True enough—here is the horror: that the "town" which witnesses the play is a society of the same sort as that depicted in the play equally corrupt, equally perverted in values, and that honest drama, which shows "that the lower Sort of People have their Vices in a degree as well as the Rich: and that they are punish'd for them" (224), is consequently impossible. But it is equally true (and of course Sven Armens elsewhere demonstrates his awareness of the play's comic aspects) that the superb inconsequence of the ending accords tonally with the general lightheartedness of the play as a whole, lightheartedness which persists, paradoxically, despite the bitterness, the intense cynicism reiterated by the ending. It is quite proper to laugh at these matters—if one can retain the perspective of an outsider and fail to realize that he also is being condemned. And it is proper also to abhor and denounce the world depicted: the one response is incomplete without the other.

III

An obvious aspect of The Beggar's Opera which we will in the main have to ignore is its music. Most operas, even comic operas, hardly exist for the average reader outside their stage productions; their music supplies justification or compensation for the improbabilities of their plots, their eccentricities of language and meter. It is a measure of how remarkable Gay's accomplishment was that his play has such vivid life even on the printed page, its songs self-justified by the charm of their lyrics. But the music of The Beggar's Opera adds an extra dimension to the play on stage—and Gay used this resource, too, in his elaborate structure of cross-commentary.

The commentary comes from the relation of Gay's lyrics to the original words attached to the music. Almost all the songs in the play are traditional tunes (hence the name of the genre created by this work: ballad opera), and the lyrics originally connected with them would have been familiar to the early audiences. A recent edition of the play has printed texts of the early songs side by side with Gay's versions,9 and some comparisons are instructive. Many have been pointed out by Professor Bronson in the essay previously cited. In general, they intensify the same implications we have discovered already. When Mrs. Peachum sings of how maids are like gold ore, wives like gold guineas, she sings to a tune which earlier had words insisting that:

We're just like a Mouse in a Trap,
Or Vermin caught in a Gin;

We Sweat and Fret, and try to Escape
And Curse the sad Hour we came in.

Thus the imagery of money is in effect placed in conjunction with that of animals—the precise metaphor of the mouse in a trap is to be used later by Lucy. The song, "'Tis Woman that seduces all Mankind" goes with a tune whose words describe a masculine seducer who loves and leaves his victims: if listeners are conscious of the traditional version, they are by this very fact prevented from having a simple view of the situation. Macheath's sentimental song, "Pretty Polly, say," is based on a piece beginning "Pretty Parret say"—and this in itself is adequate comment on the captain's sentimentality. (Indeed, the view of Polly as parrot sheds light on her apparent complexity: her ideas are secondhand, derived from diverse sources; she recites whatever seems appropriate in a specific situation.) The lyric beginning. "No power on earth can e'er divide/The knot that sacred Love hath ty'd" must be considered in conjunction with its predecessor:

Remember Damon you did tell,
In Chastity you lov'd me well,
But now alas I am undone,
And here am left to make my Moan.

So much for professions of everlasting and sacred love!

These sketchy examples should be enough to emphasize once more the consistency with which Gay insisted upon keeping his readers and audiences simultaneously conscious of different—often radically different—perspectives on the action, the characters, the very language of his play. The Beggar's Opera is a work of enormous sophistication, unprecedented in Gay's literary career and never again to be equaled or even approached by him. When he attempted immediately to duplicate his success by reusing the same characters in Polly, the result was a literary—although by no means a financial—fiasco. And perhaps the best way to conclude a discussion of The Beggar's Opera is by a brief examination of its sequel, which demonstrates by its failure to employ them how valuable the devices of the earlier play are.

IV

The early history of Polly is more interesting than the play itself. The comedy was finished late in 1728. Although it was far more innocent politically than The Beggar's Opera, in December its performance was prohibited on vague political grounds by the lord chamberlain. (As Gay himself put it, "I am accused, in general terms, of having written many disaffected libels and seditious pamphlets."'0) W. E. Schultz suggests the probability that the prohibition depended not so much on the content of the play as on the fact "that the report of a new play bearing Gay's name was … unfit for the comfort of the Walpole circle."¹¹ At any rate, the play could be printed if not acted, with the prospect of the added sales that censorship always seems to bring. Within a year 10,500 copies had been sold of two large quarto editions.¹² Estimates of Gay's actual proceeds vary wildly: Schultz believes that the playwright may have made £3,000;¹³ James Sutherland suggests £1,000.¹⁴ At any rate, immediate pirated editions reduced his receipts: the first piracies appeared within three or four days after the original publication of Polly, early in April, 1729, and by June there were injunctions for piracy against seventeen printers and booksellers.¹⁵ Evidently a good many others felt, with Gay, that a sequel to The Beggar's Opera could hardly fail.

But, whatever its receipts, the play remains a failure. The Beggar's Opera presents us with a world in which everyone is corrupt: we may discern differences of degree, but no real distinctions of kind. Filch, the youth who makes his living by causing pregnancies, has his moments of charm; Polly, that delightful heroine, has hers of unpleasant calculation. In Polly, on the other hand, society splits into heroes and villains; there is no doubt at all where one's sympathies are to lie. Polly has become a model of virtue; we are expected to take with entire seriousness her protestations of undying love to Macheath, although at the end of the play, having discovered Macheath's full villainy, she appears ready to marry a noble savage who is also, conveniently, a prince.

Her speech at this juncture is characteristic of her language throughout: "I am charm'd, prince, with your generosity and virtue. 'Tis only by the pursuit of those we secure real happiness. Those that know and feel virtue in themselves, must love it in others. Allow me to give a decent time to my sorrows. But my misfortunes at present interrupt the joys of victory" (II, 78). It is almost inconceivable that Gay could offer us such speech with no ironic perspective, but here and throughout the play he does exactly that. The Indians are without exception noble, so their language must be noble, too; the pirates, invariably villainous, talk always like villains.

Macheath has now painted himself black (a convenient symbol), named himself Morano, and taken up with Jenny Diver, who managed to be transported with him. He is no longer the model of the highwayman-gentleman, having been morally destroyed by his unworthy love. When at the end he is finally hanged, we could hardly wish for a reprieve (indeed, one is actually granted, but too late): he has become so conventionally detestable that we find him both boring and distasteful and feel well rid of him. ("If justice hath overtaken him," says the Indian prince to Polly, with superb lack of logic, "he was unworthy of you" [II, 76].) The only interesting villain in the play is a minor one, Ducat, the plantation owner who originally buys Polly to be his concubine and who at the very last hopes still to make a profit from her. In Gay's depiction of him alone (and occasionally of Mrs. Trapes, a transplant from The Beggar's Opera), we find touches of the poet's old satiric insight.

It is significant that these minor figures should be the most successful characters in the play, for they are also the two who have the closest relation to eighteenth-century actuality. Ducat is struggling to follow the model of the English gentleman; Mrs. Trapes, his tutor, guides him in his progress in vice. Given this much relation to real society, these characters seem more meaningful than their companions; the Indians, the pirates, Macheath himself, certainly Polly, do not have much to do with reality, although the playwright frequently insists that Macheath and his band are allegorical representatives of the viciousness inherent in English society. In The Beggar's Opera, on the other hand, although the atmosphere is permeated with a delicious sense of unreality (we don't believe for a moment that highwaymen or "fences" ever talked like that; we don't believe in the action; the sudden shift at the ending is a surprise but not a shock, considering that none of the action has caused the suspension of disbelief), the total effect depends fundamentally on our constant, steady conviction that everything that happens on stage has its direct analogue on higher levels of society. Lacking the power to convey this conviction, Polly can only seem an essentially frivolous and meaningless exercise.

There's no use flogging a dead horse, and Polly is a very dead one indeed. Yet it provides a dramatic illustration of how precarious was the balance Gay established in The Beggar's Opera. Lacking that balance all other devices must fail. The imagery in Polly comes from the same realms as that of its predecessor; the songs are based on similar originals. But nothing works in Polly, and certainly no two devices work together. The difference between hackwork and comic drama informed by a vision can seldom have been so clearly demonstrated as in the relation between The Beggar's Opera and its sequel.

Notes

¹ "Archetype Musical," The Guardian, July 15, 1963, p. 7.

² J. W. Lambert, "Beggars Behind Bars," The Sunday Times, July 21, 1963, p. 32.

³ Review of The Beggar's Opera, The Spectator, July 26, 1963, p. 110.

⁴ Review of The Beggar's Opera, The Observer, July 21, 1963, p. 23.

⁵ William Hazlitt, On the English Stage, under date July 27, 1826; quoted by William Eben Schultz, Gay's Beggar's Opera, Its Content, History, and Influence (New Haven, Conn., 1923) p. 274.

⁶ William Empson, "The Beggar's Opera: Mock-Pastoral as the Cult of Independence," Some Versions of Pastoral (Norfolk, Conn., 1960), p. 218.

⁷ Sven M. Armens, op. cit., p. 141.

⁸Ibid., p. 141.

⁹ John Gay, The Beggar's Opera. A Faithful Reproduction of the 1729 Edition (Larchmont, N.Y., 1961).

¹⁰ Preface to Polly, quoted by Schultz, op. cit., p. 211.

¹¹ Schultz, op. cit., p. 213.

¹² James R. Sutherland, "'Polly' Among the Pirates," Modern Language Review, XXXVII (1942), 291.

¹³ Schultz, op. cit., p. 220.

¹⁴ Sutherland, "'Polly' Among the Pirates," p. 291.

¹⁵ See ibid., pp. 292-93.