SOURCE: "The Beggar's Opera as Opera and Anti-Opera," in John Gay: "The Beggar's Opera," Edward Arnold, 1976, pp. 8-23.

[In the following excerpt, Lewis connects Gay's opera to concurrent developments in the Italian opera then performed in London, demonstrating specific sources from several operas, including those of Handel. Lewis concludes that Gay's approach to The Beggar's Opera reflects concern with the popularity of foreign opera, but does not indicate a condemnation of the genre itself.]

Today The Beggar's Opera is usually regarded as one of the very few great English plays of the eighteenth century and as one of the major literary works of the Augustan period; yet the title asserts unequivocally that it is an opera. This apparent discrepancy poses the question—what kind of opera? To Gay's contemporaries, the title of his work would at first have seemed as incongruous (although for a slightly different reason) as those of the mock-heroic poems, The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, by his friend Pope. Writing for an elite educated in the classics, Pope knew that the words 'The Rape of would bring to mind 'The Rape of Leda' or 'The Rape of Helen' or 'The Rape of Lucretia', myths and stories about events that had wide-ranging reprecussions of epic proportions, such as the Trojan War. 'The Rape of produces expectations that are dashed by the rest of Pope's title referring to a lock of hair. Similarly The Dunciad recalls Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid, but Pope's title indicates that his poem is an inverted epic, not of heroes but of dunces. By the time Gay wrote The Beggar's Opera in 1727, 'opera' in England had become virtually synonymous with Italian opera, a theatrical form characterized by great dignity and seriousness and peopled with mythological figures or personages of high rank from the distant past. That an 'opera' could be a 'beggar's' consequently amounted to a contradiction in terms. Gay's very title more or less announces that he is turning Italian opera upside down, that his own opera is both a burlesque of the Italian form and a radically new kind of English opera, indeed the first comic opera, since before Gay most operas were devoid of levity and none sported such a flippant and unlikely title as The Beggar's Opera.

In order to appreciate the rationale behind Gay's opera, it is necessary to know something about the history of opera in England during the preceding three-quarters of a century. Towards the end of the Interregnum, it was possible to get round the Puritan ban on the staging of plays by presenting in private houses dramatic works which featured musical accompaniment throughout. These established a form, the English dramatic opera, that survived the reopening of the theatres in 1660 following the restoration of the monarchy. After 1660, however there was no need for the music to be sustained throughout in order to evade prosecution, and the all-sung pattern of the Interregnum operas, in which every word had to be set to music, was abandoned. In form, though not of course in content, the dramatic opera of the Restoration period resembles the modern musical more closely than modern opera, which derives from Italian opera. The music is intermittent rather than continuous and some of the dialogue is spoken rather than sung, but the musical sections, although embedded within the framework of a spoken play, are usually much more important than the non-musical sections. As far as content goes, on the other hand, English dramatic opera resembles Italian opera in that the world it presents is elevated and heroic rather than realistic. Early in the eighteenth century the popularity of dramatic opera waned, and even though a few English operas continued to hold the stage after 1710, the genre was rapidly supplanted by Italian opera.

Not long after the 1705 production of Arsinoe, the first Italianate opera to be staged in England, a vogue for Italian opera was developing. What did more than anything else to accelerate this development was Handel's visit to London in 1710 and his subsequent decision to stay there. Handel, a prolific composer of genius but also something of an opportunist, arrived at exactly the right time. He was immediately commissioned to write an Italian opera and obliged with Rinaldo (1711), the first of many popular successes he supplied to English audiences. From 1710 the new Queen's Theatre was the home of Italian opera in England and became known as the Opera House. Furthermore, leading Italian singers were paid enormous sums to perform in London and, as 'stars', were figures of widespread public interest. In the year in which The Beggar's Opera was written, for example, the personal feud between the two leading ladies of Italian opera in London, Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni, provided a considerable amount of off-stage entertainment, especially as on one occasion it erupted on stage into mutual punching, scratching and hair-pulling.

The snobbish vogue for Italian opera and the idolizing of its principal performers soon produced a hostile reaction from some English intellectuals, who laughed at the male castrati singers, at the temperamental behaviour of the prima donnas, at the convention of recitative, at the lavishness of operatic productions, and at the fact that operas were sung in a language which was incomprehensible to most of the audience. To some extent such mockery can be put down to patriotic bias, but neo-classical critics like Addison and Dennis genuinely believed that the vogue for Italian opera posed a threat to the orthodox dramatic forms of tragedy and comedy as well as to the vitality of English music. One of the charges levelled against Italian opera was that its appeal was very superficial, delighting the ear and the eye but failing to supply the intellectual stimulus and spiritual nourishment afforded by the English dramatic tradition since the Elizabethans.

Gay himself was musical and did not dislike Italian opera in the way that his more doctrinaire neo-classical contemporaries did. Indeed, he even provided Handel with an operatic libretto, Acis and Galatea, about ten years before he wrote The Beggar's Opera. But during the 1720s he became alarmed at the ever-increasing popularity of Italian opera and its effect on English drama and music. 'As for the reigning Amusement of the town, tis entirely Musick,' he complains in a letter to Swift (3 February 1723), adding that 'folks that could not distinguish one tune from another now daily dispute about the different Styles of Hendel, Bononcini, and Attillio'. Just as Jane Austen objected much less to the Gothic novel per se than to the excessive seriousness with which it was taken by impressionable members of the reading public, Gay condemns not Italian opera but the completely uncritical theatregoers who had turned it into a fashionable cult. Jane Austen nevertheless felt that a corrective was necessary, and in Northanger Abbey wrote a book that is both a burlesque of Gothic fiction and a realistic novel in its own right. In conceiving The Beggar's Opera Gay did something very similar. He set out to combine burlesque of Italian opera with the creation of a rival form, a comic and distinctly English form of opera that quickly became known as ballad opera. This dual purpose explains the considerable difference between The Beggar's Opera and the few previous burlesques of Italian opera, which are aimed at very specific targets and do not attempt to transcend burlesque. Gay deliberately avoids direct parody and close burlesque because this might well have prevented him from achieving a self-sufficient 'opera' capable of standing as an independent work of art.

Musically, there are two great differences between The Beggar's Opera and Italian opera. Firstly, much of Gay's work consists of orthodox dramatic dialogue without any musical accompaniment, whereas all the words in Italian opera are sung; in this respect The Beggar's Opera resembles the English dramatic opera of the Restoration more closely than Italian opera. Secondly, apart from the Overture, the music for The Beggar's Opera was taken from pre-existing sources, whereas an Italian opera was an entirely new musical creation. For the sixty-nine songs in the play, Gay himself selected the melodies, most of which were well known. Forty-one of the airs have broadside-balled tunes (this explains the term 'ballad opera') but others have tunes by such distinguished contemporary composers as Purcell and Handel; Air XX is actually sung to the music of a march in one of Handel's greatest operatic successes, Rinaldo. What Gay did—and this was his most daringly original stroke—was to put new wine into old bottles, substituting his own words for the familiar ones, though retaining and modifying phrases here and there. This gamble might have failed disastrously, but Gay did it so well that in no time at all dramatic hacks were churning out inferior imitations. In the years immediately following 1728, ballad operas and ballad farces darkened the air; and although Italian opera continued to be popular, it now had to compete with a new vogue. Whatever Gay may have thought of the progeny his masterpiece spawned, he had certainly succeeded in restoring English opera. Today 'opera' seems the wrong word, but in the case of The Beggar's Opera, the large number of songs together with their vital dramatic importance distinguish it from plays of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries containing incidental music and songs. There is nothing incidental about Gay's memorable songs, and to many people they are the glory of the work.

As has been noted, Gay's burlesque of Italian opera is for the most part indirect and non-parodic, but his burlesque purpose explains many features of The Beggar's Opera. In order to maintain a superficial resemblance to Italian opera, Gay adopts several of its formal characteristics, such as a three-act structure instead of the five-act structure invariable in full-length tragedies and comedies. Again, following the example of Italian opera and departing from the customary practice of orthodox drama, he dispenses with both prologue and epilogue, the conventional and completely detachable speeches preceding and following a tragedy or comedy that were often contributed by someone other than the author. Operas did not open with a prologue but with an instrumental overture, and Gay specifies that an overture should be played for The Beggar's Opera. For the first production, J. C. Pepusch, a German composer of theatre music, provided a suitable overture featuring the melody Gay chose for Air XLVII. Although Gay's use of speech instead of recitative is a significant departure from operatic practice, his actual lay-out of the airs corresponds to that of arias in an Italian opera. The sudden switching from speech to song and back again without any attempt to justify the interpolation of an air on realistic grounds, as is often done in orthodox drama, recalls the alternation of recitatives and arias in opera. There is a further correspondence to Italian opera in that not all of Gay's airs are solos, some being duets, one being a trio, and a few involving a chorus.

Gay goes to some pains to draw attention to these and other operatic parallels in his Introduction, which precedes the Overture and which is an essential part of his design in a way that the conventional prologue was not. In this short scene, the supposed author of the opera, the Beggar, explains his work to one of the actors, the Player, and claims that although written to celebrate the marriage of two English ballad singers it is to all intents and purposes an orthodox opera. Instead of announcing explicitly in his own voice that he is about to burlesque Italian opera, Gay chooses the much subtler satiric method, perfected by Swift, of adopting a 'mask' or 'persona', that of the Beggar, and speaking indirectly through him. The Beggar's seriousness is really Gay's sleight of hand; his words are undermined from within so that we do not take them at their face value. Gay's irony can be fully appreciated only in the light of what is to follow, but his gibe at Italian opera is unmistakable when the Beggar says, 'I hope I may be forgiven, that I have not made my Opera throughout unnatural, like those in vogue; for I have no Recitative.' The Beggar appears to be apologizing for not making his opera 'throughout unnatural', but by implication these words carry their own qualification and disapproval. Gay is clearly invoking the Augustan aesthetic yardstick of nature as a measure for exposing the limitations of Italian opera. The further implication that 'Recitative' in particular is unnatural is a complaint often levelled against Italian opera at the time. According to Addison, English audiences were at first 'wonderfully surprized to hear Generals singing the Word of Command, and Ladies delivering Messages in Musick' (The Spectator, no. 29).

The rest of the Beggar's speech can also be interpreted at two levels. He is pleased with himself for using 'the Similes that are in all your celebrated Operas', and the ones he lists do appear in The Beggar's Opera: 'The Swallow' in Air XXXIV, 'the Moth' in Air IV, 'the Bee' and 'the Flower' in both Air VI and Air XV, and 'the Ship' in both Air X and Air XLVII. What Gay implies, however, is that such similes have been rendered inexpressive in Italian opera by having been worked to death; after all, they are 'in all your celebrated Operas', which is more or less true since simile arias were exceedingly popular. Gay himself tries to revitalize them, to rinse them clean, by employing them in an unconventional context. The Beggar also seems to be proud of his 'Prison Scene which the Ladies always reckon charmingly pathetick'. As his words suggest, a prison scene was almost a sine qua non in an Italian opera and usually occurred at a high point of the dramatic action so that as much emotional appeal as possible could be wrung from it. The irony here lies in the fact that not just one poignant scene but almost half of The Beggar's Opera takes place in a prison, and in addition that the prison is not some historically or geographically remote one with romantic associations, but Newgate prison in the heart of London, exactly as it was at the time with all its petty corruptions and abuses. As regards 'the Parts', the Beggar's self-congratulation at achieving 'a nice Impartiality to our two Ladies, that it is impossible for either of them to take Offence' carries a more immediately topical irony, referring as it does to the current quarrel between Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni over operatic roles. In some Italian operas there are two heroines who are rivals for the hero's affections, and to avoid causing friction, composers like Handel had to ensure that there was no obvious imbalance between the two parts. Nevertheless, even if they could not actually 'take Offence', Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni tended to treat an opera in which they appeared together as a singing contest, vying with each other vocally instead of working as part of a team. This satirical reference to the prima donnas also serves to draw attention to the operatic parallel: The Beggar's Opera itself has two heroines, Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit, who are rivals for the affections of the hero, Macheath. Indeed, the rivalry between Polly and Lucy alludes to that of the prima donnas and to that of the operatic roles they performed.

The Beggar claims that except for using speech instead of recitative his work 'must be allow'd an Opera in all its forms'; but by means of irony and by explicit references to beggars, to ballad singers, who were not particularly reputable, and to the notorious London parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields, the resort of thieves, highwaymen and prostitutes, Gay indicates throughout the Introduction that the content of The Beggar's Opera is totally unlike that of Italian opera. While in many respects Gay does adhere to the 'forms' of Italian opera, the world he presents is the very unoperatic one of St Giles-in-the-Fields. He completely inverts Italian opera, with its classical, mythological or similarly elevated narratives and its exotic atmosphere, by setting The Beggar's Opera very firmly in the criminal underworld of contemporary London. Theatregoers in 1728 would have recognized immediately that two of the major characters, Peachum and Macheath, were based on the best-known underworld figures of the early eighteenth century, Jonathan Wild and Jack Sheppard, both of whom had been executed less than four years before the first production of the work. One of the locations is the city's principal criminal prison, and death by hanging or transportation to the colonies is the fate that seems to await most of the characters. For them, the year is divided not into seasons but into the various sessions of the city's criminal court, the Old Bailey. Instead of a typical operatic hero such as Handel's Rinaldo, Gay provides the leader of a gang of highwaymen, Macheath, who is called 'Captain' but has no legitimate claim to the rank. And instead of two typical operatic heroines like the high-born Rossane and Lisaura in Alessandro, the opera which Handel wrote for Faustina Bordoni's London debut in 1726, Gay supplies Polly Peachum, the daughter of an organizer of crime and a receiver of stolen goods, and Lucy Lockit, the daughter of the very corrupt chief jailor of Newgate. The sustained tussle between Polly and Lucy over Macheath is a low-life equivalent of that between Rossane and Lisaura over Alessandro (Alexander the Great) and of almost identical love-battles in other Italian operas, as well as being a satirical allusion to the real-life tension between the two sopranos who played these operatic rivals. Of the other characters in The Beggar's Opera almost all the men are criminals of one sort or another and almost all the women are whores. Just as Jane Austen's characters in Northanger Abbey are anti-types of the stereotyped figures of the Gothic novel as well as self-sufficient novelistic characters, Gay's characters are anti-types of operatic stereotypes as well as self-sufficient dramatic characters. The Beggar's Opera is undoubtedly true to its title in that it controverts every normal operatic expectation. The nobility of character, dignity of conduct, and refinement of both sentiment and language characteristic of Italian opera are largely replaced by the attitudes, behaviour and idiom of the underworld.

However, Gay cleverly exploits, for burlesque as well as for other purposes, the discrepancy between operatic expectations and what he provides, especially in his treatment of his 'operatic hero' Macheath; thus he ensures that the burlesque level is not lost sight of behind the layers of social and political satire. In some ways Macheath acts and sounds like an operatic hero. The first words he speaks, 'Suspect my Honour, my Courage, suspect any thing but my Love' (I.xiii), have a distinctly heroic note, and Polly's reply, with its unquestioning assumption that her highwayman-husband is on a par with Hercules or Alexander the Great, makes the burlesque parallel explicit: 'I have no Reason to doubt you, for I find in the Romance you lent me, none of the great Heroes were ever false in Love.' Polly's father, even at the moment of arresting Macheath in II.v, makes an identical connection between his son-in-law and the sort of men normally presented as operatic heroes: 'Your Case, Mr Macheath, is not particular. The greatest Heroes have been ruin'd by Women.' Lucy too acknowledges the 'heroic' status of Macheath, as in her first remark on visiting him in the condemned cell: 'There is nothing moves one so much as a great Man in Distress' (III.xv). In his dealings with his gang, Macheath clearly sees himself as the equivalent of a military leader like Alexander and actually behaves with the magnanimity expected of an operatic hero. He claims to be brave, loyal, fair-minded, and generous: 'Is there any man who suspects my Courage? … My Honour and Truth to the Gang? … In the Division of our Booty, have I ever shown the least Marks of Avarice or Injustice?' (II.ii). And in III.iv, when two members of his gang are short of money after failing to steal anything, he keeps his word by digging into his own pockets: 'I am sorry, Gentlemen, the Road was so barren of Money. When my Friends are in Difficulties, I am always glad that my Fortune can be serviceable to them.' Here as elsewhere he addresses members of the gang as 'Gentlemen', insisting that they are all honourable: 'I have a fixt Confidence, Gentlemen, in you all, as Men of Honour, and as such I value and respect you' (II.ii) and 'But we, Gentlemen, have still Honour enough to break through the Corruptions of the World' (III.iv). In all such passages, the mock-heroic incongruity between the criminals who act, speak, and are spoken about, on the one hand, and the conduct and the sentiments expressed, on the other, registers as ironic burlesque.

Gay's use of familiar melodies, especially simple ballad tunes, as opposed to the elaborate arias of Italian opera is the musical equivalent of his making an operatic hero out of Macheath rather than someone like Alexander. The fact that the criminal characters of The Beggar's Opera burst into song in the manner of operatic figures in itself creates burlesque humour; and while it is unlikely that Gay intended to parody any specific arias, he does occasionally enhance the burlesque by making the hackneyed similes mentioned in the Introduction by the Beggar express attitudes, especially towards love, which are not found in the relatively chaste world of Italian opera. The simile of 'the Moth', for example, appears in Air IV, 'If Love the Virgin's Heart invade', in which Mrs Peachum reflects that if her daughter, like any other girl, 'plays about the Flame' and loses her virginity, she may end up as a whore—'Her Honour's sing'd, and then for Life, / She's—what I dare not name.' Gay also links operatic simile, in this case 'the Flower', with the fate of deflowered virgins in Polly's song about her politic motives for retaining her virginity, Air VI, 'Virgins are like the fair Flower in its Lustre'; this is intended to reassure her father that she knows how to 'grant some Things, and refuse what is most material', although she has in fact secretly married Macheath. In each of these songs the operatic simile is burlesqued by being made to convey non-operatic subject matter, but it is simultaneously rinsed clean in order to express a truth about the realities of contemporary life. The girl who succumbed to her sexual desires premaritally was, like the moth in the flame, quite likely to destroy herself. If she was known to have lost her virginity, she might well be cast out of the society that had nurtured her, and left to her own resources which usually meant prostitution. In Polly's song, Gay clarifies the severity of a social code that demanded such a penalty for a momentary human failing, and also conveys the fragility of virginity and the sense of sadness at its loss, by means of the very image which he is burlesquing. It is Gay's inspired juxtaposition of a natural garden and Covent Garden, which was a red-light district as well as London's vegetable, fruit, and flower market, that makes this possible. The cut flower ('once pluck'd, 'tis no longer alluring') being sent by the gardener to the market at Covent Garden signifies the deflowered virgin being virtually forced by society to the other Covent Garden, the flesh-market of the brothels ('There fades, and shrinks, and grows past all enduring, / Rots, stinks, and dies, and is trod under feet').

In other airs the discrepancy between what the simile normally conveys in opera and what it conveys in The Beggar's Opera is much less marked or even nonexistent; but because of the incongruity between the conceited linguistic idiom of opera and the unoperatic singer as well as the popular tune, the burlesque effect is still recognizable. Lucy's outburst of distress in Air XLVII, 'I'm like a Skiff on the Ocean tost', when she believes that Polly is 'sporting on Seas of Delight' with Macheath and decides on a plan of revenge as the only way to appease her jealousy, employs 'the Ship' simile mentioned by the Beggar in the Introduction; this therefore takes the form of an operatic cliche, for such outbursts of distress and jealousy were fairly common in Italian opera. Other airs, especially Polly's most tender expressions of devoted love for Macheath, also have operatic antecedents. Air XXXIV, 'Thus when the Swallow, seeking Prey', is the most obvious case since the Beggar points it out in speaking of the simile of 'The Swallow'; but Air XIII, 'The Turtle thus with plaintive crying', which is sung when Polly discovers that her parents are determined to arrange Macheath's execution and which features the conventional comparison of lovers to turtle-doves, is very similar. Shortly afterwards, Macheath and Polly are alone together for the first time in the play, and this scene (I.xiii), in which they declare their love for each other before having to part, contains no less than five airs, including three duets. The marked preponderance of song in itself indicates a parallel to operatic love scenes, and in his fine essay on the play, Bertrand H. Bronson tentatively suggests that Gay may have had in mind a scene between parting lovers in Handel's Floridante (1721); one of the duets (Air XVI) in particular bears some resemblance to the impassioned avowals of everlasting love by Elmira and Floridante.…

Bronson argues that several other situations in The Beggar's Opera may have specific operatic sources. The way in which Macheath is arrested in a tavern (II.V) could be based on the attempt on Ptolemy's life in a seraglio in Handel's Giulio Cesare (1724), and the quarrel between Peachum and Lockit (II.X) possibly owes something to another scene between arguing fathers in Handel's Flavio (1723). In the latter case, however, the main source is the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and the similarity to the operatic scene may be no more than a coincidence. Whether Gay intended these very specific situational correspondences remains hypothetical. However, especially in the closing stages of The Beggar's Opera there are several unmistakable though general parallels with Italian opera, and these culminate in the coup de thedtre when the two characters from the Introduction, the Beggar and the Player, enter to produce a happy ending out of apparent catastrophe.

First of all there is Lucy's attempt to eliminate her rival, Polly, by poisoning her (III.vii-x). Having helped Macheath to escape from Newgate, Lucy is tormented by 'Jealousy, Rage, Love and Fear' because she believes, wrongly, that he is with Polly. Lucy has 'the Rats-bane ready', and when Polly comes to visit her at Newgate, Lucy suggests that they have a drink to cheer themselves up. But at the moment when Lucy forces a glass containing the poison on Polly, the recaptured Macheath is brought back to the prison and Polly is so shaken at the sight of him in chains that she drops the glass and spills its contents. Gay undoubtedly bases this episode on a popular feature of a number of contemporary Italian operas, the scene set in a prison in which one of the principal characters narrowly escapes death in the form of a cup of poison. These incidents take various forms, but in several of Handel's operas produced not long before The Beggar's Opera, the hero seems doomed to die by drinking a cup of poison yet is saved as a result of a last-second intervention during which the cup is upset. In Radamisto (1720), for example, the heroine Zenobia is forced by Tiridate to take a bowl of poison to her condemned lover, Radamisto himself, who is shackled and awaiting execution; but when she reaches him, she offers to drink it herself and is prevented only by the sudden entrance of Tiridate who knocks the bowl out of her hands. An almost identical scene occurs in Floridante. In Radamisto and Floridante, the gesture is one of heroic self-sacrifice, and the treatment is intensely emotional. In The Beggar's Opera, the action is a cunning and unheroic attempt to commit murder under the pretence of friendship, and the treatment verges on the comic. This whole episode has a further burlesque significance in that it resembles the encounters between rival operatic heroines, such as Rossane and Lisaura in Alessandro, where they attempt to discuss their relationships with the hero.

The burlesque parallel continues in the scenes following Macheath's return to Newgate. The kind of prison scene in Italian opera that 'the Ladies always reckon charmingly pathetick', to use the Beggar's phrase, is the one outlined above in which a woman visits her lover or husband who is awaiting death; the greater his suffering and her grief, the more 'charmingly pathetick' the scene would be. Earlier in The Beggar's Opera (II.xiii), Gay provides a counterpart to such scenes by exposing the imprisoned Macheath simultaneously to Polly and Lucy, each of whom regards herself as his wife. The result, a comic confrontation between a rake and two of his women, one of whom, Lucy, is pregnant by him, is the antithesis of the decorous intensity of operatic prison scenes; it also travesties the situation of a hero like Alessandro, who is faced with an almost impossible choice between Rossane and Lisaura. Macheath, under verbal bombardment from both Polly and Lucy, responds in the rollicking and impudent Air XXXV, 'How happy could I be with either', by deciding to ignore both of them. The operatic parallel is considerably reinforced by Gay's subsequent use of two duets in this scene. In Air XXXVI, 'I'm bubbled' ('bubbled' means 'deceived'), the vocal line passes back and forth between Polly and Lucy just as it does between the singers of operatic duets, especially rival heroines; but the situation from which the song arises, their discovery of Macheath's duplicity in making identical promises to both of them, is unlike anything to be found in Italian opera. Air XXXVIII, 'Why how now, Madam Flirt?', in which Polly and Lucy attack each other verbally, differs in that the vocal line does not alternate throughout; instead Lucy sings the first stanza and Polly the second. Of particular interest here is the fact that the monosyllabic words at the end of the third line of each stanza, 'Dirt' and 'made', must be sung in melismatic or coloratura style, each word running for seventeen notes and occupying almost three bars. Such ornate, bravura singing is standard in operatic arias but very rare in folk songs and ballads, and is the only sustained example in The Beggar's Opera, where Gay usually fits one syllable to one note of music. That Gay should draw such attention to the operatic parallel in this song is doubly significant since nowhere else is the rivalry between Polly and Lucy so bitterly and vulgarly expressed. The contrast between matter and operatic manner is therefore exceptionally pronounced, and this in turn highlights the undignified personal behaviour of Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni in comparison with the dignified roles they took in operas. Off stage the prima donnas behaved as Polly and Lucy do on stage.

In the closing scenes Gay again brings Polly, Lucy, and Macheath together in Newgate after Lucy's attempt to poison Polly (III.xi). This encounter between the highwayman and his two 'wives' is less obviously a travesty of 'charmingly pathetick' prison scenes, but the continuing competition between the women for Macheath's attention, especially when it takes the form of a duet in Air LII, 'Hither, dear Husband, turn your Eyes', sustains the operatic burlesque. The way in which one voice takes over from the other like an echo in the second half of the song ("Tis Polly sues. / 'Tis Lucy speaks') imitates a feature of many operatic duets. As before, Macheath's predicament as expressed in Air LIII, 'Which way shall I turn me?—How can I decide?', is the essentially comic one of a philanderer, who is expert at handling one woman at a time, becoming helpless and retreating into silence when face to face with two of his conquests; again it alludes to the dilemma confronting Alessandro and some other heroes. If John 0. Rees is correct in interpreting this scene as a mock-heroic version of the classical myth called The Judgment (or Choice) of Hercules, the burlesque resemblance to opera is greatly enhanced since Hercules was a very suitable candidate for operatic treatment (see bibliography). In the myth, Hercules is confronted by two goddesses, Virtue and Pleasure (or Vice), and has to decide between them. This subject was popular with creative artists from the Renaissance onwards because it allowed them to present a metaphysical and moral conflict as a dramatic and concretely-realized situation; in the eighteenth century it was treated by several poets and composers in England, including Handel. The symmetrical arrangement of Gay's characters, with Polly and her father on one side of Macheath, and Lucy and her father on the other, is very similar to the usual formal organization of painted versions of the myth and could well be modelled on them; but it would be wrong to push the parallel too far by identifying Polly with Virtue and Lucy with Pleasure.

As an interlude before the scene changes to the condemned cell, Gay specifies 'A Dance of Prisoners in Chains' at the end of III.xii. This plainly grotesque dance is a low-life counterpart to the dignified ballet dancing that had been incorporated in many operas since the seventeenth century, and the completely arbitrary way in which it is introduced is itself a comment on the frequent insertion of dances into operas with little or no dramatic justification. The burlesque intention is much more obvious here than in the 'Dance a la ronde in the French Manner' in II.iv, but although this may sound more formal and operatic, it is not performed by deities in a temple or by aristocrats in a court but by Macheath and eight whores in a tavern near Newgate. It too is introduced in a gratuitous way when Macheath hears harp music: 'But hark! I hear musick … E'er you seat your selves, Ladies, what think you of a Dance?'

When the scene does change to the condemned cell (III.xiii), Macheath sings a soliloquy to music taken from no less than ten different songs so that the ten airs, LVIII-LXVII, coalesce into an extended piece of singing. Nowhere else in the play does Gay use fragments of tunes and nowhere else does one air follow another without any speech intervening. Of the ten airs, one consists of one line, six consist of two lines, two consist of four lines, and only the final one of eight lines is of average length. Despite the Beggar's initial claim that his opera contains 'no Recitative', Macheath's segmented utterance and abrupt changes of tune, interrupted only when he pours himself stiff drinks, is not unlike operatic recitative, especially as it concludes with a full-length air in the same way as recitative prepares the way for an aria. In opera such rapid changes of thought and emotion as Macheath's can be encompassed only in recitative, never in arias. From Gay's scrupulous avoidance before this of anything resembling recitative, one would expect the bulk of Macheath's monologue to be spoken; so the startling use of song is extremely effective in bringing home the operatic parallel. At the level of burlesque, Macheath's 'recitative and aria' is a mockery of those sung by operatic heroes in prison. Instead of exhibiting courage and fortitude while awaiting execution, like Floridante in Handel's opera who even welcomes death as a deliverance, the much more human Macheath drinks heavily in a not very successful attempt to go to the gallows bravely and concentrates his thoughts on alcohol and women.

The one sung trio, Air LXVIII, 'Would I might be hang'd!', occurs at what might be called the most 'charmingly pathetick' moment when Polly and Lucy visit Macheath in the condemned cell just before he is about to be taken to Tyburn to be hanged (III.xv). Since these three characters are on stage together in a number of scenes, there are several opportunities for trios; Polly and Lucy actually sing duets in front of Macheath, but only here do all three share an air. Gay is again following operatic precedent, because it is common in opera for the principal characters (if there are three) to join in a trio at the climax of the work. The cowardly but credible behaviour of Macheath, who has run out of alcohol ('I tremble! I droop!—See, my Courage is out'), is the antithesis of, for example, Floridante's operatic heroics in the face of death, and the yearning of both Polly and Lucy to share Macheath's fate on the gallows ('Would I might be hang'd! / And I would so too!') is a comic transformation of the attempts by self-sacrificing operatic heroines to kill themselves in order to save their lovers' lives. Gay's choice of tune for this 'Hanging Trio' could hardly have been better since 'All you that must take a Leap' was a ballad about the execution of two criminals. The burlesque effect is greatly intensified at this point by the sudden arrival of four more of Macheath's 'wives', each accompanied by a child, so that he is confronted by no less than six of his 'wives' and four of his children. Gay deliberately plunges what in opera would be intended to be a profoundly moving climax to the level of farce. Ironically, only in this ludicrous situation does Macheath acquire the moral strength of an operatic hero and welcome death as a deliverance: 'What—four Wives more!—This is too much.—Here—tell the Sheriffs Officers I am ready.' The travesty of opera could hardly be taken further, yet Gay does just that in the next scene.

As Macheath is led away, the action is interrupted and the dramatic illusion shattered by the entry of the Player and the Beggar (III.xvi). This is a low-life equivalent of the device known as the deus ex machina, common in heroic drama, tragicomedy and opera after the Restoration, and involving a surprise intervention or unexpected discovery that produces a virtually magical transformation at a stroke. No matter how closely Italian operas approached tragedy, happy endings were de rigeur, and the contrived denouements necessitated by this convention were particularly vulnerable to hostile criticism. At the end of Arsinoe, for example, Dorisbe stabs herself melodramatically after being rejected in love, but in no time at all she participates in the finale, explaining that her wound is not serious. In opera after opera the villain redeems himself at the end of the third act, and however diabolically he has behaved throughout, he suddenly becomes penitent and is reconciled with the other characters. In The Beggar's Opera the Player prevents the law taking its natural course by expostulating to the Beggar about Macheath's imminent execution. To the Player's surprise, the Beggar admits that he is 'for doing strict poetical Justice' with Macheath executed and all the other characters hanged or transported. But he gives way in the face of the Player's irrefutable argument:

Player Why then, Friend, this is a down-right deep Tragedy. The Catastrophe is manifestly wrong, for an Opera must end happily.
Beggar Your Objection, Sir, is very just; and is easily remov'd. For you must allow, that in this kind of Drama, 'tis no matter how absurdly things are brought about.—So—you Rabble there—run and cry a Reprieve—let the Prisoner be brought back to his Wives in Triumph.
Player All this we must do, to comply with the Taste of the Town.

The play can then end with a song and a dance to celebrate Macheath's release. What is so ingenious about this episode is that it allows Gay to criticize explicitly Italian opera and its fans, to burlesque by means of Macheath's reprieve the miraculous reversals of fortune and character with which operas frequently end, and at the same time to secure a fitting conclusion to what is, after all, a comedy. The Beggar's Opera demands a non-tragic ending, and in rescuing Macheath, Gay makes a virtue of necessity—indeed, several virtues. There is even a political innuendo in Macheath's unexpected escape from death; during the difficult situation following George I's death in 1727, Sir Robert Walpole surprisingly avoided political extinction by promising the new king, George II, more money for the royal family. The burlesque is given an added pungency by the completely arbitrary nature of Macheath's reprieve, which is in no way earned and is not accompanied by any moral transformation. His promise of fidelity to Polly, 'I take Polly for mine … And for Life, you Slut,—for we were really marry'd' (III.xvii), cannot be taken too seriously considering the value of his earlier promises, not to mention his condescending though admittedly affectionate use of 'Slut'.

Today, Gay's burlesque of Italian opera seems much less significant than his social satire, which is more immediately accessible to us, and criticism of the play understandably concentrates on such literary qualities as irony and imagery. Nevertheless, Gay aimed to create an original type of opera by turning the conventions of Italian opera upside down so that he was simultaneously poking fun at them, and this attempt lies behind the overall structure of The Beggar's Opera and the detailed organization of many of its parts. The continuing popularity of the work means that it is possible to enjoy it without being aware that it burlesques Italian opera, just as it is possible to enjoy Northanger Abbey without knowing anything about the Gothic novel; but the subtlety and skill of Gay's design cannot be fully appreciated without grasping the extent to which he uses, mutatis mutandis, stock operatic features and situations. The Beggar's Opera is much more than a mock-opera, but at one level that is what it is. In addition, it is ultimately impossible to separate the social satire from the operatic burlesque since they are two sides of the same coin.… To the literary critic, Gay's use of language is so absorbing that it is easy to forget that he wrote the play for the theatre and for part-musical performance. But the main reason that The Beggar's Opera appealed so much to theatregoers in 1728 and has held the stage ever since is not that it is a literary masterpiece, but that it is a lively and unconventional musical comedy, a kind of opera.