SOURCE: "Handel, Walpole, and Gay: The Aims of The Beggar's Opera," in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 75, No. 4, Summer, 1974, pp. 415-33.

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 crowded every night; to night is the fifteenth time of Acting, and 'tis thought it will run a fortnight longer.

John Gay, 1728¹

Gay's Letter to Swift, written some two weeks after The Beggar's Opera opened on 29 January 1728,² might have seemed to some an extraordinary boast. The expectation that his play would equal its already unprecedented run was, however, well founded. At a time when a dozen consecutive performances of a play were all but unheard of, The Beggar's Opera was produced without interruption no fewer than sixty-two times.³ After more than a week's run (the usual interval signaling a play's success) the Daily Journal reported that at Lincoln's Inn Fields "no one third Part of the Company that crowd thither to see [the play], can get Admittance."⁴ Even after the close of the 1727-28 season The Beggar's Opera was acted an additional fifteen times at the Haymarket Theatre by a semiprofessional company.⁵ Indeed, it was not until the 1732-33 season that audiences were drawn to The Beggar's Opera with promises that one of the afterpiece's actresses would dress in boy's clothing or that "Signora Violante will perform her surprising Entertainments on the Rope [6 September 1732]."⁶

The remarkable success of The Beggar's Opera is perhaps matched only by critical misprisions of the play. To be sure, a great deal of scholarship has gone into studies of The Beggar's Opera, but from our vantage point some two and a half centuries later we seem no closer to coming to grips with it than Herring, Burney, or Hawkins. The precise circumstances occasioning The Beggar's Opera, or the purpose of the play itself, may never be understood fully, but before any substantial answers to either of those questions can be formulated, it is necessary to clear the air—to put into proper perspective if not altogether dismiss, a number of critical assumptions which heretofore have impeded a productive study of the play. To borrow from James Sutherland: The Beggar's Opera "has suffered, in fact, from the most damaging kind of criticism that gives with one hand and takes away with the other."⁷ The purpose of this paper, then, is not to assert a set of conditions that led Gay to produce The Beggar's Opera, or even to suggest what he is up to in the play itself; instead, my intention is to scrutinize, and, where possible, to set aside the critical commonplaces that surround the play, to dispense with the notion that Gay's ostensible purpose in writing The Beggar's Opera was the dissolution of Handelian opera, and to open a path for subsequent studies of the play less overgrown than the one this study has had to follow.

I

… A set of Quaker pastorals might succeed, if our friend Gay could fancy it, and I think it a fruitfui subject; pray hear what he says. I believe farther, the pastoral ridicule is not exhausted, and that a porter, footman, or chairman's pastoral might do well. Or what think you of a Newgate pastoral among the whores and thieves there?

Jonathan Swift, 1716⁸

Swift seems to have been enthusiastic about his proposal for a Newgate pastoral, and many discussions of The Beggar's Opera point to his suggestion as being the motivation behind the play.⁹ Few, however, take into account that Swift's letter was sent to Pope, not Gay, or that more than eleven years passed before Gay wrote The Beggar's Opera.'¹⁰ In fact, according to Pope, Gay gave up the idea of a Newgate pastoral in favor of a comedy. Spence quotes Pope as saying: "This [decision of Gay's] was what gave rise to The Beggar's Opera. He began on it, and when first he mentioned it to Swift, the Doctor did not much like the project."¹¹ The issue here is not that Swift favored the pastoral form over comedy. More to the point is that Swift was urging a variety of humor that has as its basis an unlikely turn of one kind or another. What could be more bizarre than a pastoral in which a Quaker bacchanal is celebrated, if not a picture of thieves and whores frolicking like shepherds and nymphs? It is exactly that sort of humor that prompted Swift's "Ode on a Lady's Dressing Room" in which the lovely coquette is portrayed void of any cosmetic charms and perched upon a chamber pot.

Such incongruities delighted the members of the Scriblerus Club, and one may find in the Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus the essential burden of The Beggar's Opera. In his endeavors "to find out the Seat of the Soul," Martinus discovered that

Calves and Philosophers, Tygers and Statesmen, Foxes and Sharpers, Peacocks and Fops, Cock-Sparrows and Coquets, Monkeys and Players, Courtiers and Spaniels, Moles and Misers, exactly resemble one another in the conformation of the Pineal Gland. He did not doubt likewise to find the same resemblances in Highwaymen and Conquerors.

(XII. 29-35)¹²

There is little difference in Martinus' record of his discoveries and the epigrammatic remarks of Gay's Beggar, who says: "Through the whole piece you may observe such a similitude of manners in high and low life, that it is difficult to determine whether (in the fashionable vices) the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen" (III.xvi)¹³ The comic ethos amounts to a portrayal of the incongruous, the antecedents of which have some peripheral relationship to Swift's suggestion of a Newgate pastoral, but less tenuous is the play's connection with the Scriblerian activity of 1726-27.¹⁴

All of that is not to imply The Beggar's Opera was not prompted by other considerations, but it should, if nothing else, evoke a more cautious approach to critics such as Hawkins, who reduces the occasioning of the play to a purely personal level. Of Gay, Sir John writes: "The motive for writing the piece, and for the many acrimonious expressions and bitter invectives against statesmen, lawyers, priests, and others, contained in it, was the disappointment of Mr. Gay in his application for preferment at court."¹⁵ But Gay was capable of the same sorts of analogies Hawkins refers to long before he lost his place at court. In late summer of 1723 Gay wrote the following to Mrs. Howard:

I cannot indeed wonder that the Talents requisite for a great Statesman are so scarce in the world since so many of those who possess them are every month cut off in the prime of their age at the Old Baily. How envious are Statesmen! and how jealous are they of rivals! A Highway-man never picks up an honest man for a companion, but if such a one accidentally falls his way; if he cannot turn his heart He like a wise Statesman discards him. Another observation I have made upon Courtiers, is, that if you have any friendship with any particular one you must be entirely governed by his friendships and resentments not your own.¹⁶

More than four years passed before Gay's hopes for an important position at court were dashed by his appointment as Gentleman-usher to the two-year-old Princess Louisa. After declining the post he wrote to Swift, "As I am us'd to disappointments I can bear them, but as I can have no more hopes, I can no more be disappointed, so that I am in a blessed condition."¹⁷ Though Gay's tone is not one of delight, it suggests a kind of resignation, and nothing more. Nor does Swift's reply to his friend. He writes, "I entirely approve your refusal of that employment, and your writing to the Queen. I am perfectly confident that you have a firm enemy in the Ministry [viz. Walpole]. God forgive him, but not till he puts himself in a state to be forgiven."¹⁸

Gay, remember, had finished The Beggar's Opera sometime in October of 1727, which, we see, was a crucial period in his political life. It seems unlikely indeed that a man who had hopes of obtaining a significant position at court would jeopardize his chances by insulting the one man who could help him. His friendship with the Scriblerians would have made his political life difficult enough without his taking up the torch against the Ministry. One might argue that to ease his spleen Gay revised The Beggar's Opera after losing the appointment, but time has to be taken into account. The Beggar's Opera is not simply another eighteenth-century comedy—though without its music the play might pass for one easily enough—but instead a fairly complex dramatic piece that required some degree of musical collaboration, and more important, rehearsal. At the very latest it would have had to have been to Rich by the new year, and before that some time was lost when Gay took the play to Cibber.¹⁹ In short, Gay had perhaps less than two months to alter the play, and, as will be discussed more fully in another section of this paper, if any alteration did take place it was to weaken, not intensify, the sting of The Beggar's Opera.

To summarize, then, the play seems to have been occasioned by Gay's desire to produce a comedy of incongruities, built around his long-held notion of the impingement of the rapacious and base on polite society. That Gay would draw the parallels he does between high and low life is no surprise; nor is his opting for a dramatic vehicle. What does remain puzzling, however, is the dramatic form he chose.

Many commentators²⁰ take Gay's use of the ballad opera as an explicit jab at Italian opera in general, and Handelian opera in particular. That question is discussed fully in the following section, but there can be no doubt whatever that Gay's selection of a musical mode was influenced by the immense popularity of Italian opera. There was, however, a long tradition of the use of dramatic song on the English stage from which Gay must have drawn; indeed, his use of music in The Beggar's Opera more closely matches Shakespeare's in The Tempest than either of The Tempest's revisions set by Purcell and Arne. Nor was Gay the first to bring a ballad opera to the eighteenth-century theatre. There are at least three plays produced earlier in the century that may be classified as ballad operas.²¹ Of those, Gay's play has greatest kinship with Thomas D'Urfey's Wonders in the Sun (1706.) Burney records that D'Urfey's play ran for five nights before closing,²² which was a satisfactory performance record, if a disappointment to D'Urfey. Gay could expect a comparable run for his own play for novelty's sake alone. His friends were not so confident. According to Spence, Pope, speaking for himself and Swift, remarked: "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 confoundly.'"²³

The motivation behind Gay's writing a ballad opera may never be plumbed, nor can the reasons for its staggering success compared with the barely adequate run of D'Urfey's ballad opera be understood completely. Of one thing we can be certain: Both the comic ethos and the dramatic form of The Beggar's Opera number Gay among the great wits of the eighteenth century. As Dr. Johnson so aptly observed: "Whether this new drama was the product of judgment or luck, the praise of it must be given to the inventor."²⁴

II

In the year 1727, Violent Parties were formed, between the 2 famous Singers, Faustina and Cuzzoni; and in the Election for Directors Faustina's Party carried it. These Animosities were very prejudicial to the Interest of the Academy, and the Houses began to grow thinner upon it. The Beggar's Opera appearing soon after, gave such a Turn to the Town, that Operas were generally neglected.

The Earl of Shaftesbury, 1760²⁵

Charles Burney quotes Cromwell as saying that Italian opera, "being in an unintelligible tongue … cannot corrupt the morals of the People,"²⁶ but owing to its absolute power on the English stage during the first three decades of the eighteenth century, it managed, as Shaftesbury implies, to corrupt itself absolutely. The rivalries between singers, the castrati, flamboyant and idiotic props, libretti of the most pathetic sort, and a host of other absurdities elicited growing sentiments against the opera that ranged from the amusing, if highly subjective, satires of Addison to the gloomy declamation of Arthur Bedford.²⁷ Gay was no less aware of the foibles of Italian opera than the rest of London, and the entirety of The Beggar's Opera is filled with satiric barbs directed at it. But most critics who have not taken Dr. Johnson's remark that "this play [is] written in ridicule of the musical Italian drama,"²⁸ as sufficient comment have gone off on tangents of ingenuity that all but blast Gay out of the water.

Those critics who have fantasized an enmity between Handel and Gay, or even an intense hatred for Italian opera on Gay's part,²⁹ not only have failed to understand Gay's play, but also have distorted historical fact. It has been observed elsewhere that there is no evidence to suggest that Handel was annoyed with Gay after the appearance of The Beggar's Opera.³⁰ In fact, there is considerable evidence to show that Handel was not upset, and even more to demonstrate the existence of a pleasant association of that great master and the Scriblerians. There is nothing in the writings or letters of Handel that indicates he was smarting from Gay's "attack," and it is interesting to note that he had entered into a new partnership with "gay" John Rich by August of 1734.³¹ During the early 1720s Handel, Gay, Pope, and Arbuthnot had all gathered at Canons with the Duke of Chandos, and apparently that company was an harmonious one. One late-eighteenth-century writer records their relationship thus:

[Pope] heard the performances of Handel with perfect indifference, if not impatience. Gay was pleased with music without understanding it, but forgot the performance when the notes ceased to vibrate. Arbuthnot, on the contrary, who was a judge of music, and a composer, felt the merits of Handel, and conceived an esteem of him, which he afterwards displayed under the most trying circumstances.³²

Handel's association with Gay's circle had begun a decade before the Canons period. Aaron Hill, Gay's friend and classmate under Robert Luck,³³ approached Handel with the idea of Rinaldo, and it was at Hill's instance and under his supervision that Paolo Rolli completed the libretto that Handel set. Some five years later, in 1716, Gay's Trivia recalled his time with Handel and the others at Burlington's palace:

There Hendel strikes the Strings, the melting Strain
Transports the Soul, and thrills through ev'ry Vein;
There oft' I enter (but with cleaner Shoes)
For Burlington's belov'd by ev'ry Muse.³⁴

In 1719 Handel brought out his first setting of Gay's masque, Acis and Galatea,³⁵ and the following year, along with his partner in opera, Heidegger, he was among the subscribers to Gay's poems.³⁶ It was also in 1720 that Handel completed his first English oratorio, Esther. When it was performed at Canons on 29 August of that year, the audience heard Handel's settings of airs written for Esther by Arbuthnot, Pope, and Gay.³⁷ During the 1725 revival of The What D'ye Call It, Handel's "'Twas When the Seas Were Roaring" was performed,³⁸ and he was delighted when Gay used it again in The Beggar's Opera. Perhaps most telling of all is this exchange between Pepusch and Handel, recorded by Hibbert after The Beggar's Opera was produced:

Pepusch: I hope, sir, you do not include me among'st those who did injustice to your talents.

Handel: Nod at all, nod at all, God forbid! I am a great admirer of the airs of The Beggar's Opera, and every professional gentleman must do his best to live.³⁹

Handel is not being magnanimous; nor should he have been. An opera, even a ballad opera, drawing together the works of Purcell, Clarke, Bononcini, Eccles, would have been remiss to have excluded Handel's.

It has been argued that Gay's attack on opera was merely another manifestation of his difficulties at court—that because opera enjoyed the support of the crown Gay felt it had to be destroyed.⁴⁰ Such a circumstance is unlikely indeed. And even if the assertion were correct, it should be noted that Handel's difficulties with the court were very much like Gay's. He was actively and viciously opposed by the Prince of Wales for several years, and by 1729, Hawkins reports, was himself completely at odds with the court.⁴¹

Those who supported opera, and particularly that of Handel, continued their support despite the growing canon of ballad operas. Handel was not at all put off by the appearances of his music in Polly, 1729,⁴² as evinced by his subscription to Gay's collected works in 1730.⁴³ Nor was he deterred from reviving Rinaldo in 1731. For a form which was supposed to have been driven from the stage, composed by a man who was supposed to have been forced away from opera, Rinaldo did remarkably well. It was performed at the Haymarket Theatre no fewer than six times in less than a month.⁴⁴ Finally, and significantly, Handel continued, after its initial London performance in 1731, to revive Acis and Galatea, "which in every Respect charms, to this Day, Persons of all Ranks and Capacities,"⁴⁵ up to his death in 1759. That Handel gave up the composition of opera is undeniable, but that the appearances of The Beggar's Opera, Polly, Achilles, or any of the others were responsible is as untenable as the assertion that John Gay led the crusade out of animus towards a man who had been his friend for two decades.⁴⁶

Among recent commentators, C. F. Burgess is perhaps most adamant in his arguments that Gay was militantly against Italian opera.⁴⁷ Gay's oft quoted letter is frequently cited as evidence of his antipathy towards opera, and it is worth looking at again here. On 3 February 1722/23 he writes to Swift:

As for the reigning Amusement of the town, tis entirely Musick. Real fiddles, Bass Vials [sic] and Hautboys not Poetical Harps, Lyres, and reeds. Theres [sic] nobody allow'd to say I sing but an Eunuch or an Italian Woman. Every body is grown now as great a judge of Musick as they were in your time of Poetry. And folks that could not distinguish one tune from another now daily dispute about the different styles of Hendel, Bononcini, and Attillo. People have now forgot Homer, and Virgil & Caesar, or at least they have lost their ranks, for in London and Westminster in all polite conversation's Senesino is daily voted to be the greatest man that ever liv'd.⁴⁸

A close reading of that passage suggests that Gay is talking about people, not music. His sarcasm is leveled at the "great judges" of music and poetry; moreover, he is concerned here with the fickle nature of polite society, not with that society's longing for opera. Swift's views are another matter altogether; however, it is important to remember that Swift, not Gay, wrote:

[The Beggar's Opera] likewise exposeth with Great Justice that unnatural Taste for Italian Musick among us, which is wholly unsuitable to our Northern Climate, and the Genius of the People, whereby we are overrun with Italian-Effeminacy, and Italian Nonsense.⁴⁹

That is not to say that Gay was not disgusted with certain features of the opera. Any sensible and sensitive person must have been. But the passage extracted from his letter to Swift is his most fully developed comment on the subject of opera, excepting The Beggar's Opera, and that will carry the argument only so far.

Addison's four Spectator essays⁵⁰ have also been cited as proof of Gay's opposition to Italian opera.⁵¹ First, it must be remembered that the most recent of Addison's attacks was printed on 3 April 1711, scarcely more than a month after the triumphal opening of Rinaldo.⁵² Four years earlier Addison had been humiliated by the after Addison humiliated earlier by the had been financial and artistic disaster of his own opera, Rosamond.⁵³ None of that, however, has anything whatsoever to do with John Gay. When The Beggar's Opera was written, Addison had been dead for some eight years. Further, it is not certain that Steele shared Addison's vehement feelings against the new opera; none of the four Spectator numbers in question bears Steele's mark. And there is no reason to believe that Steele, even granting that he agreed with Addison, urged them on Gay. He was not one of Gay's intimates, and at the time The Beggar's Opera came to the stage was, himself, ill.⁵⁴

That Gay hated the foreignness of Italian opera is a misconception at best; at worst it is the result of putting Swift's words into Gay's mouth.⁵⁵ If the foreign flavor of the opera is what bothered Gay, how ironic it is that he should bring to the English stage a variety of the German Singspiel.⁵⁶ Excepting only those done by Carey,⁵⁷ every ballad opera, including The Beggar's Opera, was arranged and orchestrated by a German. Perhaps even more ironic is that the intentionally simple English melodies of The Beggar's Opera were to become bravura concert pieces that grew more florid with each production of the play. Burney laments:

But either from the ambition of the singer, or expectations of the audience, Music is not suffered to remain simple long upon the stage; and the more plain and ancient the melodies, the more they are to be embellished by every new performer of them. The tunes in The Beggar's Opera will never appear in their original simple garb again.⁵⁸

From Burney's comments, then, it would seem that the actions of ballad opera stars had become mirrors of Faustina and Cuzzoni, or, if not, that the audiences became not unlike those that flocked to Covent Garden and Haymarket for the opera. Perhaps it was the good fortune of Gay, Swift, and even Handel to have been laid to rest before a Dublin revival of The Beggar's Opera on 2 January 1765. The part of the swaggering Macheath was taken by Ann Catley, but to make matters worse, all the music had been "newly improved" and ornamented by a young Italian composer, Tommaso Giordani.⁵⁹

There is a tradition that on the opening night of The Beggar's Opera the audience took Pepusch's overture to be the first sounding, but when no second music was forthcoming, the audience all but lost control. To silence the crowd, the comedian Jack Hall was sent out to explain that there would be no further soundings, but the hush that fell over the audience when he appeared so unnerved him that he blurted out: "Ladies and Gentlemen, we—we beg you will not call for First and Second Music, bec-because you know—there is never any music at all to an opera."⁶⁰ Perhaps it was Jack Hill's faux pas that began the whole gruesome tradition of reading The Beggar's Opera as a brutal satire designed to destroy Italian opera. Surely Gay never intended to do more than offer, as Bukofzer wisely suggests, a few good humored parodies for the amusement of the friends of opera seria.⁶¹ Given the sorts of straws that have been grasped by some, one wonders why someone has not attempted to establish a link between the cage of sparrows. Addison lampoons in the fifth Spectator and the over thirty references to birds, beginning with Polly's name, that Gay includes in his play. The point, simply, is this: if lampoon is to be appreciated it must first be recognizable. The Lucy-Polly conflict may very well allude to the bickerings of Faustina and Cuzzoni. Or does it, as many have suggested, recall a quarrel (of which there is no record)between Lady Walpole and Maria Skerrett, Sir Robert's mistress?⁶² If one must choose, the former is certainly the more plausible. Notwithstanding the assertion that everyone knew of Walpole's philandering, the prime minister never took it to the stage; Faustina and Cuzzoni, quite literally, aired their linen before the public, and few in Gay's audience would have failed to make the connection between the two famous singers and the play's two female leads. But that sort of parody hardly constitutes a vicious attack on opera; moreover, those who followed opera were not charmed with the antics of the two prima donnas, and would have been as pleased with the joke as a Jonathan Swift.

If Gay had wanted opera off the stage he would not have relied merely upon a singers' war, or the speeches of the beggar at the beginning and end of the play (I. intro. & III. xvi), for they are too subtle. Such techniques almost always produce laughter, but rarely do they produce anger. If the death of opera was Gay's goal, he could have secured it easily enough. Macheath, instead of a rich tenor, could have been played by a squeaking castrato; Peachum, instead of dealing in contraband would have kidnapped young boys for the opera; Gay might have demanded the same sort of musical treatment of his songs from Pepusch as they actually received from Giordani four decades later. But Gay did none of those things. There are swipes at opera in his play, but swipes are not death blows. To look for more is to spoil the fun; to see more is to see something that does not exist.

III

Does Walpole 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 sharper's share, and keeps his run when the dice are changed.

Jonathan Swift, 1728⁶³

One of the most significant contributions to the study of Walpole's being satirized in The Beggar's Opera was made some years ago by Jean Kern, who ends once and for all the myth that the Peachum-Lockit quarrel is a parody of a similar disagreement between Walpole and his brother-in-law, Townshend.⁶⁴ The Walpole-Townshend row, if anything, was a parody of the quarrel that had been acted out on stage more than a year before. Walpole is among the targets of the play's satire, but the extent to which he is ridiculed must, as Professor Kern's example suggests, be approached with some caution. Gay did not, in fact, nurture a long hatred for Walpole, and from the presence of his name on the list of Gay's subscribers in 1720⁶⁵ it seems that the prime minister was nominally cordial towards Gay.

Walpole, of course, was not a beloved figure, and it is well known that the first organized opposition to him can be traced to the Scriblerian activities of the period 1726-1729.⁶⁶ I have already established that Gay had sufficient reason to be at odds with Walpole by 1727, but he was no fool and not about to risk a head-on collision with so powerful an adversary.⁶⁷ Even Walpole could tolerate the references to himself in "Robin of Bagshot, alias Gorgon, alias Bluff Bob, alias Carbuncle, alias Bob Booty," and there are numerous reports of his calling for an encore of the air (XXX) that ends with the line: "That was levelled at me."⁶⁸ What he could not tolerate, though, would be an allusion to his dalliances. And if the Polly-Lucy argument is intended to embarrass Walpole, how cleverly Gay has covered himself. The obvious analogue is the operatic rivalry, and it is behind that similarity Gay could take refuge. If the burden of The Beggar's Opera is an attack on the Walpole government, it necessarily must have been camouflaged; and what better subterfuge than the burlesque of an opera?

In the amount of criticism received, opera was second only to the Ministry; Handel, second only to Walpole. And the association between the two men, at least as far as the public could tell, was strong. On three occasions it was Walpole who arranged pensions for Handel,⁶⁹ though neither man held any affection for the other. As late as 1733, well after Handel's rift with the court, they were connected in print. On 15 June 1733 The Craftsman carried this epigram:

Quoth W—e to H—1, shall We Two agree,
 and Excise the whole Nation?
[Handel:] Si, caro, Si.
Of what use are Sheep if the Shepherds can't sheer them
At the Haymarket 1, you at Westminster?
[Walpole:] Hear him.
Call'd to order, the seconds appear'd in their place;
One fam'd for his Morals, and one for his Face.
In half they succeed, in half they were crost:
The Excise was obtained, but poor Deborah lost.⁷⁰

If the orientation of The Beggar's Opera is political, there are, subterfuge notwithstanding, few substantial allusions to Walpole. The Peachum-Lockit parallel does not exist; the Polly-Lucy conflict is tenuous at best. More to the point, perhaps, is the parody of Walpole's having to choose between his wife and mistress in Macheath's "How Happy Could I Be with Either" (Air XXXV),⁷¹ but even that would have meaning to only a very few. Gay's allusion in Robin of Bagshot is transparent, but there is never the sort of clearly defined allegorical schema to the play that allows positive identifications to be made.⁷²

It has been noted that the mode of political satire is established by the overture before the play ever begins.⁷³ Pepusch incorporated into his overture a tune known as "Walpole." That title was not so well known as an earlier one, "The Happy Clown," and when the same tune appears in The Beggar's Opera as "I'm Like a Skiff on the Ocean Tossed" (Air XLVII), it is printed under its original and best known title, "One Evening Having Lost My Way." When Lucy sings the air, it is set in G major with a time signature of 6/8. The overture, however, is written in the key of B-flat major with a time signature of 12/8. First, it is unlikely that the audience even heard the overture through its own din; second, it is doubtful that the air would have been recognized, for Pepusch treats it in fugal form in the allegro section of his French overture, and the tempo, even when the tonic melody can be followed, is considerably faster than the tempo at which it was supposed to have been sung.⁷⁴ Only a trained musician could have recognized the melody in the amount of time it took the orchestra to play it, and an extraordinary pair of ears would have been needed to have heard it played at all on the two oboes, two violins, and harpsichord for which that part of the overture was scored.

Taken altogether, the political satire of the play is hardly so potent as to conclude that it brought about Walpole's downfall.⁷⁵ Gay no more had that in mind than the dissolution of Italian opera. It was Swift who saw Walpole as damned, not Gay, whose own views, like those of Pope, were mixed; "both lunched with and satirized Sir Robert."⁷⁶ Gay had been hurt, but not to the point of wanting to destroy himself, and to have gone farther than all concrete evidence indicates he went would have spelled his end. Even so, it seems he struck closer to home than he had intended, or, perhaps, the joke simply had worn itself out. Despite the facade of good cheer, one cannot but pity the writer of these lines:

By the beginning of my letter you see how I decline in favour, but I look upon it as my particular distinction, that as soon as the Court gains a man I lose him; tis a mortification I have been us'd to, so I bear it as a philosopher should.⁷⁷

IV

But the best of all was Sir William Ashurst, who sat in a box, and was perhaps one of the first judges who ever figured away at The Beggar's Opera, that strong and bitter satire against the professions, and particularly his.

Hannah More, 1778⁷⁸

More studies of The Beggar's Opera would do well to take up Sir William's standard, for it is in its treatment of the professions, especially law, that the play's most pointed and consistent satire exists. Exactly what Gay is attempting, or why he is attempting it, remains a mystery. Hawkins' suggestion, which was quoted earlier, seems to be off the mark, as do the many that have followed it. No one has taken into account the tradition of legal satire carried on by the later Jacobean and Caroline playwrights for the benefit of their Inns of Court coterie. Nor has there been any explanation for Gay's dark, almost twentieth-century view of humanity. Certainly that was the feature of the play that attracted Brecht's attention.

On no fewer than eleven occasions there are explicit references that call the legal profession into question.⁷⁹ Each of those is put into the mouth of one of the play's low-life figures, as if some sort of vindication through balance and antithesis were intended. Every vile act in the play is justified by the vilification of polite society or one of the professions.

The gamesters and lawyers are jugglers alike
If they meddle, your all is in danger:

sings Jenny Diver to Macheath an instant before giving him the Judas-like kiss that allows him to be taken off in chains. Peachum's masterminding of the release of several members of his gang is followed by Filch's air, which observes:

For suits of love, like law, are won by pay
And beauty must be fee'd into our arms.

Peachum and his wife plot the undoing of Macheath, and that is sealed with an air containing these lines:

If lawyer's hand is fee'd, sir,
He steals your whole estate.

And the pattern repeats itself time and again throughout the play.

The morality of the play, or lack of it, prompted a number of attacks, most famous of which was Bishop Herring's sermon against The Beggar's Opera. If only for its splendid polemic, a portion of Swift's answer to the Bishop is worth quoting. "Upon the whole," he writes,

I deliver my judgment That nothing but servile Attachment to a Party, Affectation of Singularity, lamentable Dullness, mistaken Zeal, or studied Hypocrisy, can have the least reasonable Objection against this excellent moral Performance of the Celebrated Mr. Gay.⁸⁰

In fact, Swift never answers the critics of the play's morality; perhaps he dared not. The world of Gay's play is a world of enormities, but so, too, is the world that watches it. After the rabble has cried its reprieve, the beggar steps forward and remarks:

Had the play remained as I first intended, it would have carried a most excellent moral. 'Twould have shown that the lower sort of people have their vices in a degree as well as the rich, and that they are punished for them. (III. xvi)

Like the beggar, we know that there is no morality in the liberation of Macheath, but like Gay, we know too that there is no morality in his being hanged by men who belong on the scaffold with him. Gay does not, like almost all his contemporaries in drama, give us romp, which is tied up by the meting out of a brand of inefficacious poetic justice in the last scene. The Beggar's Opera is no thesis play, but neither is it mere frolic. Gay wants to entertain, and in that he succeeds most excellently. But if his treatment of society and the professions evokes laughter, it also evokes a feeling of uneasiness among those laughing. We are placed in the uncomfortable position of having to come to terms with two worlds. The world within the play is crowded with criminals on every level, but so is the world without. What we do with that second world is our own affair. What Gay himself would have done with it—indeed, what he already had done with it—is manifestly obvious in his letters.

In the preceding pages I have discussed the events and attitudes that occasioned The Beggar's Opera, set aside the notion that the aim of the play was the dissolution of Italian opera, and suggested a more cautious view of the play's political satire. I have suggested that the dominant force in The Beggar's Opera is its professional and social satire, and that its function is essentially didactic. Finally, I have implied that in working towards a stage didactic that proffers something other than pap, Gay is unique among his contemporaries. This paper does not pretend to do more than open the door to subsequent investigations, whose starting point should not be with the tired cliches put away here, but instead with a kind of drama unique in its time, the work of "a natural man, without design, who spoke what he thought, and just as he thought it."⁸¹

Notes

¹ C. F. Burgess, ed., The Letters of John Gay (Oxford,1966), pp. 70-71. Hence-forth cited as LJG.

² Emmett L. Avery, The London Stage, 1700-1729(Carbondale, Ill., 1960), II, 956.

³ Ibid., p. 931.

⁴ Ibid., p. 958.

⁵ Ibid., p. 931.

⁶ Arthur H. Scouten, The London Stage, 1729-1747(Carbondale, Ill., 1961), I, 231 f.

⁷ James Sutherland, "John Gay" in Pope and His Contemporaries, ed. James L. Clifford and Louis A. Landa(Oxford, 1923), p. 122.

⁸ From a letter to Pope, dated 30 August 1716, quoted in William E. Schultz, Gay's Beggar's Opera (New Haven, 1923), p. 122.

⁹ See, in addition to Schultz, p. 122: Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of John Gay (London, 1921), p.41; and Oscar Sherwin, Mr. Gay (New York, 1923), p.96, for example.

¹⁰ The exact date of the play's completion is unknown; however, on 22 October 1727 Gay wrote Swift: "My opera is already finished." See Burgess, LJG, p. 69.

¹¹ Quoted in Schultz, pp. 122-23.

¹² Notice that in the series of juxtapositions the animals are cited first, except in the courtier-spaniel comparison, which lowers the courtier to the level of the other beasts (Charles Kerby-Miller, ed., The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus [New Haven, 1950], p. 137).

¹³ This and all subsequent citations refer to Edgar V. Roberts, ed., The Beggar's Opera (Lincoln, 1969).

¹⁴ Kerby-Miller, p. 57, points to three periods of Scriblerian activity: 1714, 1716-18, and 1726-27. Though the authorship of the Memoirs is generally attributed to Pope and Arbuthnot, Gay no doubt had access to, if not a part in, this final version from which the quoted passage is taken.

¹⁵ Sir John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (1776; rpt. ed. anon., 3 vols., London, 1875), II, 875.

¹⁶ Burgess, LJG, p. 45.

¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 68-69. The date of the letter is 22 October 1727.

¹⁸ F. Elrington Ball, ed., The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, 6 vols. (London, 1911-14), III, 431.

¹⁹ Schultz, p. 1.

²⁰ See especially: Arthur V. Berger, "The Beggar's Opera, the Burlesque, and Italian Opera," Music and Letters, 17 (April 1936), 93-105; Edmund M. Gagey, Ballad Opera (New York, 1937), pp. 18 f.; Max Goberman, "Mr. John Gay's The Beggar's Opera," Music Review, 24 (April 1963), 3-12; W. J. Lawrence, "Music and Song in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre," Musical Quarterly, 2 (April 1916), 67-75; and Schultz, p. 139 f.

²¹ See George Tufts, "Ballad Operas: A List and Some Notes," Musical Antiquary, 4 (January 1913), 61-86.

²² Charles Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (1789; rpt. ed. Frank Mercer, 2 vols., London, 1935), II, 657.

²³ Quoted in Schultz, p. 125.

²⁴ Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, Vols. VIII and IX of The Works of Samuel Johnson, 16 vols. (rpt., Troy, N. Y., 1903), IX, 308.

²⁵ From his Memoirs of Handel; quoted in Otto Erich Deutsch, Handel (London, 1955), pp. 844-45.

²⁶ Burney, p. 677.

²⁷ Arthur Bedford, The Great Abuse of Musick (1711; facs. rpt., New York, 1965), p. 196. Bedford regards the fallen state of music in London as retributive. He writes: "Our Pur cel was the Delight of the Nation, and the Wonder of the World, and the Character of Dr. Blow was but little inferior to him. But when we made not that use thereof which we ought, it pleas'd God to shew his Resentment, and put a Stop to our Progress, by taking away our Purcel in the Prime of Age, and Dr. Blow soon after. We all lamented our Misfortunes, but never consider'd them as Judgments for the Abuse of this Science; so that instead of growing better we grew worse and worse. Now therefore Musick declines as fast as it did improve before."

²⁸ Johnson, p. 303.

²⁹ Gagey, p. 18, suggests that The Beggar's Opera was an attempt to force Handelian opera off the stage; Schultz, p. 139, calls the play Gay's effort to kill Italian opera.

³⁰ Bertrand H. Bronson, "The Beggar's Opera" (1941; rpt. in Facets of the Enlightenment, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), p. 77.

³¹ Erich H. Muller, ed., The Letters and Writings of George Frideric Handel (London, 1935), pp. 32-33.

³² John Christopher Smith (1799) quoted in William H. Irving, John Gay Favorite of the Wits (Durham, 1940), p. 284.

³³ Ibid., p. 11.

³⁴ It is worth noting that Gay's allusion to Handel's music transporting the soul is tied to the Pythagorean concept of spiritual transmigration that leads ultimately to a kind of apotheosis, and it is a compliment of the highest sort. There is a rich tradition of this notion in English thought, and Gay is drawing from it. Cf. Dryden's "Alexander's Feast" ("With ravish'd ears the monarch hears"); cf. also, Morrison C. Boyd, Elizabethan Music and Musical Criticism, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1962), pp. 5, 11, 35.

⁴¹ Hawkins, p. 876.

³⁵ Deutsch, p. 99.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 121.

³⁷ Irving, p. 184.

³⁸ Deutsch, p. 179.

³⁹ Quoted in Irving, p. 242.

⁴⁰ Schultz, p. 139.

⁴²Polly incorporates two of Handel's minutes from the Water Music and a third piece, the March from Scipione.

⁴³ Percy M. Young, "Handel the Man" in Handel: A Symposium, ed. Gerald Abraham (London, 1954), p. 3.

⁴⁴ 6, 10, 20, 24, 27 April; 1 May 1731 (Deutsch, pp. 273-74). Likewise, Julius Caesar, the most Italianate of Handel's operas, was revived successfully in 1730 (performed eleven times between 17 January and 31 March) and again in 1732 (for four performances between the 1st and 12th of February). For a complete listing of Handel's numerous operatic revivals and premieres during this general time frame, see Deutsch, pp. 252-302.

⁴⁵ John Christopher Smith, 1740, quoted in Deutsch, p. 493.

⁴⁶ For a number of informative discussions of Handel's leaving opera for oratorio see: Manfred F. Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era (New York, 1947), pp. 331 f.; Winton Dean, Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (London, 1959), pp. 33 f.; and E. D. Mackemess, A Social History of English Music (London, 1964), pp. 102 f.

⁴⁷ See esp., C. F. Burgess, "The Genesis of The Beggar's Opera," Cithara, 2 (November 1962), 11. Henceforth, Cithara.

⁴⁸ Burgess, LJG, p. 43.

⁴⁹ From Intelligencer number 3 in Satires and Personal Writings by Jonathan Swift, ed. William A. Eddy (London, 1932), p. 266. Swift was a frequent commentator on musical tastes, and himself no small judge of music if his work with his Dublin choir is any indication of his musical abilities. It seems, however, that even though he is clearly opposed to Italian music in the passage cited, he is no less concerned with human folly associated with it than Gay. That can be illustrated further by his satires on two English musical forms: the birthday ode and the ode to music. For respective examples, see Deutsch, p. 246 and Robert M. Myers, "Neo-Classical Criticism of the Ode for Music," PMLA, 62 (June 1947), 399 f.

⁵⁰ See Spectators 5, 13, 18, and 29.

⁵¹ Burgess, Cithara, p. 11.

⁵² 24 February 1711 (Deutsch, p. 34).

⁵³ 1707 (Schultz, p. 136).

⁵⁴ It is unlikely, therefore, that he encouraged Gay one way or another. He died the following year.

⁵⁵ For a contrary view, see Berger, p. 105.

⁵⁶ The similarities of that form and the ballad opera are suggested by Alan Rich, Music: Mirror of the Arts (New York, 1969), p. 175.

⁵⁷ J. S. Manifold, The Music in English Drama (London, 1956), p. 137.

⁵⁸ Burney, p. 1000.

⁵⁹ W. J. Lawrence, "Tommaso Giordani: An Italian Composer in Ireland," Musical Antiquary, 2 (October 1910), 99-107.

⁶⁰ Quoted in W. J. Lawrence, "Music and Song in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre," p. 69.

⁶¹ Bukofzer, p. 332.

⁶² Gagey, p. 45.

⁶³ Eddy, p. 437. From Swift's letter to Gay, 26 February 1728.

⁶⁴ See Jean B. Kem, "A Note on The Beggar's Opera," PQ, 17 (October 1938), 411-13, for a complete explanation.

⁶⁵ Irving, pp. 177-78.

⁶⁶ Kerby-Miller, p. 177.

⁶⁷ That was a prudent decision on his part. For example, a publisher, Haynes, was prosecuted by Walpole for printing a letter that suggested certain parallels between Richard II and the ministry. See James J. Lynch, Box, Pit, and Gallery (Berkeley, 1953), p. 248. It is a tribute to Gay's circumspect treatment of politics in The Beggar's Opera that the whole affair ended with nothing more than the suppression of Polly.

⁶⁸ For instance, see Gagey, p. 40; Schultz, pp. 186-88; and Ulrich Weisstein, "Brecht's Victorian Version of Gay," CLS, 7 (September 1970), 319.

⁶⁹ Joseph E. Ceci, "Handel and Walpole in Caricature," Musical Times, 92 (January 1951), 20.

⁷⁰ Quoted in Ceci, pp. 17-18.

⁷¹ Schultz, pp. 155-56.

⁷² Burgess proposes this allegory: Newgate=Whitehall; Macheath=George II; Lockit=Townshend; and Peachum=Walpole. Discounting Townshend altogether, what would have been the point of having Macheath double for the king? If called on to explain himself to the prime minister, Gay could not hope to satisfy Walpole with the assurance that it was not Walpole but the king he was satirizing. And Newgate is more than an analogue for Whitehall; rather it is a microcosm for all of polite society. Cf. C. F. Burgess, "Political Satire," Midwest Quarterly, 6 (April 1965), 265-76.

⁷³ See Bukofzer, p. 332.

⁷⁴ The original setting of the ballad showing a time signature of 6/8 is recorded in William Chappell, Popular Music of the Olden Time (1859; rpt., ed. anon., New York, 1965), II, 675.

⁷⁵ That, however, is precisely Schultz's assertion, p. 197. But if Gay brought Walpole down, it took him from 1728 to 1742 to do it.

⁷⁶ Sven M. Armens, John Gay Social Critic (New York, 1954), p. 192.

⁷⁷ Gay to Swift, 18 January 1731/32, Burgess, LJG, p. 119.

⁷⁸ Quoted in Schultz, p. 200.

⁷⁹ I, i, ii, iv, ix, xiii; and Airs I, II, XI, XXIV, LVII, LXVII.

⁸⁰ Eddy, p. 267.

⁸¹ Alexander Pope on John Gay, quoted by Dr. Johnson, p. 307.