Theatre
The Beggar's Opera
John Gay · 1728
Opening lines
Peachum
Through all the Employments of Life
Each Neighbour abuses his Brother;
Whore and Rogue they call Husband and Wife:
All Professions be-rogue one another:
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
A beggar announces that he is about to present his play, and we enter the house of Peachum, a fence by trade, who keeps a register of his thieves and hands over to the hangman those who no longer bring in enough. His daughter Polly has secretly married Macheath, a highwayman, which her parents judge a folly: better to inform on him and inherit. Macheath goes into hiding, is caught, and ends up in Newgate, where the gaoler has a daughter to whom he has promised marriage. The two young women meet.
Context
The play was refused by the first theatre to which its author offered it, and was staged on 29 January 1728 by John Rich at the Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre. It takes the opposite line to Italian opera, then in fashion in London: instead of gods and heroes, a fence who informs on his customers, a gaoler and two young women who quarrel over a bandit, to tunes that the public mostly knew. The Lord Chamberlain, probably on the orders of the prime minister Walpole, banned the sequel, which was not played until nearly fifty years later; the subscriptions to the printed text brought its author more than a thousand pounds, more than the stage had given him. Brecht and Weill drew a new play from it two centuries later.
Who it is for
Three acts and nearly seventy songs, translated into French. The satire targets politicians of 1728, but the plot can be followed without knowing them.
Prizes and reception
Sixty-two performances, the longest run a play had known in London; the saying of the time was that it had made Gay rich and Rich gay.
Sources for this page 7
The pages consulted to check this page.