The Beggar's Opera Reading Order

The Beggar's Opera (1728) by John Gay is the most successful theatrical work of the eighteenth century — a three-act ballad opera that ran for an unprecedented sixty-two consecutive performances in its first season and transformed English theatrical culture. Gay's innovation was to adapt the conventions of Italian opera seria (which dominated London's fashionable theatres) by substituting familiar English ballad tunes for operatic arias and by making the characters not classical heroes but highwaymen, prostitutes, thieves, and a corrupt prison keeper, who speak and sing in the language of London's criminal underworld. The central character, Macheath, is simultaneously a charming highwayman, a figure satirizing the political corruption of Sir Robert Walpole (whose nickname 'The Great Man' Macheath echoes), and a mock-heroic lover pursued by two wives (Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit) whose fathers are rival criminal businessmen. The ballad opera format — in which the dialogue is spoken prose and the songs are set to pre-existing tunes rather than original compositions — was Gay's invention, and it influenced everything from the music hall tradition to Brecht's Threepenny Opera (1928), which is a direct reworking. The opera's satire on the aristocracy, the government, and Italian opera was immediately recognized as politically radical, and its sequel Polly was banned before performance.