The Beggar’s Opera

Peachum’s racket—running a gang of thieves who prey on London’s well-to-do—is paying great dividends, but what wasn’t in his plans was his daughter secretly marrying his most profitable rogue, the highwayman Captain Macheath. The best way out of the situation seems to be to collaborate with Lockit, the corrupt jailer of Newgate prison, to see Macheath hung for his crimes—but it turns out that it’s not just Polly whom Macheath has been having a dalliance with.

The Beggar’s Opera was written as a satire of the fashionable Italian operas of the time, riffing on the same form but moving the setting from the upper-class sphere to something decidedly more down-to-earth. The music, similarly, was arranged from popular songs that the audience would have been familiar with. It was enormously popular, enjoying the then-longest theatrical run in London. A contemporary review, referring to the writer John Gay and director John Rich, quipped that “it has made Rich very Gay, and probably will make Gay very Rich.” But not all of the critics were quite so positive, with some criticizing the thinly veiled satire of then-prominent public figures.

The opera remained enduringly popular after its initial run, though the sequel Polly was seen to be a step too far and was banned. The Beggar’s Opera had its biggest revival in the 1920s, inspiring Berthold Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera and numerous other global performances and adaptations.