Beggar's Opera Flashcards
I have introduced the similes that are in all your celebrated opera: the swallow, the moth…
Beggar’s Opera is a satire of form as well as morality. FR Leavis: great art must be informed by serious moral purpose.
There is a serious moral purpose at work in Gay’s outrage that justice and morality, as seen in the play through the prism of marriage, love, sex and money, seem to punish the poor and favour the rich.
But he also loves laughter and the English tradition: hence the broad swipes at Walpole, Handel, famous opera singers (Faustina / Cuzzoni) and silly scenes with poison and prison. He rejects the Italianate tradition in favour of English folk songs - his love is seen in the choice of music, especially Green Sleeves for Macheath’s finale
And the statesman, because he’s so great,
Think his trades as honest as mine.
We see in Peachum’s song that Gay attacks the injustice of society - inverting the usual judgements and making the allegory of the criminal Jonathan Wilde the same as the greatest men of the age.
The iambic rhythm and rhyming couplets make the “and mine” ending into a punch line. The moral message - passionate though it might be - is delivered with humour.
And beauty must be fee’d into our arms.
Filch - the youngest person in the play - shows the audience the level of corruption; love is simply a commercial transaction for much of the play. The views of marriage are that all classes exploit it for financial gain. Gay fears that we are all thieves or whores in love. Filch ends the play replacing the syphilitic child-getter, called by Peachem a “knight-errant.” The nobility of the knighthood is rendered by Gay as the equal to the very worst of society and all the fair ideals of chivalry are ridiculed in passing.
…learn your catechism
The casual reference to the catechism by Mrs Peachum in her advice to Filch once again forces the audience to come to terms with the debasement of religion. Religious love and devotion has become a method of avoiding punishment. Justice has been removed, religion debased but the semantic field of honour that suffuses many of her speeches, in this case “valour” and “brave men” shows us that either she no longer perceives her own corruption because it is hidden by her register and pretension or that Gay uses her to show the hypocrisy of those who profess such feelings.
The comfortable estate of widowhood, is the only estate that keeps up a wife’s spirits.
As with the Wife of Bath marriage is seen as the worst situation for a woman in terms of power. Peachem’s advice to his daughter takes it for granted that the loss of power, in effect being made into property, is terrible. There is no thought of love, desire or passion in his calculating assessment of marriage. The Wife of Bath however seems to reject this simplistic viewpoint through both her attraction to Jankin and her willingness to marry once again. Perhaps it is simply her joie de vivre that makes the reader appreciate her passion for life must include men, sex and marriage.
…for I find in the romance you lent me, none of the great heroes were ever false in love
Here Polly’s naïveté is ridiculed; Macheath is seen immediately after this scene with his gang and then all the prostitutes. He is a satire on great heroes, just a Polly is a satire on heroines but here Gay directly attacks the portrayal of heroic love. The great romances, later to find their echoes Jane Eyre and Tess of the D’ubervilles, are seen her as false. This is perhaps why Bronte and Hardy have such flawed male protagonists instead, the cynical Age of Reason that preceded them did not allow for such delusion. The men may not be portrayed as false in great Shakespearean dramas; Romeo, Benedict in Much ado, or even the chaos of love on A Midsummer Night’s Dream all show men as fundamentally honourable even if some of their behaviour needs correcting. Even if Romeo kills himself, his love is, by this point, heartfelt; Benedict is forced to shed his cynicism and admit his love for Beatrice; and all the lovers are married in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, if we ignore Demetrius’s enchantment and the tone of the ending does seem to encourage that view. Yet, Macheath is simply manipulates the propaganda of these romances. He is false. By the end of the play wives are multiplying - yet he can use the view of love in the great romances to further his own ends.
Of tried courage and indefatigable industry!
This line from Robin of Bagshot uses the register of the gentry via its complex lexis. The effect is however burlesque, similar to the dancing of the prostitutes and their attempts to copy the fashionable quadrille. Hearing such claims to the highest aspects of loyalty and honour from the mouth of such characters is Gay’s method of exploring what friendship, what being a comrade, really meant. Although the thieves can use the right words and the right register they do not believe it. By the end Macheath has been peached by Jemmy Twitcher suggesting that the thieves are hypocritical liars, by implication, so are the other users of this lexis. Gay’s view of love and loyalty between friends seems as cynical as his view of sexual love or familial love.
I own I like an old fellow: for we always make them pay for what they can’t do.
Suky Tawdry’s bawdy view of which client is best echoes the views of her colleagues. The references to payment and the idea of exploiting the old, or the young in Mrs Vixen’s predilection for a ‘spruce prentice’ do oddly reveal an equality in love. Both thieves and prostitutes take advantage of the weak; all of them view the other as ‘prey’ as Lockit states in his horrific view of friendship. There is no love here, only commerce.
