The Beggar’s Opera Themes

John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera is set amidst a band of criminals and sex workers in early-18th-century London. The band’s mastermind, Peachum, profits from two jobs on opposite sides of the law: he buys and sells stolen goods, and he turns in the thieves who work for him. Peachum eventually learns that his daughter Polly has secretly married a dastardly highwayman, Macheath, so he carries out several ill-fated plots to have Macheath captured…

The Beggar’s Opera centers on an unconventional love triangle: the young Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit each claim Macheath as their husband. Both foolishly expect Macheath to abandon his life of crime, debauchery, and mistresses for an honest marriage with them. And while they spend much of the play trying to get rid of one another, by its end, they realize that the man they call “our Husband” has been manipulating them all along (though…

The Beggar’s Opera is in large part a response to Italian operas, which were popular in early 18th-century London. John Gay decided to write a new opera for the masses, which would both build on the Italian operas’ popularity and satirize their elitist conventions. When most operas focused on royalty or characters from mythology, Gay chose to write about thieves and sex workers from London’s lower classes—the kind of folklore antiheroes whom theatergoers would have…