English 102

John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728)

Like Swift’s mock-pastorals, TBO also examines the transformation from a “Golden Age” to an “Age of Gold.” In London’s criminal underworld of gangs, highwaymen, whores, and fences/pawnbrokers, everything is driven by self-interest and the profit motive.

Nightmare world-upside-down of ideal of civic disinterestedness presented by periodical essayists. (Compare to models of origins of society in Filmer and Locke.)

Key question: IS ANY ASPECT OF HUMAN LIFE EXEMPT from self-interest?????

Public Rational Sphere Private

How are each of these redefined in a society organized by self-interest?

Categories to focus on for lecture on TBO:

ROMANCE/FAMILY vs. SOCIAL (incl. economic) and POLITICAL ORDER (relations among men, primarily).

I. How does SELF-INTEREST corrupt the family?

What definitions of the FAMILY appear here?

* women, femininity, and female roles: daughters, wives, mothers

* What’s the best thing about marriage, for a woman?

Mr. Peachum sees Polly’s profitable circulation (as daughter) as ending with marriage (2592); Mrs. Peachum KNOWS that wives can keep circulating (2593)!

Now -- is Polly in her love for Macheath an exception to the rule that the whole world is driven by self-interest?

*her first song: women as flowers for sale that soon wilt and rot (2594)

*her second song: Love conquers all (2596): petrarchan vocab. of flames and ice

*first duet for Macheath and Polly (2601)

But where do these codes come from? “Those cursed playbooks” (2599), “the romance you lent me” (2601).

What happens to EROS and/or SEXUAL REPRODUCTION in such a world?

Black Moll, 2590: “pleading your belly”; Filch asMacheath’s sub “helping the ladies to a pregnancy against [their] sentence” (2619)

II. How does self-interest corrupt the broader domain of social/economic and political relations?

Human relations: NOT orderly patriarchal line of descent envisioned by Filmer; also NOT loose association of cooperative brothers. Maybe the nightmare version of Locke: evil and criminal siblings who each seek to maximize his/her own profit.

Relations continue only as long as it’s more profitable to do business with your brother than to turn him in for the reward. The social order derives from the balance of self-interest and fear, not family “love.”

*Lockit’s speech/song: “Lions, vultures, wolves don’t live together … Of all animals of prey, man is the only sociable one …” (2619).

Is Macheath’s gang an exception?

Language of HONOR AMONG THIEVES

*Act 2.i. “Who is there here that would not die for his friend?” “Who is there here that would betray him for his interest?” “Show me a gang of courtiers that can say as much.” (2602)

*3.iv. “You see, gentlemen, I am not a mere Court friend, who professes everything and will do nothing” (2620).

* BUT 3.xiv. “That Jemmy Twitcher should peach me, I own surprised me! ‘Tis a plain proof that the world is all alike, and that even our gang can no more trust one another than other people” (2630).

Historical contexts: Robert Walpole, head of government from roughly 1720-42). Brilliant tactician, master bureaucrat: the first politician to develop and exploit possibilities of “machine politics,” where party interests supersede individuals’ rational decisions. Prioritized trade, private property, commercial expansion overseas; encouraged stricter sentences for petty thievery (by 1740s, shoplifting and property damage above a few shillings were made capital offenses). Undermines ideal of “republic of letters” existing in a rational sphere constructed by print culture.

III. So - if neither LOVE nor HONOR are exceptions to the corruption of the world of TBO, where ELSE could we look for something to stabilize the moral order of this society?

Literature?

Consider the frame opening and closing the play: “All this we must do, to comply with the taste of the town” (2631).

How does the frame of TBO comment on the values of the “town” – that is the values of those watching Gay’s play, or those of us who, not quite three centuries later, are reading it????

What kind of world is it in which even poetry is for sale?