Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Beggar’s Opera, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Moral Corruption and Hypocrisy
Gender, Love, and Marriage
Class, Capitalism, and Inequality
Opera, High Art, and Performance
Summary
Analysis
The women discuss Macheath’s arrest. Even though Jenny Diver and Suky Tawdry struck the deal with Peachum to turn Macheath in, Mrs. Vixen thinks all the women should share the profits. Mrs. Slammekin boasts that she has just turned in three men to Peachum, but Dolly Trull objects that one of those men was in her bed at the time of his capture. And Jenny Diver says that she and Suky Tawdry absolutely won’t share their profits. On their way out, Dolly Trull and Mrs. Slammekin jokingly insist that the other must leave first, and then all the women leave “with great Ceremony.”
The women’s good-humored debates about how to share their profits resemble Peachum’s conversations with Filch and Mrs. Peachum over his account-book. Essentially, all of these characters’ corruption is based on the way they are willing to treat organized brutality as an ordinary business. The women’s banter on their way out of the tavern, which mocks England’s aristocracy, is John Gay’s reminder to his audience that their kind of organized brutality is common up to the highest levels of English society.
Themes
