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
Peachum and Lockit greet Mrs. Diana Trapes and compliment the excellent gin they taste in her kisses. Trapes sings that she used to love freely as a young woman, like a sparrow or a dove, but now she’s more interested in drinking (Air 46).
Mrs. Trapes is a madam who manages the sex workers from Act 2. This makes her a kind of female counterpart (or character foil) to Peachum, who manages the thieves. As their employees often use one another’s services, it’s no surprise that they work together to increase both of their profits.
Themes
Mrs. Trapes explains that she is looking to buy mourning clothes for her sex workers, but Peachum complains that she pays him too little. She claims that times are hard: Parliament started sending the police to her district and stopped imprisoning people for small debts (so some women, like Mrs. Coaxer, stopped reimbursing her for clothes). Peachum warns that he’s barely making a profit, and his thieves might quit if they don’t earn more. Trapes asks for black velvet scarves and explains that well-dressed sex workers can charge more. She repeats that her business is struggling: people steal her commission, and many customers are “under the Surgeon’s Hands” after catching diseases.
In an obvious metaphor for the notion that there is no moral difference between petty criminals and the rich, Trapes’s sex workers dress in fancy clothes stolen from the aristocracy. Mrs. Trapes’s comments show many other ways in which her business is like Peachum’s—and, Gay suggests, 18th-century London’s economy as a whole. Trapes never forgets about the bottom line, and she thinks about suffering, exploitation, and manipulation only in terms of the profits they produce for her. She also has a complicated relationship with the law: even though her business is illegal, she uses law enforcement to her advantage by using the threat of imprisonment to get her sex workers to pay back debts. (This is just like how Peachum’s revenue depends as much on turning in his thieves to Newgate as actually reselling what they steal.)
Themes
Peachum asks about Mrs. Coaxer, and Mrs. Trapes explains that she left Mrs. Coaxer with a special client: Captain Macheath. Peachum promises that, if he can meet Macheath today, he will give Mrs. Trapes all his velvet scarves at a discount and even cover Mrs. Coaxer’s debt tomorrow.
Macheath could have easily chosen to leave London after escaping Newgate, but instead, he let his lust get the better of him. So Peachum and Lockit’s prediction about women luring Macheath to his ruin comes true—just not in the way they expected.
Themes
