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
In front of the lowered curtain, a ragged Beggar tells a Player (actor) that he writes poetry and songs for a troupe of actors in seedy St. Giles. The Player affirms that the Muses bestow literary talent on the rich and poor alike, and he promises to stage the Beggar’s play as best he can. The Beggar explains that his play has everything a great opera should: literary similes, a prison scene, and a rivalry between leading ladies. But there’s no recitative (sung dialogue) or Prologue and Epilogue. He thanks the Player for putting on his play. The Player says the actors are ready and rushes the Beggar away. The Overture plays as the curtain rises.
This introductory scene explains the opera’s title and sets the audience’s expectations for its tone and subject matter. Of course, the Beggar’s appearance is supposed to give the work a tongue-in-cheek sense of authenticity by suggesting that it really comes straight from St. Giles. In this way, John Gay is really mocking his own decision to write exploitative, sensational stories about London’s urban underclass. In fact, by using the Beggar as a stand-in for himself, he makes a self-deprecating joke about artists’ role in 18th-century English society: they were forced to beg for money and recognition from the English elite. But he is also mocking the conventions of Italian opera, which was extremely popular in London in the 1720s—and which he deliberately invoked in order to receive attention for his work. Similes and love triangles are not the key features of Italian opera, but the Beggar’s misunderstanding comically suggests that Italian opera had become dull and predictable: it had lost its artistic value and become little more than a status symbol for the elite.
Themes
Literary Devices
