In The Beggar’s Opera, Gay assumes a highly comedic style that brings the “high” form of the Italian opera into humorous conflict with the lower-class slums, taverns, and brothels of 18th-century London. The title itself—The Beggar’s Opera—points to this amusing but discordant style, as a beggar would be an unlikely figure to produce an opera, a form of entertainment fashionable among the British upper class and aristocracy. Much of the rambunctious comedy of the text stems from this mismatch of this high style and low content. The titular Beggar identified within the text as its (fictional) author comments directly upon this incongruous, humorous style:
Through the whole Piece you may observe such a similitude of Manners in high and low Life, that it is difficult to determine whether (in the fashionable Vices) the fine Gentlemen imitate the Gentlemen of the Road, or the Gentlemen of the Road the fine Gentlemen.—Had the Play remain’d, as I at first intended, it would have carried a most excellent Moral. ’Twould have shown that the lower Sort of People have their Vices in a degree as well as the Rich: And that they are punish’d for them.
As the Beggar notes, The Beggar’s Opera pits “high and low life” against each other, ultimately concluding that they are more similar than dissimilar. Underscoring this cynical humor, the Beggar further insists that he cannot tell whether or not “fine Gentlemen” have learned to imitate “Gentlemen of the Road” (or criminal highwaymen, such as Macheath) or whether those criminals have instead been instructed in vice by following the upper classes. Though the Beggar claims that his original intention was to write a story that carries “a most excellent Moral,” the comedic style of The Beggar’s Opera resists such moral didacticism, and Macheath is saved from the hangman’s noose despite having learned little from his past mistakes.
