John Gay: Beyond The Beggar’s Opera

Well, there you have it: Pride Month concludes with the birthday of John Gay (1685-1732).

Today, Gay is known for but one of his many works for the stage and the page, The Beggar’s Opera (1728), although most know it primarily as the source material for the Weimar era adaptation by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann with music by Kurt Weill,The Threepenny Opera(1928). (I never realized that it premiered in the year of its bicentennial until now). Those encountering the original work should be struck by its similarity to the German one. A satirical ballad opera, it poked fun of the politics of its own time, and parodied a wide variety of forms and styles, as was the wont of Messers Brecht and Weill. For those who know neither work: it is set amongst gangs of cut-throats, thieves, and robbers, notably the cold-blooded Peachum and the womanizing MacHeath. The women in the tale are mostly prostitutes. The multi-leveled comedy at once sent up politicians like Robert Walpole, the de facto prime minister (the office did not exist yet); and the notorious criminals of that time, including Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. The idea for the play had been suggesting by Gay’s two close friends in the Scriblerus Club, Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. It was a runaway hit in its own day, and has been frequently produced from that time to this.

Though The Beggar’s Opera is the only Gay work recalled by posterity, many of his others were successful in his day. They include Wine (1708), The Present State of Wit (1711), The Mohocks (1712), The Wife of Bath (1713), The Rural Sports (1713), The Shepherd’s Week (1714), The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), Three Hours After Marriage (1717), Acis and Galatea (1718), Dione (1720), Poems on Several Occasions (1720), The Captives (1724), Fables (a.k.a. as Fifty-one Fables in Verse or Fables of John Gay) (1727), Polly (1729, a sequel to The Beggar’s Opera), and posthumously, Achilles (1733), Fables, Part the Second (1738), and The Distress’d Wife (1743)

Like Pope, Gay is almost invariably depicted in portraits as wearing a turban, which were very much in vogue at the time. No one quite seems to know his cause of death, though he was only 47 at the time of his passing. He was interred next to Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, the epitaph written by Pope.

In 1953, Peter Brook in his feature film debut, directed the screen version of The Beggar’s Opera with Laurence Olivier (his only musical), Hugh Griffith, Stanley Holloway, et al.