The Beggar's Opera and British Opera
- The Beggar's Opera and British Opera
Todd Gilman
Visiting Fellow, Houghton Library, Harvard University
I would like to thank Professors Brian Corman, Robert D, Hume, and J.R. de J. Jackson for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
Footnotes
1. John Gay's The Beggar's Opera premiered at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln's Inn Fields, on 29 January 1728. Dr Johnson remarked that ‘this play [is] written in ridicule of the musical Italian drama’ (quoted in McIntosh, 421). Jonathan Swift wrote for a Dublin newspaper just before the first performance there: ‘[The Beggar's Opera] ... exposeth with Great Justice that unnatural Taste for Italian Musick among us, which is wholly unsuitable to our Northern Climate, and the Genius of the People, whereby we are overrun with Italian-Effeminacy, and Italian Nonsense’ (quoted in McIntosh, 425). More recent views in agreement with these include Gagey, 18, and Fiske, 94ff. Others have suggested the work parodies Italian opera but does not necessarily condemn it. They feel, for example, that The Beggar's Opera attacks to a significant degree ‘the completely uncritical theatregoers who had turned [Italian opera] into a fashionable cult’ (Lewis 1976, 10), that it is meant to exploit the long-standing success of Bononcini's naturalized opera Camilla (Lindgren), or that it ‘pok[es] affectionate fun at conventions which, like most conventions objectively regarded, have their ludicrous side’ (Bronson, 216). For more recent reassessments in addition to Lewis and Lindgren see McIntosh. Still others have flouted the whole notion of burlesque in Gay's play or have argued ambiguously that Gay was offering a form of opera to rival Italian opera. Bronson attributes this view to Sir John Hawkins (206). McIntosh quotes Hawkins's alternative: ‘The motive for writing the piece ... was the disappointment of Mr. Gay in his application for preferment at court’ (418). Gagey notes that ‘Some writers and musicians ... including [Charles E.] Pearce, [Charles] Burney, and George Hogarth, have striven laboriously to prove that Gay was not really satirizing Italian opera but merely offering a rival form’ (19). Lewis believes Gay ‘set out to combine burlesque of Italian opera with the creation of a rival form, a comic and distinctly English form of opera’ (1976, 10–11).
2. I refer to Schultz and Gagey. Arundell, White (History), and Fiske all situate The Beggar's Opera in its musical historical context. However, in keeping with the broad scope of their studies, their analyses are cursory and somewhat simplified. Lewis, as noted, asserts that The Beggar's Opera is a ‘distinctly English form of opera,’ even that it is ‘a radically new kind of English opera’ (1976, 11, 9). Yet in his discussion he scarcely considers the ways in which the work relates to earlier native opera. Winton argues for the Englishness of the Opera from a different point of view.
3. Even William Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes (1656), now sometimes considered the first English opera, was not called an opera by its creator. As Grout observes of Davenant's production, ‘Apparently in order to avoid trouble with the Puritan authorities, the acts were called “entries” and the whole spectacle was known as... “A Representation by the art of Prospective in Scenes and the Story sung in Recitative Musick”’ (136). It is now generally thought that Davenant would not have had the work sung had the decision been left to him. Dryden confirms this opinion (9).
4. For a discussion of the many points of tension between the British and the Italians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries see Kliger.
5. The relevant British musico-dramaric works that appeared in London from the Restoration until The Beggar's Opera fall into three categories: (1) masques, short (usually one-act) all-sung dramatic performances in costume in front of scenery; (2) dramatic operas or semi-operas, spoken plays with interpolated masques or musical scenes; and (3) all-sung musico-dramaric stage works in English based on the Italian and French models. The all-sung works were the least common (there were only five): Dryden and Grabu's Albion and Albanius (1685), Congreve and Eccles's Semele (1707, rehearsed but...
