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Chapter 1 Why There's No Poetic Justice in The Beggar's Opera: Ballads, Lyric, and the Semiautonomy ofCulture To understand the work ballads do in The Beggar's Opera, it is best to approach them from the oblique angle provided by the conclusion. As Macheath moves toward the scaffold, his progress is stopped by an exchange between the Player and the Beggar who has putatively written the play: Player. But, honest Friend, I hope you don't intend that Macheath shall be really executed. Beggar. Most certainly, Sir.-To make the Piece perfect, I was for doing strict poetical Justice.1 Poetic justice requires that a narrative end with the guilty punished and the virtuous rewarded. Yet when the Player protests that to hang Macheath would violate the rule that "an Opera must end happily;' the Beggar immediately gives in, commanding the "Rabble" to "cry a Reprieve;' while the Player consolingly adds, ''All this we must do, to comply with the Taste ofthe Town" (3.16.9-17). The Beggar agrees, but he also regrets the compromise he has been forced to make: "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" (22-26). So Gay suggests that his era is too corrupt to allow art the space even to dream ofjustice. The power of"the Town" allows it to demand the Beggar produce the comic ending it wants, poetic justice and aesthetic coherence be damned. The blame placed on "the Town" helps us to historicize the forces blocking "poetical justice:' When Thomas Rymer coins the term "poetic justice" in 16 Chapter 1 1677, the normative social referents ofwhat he brings together-"poetic" (the world of high art) and "justice" (the judicial system superintended by the state)-are in the midst of a separation.2 Though Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, this does not stop the faltering of the Court as a center of political and cultural power and the concomitant rise of the City, with its more fluid systems of "Public Credit" and of literary production and consumption .3 By the time Gay stages the failure of "poetical justice" fifty years after Rymer, the world ofhigh art has drifted further from the Court. Accordingly , Macheath escapes hanging not by the grace of the king who is supposed to embody both the power of the state and cultivated taste but rather by the frivolous demands of "the Town." (Here, "the Town" means the fashionable people increasingly concentrated in the west of London-not part of the square-mile medieval "City" that is London's commercial heart, but a potent force within the City more broadly considered.) The conflict Gay stages between just art and a fallen world anticipates a reading of the play by John Brewer, one that exemplifies the critique of the aesthetic in recent eighteenth-century studies. According to Brewer, Gay seeks to expose the injustices ofWalpole's England, and he does this on a formallevel by combining a variety ofgenres ranging from opera to Grub Street biographies of criminals in order to satirize the indiscriminate melding of a "heterogeneous world of high, low, and commercial art" that emerges in place of the Court.4 Yet in the end Gay, like his Beggar, is victimized by the very materials of"commercial culture" that he imports, for they make it easier for merchandisers to turn his characters into playing cards and other trinkets blunting his political message.5 So just as the Beggar's idea of poetic justice is vitiated by the absurd rules of the opera, the same fate befalls Gay's attempt at satire. Faced with a threat by "commercial culture" to their tenuous purchase on cultural capital, authors like Gay (an ex-linen-draper's apprentice from a once-powerful provincial family) who aspired to high status aimed to separate themselves from commerce in the name of a disinterested "justice" and "taste." But separation from the greasy till proves impossible: While poetic justice may appear to remove itself from the messiness of history in order to gain the moral high ground, that detachment is actually fueled by the contingencies of history, the same contingencies that undermine claims to aesthetic disinterest. But Gay has already thought of an answer to this critique. To begin seeing...

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