1728 John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (known as a ‘Newgate Pastoral’) was produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields (along with Drury Lane, one of the two principal playhouses in London) on 29 February 1728. It was a tense occasion for the playwright and his fellow members of the Scriblerus Club (Alexander Pope, for example), who were among the audience. The work was, as the Daily Journal described, a ‘new English opera in a manner entirely new’. The novelty was stage dialogue interspersed with ballads (to musical accompaniment). The Beggar’s Opera was satirical – Swiftian, almost, in its critique of the English criminal justice system. It daringly attacked the leading politician of the day, Robert Walpole (as Bob Booty); and it ran entirely against the accepted norms and conventions of Italian opera. Colley Cibber, the proprietor at Drury Lane, had played safe by turning Gay’s offering down.
The work opens in Peachum’s house, in which the thief-taker cheerfully outlines his nihilistic philosophy of life:
Through all the Employments of Life
Each Neighbour abuses his Brother;
Whore and Rogue they call Husband and Wife:
All Professions be-rogue one another:
The Priest calls the Lawyer a Cheat,
The Lawyer be-knaves the Divine:
And the Statesman, because he’s so great,
Thinks his Trade as honest as mine.
At the end of the first act (of three) on the first night there was complete silence. The absence of applause was not, however, evidence of audience displeasure but head-scratching uncertainty as to how to react to this spectacle of roguery, thievery and whoredom. When the curtain descended on the third act, the clapping was thunderous. Pope realised that his friend had triumphed when he overheard the Duke of Argyle exclaim, in his adjoining box: ‘It will do.’
It did very well for Gay, running as it did for 62 nights (with every third night a benefit for the playwright – who was estimated to have made some £600 from the first run). On the strength of the play’s success the manager of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, John Rich, was able to construct a fine new establishment (the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden), the forerunner of today’s Royal Opera House. Bertolt Brecht paid Gay the sincerest flattery by imitating his work as Drei Groschen Oper (Threepenny Opera) with music by Kurt Weill.