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Robert Walpole and his regime are often considered the prime topical target of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. The significance of Macheath as a mirror for Walpole's political rival, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, has been obscured. In his parodic representation of the two political creeds dominating the public debate, Whig and Tory, Gay showed how both value systems deployed categories to justify discrimination against two categories of human being: women and the common people. Gay relied on the powers of the aesthetic to ensure that his audience's experience of pleasure defused the operations of this ideological categorization, but the prior identification of the two worldviews circulating those categories was vital to his satiric project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay "Pirate Assemblage" explores two related questions. The first is how we read and appreciate the literary form of pirate literature such as Alexander Exquemelin's Buccaneers of America (1678) and Charles Johnson's two-volume General History of the Pyrates (volume one 1724, volume two 1728). The second is what the answer to that first question suggests for how we regard pirate literature in relation to more canonical eighteenth-century literature and how this relation might revise our reading of that literature. My answer to the first question explores the concept of "assemblage" for reading and appreciating pirate literature, and my answer to the second question that eighteenth-century literature read in relation to this "pirate assemblage" suggests new ways of reading canonical texts such as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and John Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728) that were written soon after the first volume of The General History of Pyrates. In doing so, my essay responds to the large body of scholarly literature on pirates that has focused on the question of identity—race, class, gender, and sexuality—and the question of whether or not such literature was transgressive. In my essay, by closely reading the unique literary form of pirate literature and utilizing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concepts of "assemblage" and "minor literature," I argue that pirate literature, rather than representing transgressive identities, instead progressively produces new economic and social connections that deterritorializes the economy, literary form, and language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Gay's The Beggar's Opera has influenced popular culture since its debut. Its 1729 sequel, Polly, has been understudied by literary critics, perhaps because of its suppression in Gay's lifetime. However, Polly offers scholars new views on British imperialism before an active abolition movement in Britain. Gay confronts the evils of colonialism through his theatrical use of disguise. While other Caribbean plays of the period allow white characters to reinvent themselves abroad, in Polly disguise only intensifies the self, while the higher stakes of plantation space are where the characters meet the fates originally designated for them in The Beggar's Opera. Although the play contains a slave rebellion and many white characters referred to as slaves, the absence of actual Black characters suggests an inability to deal directly with the effects of chattel slavery on Britain and its victims as well as the impossibility of Black guilt in a system that otherwise indicts all participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary critics and historians have often stressed the importance of the sensory experience in John Gay’s Trivia (1716) and have concentrated on the visual impact of the London cityscape as being responsible for the sensory impressions in the poem. But, as Trivia’s London is largely represented by street noise, this essay argues that it is above all sound that gives the poem this impressionistic quality. City noise is constantly present as a backdrop to Gay’s eighteenth-century urban setting. Moreover, much of the text reveals social tensions in an urban setting where individual identities are effaced, and Trivia’s speaker is constantly at pains to preserve the integrity of his own self. But as neither silence nor distance are possible in Gay’s London, there is no escape from the crowd’s press or from the continuous invasion of sound. Especially the emphasis on the presence of traffic noise, and the allusions to Homeric and Biblical chariots of war, turns into a powerful symbol of fear of the city as a place of moral degradation and cultural annihilation.

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For decades critics have categorised John Gay's Trivia: or The Art of Walking the Streets of London as a mock Georgic deriving its main characteristics and themes from Juvenal's Third Satire and Virgil's Georgics. Many readers have been perplexed by the ambiguities and dissonance between the Walker's/Author's observations, advice, and actions and the characteristics of those classical genres. This article discusses the additional influences of civility books, especially Dedekind's German satiric civility book, Grobianus, on Trivia. Those literary lineages place in context the Walker's inconsistently ironic advice and explain how Gay uses the distinction between the Walker's advice and his contrary behaviour to describe the psychological and pragmatic complexities of a shift from rural to urban lifestyles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the eve of his execution, Captain Macheath in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) sings a lament or “Last Goodnight”. Unlike the rest of the opera’s musical numbers, Macheath’s lament is a medley consisting of ten tunes. Placing them in close succession, Gay created a mini-narrative embedded within the larger story, forming a climactic picture of Macheath’s mind – clearly the most musically dynamic moment of the opera. Daniel Heartz likens Macheath’s “delirium” lament with the quodlibet or medley, popular on the contemporary French stage. While this speaks to the dark humor of the piece, an Italian musical genre, the solo cantata, had only recently been introduced to English audiences and may also account for the style and placement of Gay’s work. Johann Christoph Pepusch, responsible for musical settings in The Beggar’s Opera, had published his English Cantatas in 1710, and Henry Carey had published comic cantatas throughout the 1720s. Comparing continental traditions and formal analysis of Macheath’s lament, this study considers the lament as a musical combination of the French comic and the dramatic Italian cantata traditions, in which the two continental genres melded with the English ballad to create a musical, sociopolitical tour de force, mocking British and Italian conventions simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This study examines the significance of both John Gay and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s most famous works, where the form is as essential to telling the story as is the story itself, and conventional racial and gender restrictions are defied as a matter of rhetoric. Utilizing working-class music forms as well as the similarly pedigreed, boundary-defying characters of Macheath and Hamilton, Gay and Miranda redefine performance, poetics, patriotism and cultural power. Hamilton follows in the tradition of The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and Polly as a tipping point in cultural history by which subcultures may challenge and reshape prevailing understandings of performance, identity and national mythology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I consider the 'Judgment of Paris' story that decorates the leaf of a fan made in the late seventeenth century. I review the popularity of this legend in seventeenth-century painting, music, and literature and explore how the concept of female beauty in competition was reflected in the practice of female portraiture in the period, particularly in the collections known as 'beauties series'. I examine how some women (Elisabeth Charlotte d'Orléans, Sophia of Hanover, Marie Mancini Colonna and Hortense Mancini Mazarin) both resisted and participated in these early modern beauty contests, in their written commentary and in their activities as subjects and patrons of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the nature of Brecht's collaboration with some eighteenth-century British writers and argues for the timeliness of a revival of interest in styles of political satire that this peculiar collaboration highlights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At first sight, John Gay's Polly (1729) seems to 'rectify' the moral problems of The Beggar's Opera (1728): Macheath is finally brought to justice, and the virtuous Polly finds a suitable husband. This view has been more or less taken for granted for almost 300 years. However, closer analysis reveals that Gay's treatment of the morality question is ironic, since Polly is not the model of virtue she has frequently been taken to be. In particular, some of the songs she sings highlight the discrepancy between her words and her actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The definitional boundaries between criminal violence, political violence, and transitional violence become fluid in situations of political transition, when sovereignty is in question, and instituting violence becomes de-linked from instituted violence.This article examines the social imaginary that comes into play in the process, by reference to Junction Avenue Theatre Company's play, Love, crime and Johannesburg (2000), and its distant models, John Gay's The beggar's opera (1728) and Bertolt Brecht's The threepenny opera (1928). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although art, music, and theater are companion arts, their respective histories are usually exclusive. It is relatively uncommon to find a point in time when these arts interact intimately. One of the rare exceptions to this occurred during Georgian England of the 1720s and 1730s. The two men responsible for this historical phenomenon were the artist William Hogarth and the writer John Gay. Hogarth was an artist intrigued by music, while Gay was a theatrical figure fascinated by art and music. Their shared love for music resulted in the creation of the new artistic genres, narrative art (Hogarth) and ballad opera (Gay), that were mutually influential. The paper shall examine the close relationship between the works of Hogarth and Gay in choice of subjects, storytelling, and style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]