Not Caring One Farthing for Either Whig or Tory: John Gay's Satire of the Political Elites in The Beggar's Opera.

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]