Henry Fielding and the Ballad Opera

Abstract

BALLAD OPERA has the distinction of being one of the few literary forms destroyed by a political decision. It began its short vigorous life in 1728 with its most famous representative, Gay's Beggar's Opera. Nine years and nearly one hundred ballad operas later, its life was virtually over. Walpole's Licensing Act may have been aimed at Fielding's satura, his satiric reviews, but it also managed to destroy the ballad opera. Only one new ballad opera was produced in 1738 and only three new ones in 1739. There had been eight printed or produced in 1735 and twenty-three in 1733. Ballad operas did continue to be written, sporadically, into the 1750s, but they were literary afterthoughts. Its demise in 1737 and the burst of production in 1733, the year of the Excise Tax controversy, indicate something about the nature of the ballad opera. Gay had fashioned a perfect dramatic form for satire, and it had never lost this character. Conceiving ballad opera as a low-life parody of sentimental love, a Newgate pastoral, Gay had added burlesque of Handel's Italian opera (the tortuous distortion of a word, the duet quarrel, the metaphor aria), and he had also added topical political satire (the attack on Walpole as a highwayman and as a lover unfaithful to both his wife and his mistress, Maria Skerrett). Although there were farce intrigue ballad operas, on the pattern of Restoration comedy, and pastoral ballad operas, on the pattern of court masques and English operas of the Restoration, the form was dominated by satire and burlesque, much of it political.' While only three of the nine ballad operas written by Fielding between 1730 and 1742 can be construed as sustained political satires (The Welsh Opera, later called The Grub-Street Opera, 1731; Don Quixote in England, 1734; Tumble-Down Dick, 1736),2 most of the rest are