Irony as a Dramatic Method in The Beggar’s Opera; ‘A Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce’

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to manifest Gay’s particular sort of irony through The Beggar’s Opera. And I tried to demonstrate how irony can be absorbed in a pervasive gentleness of tone in Gay’s handling of characters of his work. In The Beggar’ Opera, the whole personal and social problems are systematically displayed in Gay’s ironic power to show effectively, without disgusting, the complicated phenomena in Eighteenth-Century’s England. As a poet and dramatist by labelling his play as‘Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce’, Gay essayed the regular forms of comedy and tragedy. In The Beggar’s Opera, we have seen the main features of Peahum, Macheath, Lockit, and Polly and their relationships in terms of double-capacity. And we should know that Gay’s double-dealing pervades every character, and everything operates on a double level gives people a profound vision of that time. Through this, Gay’s handling of the other gangsters illustrates two-way irony, just as the same as Macheath, Peachum and Lockit. As a critical point of view, the effects of Gay’s irony is lying under the disarming casualness, and employing the same bantering tone to convey the full complexity and ambiguity of his characters. His play would have carried a moral that every kinds of people, who is lower sort or rich, they have their vices in a degree as well as virtues. In this process, Gay depicts not only the political situations in the eighteenth century England, but the commercial-individualism which had been emerged greatly at that time.