John Gay’s Urban Aviary: Pastoral and Fabular Birds in The Beggar’s Opera

Abstract

In the Spectator No. 5 (Tuesday, March 6, 1711), the essayist Joseph Addison criticizes Italian opera as a cultural form that privileges style over substance, the visual over the intellectual. Opera’s chief “Design,” writes Addison in the persona of Mr Spectator, “is to gratify the Senses.”1 Substantiating this claim, he reports that theatre managers have even arranged for real “Decorations,” sets with live animals and running water, to please London audiences. In this same essay, Mr Spectator relates an anecdote that supports his opinion of operatic stagecraft. His curiosity is piqued by a man on the street carrying a birdcage; the fictive observer is told that the birds will feature in an opera, a lavish pastoral in which “the Sparrows were to act the part of Singing-Birds in a delightful Grove.”2 Yet Mr Spectator reports that the birds eventually become a nuisance, for, as wild things as well as objects of metaphorical expression, they cannot be controlled: there have been so many Flights of them let loose in this Opera, that it is feared the House will never get rid of them; and that in other Plays, they may make their entrance in very wrong and improper Scenes, so as to be seen flying in a Lady’s Bed-Chamber, or perching upon a King’s Throne3