The Beggar's Opera and British Opera

Abstract

For well over 250 years, The Beggar's Opera's explicit and implicit commentary on operatic forms and conventions has generated a steady stream of criticism detailing the work's purportedly censorious treatment of contemporary Italian opera. In fact, Italian opera has become a critical hobby-horse, eclipsing other musico-dramatic inquiry into Gay's work. Only two critics—the most recent fully 60 years ago—have attempted to situate this work in the equally immediate context of its contemporary British operatic history, theory, and practice, and even they have not recognized the most important implications of such inquiry: that one of The Beggar's Opera's central preoccupations is the championing of traditionally British musico-dramatic conventions against foreign forms, and that this preoccupation already had a long history in British literature and culture when The Beggar's Opera premiered.