To understand in detail “The Beggar’s Opera” it is necessary to analyze first the society and the epoch where it was composed. We are talking about a period in the history of the English literature which was marked by a bawdiness and wit, as well as sentimentality. A period where English theaters, after having enjoyed a revival during the Restoration, had subsided into an opaque phase and the stages had become part of the political battleground.
At the same time there were two emerging and fashionable forms of entertainment that arose: the Italian opera, a formative and stylized type, and a culture of satire in literature that was growing, with Swift and Pope, good friends of Gay, among its most prominent exponents.
It was then when John Gay’s great masterpiece appeared. Written in 1728, The Beggar’s Opera is considered a funny satire on marriage, money and morals, as relevant today as it was when first written and played. The piece sought to transform the formal patterns of Italian opera to a bawdy satire, set in the underworld’s London of the time, where beggars and thieves created a world of love, violence, sexual passion and fraud. The targets of Gay’s satire were really obvious, the Italian opera itself; those responsible for administering the law, the corruption of the time particularly the politicians as the Prime Minister Robert Walpole, who restricted activities of the theatre and finally the writer satirized the practices of society. So we all agree that Gay's work was a mock heroic opera, which picturing the London criminal underworld, suggested the idea that the morals of the people in Newgate prison did not differ so much from the rest of society.
Due to its innovative character and social connotations, The Beggar's Opera had a huge success at that time. It was arguably the first musical in the modern sense; a play animated by songs, but with plenty of unsung dialogues, unlike the Italian opera of the times. In this way we can say that the success achieved remained all through the years and turned the opera into an excellent masterpiece of the English Literature.
