“THE BEGGAR’S OPERA”
One of Boswell’s projected works was a history of the controversy over The Beggar’s Opera. The best known of the works he actually did write contains several references to this controversy. Reynolds said it afforded a proof how strangely people will differ in opinion about a literary performance. Burke thought it had no merit. Johnson thought very much the opposite, but said characteristically, “There is in it such a labefactation of all principles as may be injurious to morality.” Gibbon suggested that it might refine the manners of highwaymen, “making them less ferocious, more polite—in short, more like gentlemen.” It is noteworthy that the work was half a century old when these observations were made about it. It had become a classic. And later generations treated it as a classic—that is to say, kept on refashioning it to the taste of their own time. The version, for instance, that Hazlitt was so fond of writing about (in the second decade of the last century) was a sad mangling of the original. Even so, it represented for Hazlitt the high-water mark of theatrical enjoyment, just as the original did for Boswell, who said, “No performance which the theatre exhibits delights me more.” You cannot take up a volume of Swift’s correspondence, or Horace Walpole’s or Arbuthnot’s, without mention of The Beggar’s Opera. It even got into Grimm. It was the H.M.S. Pinafore of the time.
And that reminds me. As I sat at the Hammersmith Lyric listening to the dialogue between Peachum and Mrs. Peachum on the question whether Polly was Macheath’s wife or his mistress, the thing seemed strangely modern, and not only modern, but Gilbertian. (I am speaking, of course, of the tone, not of the sentiment—Gilbert was a very Victorian of propriety.) Peachum is Gilbertian. “Do you think your mother and I should have liv’d comfortably so long together if ever we had been married? Baggage!” Mrs. Peachum is Gilbertian. “If you must be married, could you introduce nobody into our family but a highwayman? Why, thou foolish jade, thou wilt be as ill-used and as much neglected as if thou hadst married a lord!” Again, “If she had only an intrigue with the fellow, why the very best families have excus’d and huddled up a frailty of that sort. ’Tis marriage, husband, that makes it a blemish.” Once more. “Love him! Worse and worse! I thought the girl had been better bred.” Polly herself is Gilbertian. “Methinks I see him already in the cart, sweeter and more lovely than the nosegay in his hand! I hear the crowd extolling his resolution and intrepidity! What volleys of sighs are sent from the windows of Holborn, that so comely a youth should be brought to disgrace! I see him at the tree! The whole circle are in tears! Even butchers weep!” Lucy is Gilbertian. When Macheath is at the “tree,” her comment is, “There is nothing moves one so much as a great man in distress.” And not only the tone, but the very principle of the play is Gilbertian. Gilbert took some typical figure of the social hierarchy—a Lord Chancellor, a First Lord of the Admiralty—and set the Chancellor capering and the First Lord singing about the handle of the big front door. He put a familiar figure in unfamiliar postures. Gay took a typical figure of his own time—the highwayman—and showed him, not at work on the highway, but enjoying an elegant leisure, behaving like a Chesterfield or one of Congreve’s fine gentlemen. It was the realism, the actuality of the subject, combined with the burlesque of the treatment, that delighted the London of 1728 as it delighted the London of a century and a half later. At each date it was a new experiment in opera libretto. Boswell specified the attraction of Gay’s realism—“the real pictures of London life.” Johnson singles out the “novelty” of the treatment.
But it is time that I said something about Mr. Nigel Playfair’s revival. This is a remarkable success, from every point of view. For the original attraction of realism is, of course, no longer there. We have to take it all historically. And the revival has been particularly careful of historical accuracy. Just as Gay’s dialogue prompts you to say “Gilbert,” so Mr. Lovat Fraser’s scenery and costumes prompt you to exclaim “Hogarth!” By the way, on one of Hazlitt’s visits he records the exclamation of an old gentleman in the pit, after the scuffle between Peachum and Lockit, “Hogarth, by G—d!” This was, no doubt, a tribute to the grim, ugly squalor of that particular scene. But the whole décor and atmosphere of the present affair are Hogarthian—the stiff, flattened hoops of the women, the tatterdemalion aspect of Macheath’s rabble, Peachum’s dressing-gown (which I suppose is “documentary”), Macheath’s scarlet coat and flowing wig. And the dresses are accurately simple. The women wear plain stuffs; Polly alone is allowed a little finery. Indeed, there is an almost austere simplicity about the whole affair. One scene, with just the alteration of a few accessories, serves for Peachum’s house, for a tavern, and for Newgate. There is an orchestra of five strings, a flute, an oboe, and a harpsichord. It seems to me that their playing has the delicate charm of chamber music rather than the power and colour of orchestral—but I must not stray out of my province.
Hazlitt indulged in raptures over Miss Stephens, the first Polly he heard, and never failed to contrast with her her less pleasing successors. He had evidently lost his heart to her—a somewhat susceptible heart, if you think of the “Liber Amoris.” I have no Miss Stephens to compare Miss Arkandy with, and can only say the songstress is quite sweet enough for my taste and the actress a charming little doll. Miss Marquesita, the Lucy, is a good contrast, a voluptuous termagant. Boswell says of Walker, the original Macheath, that he “acquired great celebrity by his grave yet animated performance of it.” Mr. Ranalow’s Macheath is decidedly more grave than animated, is in fact a little solemn—long before he gets to the Condemn’d Hold. There is an almost Oriental impassiveness about him, something of the jaded sultan—which, after all, is not an inappropriate suggestion, surrounded as the poor man is by his seraglio of town-ladies. Miss Elsie French bravely makes a thorough hag of Mrs. Peachum; the Peachum and Lockit of Mr. Wynne and Mr. Rawson are properly, Hogarthianly, crapulous; and Mr. Scott Russell makes a good, vociferous Filch, leading with a will the fine drinking-song “Woman and Wine” and the still finer “Let us take the Road” (to the tune of Handel’s march in Rinaldo). Altogether a delicious entertainment: gay, despite the solemn deportment of Macheath, and dainty, despite the sordid crapule of Newgate. Yes, my final impression of the affair is one of daintiness. Even the women of the town are dainty. They might almost be Dresden china shepherdesses (which would be bearing out the original suggestion of a Newgate “pastoral” very literally). For the sordid milieu is so remote from us as to have become fantastically unreal; the Peachums and the Lockits are no longer ugly men, but have been turned into grotesque gargoyles; the rabble round Tyburn Tree has lived to see a Russian ballet and learnt to move in its elegant arabesques. It is a Hogarth retouched by a Shepperson—or rather, to speak by the card, by a Lovat Fraser.