The Beggar and the Player In John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera

What I found to be particularly interesting about John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, is the inclusion of the Beggar, the fictional author of the play, and the Player as characters. These two characters appear in the beginning of the drama and reappear towards the very end, but within different contexts.

The Beggar and the Player are having a discussion in the introduction of The Beggar’s Opera. While they share this dialogue, they are at a distance from the play itself. Why would Gay create a fictional author? Is this his way of avoiding authorship should his contemporaries label him seditious? Would the Beggar and the Player’s exchange be performed on stage, or was it only meant to be read? I asked myself these questions but had trouble answering them. When I first read the exchange between the Beggar and the Player, I was under the impression that the play will adhere to conventions found in the operas. The Beggar makes this clear to the Player when he says, “I have introduced the similes that are in all your celebrated operas” and then goes on to explain some of these inclusions (41). At this point in the reading, I didn’t have the slightest idea as to what the initial dialogue’s purpose is. By the end of the piece, however, I felt I could answer some of my own questions.

By the end of the piece, the Beggar and the Player appear once more. However, they are no longer at a distance, but rather “enter” the scene itself (120).  By entering the scene, have they become characters in the play? It is in this scene that we learn about the Beggar’s authorial intention: to apply “poetical justice” to the end of his play in order to punish vice and reward virtue (120). He thus intended on executing Macheath. The Player, however, interjects and says, “Why then, friend, this is a downright deep tragedy. The catastrophe is manifestly wrong, for an opera must end happily” to which the Beggar complies (191).  Nonetheless, the Beggar makes it clear that had the play gone as he intended, “it would have carried a most excellent moral” (121).

The Beggar and the Player represent a tension existing in Gay’s contemporary society: wanting to abide by the traditional neoclassical features of a drama, and yet having to accommodate the literature to fulfill the public’s new interest. I don’t think Gay was going to simply end his drama within the conventions of an Italian opera without making it clear that he detests doing so. So, how can he do this without facing backlash from his contemporary society? He creates a fictional author, the Beggar.

By the end of the play, I was able to answer some of my initial questions. I was nonetheless left with many more unanswered. Does Gay’s ending imply that the audience’s expectations triumph over the author’s desire? By making the fictional author a beggar, is Gay hinting that the Beggar had no choice but to denounce poetic merit for the sake of making an income? Is the author a commodity then?