Relationships in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera works on a strange level. For one notion, people who profess to be friends will ultimately work to cheat the other(s) for their own betterment. Familial relationships also work on a similar level, where parents will turn down their children for their own desires. We also mustn’t forget the way that the Beggar has a relationship with the entire play, making the whole play very meta, and his friendship with the Player(s).
There are ideas of relation clashing against one another amongst the whole play.
Peachum is one notable example of a case of false relationships. He marries his daughter off so that he can become wealthier. Macheath, a criminal, promised to marry both Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit, daughter to the corrupt jailer and ‘employee’ of Peachum – he runs the jailhouse, but Peachum seems to oversee it, corrupting it further than Lockit does on his own. After Macheath becomes imprisoned, Lucy scolds him for promising to marry another woman, to which he denies.
Polly inevitably shows up to this rendezvous, and Macheath claims that she is mad. Lucy releases Macheath from prison, to which Lockit finds out, and yells at Lucy for releasing the criminal, but he is actually angry because he is now worried that Peachum will have Macheath’s fortune from marrying Polly.
Both Lockit and Peachum worry more about their own monetary gain than their daughters’ happiness, and from that they go to any means to get more.
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Clearly they are running a corrupt jail, getting income from that, possibly doing other very illegal things to get more money, and this; they both discover where Macheath is hiding after he is released and decide to split the fortune he has. Their friendship had gone around from being there, to both of them worried more about their own money, to a combination of the two.
In the very beginning of the play, Peachum discovers that Polly is marrying Macheath, and his response is not as a normal Fathers would be; “You know, Polly, I am not against your toying and trifling with a Customer in the way of Business, or to get out a Secret, or so. But if I find out that you have play’d the Fool and are married, you Jade you, I’ll cut your Throat, Hussy.
Now you know my Mind” followed by Mrs. Peachum calling her names, and shaming her (Gay, I.i). While a normal thing to do would be happy for a daughter being faithful to one man, they want their daughter to play Gold Digger with the man, make a ‘profit from the relationship’ (White). They mock her for wanting to be with only one man, and call her a slut for that, and this relationship between parents and daughter switch roles so drastically from what the audience expects, and from the beginning, the audience is now expecting some strange things to happen.
Around the same time, Peachum tells Polly to have Macheath arrested, on purpose, and have him hanged and be “dutiful,” implying that it is a wife’s duty to cheat, lie, and force their lovers money into their hands by any means necessary. This puts the play in action, but it is another huge twist on relationships that the audience would not have seen coming. Not only are both her parents telling their daughter to assist in the murder of her love, but also, we are made to assume that lovers are only good for their monetary value to the other lover, and are of no other use whatsoever. This causes a totally new perspective on the relationship Peachum and his wife share as well. Mr. and Mrs. Peachum really are so greedy that they are willing to sacrifice their relationship with their daughter, and hers with Macheath in order to get more money.
On top of that, Mr. and Mrs. Peachum may not have ever been truly in love, based on how they are responding to Polly’s having a love interest. They say to have him killed to have his money, then, did they wish to do the same for each other? It is a curious relationship between man and wife in this universe, and we can see that with these three characters alone.
Macheath and Peachum have an interesting relationship as well. Macheath admits that he only exists because of Peachum; “Business cannot go on without him. He is a Man who knows the World, and is a necessary Agent to us” (Gay, II.i). In reality, it is the other way around. Peachum would be nothing were it not for his thugs who do all his thievery and other dirty work for him. He only oversees the criminal underworld, and if he had not had criminals to do his jobs, he would be nowhere.
Also, if he were not there running things, somebody else would be, in perhaps a slightly different manner than Peachum, but running things nonetheless. So Macheath seems to have one perspective on his relationship with Peachum, but like all other relationships of the play, it is an incorrect take on what it is, and on what it should be.
In a typical family, especially of earlier centuries than today, it was of the norm to wish to marry up to a higher class. Not just for the money, but also for the titles, class standards, and reduction of the poor. Obviously this wouldn’t always happen, but the Peachums seem to take this idea to a further level, and say that you should only go for someone with more money that you. Make use of your beauty, and of the size of their wallet. In Polly’s case, she is almost marrying further down. She is marrying a criminal working for a criminal mastermind. To Peachum, that’s almost a slap in the face; or it would be if thievery were regarded as low an ‘occupation’ to us as to them. Instead, it is only slightly disgraceful to him, because he knows how much money Macheath has, and he wants his daughter to take advantage.
In Act II, Scene iv, Friendships are also put to the test, when two of Macheath’s friends – whores of his gang – betray him for the reward money Peachum and Lockit have promised. Clearly in the Universe Gay has created, it is fairly natural for women to lie, cheat, and betray men for money; all that is important is monetary gain. Love is not so important. This is something Polly refuses to see, and instead lusts over Macheath. It is perhaps the sheer fact that this is not the norm that persuades her in going after Macheath so strongly; rebelling against her parents’ wishes, as any other rebellious teen would try to do.
It is also notable to display how she met the other lovers Macheath has had, even proclaiming to be pregnant with his child; she met them handsomely, with grace and sophistication. These actions pushed her to her finale of the play. She is a “self-actualized woman” in that she defies her parents to such a great extent. The ending of the play, the audience / Player(s) agree with her actions, desiring to see her happy with her love (Mullison 7).
The relationships in this play are not as binary as the relationships that we as readers may be used to. Obviously, relationships can differ from person to person, but there is typically a certain trend that leads the relationship toward a certain path, perhaps with some wiggle room; but this play takes that path and twists it around on itself, to show that relationships, and man in general, are susceptible to greed and corruption. These relationships can go from happy family to conniving parental units out to get more money for themselves. Friends to rats, loss of that friendship, or even foe.
The entire ending of the play lays out a lot of detail about the relationships in the play. Lucy attempts to kill her friend Polly over the man they love, and four other women come and claim that Macheath had promised to marry them – now, we don’t know how true this is, but at this point, Macheath is no longer worried about any relationship that is there, and is ready to be hanged. Instead of confronting his own actions, and his own relationships, he remains true to only himself, and takes the easy way out of it – his death.
Following that, The Beggar and the Player(s) reveal themselves once more, and show their relationship to us. The Beggar, as the audience knows, wrote the play that is being acted out. When the Player(s) confront the Beggar about killing off Macheath at the end, he says that it is important to the story that he die, but immediately removes the death (in the text version). It would be important, considering this course of thought: that Macheath needed to flee from his relationships, because those (relationships) can always be sure to lead to the horrible according to the play thus far.
All relationships have fallen, staggered, or otherwise stumbled into the final scene of the play, where it is ‘resolved,’ as per Operatic standards. Should the death remained, the relationships would have remained as it were; Polly would be disliked by all the other women Macheath had taken/taken advantage of, Polly’s parents would scold her for acting on love instead of monetary gain, Lockit would do the same to Lucy, and the whores would go on whoring and taking advantage and getting even more money. The Beggar takes away the death scene from the play, and he marries Polly. With little explanation on how that happened; the Player(s) simply wanted to see a relationship play out well, and forced one to happen (BBC / Gay).
The Opera was meant to be a comedic, or romantic story, and the original ending would have been extremely tragic for all relationships and characters in general – no one would have gotten a true happy ending, save for the greedy criminals but that’s not a good ending for a story such as this. Even in the very last line of the play, Macheath, in his triumph, calls his new wife a slut, as Mrs. Peachum had throughout the play for her love toward one man, just as she was called a Hussy by her father. These – should be – loving relationships have been tainted, and loving embraces switched with derogatory ones.
Even the fact that in the end, the Beggar had to ‘change’ the outcome of the story shows the fragility of relationships. The Beggar’s Opera’s relationship to other operas was so drastically changed when it became a tragedy instead of a comedy. This relates so well to the rest of the story because even though it is ‘supposed’ to be one way, Gay changes that to his own desires. Or at least, he attempts to. He is just the same as the satirical characters he has created, going to erroneous means to get what he wants out of something.
This play seems to put forth a reduction in the relationships two humans share, love, family, friendship, etc. Mr. and Mrs. Peachum only stand in the way of Polly’s marriage because they stand to gain nothing from the relationship themselves. They would prefer she be a whore, honestly, because at that rate they could stand to gain something from her feminine qualities. Relationships to them are only transactions. Ways to get more money for themselves. This play brings out the worst in people, but it also in the end brings two people together in a strange way. There was a forced relationship put onto Macheath and Polly by the Players, and it does not seem to fit with the rest of the story, for the sole reason that it just does not make sense.
This topic of Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera is one of intrigue. The very concept of a relationship is so central to any plot; imagine a story where all characters are separated from one another, never interact, etc.; it would be a boring mess to try and get involved in. There would be no character to really relate to. That’s what brings an audience into a story; likable characters with similar relationships and ties to the audience. It also goes to show that this play does not have that, yet it brings in a crowd. Why is that? The play is such a strange occurrence for anybody looking on, because all the relationships are so switched, to the extent that some roles are turned upside down from the norm.
Some aspects are kept the same, but many things that an audience member would normally see and relate to are gone. No fondness between mother and daughter, nor between bosses and employees which do their jobs the best. Money is more important than anything else here. That is only slightly agreeable, and only slightly because of its satirical content. Gay is telling its audience how they themselves are acting, but in a way so farfetched, that it is outrageous. Even the play’s relation to the type of art it gets its name from is outlandish; it is not the same style or theme as a natural Italian opera, instead it twists and turns into something much darker (or at least it would).
One of the largest takes on relationships this play takes is in the meta-scenes. The ‘prologue,’ where the audience learns that this random beggar wrote this play, and is having it performed, and the penultimate scene, where his player asks that he make the play not end on a dark note. This forces the audience to see the play as a play, and not a story they have been divulged into. The static-ity of a play can also be seen here, in that the play was changed at the literal last minute of the performance. It was in the midst of being acted out, and the Beggar changed it to appease his performers and his audience.
An Analysis of the Relationships in The Beggar's Opera by John Gay. (2022, Dec 13). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/an-analysis-of-the-relationships-in-the-beggar-s-opera-by-john-gay/
