ABSTRACT
The Beggar's Opera is too familiar a play. We know it before we read it, in part because of the Brecht/Weill adaptation. Popular songs have made Macheath and Polly Peachum well-known figures. But even when we read The Beggar's Opera it seems familiar; the device of comparing statesmen to criminals is a contemporary device; and given the fortunes of the word ‘impeach’, we have little difficulty substituting Nixon for Walpole. Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather is a recent version of the rich figure of organized crime. Literary critics aid in this familiarization; to take one example, William Empson reads the Opera as a proto-romantic work, embodying the ‘cult of independence’, and foreshadowing the modern romanticization of criminals: he compares Macheath to a Chicago tough (of the 1920s and 1930s). 1 Given this familiarity, I think it is important to insist on the historicity of the work, a play of the English 1720s, and to see it as a condensation, a figuration, of contradictions within that society. Such a defamiliarization could restore to this drama its ability to provide an imagination of historical transformation to our supermarket culture.
