![]() The story of the play is essentially the same as The Beggar’s Opera, although it is set in Victorian London instead of Georgian London as Gay’s play was: Mack the Knife marries Polly Peachum, to the chagrin of her father Peachum who is an underworld crime lord in concert with the Chief of Police, Peachum convinces the policeman to gather enough evidence to hang Mack. Murder, arson, and rape: all of these crimes are attributed to Macheath even though he is the hero of the tale, he is certainly not as noble and gentlemanly as the Macheath of Gay’s story. The song then gives us a litany of some of the quite brutal crimes attributed to Macheath/Mack the Knife: This comes through most clearly in the song entitled Die Moritat von Mackie Messer, sung usually at the beginning of the play, which is the song we all know as Mack the Knife: While in Gay’s earlier play, Macheath is a jovial and relatively good-natured fellow who flinches from using violence, Brecht gives us a Macheath, or a ‘Mack the Knife’ who, it is hinted, has a darker side to his character. The song Mack the Knife does not appear in Gay’s opera, but appeared Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera. Later anonymously-written penny dreadfuls include a long running serial in the magazine Tales of Highwaymen (1865–66), as well as Captain Macheath: The Prince of the Highway (1892), which is a virtual plagiarism of Egan’s earlier novel. Pierce Egan (1814–80), an author about whom I have written a lot on this website, authored Captain Macheath: The Highwayman of a Century Since (1840). The actual stories differed little from other contemporary tales of highwaymen, being mostly full of daring adventures, escapes from the police, and the rescue of young maidens from aristocratic villains. Dick Turpin (1705–39) appeared regularly in the columns of these cheap magazines, as did older highwaymen such as Robin Hood and the afore-mentioned Jack Sheppard. (Portrayals of Captain Macheath/Mack the Knife through the Ages)ĭuring the Victorian period, with the rise of the penny dreadful publishing industry, tales of highwaymen became immensely popular with both adults and youths of the lower middle and working classes. Widely viewed as corrupt, even though nobody ever managed to trace any particular frauds or embezzlements to him, to satirists in the eighteenth century he represented all that was wrong with the ruling aristocratic oligarchy. Ī particular target of Gay’s attacks in The Beggar’s Opera was the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745). ![]() Like me too he acts in a double capacity, both against rogues and for ‘em for ‘tis fitting that we should protect and encourage cheats, since we live by ‘em. Whore and rogue they call husband and wife,Ī lawyer is an honest employment, so is mine. ![]() Thus we see Peachum in the opening scene of The Beggar’s Opera singing: In his play, Gay had a wider point to make, however: he wanted to criticise the government the leading ministers of state were no better than the corrupt thief takers who patrolled London’s streets and who, while they prosecuted certain small-scale, petty criminals, left larger crimes unpunished. ![]() In turn, later highwaymen such as James Maclaine (1724–50) fashioned themselves as modern-day Macheaths in order to curry favour with the public. The play did much to cement the image of the heroic highwayman in public consciousness with contemporary audiences, which built upon previous portrayals of some robbers as noble and generous in criminal biographies such as Alexander Smith’s History of the Highwaymen (1714) and Charles Johnson’s History of the Highwaymen (1734). Instead of being hanged, however, the playwright steps on to the stage and proclaims a reprieve at the last moment, saving the heroic highwayman from the gallows. What follows is a comical tale of encounters with sex workers, escapes from gaol, until finally he is taken to be hanged. He takes exception to the proposed marriage between Macheath and his daughter and resolves to have him hanged. As thief taker, Peachum controls all the crime in London in his capacity as the main law-enforcer, and has the power of life and death over his criminals. The latter is a character based upon Sheppard’s nemesis, Jonathan Wild (c. It tells the story of a womanising highwayman, Macheath, based upon the real-life thief, Jack Sheppard (1702–24), who has a romance with the daughter of the thief taker, Peachum. Gay’s opera was essentially the first ‘jukebox musical’: it took the tunes of contemporary popular folk songs, changed their lyrics, and inserted them into the narrative.
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