SOURCE: "The Beggar's Opera as Opera and Anti-Opera," in John Gay: "The Beggar's Opera," Edward Arnold, 1976, pp. 8-23.

In the following excerpt, Lewis connects Gay's opera to concurrent developments in the Italian opera then performed in London, demonstrating specific sources from several operas, including those of Handel. Lewis concludes that Gay's approach to The Beggar's Opera reflects concern with the popularity of foreign opera, but does not indicate a condemnation of the genre itself.

Today The Beggar's Opera is usually regarded as one of the very few great English plays of the eighteenth century and as one of the major literary works of the Augustan period; yet the title asserts unequivocally that it is an opera. This apparent discrepancy poses the question—what kind of opera? To Gay's contemporaries, the title of his work would at first have seemed as incongruous (although for a slightly different reason) as...