The Beggar's Opera Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Sven M. Armens

Critical Essay by Sven M. Armens

SOURCE: "The Beggar's View of Courtly Love," in John Gay: Social Critic, Octagon Books, 1966, pp. 128-54.

In the following excerpt, Armens considers Gay's view of relationships between men and women in the context of Restoration and early eighteenth-century stereotypes of feminine vanity and the expectation of marital infidelity. Armens focuses on The Beggar's Opera and Achilles, but connects Gay's dramatic work to his earlier pastoral poems. Armens also discusses Gay's relationships with particular women.

Love, usually considered the most basic of the passions, offers a good measure for examination and judgment of a society. Attitudes toward sex and the ideals of relationship between men and women are necessarily basic fodder for the satirist and the social commentator. Of them Gay makes good use. Much of his thought was devoted to such examination, and his judgments on sex conduct and love are expressed in all his works.

It is fair...
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