SOURCE: "Handel, Walpole, and Gay: The Aims of The Beggar's Opera," in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 75, No. 4, Summer, 1974, pp. 415-33.

In the following essay, McIntosh disputes commonly held assumptions about Gay's satiric targets in The Beggar's Opera. McIntosh suggests that Gay's cordial relationship with Handel and his treatment of music in his own work contradicts the notion that Gay was attacking Italian opera, and that evidence of specific, personal attacks on Walpole is very weak. Instead, he proposes that the object of Gay's satire is society itself.

I have deferr'd writing to you from time to time till I could give you an account of the Beggar's Opera. It is acted at the Playhouse in Lincoln's Inn fields, with such success that the Playhouse hath been crowded every night; to night is the fifteenth time of Acting, and 'tis thought it will run a fortnight longer.

John Gay, 1728¹

Gay's...