SOURCE: "The Beggar's Triumph," in John Gay, Twayne Publishers; Inc., 1965, pp. 145-61.

In the following excerpt, Spacks suggests that in The Beggar's Opera Gay developed a dramatic form that ideally suited both his artistic voice and his political concerns. Spacks also looks at the Opera's less successful sequel, Polly, to illuminate the reasons for the Opera's popular and critical acclaim, in both the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.

It is, of course, for The Beggar's Opera that Gay is remembered in the twentieth century, even among people with no particular interest in eighteenth-century poetry or drama. The play was revived in a rather romanticized London production with great success in 1926; its music was later adapted and presented by Benjamin Britten; in 1963 the Royal Shakespeare Company produced it once more, with great attention to realistic detail, and with a vivid sense of the play's topicality in modern England...