The Language of John Gay's 'The Beggar's Opera'

There is no doubt that John Gay makes an effort to differentiate at least two conversational registers in his The Beggar’s Opera. On the one hand, the language used by Mr Peachum, a parvenu or new rich, who has made a fortune with the dirty business of buying and selling stolen goods. After having been probably a thief, and originally a member of the lower strata of society; his new situation and position as a wholesaler, actually a thief-catcher and underworld fence who sells stolen goods, has given him and his family access to and facilitated his contacts with the middle and upper classes. This is the reason why the kind of sub-standard English he probably used when he was simply one more thief has given way to a far more refined conversational register. Thus, he no longer uses the forms of the singular second person of the personal reference pronouns ‘thou’, ‘thee’, ‘thy’ and ‘thine’ and their corresponding verbal forms as the thieves do; but the forms of the paradigm ‘you’, ‘ye’, ‘your’, which in the eighteenth century were prevailing over and displacing the ‘thou’(you, S), ‘thee’(you, O), ‘thy’(your) and ‘thine’(yours) forms in standard and cultivated English.

On the other hand, as has just been said, the thieves often employ these ‘thou’, ‘thee’ and ‘thy’ forms, which were becoming slightly obsolete and whose use was reduced to social and regional dialects. The contrast is very obvious, while Polly and Peachum speak like that, this is, with a standard English and vestiges of cultivated English of the time, the thieves and prostitutes of the play do not.

            This contrast adds dynamism and life to the dialogues; and, obviously, the kind of counterpoint that it generates is an aesthetic value. And this is true in spite of the expressive limitation of the convention used by prose writers and playwrights in the rendering or representation of dialect in literature. Indeed, before the nineteenth century –and, therefore, the triumph of realism– , the insertion of a couple of dialectal traits was considered sufficient, by both authors and audiences or reading publics, for the characterisation of dialectal uses. Even in Shakespeare (like in Henry V) plays we find this poor condition.