John Gay’s ballad-opera “The Beggar’s Opera” (1718) is one of the outstanding achievements lithe English stage in the early eighteenth century.
Its immediate aim was to satirize Walpole in the person of Mac heath, the highwayman. But it had a more subtle design in transferring the ole grandiose apparatus of opera to the precincts of Negate. The Beggar’s Opera belonged not only to those things in the theatre which are original, but to that very small group of plays which are permanent and have success, whenever they are competently, revived to intelligent audiences” (for Evans).