'An Irregular Dog': Gay's Alternative Theatre
'An Irregular Dog': Gay's Alternative Theatre
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“一只不规则的狗”：盖伊的另类剧院
DOI：
10.2307/3508200
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发表时间：
1988
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
P. Lewis
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
P. Lewis
The phrase is Peachum's. Near the opening of The Beggar's Opera this middle-aged, upwardly mobile, double-dealing proto-capitalist, who aspires to the condition of bourgeois respectability on the basis of highly successful criminality, consults his register of Macheath's gang in order to decide whether the current stock of thieves and highwaymen are still sufficiently productive and profitable to justify his continued protection. If not, he can profit from them in another way by trading them into the law for the forty pounds reward given for information leading to a criminal conviction. Peachum's monologue is echoed towards the end of the play when Peachum and his partner in crime, 'Brother' Lockit, are consulting 'the Coronation Account' (III.5. i), an inventory of stolen property obtained during the celebrations surrounding the coronation of George II in I727. The resemblance between the scenes is a dramatic embodiment of Peachum's way of assessing everything in monetary terms, making no distinction between human beings and things because both are disposable commodities. One of the rogues Peachum considers as a suitable candidate for betrayal and 'a decent Execution against next Sessions' (i.3. 1-2) is Wat Dreary, alias Brown Will, 'an irregular Dog, who hath an underhand way of disposing of his Goods' (11. 13-15).1 Despite the self-reflexive element in The Beggar's Opera, in which the supposed author, the Beggar himself, is incorporated into the play and finally agrees to a total reversal of his intended denouement, it would be stretching credulity beyond breaking point to suggest that Gay was surreptitiously including a thumbnail sketch of himself in Peachum's description of Wat Dreary. Nevertheless, as a practising dramatist Gay proved to be, amongst other things, 'an irregular Dog' and there is a sense in which he did have 'an underhand way of disposing of his Goods'. If an important part of the 'Goods' of The Beggar's Opera is its acerbic political satire and attack on Walpole, Gay succeeded particularly well in 'disposing' of it in a suitably 'underhand way' so as to circumvent the possibility of censorship. In the scenes mentioned above, for example, Gay suggests a close resemblance
