John Gay, Bertolt Brecht, and urbanized opera

Both the design and the detail of John Gay’s play The Beggar’s Opera (1728) serve to situate it solidly in Georgian London. A new urban sensibility permeates the work, and a means of treating “low” subject-matter is found that would blaze a trail for later writers. In particular, The Beggar’s Opera sows the seeds of its spectacular twentieth-century remaking by Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s play responds to city culture as fully and as unflinchingly as Gay’s did