Previous
Act 2, Scene 15
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Beggar’s Opera, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Moral Corruption and Hypocrisy
Gender, Love, and Marriage
Class, Capitalism, and Inequality
Opera, High Art, and Performance
Summary
Analysis
Macheath has just escaped from Newgate, and Lockit accuses Lucy of helping him. Lucy blames Peachum and Polly instead, but Lockit doesn’t believe her. She insists that she is innocent. Lockit asks how much Macheath paid her to get out, and Lucy replies that she loves Macheath and would have paid him to spend time together. Lockit chastises Lucy for forgetting everything she learned about men from her days as a barmaid. In song, she explains that meeting men in the bar led her to long for true, deeper love (Air 41).
Lockit’s self-interested worldview once again clashes with Lucy’s idealistic fantasies about true love—which is the opposite of self-interest because it means that two people agree to elevate each other’s needs above their own. Lockit can only imagine one reason why Lucy would free Macheath: money. In contrast, Lucy would give anything (money included) to live out her impossible fantasy of marrying him. Lucy’s worldview may look foolish and lead her to ruin, but only because she lives in a society that puts profit above everything else. Indeed, her song about the bar is also a critique of such a society, because she points out how it limits people to superficial, opportunistic relationships.
Themes
Lucy admits that she helped Macheath escape. He sweet-talked her into doing it because he knew that she loved him. Lockit calls Lucy a stupid fool, but she replies that “in Love we are all Fools alike.” Actually, she knows she made a mistake: she has since realized that Polly Peachum was telling the truth. Now, she thinks, Polly and Peachum will turn Macheath back in for the bounty, and Polly will get all of Macheath’s estate too. Lucy threatens to murder Polly and curses Macheath. She sings about how her “Madness and Folly” has left her wretched but made Polly happy (Air 42). Lockit tells Lucy to go away and “fast and mortify [her]self into Reason.”
Lucy finally admits that Macheath was manipulating her and recognizes that she made a mistake. But ironically, in the process, she starts to overestimate Polly: she suggests that Polly is carrying out some sinister moneymaking plot, when in reality, Polly is actually just as naïve, lovestruck, and uninterested in money as Lucy. In this way, errors and misunderstandings continue to drive the play’s action: everyone assumes that everyone else knows what they’re doing, but really, nobody has a plan at all (expect perhaps Peachum).
Themes
