The Beggar's Opera; To Which Is Prefixed the Musick to Each Song

John Gay's 1728 masterpiece invented a genre and scandalized a nation. Set in the criminal underworld of Georgian London, it follows the irresistible Macheath, a highwayman so charming he seduces both Polly Peachum (daughter of a notorious thief-taker) and the audience. When Polly's father discovers her marriage, he schemes to betray Macheath to the authorities not from moral outrage, but from business jealousy: his daughter's romance has distracted his best thief from work. The satire cuts in two directions at once, exposing the criminal class as petty, greedy, and corrupt while daring to suggest that polite society operates by identical rules. Gay set his drama to existing popular tunes, creating an opera that anyone could whistle, and the result became a cultural phenomenon that influenced everything from Victorian melodrama to Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Three centuries later, Macheath remains magnetic: a murderer and thief sowitty and self-aware that we can't help but root for him, which is precisely the point.