One imagines Nigel Playfair and Arnold Bennett suddenly starting hares over their cigars after dinner. "What shall we do next?" asks N. P. plaintively. "Aren't there any old plays that are really good that the public knows nothing of?"
A. B. gets up wearily and turns over a Dodsley or a Nimmo. "We don't want to cut into the preserves of the Phoenix," he grumbles. "_The Duchess of Malfi_, _Volpone_, _All for Love_ ... do you mean that sort of thing?"
"Good God, no," replies Nigel truculently. "I meant something light--something with a 'zip' about it."
"_The Critic_ or _A Trip to Scarborough_?" queries A. B. He is getting sleepy and is rather bored.
"This is for the Lyric, Hammersmith, _our_ Lyric, not the Tooting Bec Hippodrome or the Moss Empires."
"Well, what about _The Beggar's Opera_?" answers A. B. so languidly that Nigel doesn't hear. He repeats it.
"The Beggar's what?" asks Nigel. "Never heard of it."
"I'll sing you some of the songs in it," says Arnold, waking up.
"No, no, for God's sake, no. We'll take it as sung."
That, I truly believe, is how plays get played. At any rate this is how plays get read.
There are dozens of things lying buried in your old library, but you won't take the trouble to unearth them. But now, well, you've only got to dine earlier and enter a detestable Tube and cross a more detestable Broadway and you can see _The Beggar's Opera_ most exquisitely done for you on the stage. You can read the more piquant bits of it during the interval in a truly Martin Seckerish edition if your companion goes to the bar; this is quite different from the play as one hears it. The eye is not so easily shocked as the ear. But I am wandering from my point, which is this: "Why we should read Such a Book as _The Beggar's Opera_" is my heavily weighted heading to this chapter.
Read _The Beggar's Opera_, yes, and then see if you can't find some of the scores of other neglected plays equally well worth playing, and make such a fuss about them that soon Nigel and Arnold or some other lover of the theatre is compelled to put them on.
There is no dearth of mirth-provoking material, which is still not quite intellectually futile---- But I'm wandering again. Let me begin.
We read _The Beggar's Opera_ for much the same reason that we read Fielding, because it is, as Maurice Baring says, English, as English as a landscape by Constable, or eggs and bacon. It has this added advantage to those who see it acted, that it is full of ravishing English music. Written in the first place in ridicule of the musical Italian opera, we now read it or see it to regain some of that atmosphere of London life, of brilliant wit, of racy coarseness, of satiric richness, which marked the healthy century that gave it birth.