Tuesday
As I’ve watched one woman after another come forward with reports of having had either a child or a paid abortion (and sometimes both) courtesy of GOP Senate Candidate Herschel Walker, I’ve had a nagging feeling that I’ve encountered something similar in literature. After much thought, I’ve figured out the work.
At the end of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728), the promiscuous highwayman Mac the Knife has been captured and sentenced to the gallows. His two wives, Lucy Lockett and Polly Peachum, are both there when he receives his sentence:
Macheath: My dear Lucy—My dear Polly—Whatsoever hath pass’d between us is now at an end—If you are fond of marrying again, the best Advice I can give you, is to Ship yourselves off for the West-Indies, where you’ll have a fair Chance of getting a Husband a-piece, or by good Luck, two or three, as you like best.
Polly. How can I support this Sight!
Lucy. There is nothing moves one so much as a great Man in Distress.
It turns out that Lucy and Polly are not Mac’s only wives. When four more show up, with babes in arms, Macheath decides that the gallows can’t come soon enough:
Jailor. Four Women more, Captain, with a Child apiece! See, here they come.
Enter Women and Children.
Macheath. What—four Wives more!—This is too much—Here—tell the Sheriff’s Officers I am ready.
Walker keeps on telling us that, as a Christian, he has been forgiven and redeemed and that we all should move on. I believe that forgiveness and redemption are supposed to be preceded by penitence, which has been absent in Walker. But the GOP is certainly willing to grant what Macheath receives in the play: a reprieve. Beggar’s Opera is a play within a play and, at the end, we see the beggar playwright arranging such a happy ending:
Player. But, honest Friend, I hope you don’t intend that Macheath shall be really executed.
Beggar. Most certainly, Sir.—To make the piece perfect, I was for doing strict poetical justice.—Macheath is to be hang’d; and for the other personages of the drama, the audience must have suppos’d they were all either hang’d or transported.
Player. Why then, friend, this is a downright deep tragedy. The catastrophe is manifestly wrong, for an opera must end happily.
Beggar. Your objection, Sir, is very just, and is easily remov’d. For you must allow, that in this kind of drama, ’tis no matter how absurdly things are brought about—So—you rabble there—run and cry, A Reprieve!—let the prisoner be brought back to his wives in triumph.
Player. All this we must do, to comply with the taste of the town.
Or, in our case, the taste of the GOP. Which doesn’t appear to believe in accountability.
