The Grub Street Opera - Themes

Themes

The Grub-Street Opera is the first truly political play and also Fielding's first ballad opera. As such it owes a lot to Fielding's model, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Unlike his other Scriblerus plays, Fielding's Scriblerus persona in The Grub-Street Opera is deeply connected to Gay instead of Gay's fellow members of the Scriblerus Club, Alexander Pope or Jonathan Swift. As in The Welsh Opera, this connection served as a means to put forth a general political view and deal with politics in a more critical way unlike any of Fielding's previous plays. The play is a political allegory that satirizes Walpole's government and the British monarchy. However, the play does not pick a side but pokes fun at everyone. He also kept his personal political views out of the play.

Fielding hoped to remove any moral ambiguity found within The Beggar's Opera. Unlike The Welsh Opera, the rewrite deals with morality at the very beginning. Similarly, the play focuses on problems within the literary community; the title links the play with the Grub Street Journal, a periodical that satirized inept writers that frequent Grub Street. It also links the play with Fielding's previous attacks on the London theatre and inept writers. In particular, Fielding satirizes bad imitations of Gay's The Beggar's Opera and those who do not understand what Gay's play was originally about especially in regards to its mockery of the Italian opera tradition.

The virtue of the female servants is a point of humor in the play. Traditionally, female servants were depicted in comedic works as those lacking virtue and sexually willing towards their masters. The constant discussion of virtue and the upholding of virtue on the part of the servants is used in juxtaposition of that tradition in order to amuse an audience. However, their discussion also serves as a means for Fielding to discuss morality in a manner similar to Daniel Defoe's use of Moll Flanders or Samuel Richardson's use of Pamela. Unlike those later novelists, Fielding incorporates the humorous juxtaposition to allow for a mixture of humor and truth. The issue of gender roles and the virtue of various characters is extended further within The Grub-Street Opera to include the use of effeminacy and dominance by women to mock various characters. In particular, the way the men are dominated by their wives is made fun of and shown as problematic.