Abstract

For centuries, critics have viewed Polly Peachum as the moral centre of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728). Actress Lavinia Fenton’s (1708-1760) influence on interpretations of Polly’s character may be tracked in eighteenth-century sources and continues to be discussed in contemporary criticism. Common across these discussions is the suggestion that Fenton’s performance embodied an innocent Polly possessed with moral virtue. This thesis argues that the misreading of Polly is largely owing to critics’ projection of aspects of Lavinia Fenton’s offstage experience onto Polly, and that this interweaving has had the effect of limiting our view of the actress, the character she made famous, and the creative agency it took to create the relationship between them. Rather than accepting and reiterating this outdated contextual frame, this thesis rereads several of Polly’s airs in The Beggar’s Opera as well as eighteenth-century accounts of Lavinia Fenton’s stage presence as preserved in reviews, ‘Polly’ fanfictions, and ‘Polly’s’ costume, to argue that it is more critically interesting, and more accurate, to focus on the pragmatic duplicity of these figures. Doing so sheds light on Fenton's significant literary and cultural contributions to The Beggar's Opera by establishing her investments in a campy performance style. This thesis also models a strategy for performance history that entails reading between the lines of historical sources in order to recreate the actions and motives they describe without the bias of sexism.