Abstract

The many images of bonds and confinement in The Beggar’s Opera are metaphorical prefigurations of death by hanging, which threatens every character in the play. The only way in which they can delay this inevitable outcome is by keeping bodies, money and meaning in movement, while fixity means immediate death. Female desire, however, is phobically represented as mortiferous desire, whose ultimate goal is to reintroduce bonds and knots—especially "the sacred knots of marriage." The two ends offer two opposite outcomes for the war between the sexes which structures the plot: while the female taste for fixity triumphs in the original "tragic" end, the male propension for play has the final word in the Player’s comic version.