This comedy contains likewise a satire, which, without enquiring whether it affects the present age, may possibly be useful in times to come; I mean, where the author takes the occasion of comparing the common robbers of the public, and their various stratagems of betraying, undermining and hanging each other, to the several arts of the politicians in times of corruption....
"Upon the whole, I deliver my judgment, that nothing but servile attachment to a party, affectation of singularity, lamentable dulness, mistaken zeal, or studied hypocrisy, can have the least reasonable objection against this excellent moral performance of the celebrated Mr.
Gay." Of course, if "The Beggar's Opera" is taken as irony, there is really nothing at all to be said against it; but the majority of any audience do not understand irony, and to many the whole thing seemed vicious, an approval of vice, and even an incitement to wrong-doing.

Dr.Herring, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, preached against the Opera in, it is said, Lincoln's Inn Chapel, and censured it as giving encouragement not only to vice but to crimes, by making a highwayman the hero and dismissing him at last unpunished.

In the Preface to Dr.Herring's "Sermons," it is added that "several street-robbers confessed in Newgate that they raised their courage at the playhouse by the songs of Macheath."[8] Others certainly shared the views of the clergyman.

When on September 15th, 1773, at the Old Bailey, fifteen prisoners were sentenced to death, forty to transportation, and eight to a whipping, it is recorded that the magistrate, Sir John Fielding, "informed the Bench of Justices that he had last year written to Mr.Garrick concerning the impropriety of performing 'The Beggar's Opera,' which never was represented without creating an additional number of real thieves,"[9] and that to this effect he not only wrote to Garrick at Drury Lane Theatre, but also to Colman at Covent Garden Theatre.

"Mr.Colman's compliments to Sir John Fielding," the latter replied, "he does not think his the only house in Bow Street where thieves are hardened and encouraged, and will persist in offering the representation of that admirable satire, 'The Beggar's Opera.'"[10] Sir John Hawkins, Chairman of the Middlesex Bench of Justices, also held the view that the Opera was harmful, and in 1776, wrote: "Rapine and violence have been gradually increasing since its first representation."[11] Dr.Johnson took a saner view, and one that was subsequently supported by Sir Walter Scott, and is generally accepted to-day.