Character guide

Captain Macheath

major

Also known as Macheath, Captain, the Captain

Macheath moves through taverns and Newgate alike with the swagger of a man who believes his courage and charisma will carry him through any scrape. He genuinely cares for the women he courts, yet his roving eye and taste for wine and gaming keep him perpetually entangled. When the women in his life turn informer, his confidence curdles into bitter fury — 'Women are decoy ducks; who can trust them!' — and the play's central question becomes whether charm can outrun a noose.

Polly Peachum

major

Also known as Polly, Miss Polly, Miss Polly Peachum

Polly grows up in a household where crime is bookkeeping, yet she risks everything for love rather than profit, marrying Macheath behind her parents' backs. Her devotion is genuine but not naive: she knows her father's trade and understands exactly what danger her husband faces. Caught between a family that would hang Macheath for business and a rival who would keep him for love, Polly becomes the play's most sympathetic figure — a woman whose tenderness is her only weapon.

Lucy Lockit

major

Also known as Lucy, Miss Lucy, Mistress Lucy

Lucy was raised in the bar of Newgate, where her father taught her to score kisses like debts, and Macheath collected on every one. Now she finds herself pregnant, abandoned, and publicly humiliated by Polly's claim — a combination that turns her love into something closer to vengeance. Her confession to Lockit — 'in love we are all fools alike' — is both an apology and a threat, and her willingness to free or destroy Macheath makes her the unpredictable hinge of the play's middle acts.

Mr. Peachum

major

Also known as Peachum, Mr. Peachum

Peachum sits at his account book sorting rogues into profit and loss, protecting the industrious and 'booking' the lazy for execution with the calm of a man auditing taxes. He sees all professions as variations on his own — 'the statesman, because he's so great, thinks his trade as honest as mine' — and treats his daughter's marriage as a bad debt. His cold arithmetic drives the plot: when Macheath becomes a liability, Peachum's professional machinery grinds toward the gallows, and the play's satire sharpens into something genuinely menacing.

Mrs. Peachum

supporting

Also known as Mrs. Peachum

Mrs. Peachum shares her husband's trade and his ledger-minded view of the world, but her concern for Polly runs through the currency she understands best: reputation and money. She sees Macheath not as a romantic figure but as a highwayman whose profession will inevitably bring the family down with him. Her pragmatism provides a grimly comic counterpoint to Polly's romantic defiance, and her willingness to sacrifice her daughter's happiness for the household's survival reveals how thoroughly the play's criminal economy has colonized even maternal love.

Lockit

supporting

Also known as Lockit

Lockit governs Newgate with the same double capacity Peachum brings to thief-taking: he sells escapes, softens evidence, and keeps his own accounts, all while suspecting his partner of skimming. His relationship with Lucy is a mixture of paternal concern and professional contempt — he warns her against love as bad business, then uses her feelings to extract information. When Macheath's escape threatens his reputation and his profits, Lockit's alliance with Peachum frays into mutual accusation, exposing how thin the line is between the men who break the law and the men who sell it.

Jenny Diver

supporting

Also known as Jenny

Jenny belongs to the chorus of 'Women of the Town' whose names — Coaxer, Trull, Vixen, Doxy — announce their trade, and she numbers among the many lovers Macheath keeps in addition to his wife Polly. Her presence sharpens the play's central irony: the highwayman who lives by fraud is himself entangled by women whose affections, like his own profession, are paid for. She matters to the middle arc as one of the threads that can be pulled to expose or betray Macheath when the Peachums and Lockits close in.

Diana Trapes

supporting

Also known as Mrs. Trapes, Mrs. Diana Trapes

Mrs. Trapes sits at the crossroads of the play's two economies — sex and stolen property — running a house where goods and women are both for sale. As a fence and bawd she knows where bodies and valuables are hidden, which makes her a natural instrument for Peachum's scheme to track down his son-in-law. Her willingness to sell information for profit quietly demonstrates the opera's thesis that in this world every profession, high or low, is be-rogued by another.

Suky Tawdry

minor

Also known as Suky, Tawdry

A prostitute in the gang, appears in the tavern.

Ben Budge

supporting

Also known as Ben

Ben Budge is one of the named gang members — alongside Jemmy Twitcher, Crook-fingered Jack, and Matt of the Mint — who give Macheath's band its texture of camaraderie and menace. His loyalty to the captain is the loyalty of a trade, not a virtue, and it is exactly the kind of bond that Peachum's account book can buy or break. As the sessions approach, Budge and his fellows embody the precarious fellowship of thieves whose friendship lasts only as long as the profit does.

Matt of the Mint

supporting

Also known as Matt

Matt belongs to Macheath's gang, the brotherhood of road agents whose loyalty is tested the moment the reward money starts to talk. His nickname ties him to the Mint, the lawless precinct where debtors and criminals shelter, marking him as a man formed entirely by the margins of the city. In the early and middle acts he helps establish Macheath's world as one of rough fellowship and shifting allegiance, a world the Peachums understand better than the highwaymen themselves.

Tom

minor

Also known as Tom

A highwayman, brother of Matt, appears in gang scenes.

Marybone

minor

A minor character, possibly a location or person.

The Beggar

supporting

Also known as Beggar

The Beggar appears in the frame, introducing the piece and returning to comment on it, so that the whole story of Peachum, Polly, and Macheath arrives already wrapped in a beggar's claim to authorship. His presence is a joke with teeth: a beggar writing an opera about thieves and whores mirrors the play's insistence that high and low society are the same trade under different names. He matters because he sets the tone — ironic, self-aware, and refusing to let the audience mistake the gallows humor for mere entertainment.

Filch

minor

Also known as Filch Betty

A young pickpocket in Peachum's employ.

Dolly Trull

minor

Also known as Trull

A prostitute and associate of the gang.

Mrs. Coaxer

minor

Also known as Coaxer

A prostitute in the gang, appears in tavern scenes.

Molly Brazen

minor

Also known as Molly

A prostitute, one of Macheath's acquaintances.

Betty Doxy

minor

Also known as Betty

A prostitute in the gang.

Mrs. Vixen

minor

Also known as Vixen

A prostitute, appears in the gang scenes.

Mrs. Slammekin

minor

Also known as Slammekin

A prostitute, appears in the gang.

Ned Clincher

minor

Also known as Ned

A highwayman in Macheath's gang.

Harry Paddington

minor

Also known as Harry, Henry Paddington

A highwayman, appears in the gang.

Jemmy Twitcher

minor

Also known as Jemmy

A highwayman, appears in the gang.

Crook-fingered Jack

minor

Also known as Jack

A pickpocket in the gang.

Nimming Ned

minor

Also known as Ned

A pickpocket in the gang.

Roger

minor

A minor character, possibly a constable or servant.

Black Moll

minor

A prostitute mentioned in the gang.

Betty Sly

minor

A prostitute mentioned in the gang.

Brown Will

minor

A minor character in the gang.

Slippery Sam

minor

A minor character in the gang.

Jack Ketch

minor

The hangman, appears in the condemned hold.

Bob Booty

minor

A highwayman, mentioned in the gang.

The Player

minor

Also known as Player

Interlocutor with the Beggar in the framing scenes.