The Beggar's Opera
Maclaine could not have been the model for Captain Macheath, antihero of John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera" (reinvented by Berthold Brecht as "Mack the Knife"), because "The Beggar's Opera" was written in 1728, when Maclaine was only four. (The preferred claimant for that distinction is Jack Sheppard.) Rather, Maclaine's romantic image owed something to the popular example of Macheath, the chivalrous highwayman, reinforced by the fact that Macheath's character in some measure satirized Sir Robert Walpole (1st Earl of Orford, died 1745), Horace Walpole's father.