The Beggar's Opera

by John Gay

Overview

The Beggar's Opera introduced to theater the ballad-opera and an immortal cast of characters. The Peachums, employers of a company of pickpockets, shoplifters, and thieves, raised their daughter Polly for finer things, but she has done a dreadful deed. She has married for love. Her husband is Macheath, so exquisite a robber he might have been a lawyer or lord, and so devoted to matrimony that he has two or three wives already.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781505538328
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	12/14/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	42
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.09(d)

About the Author

David Lindley is Professor of Renaissance Literature at Leeds University. He is the author of Shakespeare and Music in the Arden Critical Companions Series and editor of The Tempest for the New Cambridge Shakespeare series.


Vivien Jones is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Gender and Culture at Leeds University. She has edited Evelina and Jane Austen: Selected Letters for Oxford World's Classics and has written widely on women in the eighteenth century.

Editorial Reviews

...with Ilona Sekacz's complete musical overhaul, [Caird] raises the dramatic fever of the score to match Gay's wonderfully savage and scabrous script.

Observer (London)

Fresh as milk, horny as hell, a dream, a nightmare, a cross-section of an ant hill, John Gay's BEGGAR'S OPERA is like life. It is beautiful, it is there, and it goes on. And, in John Caird's sensationally seductive production you never want it to end...Here's variety before the word was invented.

Midweek Magazine

THE BEGGAR'S OPERA...is obviously full of zest and fascination...There is so much life and vigour in the whole thing...It was absolutely spell-binding...

Oxford Magazine

Offers a useful performance history of the satirical ballad-opera...the New Mermaids [edition] includes music as well as words for the songs.” —Plays International

From the Publisher

Offers a useful performance history of the satirical ballad-opera...the New Mermaids [edition] includes music as well as words for the songs.

Plays International