The Beggar's Opera

Gay, John & Edgar V. Roberts & Edward Smith

ISBN 10: 0803253613 / ISBN 13: 9780803253612

Published by University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1969

About this Item

Regents Restoration Drama Series; 5.5 X 0.62 X 8 inches; 238 pages.

Seller Inventory # 44987

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Beggar's Opera
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska
• Publication Date: 1969
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803253613
• ISBN 13: 9780803253612
• Binding: Softcover
• Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Plays

About this title

Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

The great lords and powerful public officials of early eighteenth-century England are represented as highwaymen and thieves in this deliciously satirical ballad opera. In addition to its burlesque of the contemporary vogue for Italian operatic styles, John Gay's 1728 masterpiece ridicules a broad spectrum of political figures and social conventions—marriage, lawyers, trade, and even Walpole, the prime minister.
Depicting crime and vice at every level of society, The Beggar's Opera offers a witty and powerful indictment of greed, hypocrisy, and corruption in all social classes. When Peachum, a receiver of stolen goods, discovers that a notorious highwayman has eloped with his daughter, the wily old villain turns informer and collects the reward money as his prospective son-in-law is hauled off to prison. Events take an increasingly absurd turn as the dashing outlaw romances the jailer's daughter and effects an escape, only to return to the shadow of the gallows for a farcical climax that parodies the sentimental tragedy of the day.