The Beggar's Opera
By John Gay

See Source Texts for information about the digital edition. Proofreading, markup, and editorial commentary are original to this Literature in Context Edition, and undertaken by Students and Staff of The University of Virginia, Tonya Howe
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Sources

London : Printed for John Watts, at the Printing Office in Wild-Court, near Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1728The XML was drawn from the 1921 HTML edition available in Project Gutenberg, and corrected to match the 2nd edition available on Google Books. The Beggar's Opera was first performed in Lincoln's Inn Fields, under the management of John Rich, on January 29, 1728. It represented a new form of theater, the ballad opera, which drew both on the world of the popular ballad and the elite world of the Italian opera, then all the rage in London. The play is set it in and around the famed Newgate Prison, populated with the characters of the London underworld. The play is deeply satiric, offering a caricature of the aristocracy and the underworld, the elaborately stylized forms of Italian opera, and the hypocrisies of the justice system itself. It was incredibly popular, running for an astonishing 62 consecutive performances; the actress playing Polly--Lavinia Fenton--became an overnight sensation. The play represented a new form of theater, the modern musical, setting its songs to well-known contemporary tunes, and it grew from a period of intense experimentation on the London stage in the 1720s. Two hundred years later, in 1928, Bertholt Brecht reworked Gay's satirical ballad opera into The Threepenny Opera, drawing on both Gay's formal innovations and satiric visions to critique the work of modern capitalism in Germany. Brecht's collaborator, Kurt Weil, wrote the score for the play, drawing on jazz and music hall influences; similarly, Gay's collaborator, Johann Christoph Pepusch, scored the ballad opera using eighteenth-century equivalents--popular ballad tunes, hymns, and airs, at odds with the conventions and forms of serious opera. Gay wrote a sequal to The Beggar's Opera, Polly, set in the West Indies and censored during Gay's life.This digital edition includes audio from LibriVox, as well as harpsichord music generated from notations available in The Traditional Tune Archive by Michael Eskin's ABC Transcription Tools. There are, however, several good full audio productions, which are worth listening to, including the Frederic and Richard Austin recording from 1954, which is quite lively and engaging, available from the Internet Archive.Online: Project Gutenberg, 2008This digital edition is built on the Project Gutenberg etext (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25063/25063-h/25063-h.htm), which uses the 1921 Heinemann edition edited by Claud Lovat Fraser and prepared for Project Gutenberg by Louise Hope.Onine: Internet Archive, 2018A facsimile edition of the 2nd edition is available on Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/beggarsoperaseco00gayj).

Editorial Statements

Research informing these annotations draws on publicly-accessible resources, with links provided where possible. Annotations have also included common knowledge, defined as information that can be found in multiple reliable sources. If you notice an error in these annotations, please contact lic.open.anthology@gmail.com.

Original spelling and capitalization is retained, though the long s has been silently modernized and ligatured forms are not encoded.

Hyphenation has not been retained, except where necessary for the sense of the word.

Page breaks have been retained. Catchwords, signatures, and running headers have not. Where pages break in the middle of a word, the complete word has been indicated prior to the page beginning.

Materials have been transcribed from and checked against first editions, where possible. See the Sources section.

Citation

Gay, John. The Beggar's Opera, Printed for John Watts, at the Printing Office in Wild-Court, near Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1728 . Literature in Context: An Open Anthology. http://anthology.lib.virginia.edu/work/Gay/gay-beggars-opera. Accessed: 2024-11-21T11:11:56.148Z

Linked Data

Explore the collection using linked open data.

TEST Audio
[TP] THE
BEGGAR'S
OPERA.
As it is Acted at the
THEATRE-ROYAL
IN
LINCOLNS-INN-FIELDS

 Written by Mr. GAY.

 --Nos haec novimus esse nibil.Mart.
The SECOND EDITION:
To which is Added
The OUVERTURE in SCORE;
And the MUSICK prefix'd to each SONG. LONDON:
Printed for JOHN WATTS, at the Printing-Office
in Wild-Court, near Lincoln's-Inn-Fields.
MDCCXXVIII.
 [Price 1s. 6d.]
Page [TP]Page [TP]

Footnotes