Beggar's Opera

The beggar's opera

Gay, John

Roberts, Edgar V. (Edited By)

Literature & Fiction

Edward Arnold

‘Whore and rogue they call husband and wife: All professions be-rogue one another' The tale of Peachum, thief-taker and informer, conspiring to send the dashing and promiscuous highwayman Macheath to the gallows, became the theatrical sensation of the eighteenth century. In The Beggar’s Opera, John Gay turned conventions of Italian opera riotously upside-down, instead using traditional popular ballads and street tunes, while also indulging in political satire at the expense of the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Gay’s highly original depiction of the thieves, informers, prostitutes and highwaymen thronging the slums and prisons of the corrupt London underworld proved brilliantly successful in exposing the dark side of a corrupt and jaded society. Bryan Loughrey and T. O. Treadwell’s introduction examines the eighteenth-century background of musical theatre and opera, the changing cityscape of London and the corruption of the legal system. This edition also includes a note on the music in The Beggar’s Opera and suggestions for further reading. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Beggar's Opera (Penguin Classics)

Dramas & Plays

Penguin Classics

The Letters of John Gay

Burgess, C.F.

Essays & Correspondence

Oxford University Press

"Gamesters and Highwaymen are generally very good to their Whores, but they are very Devils to their Wives." Raucous, lyrical, witty, ironic and tragic by turns, The Beggar's Opera and Polly--published together here for the first time--offer a scathing and ebullient portrait of a society in which statesmen and outlaws, colonialists and pirates, are impossible to tell apart. With The Beggar's Opera, John Gay created one of the most enduringly popular works in English theatre history, and invented a new dramatic form, the ballad opera. Gay's daring mixture of caustic political satire, well-loved popular tunes, and a story of crime and betrayal set in the urban underworld of prostitutes and thieves was an overnight sensation. And its sequel, Polly, banned in Gay's lifetime, boasted a cross-dressing heroine and a cast of female adventurers, pirates, Indian princes, rebel slaves, and rapacious landowners--a culture in which all human relationships are reduced to commercial transactions. The Introduction to this edition explores Gay's use of criminal and rogue literature, the political context of the plays, Gay's attitude to slavery and piracy, his treatment of gender, and the plays' formal theatrical innovations. The text is the most accurate available, with notes that explain criminal and underworld slang and the topical allusions that gave Gay's satire its edge. The volume also includes an appendix on the sources for the tunes Gay used for the two plays, highlighting many cases where the songs' original words, familiar to contemporary audiences, give a bawdy or ironic double meaning to Gay's lyrics. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Beggar's Opera and Polly (Oxford World's Classics)

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars.
Western literary study flows out of eighteenth-century works by Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Denis Diderot, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others. Experience the birth of the modern novel, or compare the development of language using dictionaries and grammar discourses.

The poetical, dramatic, and miscellaneous works of John Gay

AMS Press

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Selected Poems of John Gay (Fyfield Books)

History & Criticism

Routledge

Fables Of Mr. John Gay: With An Italian Translation (Classic Reprint) (Italian Edition)

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Forgotten Books

The Poetical Works of John Gay: Volume 3

Poetry

Adamant Media Corporation

The Poetical Works of John Gay: Volume 1

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Fables Of Mr. John Gay (1773)

Kessinger Publishing

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