The Beggar's Opera (Penguin Classics)
by John Gay
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Book Summary Information
Author: John GayContributor: Bryan Loughrey
Contributor: T. O. Treadwell
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1987-01-06
ISBN: 0140432205
Number of pages: 128
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780140432206
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Book Reviews of The Beggar's Opera (Penguin Classics)
Book Review: The Birth of Mack the Knife best read in this Regents Restoration Drama edition
Summary: 5 Stars
The beggar's opera,: And companion pieces (Crofts classics) is good as it includes extra writings from Mr. John Gay, friend of Jonathan Swift (the Irish cleric of The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift (Norton Critical Edition) and A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works (Dover Thrift Editions) and Gulliver's Travels (Oxford World's Classics)) and collaborator with Alexander Pope in the gathering and editting of Shakespeare's plays. Specifically the Croft edition contains excerpts from Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London.
We would wish very much to find a complete edition of the writings and plays of Mr. Gay, yet we are fortunate to find at least one here in this Regents Restoration Drama edition, the one for which he is most famous, as it was gratefully adapted by Mr. Bertolt Brecht some eighty years ago for the well known The Threepenny Opera (Penguin Classics), whose Kurt Weill music we groundlings know best in the one song Mack the Knife.
Here in the Regents edition we find the original play, with the longest section of this book the collection of sheet music with songs and lyrics, the melodies of which come from traditional airs of that time, as this was the earliest ballad opera. A brilliant introduction by Edgar V. Roberts presents fully the history, context, arguement and effects of this opera, which basically satirizes the felonoius larceny of the London aristocracy in the guise of cheap hoodlums and thieves, as if Dick Cheney's Halliburton ran and protected no more than your city, for a fee.
Read this book. Know your history. See what is happening today under our globalization and free trade agreements. Read this book.
A very helpful chronology completes this volume, setting Gay into the context of his day. This may be all we can hope for, and I certainly would like to read the rest of Trivia, and of Polly, and of The What D'ye Call It.
Summary of The Beggar's Opera (Penguin Classics)
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 "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.General Books
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