Download or read book The Beggar s Opera and Polly written by John Gay and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Gamesters and Highwaymen are generally very good to their Whores, but they are very Devils to their Wives.' With The Beggar's Opera (1728), 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. Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum have become famous well beyond the confines of Gay's original play, and in its sequel, Polly, banned in Gay's lifetime, their adventures continue in the West Indies. With a cross-dressing heroine and a cast of female adventurers, pirates, Indian princes, rebel slaves, and rapacious landowners, Polly lays bare a culture in which all human relationships are reduced to commercial transactions. 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. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range 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, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Download or read book Polly written by John Gay and published by . This book was released on 1729 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Beggar s Opera written by Frank Kidson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1922, this book contains a history of English opera described through the lens of The Beggar's Opera, first performed in 1728. Kidson details the background to the opera's creation, its author, and its lasting impact on the English opera scene. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the English opera and English musical history.
Download or read book Dead Dog in a Suitcase and Other Love Songs written by Carl Grose and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-27 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kneehigh Theatre Company presents Dead Dog in a Suitcase written by Carl Grose. What the HELL is the world coming to? Based on The Beggar's Opera, John Gay's classic musical satire, Dead Dog in a suitcase (and other love songs) is busting with wit, wonder and weirdness. An extraordinary Kneehigh cast of actor-musicians shoot, hoot and shimmy their way through this twisted morality tale of our times...by turns SHOCKING, HILARIOUS, HEARTFELT and ABSURD! Mayor Goodman has been assassinated. Contract killer Macheath has just married Pretty Polly Peachum and they plan to escape to a better world – but they aren't going anywhere. Not if pickled pilchard, hair gel and concrete tycoon Les Peachum and his wife have anything to do with it. See, they aren't happy with their daughter marrying Macheath. Not one bit. Before the day is out Macheath will face the hangman's noose and much more besides. All the while, the dogs are howling, the pier is creaking, the babes are crying, the concrete is cracking and the truth won't stay hidden for much longer... This is now, this is it The world is poor and man's a shit The game is rigged, nothing's truer Death's a joke and life a sewer!
Download or read book John Gay s The Beggar s Opera written by Harold Bloom and published by Chelsea House. This book was released on 1988 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Trivia written by John Gay and published by . This book was released on 1716 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Marriage A La Mode written by John Dryden and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-13 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dryden's audiences in 1671, both aristocratic and middle-class, would have been quick to respond to the themes of disputed royal succession, Francophilia and loyalty among subjects in his most successful tragicomedy. In the tragic plot, written in verse, young Leonidas has to struggle to assert his place as the rightful heir to the throne of Sicily and to the hand of the usurper's daughter. In the comic plot, written in prose, two fashionable couples (much more at home in London drawing-rooms than at the Sicilian court) play at switching partners in the 'modern' style. The introduction of this edition argues that Dryden's own ambivalence about King Charles and his entourage, on whom he came to rely more on more for patronage, manifests itself in both plots; most of all perhaps in the excessively Francophile Melantha, whose affectation cannot quite hide her endearing joie-de-vivre.
Download or read book John Gay and the London Theatre written by Calhoun Winton and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Beggar's Opera, often referred to today as the first musical comedy, was the most popular dramatic piece of the eighteenth century—and is the work that John Gay (1685-1732) is best remembered for having written. That association of popular music and satiric lyrics has proved to be continuingly attractive, and variations on the Opera have flourished in this century: by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, by Duke Ellington, and most recently by Vaclav Havel. The original opera itself is played all over the world in amateur and professional productions. But John Gay's place in all this has not been well defined. His Opera is often regarded as some sort of chance event. In John Gay and the London Theatre, the first book-length study of John Gay as dramatic author, Calhoun Winton recognized the Opera as part of an entirely self-conscious career in the theatre, a career that Gay pursued from his earliest days as a writer in London and continued to follow to his death. Winton emphasizes Gay's knowledge of and affection for music, acquired, he argues, by way of his association with Handel. Although concentrating on Gay and his theatrical career, Winton also limns a vivid portrait of London itself and of the London stage of Gay's time, a period of considerable turbulence both within and outside the theatre. Gay's plays reflect in varying ways and degrees that social, political, and cultural turmoil. Winton's study sheds new light not only on Gay and the theatre, but also on the politics and culture of his era.
Download or read book Threepenny Novel written by Bertolt Brecht and published by [London] : B. Hanison. This book was released on 1956 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brecht's only novel is, of course, based on his own Threepenny Opera, which was itself based on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Set in Victorian London, the novel feels similar to Dickens in many ways, but written with a very dry humour and none of the sentimentality. The plot mostly involves the extremely dodgy business dealings of the characters Peachum and Macheath, along with some equally dubious bankers and financiers - in fact it feels surprisingly relevant to current times! A satirical yet rather subtle attack on capitalist society, Brecht's vision here is of a world in which the poor and weak are continually exploited in the most casual fashion by the powerful and unscrupulous who always come out on top. It's very good writing but may be a little slow-going for some."--Goodreads
Download or read book Kurt Weill The Threepenny Opera written by Stephen Hinton and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1990-07-26 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book on the best known of the Weill-Brecht collaborations which explores the extent and significance of the composer's contribution. After a detailed reconstruction of the work's genesis and continued revision over three decades, Stephen Hinton examines the spin-offs on which Weill and Brecht participated: the instrumental suite, the film, the lawsuit, the novel, and the musical and textual revisions of songs. In a survey of the stage history, Hinton pays particular attention to pioneering productions in Germany and Great Britain. Kim Kowalke provides an exhaustive account of the history of The Threepenny Opera in America, Geoffrey Abbott addresses questions concerning authentic performance practice, and David Drew analyses large-scale motivic relationships in the music. Among the earliest writings on the work reprinted here, those by Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin appear for the first time in English translation. The book contains numerous illustrations, a discography, and music examples.
Download or read book Deep Play written by Dianne Dugaw and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Deep Play" examines the emergence of modern self- and social-consciousness in eighteenth-century Britain as an awareness of class and culture. It examines popular ballads and songs, country dances, catches, mumming plays, beliefs and sayings, fables, stories, and legends as these plebeian cultural materials are brought by Gay to comment on "polite" opera, drama, and literature. Illustrated.
Download or read book Mistress Peachum s Pleasure written by Lisa Hilton and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2006 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the first 'Polly Peachum,' the eighteenth century actress who became the Duchess of Bolton, Lavinia Fenton.
Download or read book The Convict s Opera written by Stephen Jeffreys and published by Nick Hern Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A witty re-imagining of the world's first musical, now set on a convict ship heading for Australia.
Download or read book Selected Works written by John Wilmot Earl of Rochester and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2004-10-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The brightest star at the court of King Charles II, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), lived a life of reckless debauchery and sexual adventuring that led to his death at the age of thirty-three. He was described by Samuel Johnson as having "blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness". Rochester was also one of the wittiest and most complex poets of the seventeenth century, writing comic verse, scurrilous satires and highly explicit erotica. With endless literary disguises, rhymes and alliteration, humour and humanity, Rochester's poems hold up a mirror to the extravagances and absurdities of his age.--From publisher description.
Download or read book John Gay a Profession of Friendship written by David Nokes and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * First full-length biography of John Gay for over 50 years This major biography is the first full-length life of John Gay (1685-1732) for over fifty years. David Nokes's detailed and extensive research has unearthed several new discoveries, including hitherto unpublished letters, and possible attributions. Presenting Gay as a complex character, tornbetween the hopes of court preferment and the assertion of literary independence, this book is at once a lively and readable biography for the non-specialist, as well as a comprehensive and scholarly study. Perhaps best known for The Beggar's Opera, John Gay is here revealed to be a contradictory figure whose life defies strict generic categories. Often cast as a neglected genius, dependent upon others, Gay in fact left a healthy estate after his death. Depicted both as childlike innocent and rakishladies' man by his friends, the same writer produced Polly, the most successful and subversive theatrical satire of his generation, which was banned from the stage. David Nokes argues that Gay's self-effacing and self-mocking literary persona was largely responsible for perpetuating an image of himself as a genial literary non-entity. Hence Gay's authorship has been frequently questioned and often attributed, at least in part, to his friends in the ScriblerusClub - Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Parnell. John Gay, A Profession of Friendship finally views Gay as a man whose struggles for literary and social recognition led him, paradoxically, to project a seemingly nebulous personality.
Download or read book The Power of Laughter and Satire in Early Modern Britain written by Mark Knights and published by Boydell Press is. This book was released on 2017 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars show how laughter and satire in early modern Britain functioned in a variety of contexts both to affirm communal boundaries and to undermine them.
Download or read book She Stoops to Conquer and Other Comedies written by Nigel Wood and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Modern Husband * The Clandestine Marriage * She Stoops to Conquer * Wild Oats This edition brings together four eighteenth-century comedies that illustrate the full variety of the century's drama. Fielding's The Modern Husband , written before the 1737 Licensing Act that restricted political and social comment, depicts wife-pandering and widespread social corruption. InGarrick and Colman's The Clandestine Marriage two lovers marry in defiance of parental wishes and rue the consequences. She Stoops to Conquer explores the comic and not-so-comic consequences of mistaken identity, and in Wild Oats, the 'strolling player' Rover is a beacon of hope at a time ofunrest. Part of the Oxford English Drama series, this edition has modern-spelling texts, critical introduction, wide-ranging annotation and an informative bibliography.
