The Beggar's Opera and Other Eighteenth-Century Plays

by David W. Lindsay (Editor)

The Everyman Paperback Classics series offers the latest scholarship on the works of the world's greatest poets, writers and philosophers. Each edition includes a comprehensive introduction, chronology, notes, appendix, critical responses, and a text summary. Presented in an affordable edition with wide format pages for generous margins for notes. Contact your sales rep or call Tuttle for a complete list of available titles.

Genres: Plays, Drama

Paperback

Published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Joelendil]

I enjoyed reading this, but for me a big part of the interest was seeing what English plays looked like a century or so after Shakespeare (especially since theater was shut down during the commonwealth period). Some of the plots felt Shakespearian, especially the historical Cato, but the language usage seemed so flat by comparison (but who doesn’t?).

My enjoyment of the plays themselves varied quite a bit. Two or three of them featured the kind of humor that revolves mostly around adultery, which I’ve never found amusing no matter how hilarious early English lit seems to regard it. It’s been a while since I read this, so the details on some of them them blend together, but I definitely remember liking the historical Cato and the farcical, trope-mocking The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great. Overall, worth reading if you like classic English plays.

[C. Michael]

Decent affordable edition of these plays, especially for a selection generally considered to be among the most significant of their era, but with little additional critical material. I am not much of a fan of these plays, particularly not of The Beggar's Opera, even if I recognize its historical significance. But for an affordable collection, this is decent.

[Blue Book Corner]

It was okay. I'm not crazy about 18th century plays. To be fair, these were probably meant to be acted and are therefore less interesting when read. I also just finished reading "Eighteenth Century Women Dramatists" and the only difference between the women and the men was that the men obviously enjoyed using derogatory slang to refer to the women in their writing.