John Gay, Ballad Opera and the Théâtr la foire - Volume 11 Issue 2
Contents:
JOHN GAY
The Beggar’s Opera, a ballad opera three acts by John Gay, performed at Lln’s Inn Fields Theatre, London, 1728 and published the same year. The work b edy and polil satire prose terspersed wh songs set to ntemporary and tradnal English, Irish, Sttish, and * john gay theatre *
The Beggar’s Opera, a ballad opera three acts by John Gay, performed at Lln’s Inn Fields Theatre, London, 1728 and published the same year. In , Gay portrays the liv of a group of thiev and prostut 18th-century London.
Gay ritur the ernment, fashnable society, marriage, and Italian operatic style. Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill based their ballad opera Die Dreigroschenoper (1928; The Threepenny Opera) on Gay’s work.
JOHN GAY, BALLAD OPERA AND THE THéâTR LA FOIRE
John Gay, English poet and dramatist, chiefly remembered as the thor of The Beggar’s Opera, a work distguished by good-humoured satire and technil assurance. A member of an ancient but impoverished Devonshire fay, Gay was ted at the ee grammar school Barnstaple. He was * john gay theatre *
John Gay, (born June 30, 1685, Barnstaple, Devon, Eng. A member of an ancient but impoverished Devonshire fay, Gay was ted at the ee grammar school Barnstaple. Gay’s journalistic terts are clearly seen a pamphlet, The Prent State of W (1711), a survey of ntemporary perdil publitns.
It is such lite probg of the surface of social life that Gay excels.
Gay was a member, together wh Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Arbuthnot, of the Scribles Club, a lerary group that aimed to ridicule pedantry.
JOHN GAY THEATRE, BARNSTAPLE
The iends ntributed to two of Gay’s satiril plays: The What D’ye Call It (1715) and Three Hours After Marriage (1717) most succsful play was The Beggar’s Opera, produced London on Jan. “Hont” John Gay lost most of his money through disastro vtment South Sea stock, but he nohels left £6, 000 when he died.
(John Gay, A Poem: In a Letter to a Lady (1714)) For nearly a century scholars have suggted that dramatic precents for English ballad opera might be found the French theatre. In 1937 Edmond Gagey was the first morn theatril historian to speculate that French mil theatre works of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuri were mols for John Gay's supposedly ‘origal’ new genre:. Footnote 2 Gagey spected that the popular fair entertaments might have fluenced Gay, wrg: ‘How nvenient would be at this pot to disver a neat ltle passage … provg beyond qutn that Gay was faiar wh the French édi en vvill!
Footnote 3 Dpe Gagey's hunch, however, he uld not fd any pellg evince that credibly lked the édi en vvill wh Gay. Gay probably saw the édi en vvill performed durg his trips to France 1717 and 1719. Calhoun Wton, his 1993 book John Gay and the London Theatre, hypothized that Gay might also have observed the Parisian troup while they were London and heard them sg their vvill live.