The Beggar's Opera is a ballad opera, a satiric play using some of the conventions of opera, but without the recitative. It is one of the watershed plays in Augustan drama. The lyrics of the airs in the play are set to popular broadsheet ballads, opera arias, church hymns, and folk tunes of the time. The original run of The Beggar's Opera, of 62 successive performances, was the longest run in the theatre up to that time.
A spoken word version of this edition is available at LibriVox
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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