The Beggar's Opera is an important play, both in terms of its effects on its own time, and its interpretations in later periods. The opening run of the play lasted sixy-nine performances at the Lincoln's Inn Fields, which at the time was the most extensive run of any English play (CITE Regents TBO) . It has been reprinted consistently since its first printing in 1728, and has had been revived during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the most notable recent example being the 1920 revival, which features a redone score by Frederic Austin. In addition, it is the basis for Berthold Brecht's Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), a loose adaptation of the play dealing with primarily marxist themes. Other recent echoes of the play exist, which, although they are perhaps less influential in themselves, do confirm the lasting impression left by The Beggar's Opera.
The Beggar's Opera is, if not the first, at least the first successful ballad opera. Like none of the (perhaps two) ballad operas before it, and like few after it, it caught the popular imagination of eighteenth century England, selling out shows for multiple seasons, and producing a flood of merchandising and a score of (mostly forgettable) imitators. Its sequel, Polly (1729), despite being banned from performance in London, sold very well in subscription form, and was performed often in outlying regions.
Furthermore, The Beggar's Opera has maintained a consistent popular appeal from its first performance to the present. Though the personal attacks on and references to Robert Walpole and Jonathan Wild may have lost some of their immediacy for modern readers, the presentation of a society where "Gold from Law can take out the Sting," (Video) has an immediate relevance. Issues of wealth and justice in the play were as vital when Berthold Brecht read it as in 1728, and as vital in 2005 as they were for Brecht.
The Beggar's Opera is a play well suited to presentation as an online edition. The play consists of three media: text, audio, and video (or, the written dialogue and any notes, the music, airs, and spoken performance of the dialogue, and the performer's motions onstage). A printed edition can contain written dialogue and notes, sheet music, and pictures. It can convey costuming and approximate scene composition, but cannot represent motion, or effectively collate the visual and sonic actions onstage. It can convey the notes that were played, but not produce the sound itself. A filmed performance can represent the visual and audio elements, but it provides no good method for footnoting, nor a written text of the play. The internet, however, is capable of, within limits, representing all of these aspects, from digitally encoded video and audio, to the text itself.
The most basic of the play's opportunies for multimedia presentation are the airs interspersed throughout it. There are a total of sixty-nine seperate airs in the play, ten of them in Act 3 Scene 13, and comprising nearly the sum total of that scene. A printed or e-text verion of an air gives the reader access to the lyrics, the portion of the song that can be contained by the text. This certainly has advantages in ease of reprinting and distribution, as well as allowing for footnoting and easy cross-textual analysis with other parts of the play. In a recorded performance of an air, the audience has access to the sound of the melody, concurrent with the lyrics, providing a far greater richness of experience, and bringing the auditor one step closer to an understanding of the air as a synthesis of verbal and auditory elements. However, several advantages of textual presentation, most notably the ease of comparison and cross-comparison with other sections of the play, are curtailed, if not lost. A hypertext edition, however, can present both textual and auditory aspects, concurrently. The Beggar's Opera benefits markedly from such presentation. A reader familiar with any of the broadside ballads whose tunes are used by these airs is provided an additional level of context, one which the original audience certainly possessed, and which Gay exploited to full effect. For example, Air III, "If Any Wench Venus's Girdle Wear" uses the same tune as a popular ballad "The Farmer's Daughter." Compare the lyrics here. With this context provided, an additional complexity is provided to the air: a tension between the two different sets of lyrics. Even a fairly unprepared modern reader can, with difficulty, produce a similar "Aha!" moment, upon listening to Air LXVII and recognizing the tune of "Greensleeves."
Likewise, certain scenes in the play read signifigantly differently than they represent onstage. In any play, there is a significant difference between the experience of reading the play and seeing it performed (although there is also a similar difference between reading two editions or seeing two performances). However, The Beggar's Opera is a play with far deeper divide between the experience of reading and the experience of viewing. Certain scenes are impossible to completely grasp without a level of visual and auditory presence that is unavailable in a text edition. This problem is compounded in The Beggar's Opera, and other plays of its period, by the paucity of stage directions and the antiquity of the appropriate scenery and dress. Environments, costume, and often blocking must be guessed at, either due to insufficient knowledge of the period, or insufficient directions in the play. A multimedia edition including video, however, can easily provide at least a second-hand version of the audience-experience. As an example, read scene 2.4. Upon a cursory glance, or even after a few re-readings, it appears to begin with a long monologue, followed by a single stage direction. It is, presented like this, a literary artifact, solid and unbroken in the center of the page. However, if you will view the scene, you will see that the presence of nine bodies carousing on stage (eight of them clad as prostitutes) produces a vastly different experience than the single line of text "[A dance a la ronde in the French manner; near the end of it this Song and Chorus.]" would bring to mind. Footnotes can provide some of the context (informing one that it is a country dance, and thus low class or popular), but there is still a great gap in the understanding of the scene. In addition, pictures and video provide a look into at least one possible set of blocking and costuming decisions, which helps to establish for the reader what even the sections of the play not directly presented in the video clip might look like. Finally, the performance is immediately accessible, without the need to switch attention from one media device to another, thus preserving the reader's flow of consciousness.
Furthermore, an online version can, in many ways, enhance the presentation of these multimedia elements, even past its ability to present the reader with more aspects of content. Using the ability of HTML (or, in this case, its successor XHTML) to make direct cross-references between different text or image segments, or even from text or image segments to different media, the editor has far greater power to provide context to the reader, without having to worry about what medium the context is in, or the physical logistics of providing it. A single scene can be presented both visually and audibly, and could be linked to alternate editions, period analogues, or critical articles, to whatever degree of depth and breadth that the editor feels is helpful. Likewise, the reader now has a far greater level of agency in his/her own reading, an ability to pick and choose what contexts he/she absorbs, and to what level he/she allows the contexts provided to interrupt his/her flow of consciousness. Additionally, internet presentation already contains elements that aid in preserving flow of consciousness, such as the lack of physical page breaks, and pop-up or raise-on-cursor footnotes.
But perhaps the most important advantage of presenting The Beggar's Opera online is the ability to include a variety of context materials without cluttering the text. The Beggar's Opera is a play that begs for additional contextual material, and for which a great deal of such material exists. To properly understand many of the references in the text, one must be familiar with the world it is set in; with the political, social, and theatrical realities that Gay satirizes. Gay's play connects strongly to the moment of its production. The attacks on Walpole and Wilde, the references to the vogue for opera, the look at the inner workings of Newgate: these things, familiar and vital in 1728, require explanation for the 21st century reader.