Word: beggared
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Beggar's Opera', and the common question, whether it was pernicious in its effects; having been introduced...
...Beggar's Opera" took London by surprise and fifty years later it was still a favorite theme for polite dispute. The occasion on which Johnson coined this mouth-filling dictum is memorable for another reason; -- the attentive Boswell for once disagreed with his master's defense of the play, and declared "the gaiety and heroines of a highwayman very captivating to a youthful imagination", and a temptation which "it requires a cool and strong judgment to resist". Boswell was not alone in his brave opposition; no loss a figure than Edmund Burke "thought the literary merit of "The Beggar...
...century and a half has not been sufficient to answer this academic question. Last week at New Haven, that baptismal font of good plays and evil, the revived "Beggar's Opera" came for a "one-night stand" after winning London for three years, and the whole of this country during an extensive tour. But New Haven, accustomed to passing independent judgment, was inclined to be inhospitable. Professor John Million Berdan, of Yale and Early Tudor fame, took the double role of Burke and Boswell, calling the Play banal and immoral. A good citizeness of the town, alarmed by these aspersions...
...revived it. Surely he did so not because he wanted it to be preserved as a sample of ancestral art, but because he thought it was still good entertainment for the regular theatre-goer. He was right--but the regular theatre-goer hasn't waked up yet. "The Beggar's Opera" was an identical experiment, but in that case the theatre-goer did wake up. Perhaps it was the press-agent...
Fine Arts.--"The Beggar's Opera", by John Gay, 1728. Last week of a delightful archaism. The music alone has won it many "repeaters...