The enormous popularity of The Beggar's Opera gave rise to a remarkable series of plays known as ballad opera, a form that dominated the eighteenth-century London stage during the 1730s, a crucial decade in the development of English theatre. Although virtually every major playwright of the period, including Colley Cibber, Henry Fielding and George Lillo, experimented with the form, ballad operas have been dismissed as artless and insignificant imitations. Arguing that the failure to understand these plays stems from an inability to conceptualize them as a coherent dramatic form, I propose a theory of genre that regards literary categories not as logical taxonomies but as social institutions that constitute texts. I also develop a method for exploring the process of literary imitation, showing how numerous acts of varying an exemplar text combine to create a stable literary form. Drawing on evidence from not only the plays themselves but also eighteenth-century periodicals, dedications, letters, and advertisements, I demonstrate how ballad opera developed into a genre unified by an insistent effort to reveal of the arbitrariness of legal and cultural norms. Unified in its insistence that money is the sole arbiter of virtue, ballad opera explored corruption if every phase of public life, and gleefully championed insincerity, acquisition, and self-promotion as the only logical response to the emerging marketplace economy. Additionally, as the dominant theatrical genre of its time, ballad opera began to change the social function of theatre itself, enticing mass audiences to the patent houses, encouraging dramatic innovation, and using the stage for political protest. These transformations were not universally tolerated: ballad opera was the most frequently censored dramatic form and both the primary cause and main victim of the restrictive Licensing Act--legislation that brought an end to both ballad opera and theatrical experimentation in general. This dissertation therefore resolves a paradox that has troubled previous critics--namely, why such seemingly innocuous plays were the subject of so much government scrutiny. Once one recognizes the genre's influence on reception, ballad operas no longer can be dismissed as frivolous entertainments; they demand attention as social critiques of considerable power and ingenuity.

Last modified

• 07/26/2018

Creator

• Douglas Franklin O'Keefe

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N26F0V

Subject

• English

Keyword

• English

Date created

• 2007-05-11

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright