The Beggar’s Opera: A Site for Scholars, Performers, Teachers and Students breaks new ground by providing the first scholarly digital edition of the play and the first that makes substantial use of the multimedia functionalities of a digital environment, bringing the play alive both in its time and ours.
The Website
More specifically, the Beggars Opera site offers:
A new editorial approach: This site offers the only accessible edition of The Beggar’s Opera that integrates what scholars agree is the authoritative edition of the text (the first) and the music (the third), with some textual changes in the second and third that seem to have authorial warrant. Recent editions by Lewis (1973), Fuller (1983), and Gladfelder (2013), do not include the music, reasoning that it can be found elsewhere, as in Barlow’s standard edition of the music only (1990). But this splits apart the essential twinning of text and music, word and song at the heart of the play. This edition also seeks to acknowledge recent challenges to authorial intent as the determining criterion by retaining inconsistencies in printing where there is no good reason to assume authorial intent, thereby acknowledging the contingencies of the publication process. More on the editorial principles behind this edition can be found here.
A realization of the resources of a digital environment: Neither the print editions nor the Project Gutenberg (2008) edition enrich the experience of the text by providing audio and video clips as our site does; the Gutenberg Edition provides access to MIDI and pdf files that can be downloaded, but this does not provide the dynamic experience found on this site. In contrast, visitors to our site will be able to:hear audio of all of the airs by hovering over them click on links to audio and audiovisual performances access an image bank of playbills, pictures of performances and performers, and Beggar’s Opera merchandise ( g., playing cards and fans), among other things. engage with essays on the many historical contexts of the play that include audio and visual examples, among them political satire, the South Sea Bubble (the first stock market crash), the state of the theater at the time, the history of both Italian opera and ballads, the sources of the tunes, and adaptations. annotate the text privately or publicly using hypothes.is, interact with those overseeing the site and with other users; in addition to being able to contact the site curators, visitors will be able to deposit syllabi and suggest ideas for teaching and performing the play. provide a proof of concept for the digital presentation of music and text, especially musical theater: There is a surprising lack of digital sites that present texts combining music and text, and this is particularly true of musical theater. This may be due in part to the obstacles posed by acquiring rights to any text not in the public domain, but it is probably also due to the challenges posed by the necessarily mixed media of musical texts. Our site aims to help others who seek to make these works accessible in a digital format, including ways to combine the two standard languages for the scholarly presentation of text and music, the Text Encoding Initiative Extensive Markup Language (TEI-XML, or eTEI for short) and the Music Encoding Initiative Extensive Markup Language (MEI-XML, or MEI for short). These languages, which provide a rich lexicon for noting the features of texts and music, from speakers to locations to musical tempi, have rarely been brought together in a single project. .
More on editorial approach, as mentioned above:
The only recent editions to include the music are faulty in other ways. Lindley and Jones (2010) do not include the overture, despite using the third edition as the music copy-text, and they follow the second edition’s integration of the music into the body of the text, even though there is good reason to believe that the third edition, which reverts to the first’s practice of putting the scored music at the end, had authorial sanction. The other version from the past to print music and text, from Project Gutenberg (2008)–which is also the only other online version–reprints Lovat Fraser’s 1921 edition, which, though historically significant, is itself based on the non-standard 1765 edition. Other editions that combine text and music are either long out of print (Roberts and Smith, 1969) and/or are problematic in other ways.
