Introduction
The Formation of the Criminal Atlantic
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23435322 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gwenda Morgan, Peter Rushton (0000-0002-7296-3557) |
| Year | 2004 |
| Pages | 1-8 |
| Publication date | 2004-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/9780230000872_1 |
| OpenAlex | W2478909272 |
| ISBN | 9780230000872 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
In August 1752, a performance of The Beggar’s Opera was advertised at the New Theatre, Upper Marlborough, by the Company of Comedians from Annapolis, capital of Maryland. Whether there were many convicts eager to be in the audience in what one visitor noted as a ‘tobaccohouse’, is not recorded, but there is a certain irony in the fact that England’s best-known dramatic representation of criminals was going to be performed in the colony with the highest proportion of transported convicts in its population. This was not uncommon, for Gay’s musical play provided one of the most popular entertainments in the colonies, in Virginia as well Maryland.1 If British felons did attend, they would only have become prouder of their criminal professions than before, at least so Daniel Defoe asserted (a remark one writer describes as ‘pretty rich from the author of Moll Flanders’).2 In England, according to apocryphal stories, youthful highwaymen were arrested in London with copies of The Beggar’s Opera in their pockets, and so influential was the live performance that one seventeen-year-old is supposed to have left the play and immediately spent his last guinea on a brace of pistols in order to emulate his stage hero, the gentlemanhighwayman MacHeath.3
Art · Art history · HAMLET (protein complex) · HERO · Irony · Literature · Media studies · Musical · Opera · Order (exchange) · Political science · Population · Representation (politics) · Sociology · Visitor pattern · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Demography · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |