The Grub Street Opera
The Grub-Street Opera is a play by Henry Fielding that originated as an expanded version of his play, The Welsh Opera. It was never put on for an audience and is Fielding's single print-only play. As in The Welsh Opera, the author of the play is identified as Scriblerus Secundus. Secundus also appears in the play and speaks of his role in composing the plays. In the The Grub-Street Opera the main storyline involves two men and their rival pursuit of women.
The play is Fielding's first truly political play and first ballad opera. Unlike The Welsh Opera, the play deals with morality from the beginning. Additionally, it linked to Fielding's previous attacks on the London theatre and inept writers. Fielding also used the virtue of female servants as a point of humor and to discuss morality, while using the effeminacy and dominance by women to mock various characters and discuss the issue of gender roles. Critics viewed The Grub-Street Opera positively, noting it to be a definite improvement on The Welsh Opera.
Read more about The Grub Street Opera: Background, Cast, Plot, Themes, Sources, Response, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words grub, street and/or opera:
“I have tasted but little bread in my life. It has been mere grub and provender for the most part. Of bread that nourished the brain and the heart, scarcely any. There is absolutely none on the tables even of the rich.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)