The Grub Street Opera - Response

Response

Although the play was never performed, its revisions reflect how Fielding sought to cater to what the audiences saw was popular in the earlier version, The Welsh Opera, which including adding more songs. Although not performed on stage, the songs became popular on their own. This was especially true in the case of "The Roast Beef of Old England". Edgar Roberts, when examining the quality of the songs of the play, declared that "it is fair to say that The Grub-Street Opera is musically the most satisfactory of all the ballad operas written in the decade following The Beggar's Opera." Likewise, Robert Hume determined that The Grub-Street Opera was "one of the finest ballad operas of its time".

Other views focused on other aspects, including the possible topical statements; John Loftis argues that "this afterpiece in the form of ballad opera seems, in its rendering of Court gossip, to be a dramatization of Lord Hervey's Memoirs". Thomas Cleary wrote that the "Grub-Street Opera is a much better play than the two-act Welsh Opera. It is so much improved that the impossibility of staging it must have infuriated Fielding. Thomas Lockwood believes that both The Welsh Opera and The Grub-Street Opera are characterized by a "spirit of fun" but are complicated by the 18th-century politics that gave them birth.