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PRIMARY SOURCE OF THE MONTH
Playbill for The Beggar’s Opera, Williamsburg, Virginia, ca. 1768.
Special Collections,
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library,
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
The first theatre in British North America was built on the Palace Green in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1716. The first theatre was a short-lived venture, but a second one was built on a site near the Capitol building in 1751. It was here that Lewis Hallam’s “Company of Comedians from London,” performed the first professional theatrical performance in British North America in 1752.
Playbills, such as the one above for The Beggar’s Opera, were used to advertise upcoming public performances and to attract patrons to attend the theatre. Surviving Williamsburg playbills indicate that then, as now, the most popular and successful plays dealt with the universal themes of love, loss, double meanings, and the triumph of good over evil.
The Beggar’s Opera, written by John Gay (1685–1732), was first performed in 1728 at Lincoln’s Inn Field in London. Known as the greatest theatrical success of the eighteenth century, the play took a satirical look at politics and the Italian opera and used recognizable tunes with new lyrics for its 69 songs. The play’s characters include pickpockets, thieves, highwaymen, scoundrels, and other “lesser sorts” of eighteenth-century London society. Several characters are thinly disguised portrayals of prominent English politicians, including Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. The music borrowed for the play included popular dance tunes and ballads, and music composed by Henry Purcell and George F. Handel.
The first known performance of The Beggar’s Opera in Williamsburg was June 3, 1768, under the musical direction of Williamsburg church organist Peter Pelham. In March 1771, the Virginia Gazette advertised the score “set to Musick” and available for purchase at the printing office.
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