The Beggar's Opera [SEP] narrative location
run of 1,463 performances at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, London, which was one of the longest runs in history for any piece of musical theatre at that time.
The piece satirised Italian opera, which had become popular in London. According to "The New York Times": "Gay wrote the work more as an anti-opera than an opera, one of its attractions to its 18th-century London public being its lampooning of the Italian opera style and the English public's fascination with it." Instead
, the most famous highwayman in English drama is Captain Macheath, hero of John Gay's 18th-century ballad opera "The Beggar's Opera". The legend of Dick Turpin owes an enormous amount to "Rookwood" (1834), in which a heavily fictionalised Turpin is one of the main characters. Alfred Noyes's narrative poem "The Highwayman" has been immensely popular ever since its publication in 1906.
From the early 18th century, collections of short stories of highwaymen and other notorious criminals became very popular.