The interest which the forthcoming production of Gay's "Beggar's Opera" has aroused in Shanghai is witnessed by a reader sending in the following translation of a passage appearing in Andre Maurois' "Histoire d'Angleterre" which was published last year:
"With drunkenness violence increased, all the more dangerous because there were no police and because the army had been reduced, after the Treaty of Utrecht to 3,000 men for the whole of Great Britain. In the streets of London a gang of young cads of quality, the Mohawks, terrorized passers-by. On the roads, which were veritable: morasses, highwaymen robbed travellers. About 1725 everyone in London was talking of Jack Shepherd, a sort of Al Capone of the 18th century. This thief was popular. He only attacked the rich, taking their money with the manners of a gentleman, and distributing it generously. When for the last time he crossed London going from Newgate Prison to the gallows at Tyburn, it was a triumphal procession. On the life of this bandit the poet John Gay conceived the idea of writing a comic pastoral, a parody of the Italian operas, of what occurred in Newgate Prison, that astonishing place where thieves, so long as they had the money, were treated by their jailers as grand lords. Gay's work became the rage of the to Lively, quick, cynical, like "Figaro's Marriage which owe their fame to the times, to their aesthetic success and their historical importance.
pictures an immoral society which_ cannot control its bandits and which out of a residue of ferocity actually admires them."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.