Where to find restoration drama?

The Beggar's Opera introduced to theater the ballad-opera and an immortal cast of characters. The Peachums, employers of a company of pickpockets, shoplifters, and thieves, raised their daughter Polly for finer things, but she has done a dreadful deed. She has married for love. Her husband is Macheath, so exquisite a robber he might have been a lawyer or lord, and so devoted to matrimony that he has two or three wives already.

First published in 1676, The Virtuoso set a standard for theatrical satire. It was the most extensive dramatic treatment of modern science since Jonson's The Alchemist and took as its target no less than the Royal Society of London. Shadwell's barbs hit their targets often and cleanly. In 1689 he became Poet Laureate of England, a position he held until his death in 1692.

The virtuoso of the title is Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, who like many after him confuses the extent of a collection with the depth of a science. Sir Gimcrack is fascinated by the geography of the moon, the worlds in his microscope, and the possibilities of human flight. More seriously andfor Shadwell's audiencemore comically, his obsession with his arrays of worms and spiders proceeds at the expense of his wife and two beautiful nieces.

The play also introduces Sir Formal Trifle, a pedantic ciceronian orator and coxcomb. His character established thereafter the theatrical type of the know-it-all blowhard. Famous for its wit and high-speed changes, The Virtuoso is also a display of the prestige of modern science and the pomposity of its ameteurs.

Mrs. Millwood is beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious, but London gives her no means of support except to seduce men. Love for her leads eighteen-year-old Barnwell to deceit, theft, and murder.

"What are your laws," Mrs. Millwood asks, "but the fools wisdom and the cowards valor, the instrument and screen of all your villainies by which you punish in others what you act out yourselves, had you been in their circumstances? The judge who condemns the poor man for being a thief had been a thief himself, had he been poor. Thus you go on deceiving and being deceived, harassing, plaguing, and destroying one another, but women are your universal prey."

First performed in 1731, The London Merchant became on of the most popular plays of the century. A chronicler of the age, Theophilus Cibber called it "almost a new species of tragedy."

Nowhere better than in the history of its railroads is the growth of the Old West revealed, and for Colorado the development of the Denver and Rio Grande Western epitomizes the changes that took place between 1870 and the present. Robert G. Athearn's intimate knowledge of the West has enabled him to write a gripping account of the famous narrow-gauge Denver and Rio Grande as it inched its way south, then turned west into the Rockies. By f1883 it had joined with the Rio Grande Western to become Colorado's only line across the mountains. The Dotsero Cutoff and the six-mile Moffat Tunnel put Denver on a transcontinental line for the first time. Twelve maps and fifty-five illustrations help tell the story.