 “The Beggars” is one of Plath’s poems seemingly set in Benidorm, Spain. If Plath had been reading the newspapers from home, which Aurelia might have sent, she would have seen that a new version of Faust opened at the Theatre on the Green in Wellesley, running July through August. In an article entitled, “The Beggar’s Opera,” the Harvard Crimson’s rave review praised stars Jack Cassidy and Shirley Jones in the leading parts. Meanwhile, the famous movie director Werner Jacobs had released his motion picture, The Beggar Student.
Beggar “tragedians” seemed to be everywhere in 1956. Also that year, Patience Macelwee published Beggar My Neighbour (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1956), a book about how in economics, policy that benefits one country may be at the expense of others, and even at the expense of a country’s own longer term security. Finally, in August of that year, the famous poet and playwright Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, a Marxist who probably had strong feelings about Macelwee’s subject and who famously revised “The Beggar’s Opera,” died on August 14, 1956. The date Plath wrote “The Beggars” is uncertain, but Hughes did place it within Plath’s 1956 poems. BEGGAR MY NEIGHBOR, BEGGAR MY NEIGHBOUR, BENIDORM, EARLY POEM, EUGEN BERTHOLD FRIEDRICH BRECHT, FAUST, HARVARD CRIMSON, JACK CASSIDY, PATIENCE MACELWEE, PLATH POEM, SHIRLEY JONES, SPAIN, SYLVIA PLATH, TED HUGHES, THE BEGGAR STUDENT, THE BEGGAR'S OPERA, THE BEGGARS, WERNER JACOBS
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