Based on the character of a fisherman from George Crabbe's poem, The borough, the opera is set in an English coastal village around 1830. The fisherman, Peter Grimes, is questioned over the death of his apprentice, and the coroner forbids him from ever keeping one again. As Grimes is in desperate need of help to fish, Ned Keene, the apothecary, finds him a new apprentice from the workhouse-- but nobody will volunteer to fetch the boy. Eventually Ellen...