W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911)

I became enamored of the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan only after I saw Topsy-Turvy, the Mike Leigh film that dramatizes the relationship between the two eminent Victorians. I have come to greatly admire W.S. Gilbert for his agile light verse, his sharp sense of the absurd (always delivered with a straight face) and for his ingenious plotting. Now I'm starting to explore the non-musical comedies he wrote without Arthur Sullivan, and the first I've finished is Engaged.

This play was a huge show more hit; Oscar Wilde liked it so much, he used it as the inspiration for The Importance of Being Earnest. The story centers around a rich but tight-fisted aristo who can't help proposing marriage to every single woman he sees. Gilbert has a great deal of fun mocking the absurdities of romanticism; most of the characters espouse airy and noble notions while constantly trying to marry for money.

The plot is devilishly complicated, with reversals aplenty. Gilbert's dialogue remains hilariously witty in the 21st century -- his trick of presenting the outlandish with a strong dose of understatement may never grow tired. Oh please won't somebody stage Engaged around here? We all love The Pirates of Penzance, but there is more to life (and to Gilbert) than the patter of a modern major general. show less

A bundle of charm. Martyn Green was one of the luminaries of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the 1930s and '40s, and became indelibly associated with a Golden Age of Gilbert and Sullivan in performance. By 1961, he had left the company in disagreement at management and was able to benefit, that year in particular, by G&S going out of copyright. It was the beginning of the end for D'Oyly Carte (although the company's demise would take another twenty years) but Green left us a valuable show more record here.

The volume contains the full text for the 11 "standard" G&S operas - at the time, The Grand Duke (which has since earned a place on the fringes of the repertory) and Utopia Limited (which has not) had not been staged professionally in at least half a century, even by the company literally devoted to staging the operas. Additionally the piano and voice sheet music excerpts from the earlier 1940s anthology are reprinted. So you get a hefty volume with both text and some music, although both things can be found in better quality elsewhere. The selling point of this volume is Green's own margin annotations of the operas in performance.

The notes range from sly asides about the nature of G&S characters to reminiscences to useful tips on how encores can be navigated for certain songs, through discussions of staging, acting, and singing. Inevitably, given one person's opinion, there are pages with margins stuffed full of comment and others where one short and ultimately unnecessary note is surrounded by blank space. As an insight, though, into these great works from a man who knew them so intimately, backed by the force of Gilbert and Sullivan's own company, where the traditions had been handed down faithfully since the gentlemen's deaths, this can't be beat. show less

H.M.S. Pinafore I saw performed a day ago at the Highfield Theatre (a British spelling affectation, since it’s on Cape Cod), and a decade ago from the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, directed by Joe Dowling, on PBS. Having seen several Guthrie productions when working on my doctorate at U Minnesota, I grouped that version with outstanding others, like the Uncle Vanya I saw there decades ago, one of the first to capture the Chekhovian pathos with comedy. Gilbert’s no Chekhov, and show more vice-versa. Not much pathos in Pinafore, though the most famous song issues from “Sweet Little Buttercup,”
the former Nanny, now street-marketer of “laces, tabaccy and polonies” (bologna).

Rather the opposite of pathos, summed up in this comic rhyme, in the patrician Capt.’s advice on the tars, the common sailors,

“Though foes they could thump any,
Are hardly fit company,
My daughter, for you.”(111)
Tri-syllabic rhymes are always comic, and they all seem the best of their sort.

Our local performance in Falmouth (famous for Katherine Lee Bates, writer of “America the Beautiful”) had performers from university music programs in Oklahoma and Iowa, Wisconsin, the local from BU. We Americans lack the class-consciousness on which the whole plot of Pinafore depends, the changeling in the crib where the child raised to aristocratic Captain was of low birth—“hardly fit company” of his own daughter!
But Gilbert knew the Victorian limits of the this changeling theme, not making the Lord of Admiralty of low birth. Rather, almost as amusing in English Class Society, Sir Joseph is a bourgeoise workaholic, beginning as an office boy in an attorney’s firm,

“I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor,
And I polished up the handle of the big front door.
I polished up that handle so carefullee
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!”(95)

And my personal favorite, as the father of an attorney daughter,

“Of legal knowledge I acquired such a grip
That they took me into the partnership.
And that junior partnership I ween
Was the only ship I had ever seen.
But that kind of ship so suited me
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!”(96)

As for others of the fourteen works in this volume, the Major-General’s song in Pirates of Penzance features “fourteeners,” which can be subdivided into ballad form, but that gives them an entirely different effect. Say the Major-General’s as fast as possible (see the Stratford, Ontario version on Youtube):

“I am the very model of a modern major-General,
I’ve information vegetable, animal and mineral,
I know the Kings of England, and I quote the fights historical,
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical,
I’m very well acquainted too with matters mathematical
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical…”(133)

Fourteeners were common in Shakespeare’s period, though I don’t recall his using the form—or perhaps I recall noting it once, to my surprise. Chapman’s Iliad, Keats’s source, is written in rhymed fourteeners; and Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet, Shakespeare’s source, is in Poulter’s measure, an iambic hexameter followed by a fourteener. (A critic in 1575 called it the commonest form of verse then.)

Another favorite of mine is a dance piece from Iolanthe,

“Tripping hither, tripping thither,
Nobody knows why or whither;
Why you want us we don’t know,
But you’ve summoned us, and so
Enter all the little fairies…”(221)

We Americans miss out on the great jokes on class structure, though we can certainly enjoy the political jokes, when the Admiral talks about becoming a politician:

“I grew so rich that i was sent
By a pocket borough into Parliament.
I always voted at my party’s call
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
I thought so little they rewarded me
By making me the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee.”(96)

A “pocket borough” was a Parliamentary seat controlled by one person or family; they were abolished more than once, in 1832 and 1867 Reform Acts, showing their persistence. Gerrymandering in the US is our version of pocket boroughs, that and simply buying votes, maybe by ads, maybe by social media, as Russia did. show less

Not to my taste -- I might be too old for this. Gilbert was in his late twenties and early thirties when he wrote these tales. Just a child! They are clever and cynical, in a Victorian fashion, although be it said not as clever as Oscar Wilde. I have no patience for clever cynicism anymore. It's me, W.S., it's not you.

But I love the operettas! So apparently all one needs to do is commit the clever cynicism to verse and set it to a catchy tune. Who knew.