The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan

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 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, show more 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

This was my father's copy I got my own paperback later) and one of my favorite books as a teenager. I memorized chunks of it (though not complete songs) and recited them in music class, I did part of the dialog from Ruddigore as a humorous declamation in speech contests, etc. My brother used a play game by opening the book randomly and reading a few lines and I would tell which opera they were from. Looking at the plays now I can see some are dated for what would not be racist, sexist, or class humor, but a lot is still funny at least to me, with very ingenious wordplays.

I started getting into Gilbert & Sullivan operettas after viewing The Pirates of Penzance movie on TV. OMG. Funniest musical. I bought the soundtrack and then viewed Topsy-Turvy (a retelling of how G&S got to creating The Mikado). I bought that album as well. I have since bought another three G&S operettas (the recorded albums) but I found some of the singing made it difficult to understand the lyrics. Lyrics, of course, help you understand the gist of the play/musical/whatever. So I bought this book which has the collected works of G&S printed clearly. You can watch the play and follow right along. You can listen to the album and follow right along. YAY!! I now know the lyrics to these operettas and enjoy singing them out loud in my show more car in traffic. (I get a lot of funny looks.) show less

4 stars for the content but only 3 stars for this particular Kindle edition (from Project Gutenberg) which suffered from formatting problems.

This book contains the 14 operas that Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated on. I have rated the individual plays/operettas separately.

Simply a more compact inexpensive version of the complete text of the operettas. I bought it when I was not living at home with access to my parents' Modern Library edition which I have since inherited

Reprint. Orig. publ. Garden City Publishing, 1941

borrowed from Anisha