W. S. Gilbert

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (November 18, 1836 – May 29, 1911) was an English dramatist and librettist best known for his operatic collaborations with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, known as the Savoy Operas. He also wrote the Bab Ballads, a collection of light verse accompanied by his own comic drawings. His creative output included over 75 plays and libretti, numerous stories, poems, lyrics and various other comic and serious pieces.

Lines from his operas would permanently enter the English language: "short, sharp shock" and "the punishment fit the crime", for instance. His play, Engaged would inspire one of Oscar Wilde's most popular plays, The Importance of Being Earnest, and his most popular collaboration with Sullivan, The Mikado, became one of the most performed works of musical theatre in history.

Gilbert's father, also named William, was a naval surgeon and he spent much of his youth touring Europe before settling down in London in 1849, later becoming a novelist. The most famous of his works was The Magic Mirror, the original edition of which was illustrated by his son. Gilbert's parents were distant and stern, and he did not have a particularly good relationship with either of them. Following the breakup of their marriage in 1876, his relationships became even more strained, especially with his mother.

In the late 1850s, Gilbert received a bequest of £300 and used it to take up a career as a barrister. He was not particularly successful, averaging just five clients a year. In a short story called "My Maiden Brief" that is usually taken as partly autobiographical, his client, a female pickpocket, hurled abuse (and a boot) at him:

"No sooner had the learned judge pronounced this sentence than the poor soul stooped down, and taking off a heavy boot, flung it at my head, as a reward for my eloquence on her behalf; accompanying the assault with a torrent of invective against my abilities as a counsel, and my line of defence." (Gilbert 1890, pp. 158–9).

To supplement his income, Gilbert wrote a variety of stories, reviews, comic rants, and, under the pseudonym "Bab" (his childhood nickname), a variety of short illustrated poems for a variety of comic magazines, primarily Fun. The poems proved immensely popular and were duly reprinted in book form as the Bab Ballads. He would later return to many of these as source material for his various plays and comic operas.

Some controversy exists as to the start of Gilbert's career as a playwright. Gilbert himself always named Dulcamara, (an 1866 burlesque of Gaetano Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore) as his first play, however, Terence Rees discovered a play called Uncle Baby from 1863 - though this may, in fact, be by Gilbert's father. Less confusion is created by another play, with the overblown title Hush-a-Bye Baby, on the Tree Top or Harlequin Fortunia, King Frog of Frog Island, and the Magic Toys of Lowther Arcade that opened a few days before Dulcamara, as the latter could well have been written or sold first.

In any case, Dulcamara's popularity ensured a long series of further burlesques and farces, full of awful puns (traditional in the period),^[1] though they did have their better moments, for instance:

That men were monkeys once -- to that I bow;

(looking at Lord Margate) I know one who's less man than monkey, now,

That monkeys once were men, peers, statesmen, flunkies--

That's rather hard on unoffending monkeys!^[1]

Beginning about 1869, Gilbert's plays would change in character to contain original plots and fewer puns.

Theatre, at the time Gilbert began writing, had fallen into disrepute. As Jessie Bond vividly described it, "stilted tragedy and vulgar farce were all the would-be playgoer had to choose from, and the theatre had become a place of evil repute to the righteous British householder."

In 1869, Gilbert joined with one of the leading figures in theatrical reform, Thomas German Reed, whose Gallery of Illustration sought to regain some of theatre's lost respectability by offering family entertainments in London. Gilbert created six musical entertainments for German Reed, some with music composed by German Reed himself. These works were a success, and with Gilbert's first big hit, Ages Ago, he began a long collaboration with composer Frederic Clay that would last seven years. At a rehearsal for Ages Ago, Clay introduced Gilbert to his friend, Arthur Sullivan.

Many of the plot elements of the German Reed Entertainments (as well as some from his earlier plays and Bab Ballads) would be reused by Gilbert later in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. These works would bring in such elements as the characters from a melodrama brought to life, with none of said characters actually anything like the role he or she was cast in within the melodrama (A Sensation Novel; similar things are done in Ruddigore), paintings coming to life (Ages Ago, used again in Ruddigore), and a deaf nursemaid causing a respectable man's son, who was to be engaged to be a pilot, to be a pirate instead (Our Island Home,^[2] reused in The Pirates of Penzance).

In 1871, John Hollingshead commissioned Gilbert to work with Sullivan a holiday piece for Christmas, Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old, at the Gaiety Theatre. Thespis outran five of its nine competitors for the 1871 holiday season, and appeared on the programme for an April 1872 performance benefiting Nellie Farren, who had created the role of Mercury. However, no one took Thespis as the beginning of a great collaboration, and Gilbert and Sullivan went their separate ways, Gilbert returning to work with Clay for Happy Arcadia, Alfred Cellier for Topsyturveydom, as well as writing several plays and translations many of which would later be revised as operas.

It would be another four years before the men worked together again. In 1875, Richard D'Oyly Carte commissioned Gilbert and Sullivan to write a one-act afterpiece to Offenbach's La Périchole. After the success of Trial by Jury, there were discussions of reviving Thespis, but the duo were not able to agree on terms with Carte and his backers. Thespis was never published, and the music is now lost.

It took some time for Carte to get funds for another Gilbert and Sullivan opera together, and in this gap Gilbert produced several works away from Sullivan, including his last opera with Clay, Princess Toto (1876), their last and most ambitious work, stretching to a full three acts and full orchestra, as opposed to the shorter works for much reduced accompaniment that came before, what is, perhaps, Gilbert's most successful play, Engaged (1877); as well as Tom Cobb, Eyes and No Eyes (his last German Reed Entertainment), and two serious works: Broken Hearts and Dan'l Druce, Blacksmith. Of these, Engaged is perhaps the most notable, having had several professional productions in recent years as well as inspiring Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. It's a burlesque of romantic drama written in the "topsy-turvy" satiric style of many of Gilbert's Bab Ballads and the Savoy Operas, with one character pledging his love, in the most poetic and romantic language possible, to every single woman in the play; the innocent Scottish rustics being revealed to be making a living through throwing trains off the lines and then charging the passengers for services, and, in general, romance being gladly thrown over in favour of monetary gain.

However, after these false starts, Carte finally assembled a syndicate in 1877 and formed the Comedy Opera Company to launch a series of original English comic operas, beginning with Gilbert's third collaboration with Sullivan, The Sorcerer in November 1877.

H.M.S. Pinafore followed in May 1878. Despite a slow start, mainly due to a scorching summer, Pinafore became a red-hot favourite by autumn. After a dispute with the Comedy Opera Company directors over the division of profits, Carte's partners hired thugs to storm the theatre one night to steal the sets and costumes, intending to mount a rival production. The attempt was repelled, and Carte continued as sole impresario of the newly renamed D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.

For the next decade, the Savoy Operas (as the series came to be known, after the theatre Carte built to house them) were Gilbert's principal activity. The financially successful comic operas with Sullivan continued to appear every year or two with predictable regularity. After Pinafore came The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Patience (1881), Iolanthe (1882), Princess Ida (1884), The Mikado (1885), Ruddigore (1887), The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), and The Gondoliers (1889). In addition, Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated on one other work, the oratorio The Martyr of Antioch, first produced late in 1881. Gilbert arranged the original epic poem into a form suitable for music, and some of the song lyrics in that work are Gilbert's original work.

During this period, Gilbert occasionally wrote plays to be performed elsewhere – both serious dramas (e.g. The Ne'er-Do-Weel, 1878) and more humorous works (e.g. Foggerty's Fairy, 1881). However, he no longer needed to turn out multiple plays per year, as he had done before. During the eight years that separated The Pirates of Penzance and The Gondoliers, he wrote just three plays outside of the partnership with Sullivan.

After The Gondoliers, the partnership broke up temporarily over a dispute concerning costs at the Savoy, particularly a new carpet for the theatre lobby (see the Gilbert and Sullivan article). In the interregnum, Gilbert wrote The Mountebanks with Alfred Cellier and Haste to the Wedding with George Grossmith, before returning to collaborate with Sullivan on Utopia Limited (1893) and The Grand Duke (1896). These two operas were not particularly successful, and the partnership ended.

Gilbert and Sullivan had a sometimes strained working relationship and several temporary rifts in their career, partly caused by the fact that each saw himself allowing his work to be subjugated to the other's, and partly caused by the two men's opposing personalities. Gilbert had a prickly personality, while Sullivan eschewed conflict. In addition, Gilbert embued his libretti with "topsy-turvy" situations in which the social order was turned upside down. After a time, these subjects were often at odds with Sullivan's desire for realism and emotional content. Finally, Sullivan was eager to socialize among the wealthy and titled people who would become his friends and patrons, and Gilbert's often political satire was not always well-received in the circles of privilege. ^{[citation needed]}

Gilbert was the stage director for his plays and operas. By the time of The Sorcerer, Gilbert had decided how his comedies should be played. In his preface to Engaged, which opened just before The Sorcerer, he wrote:

It is absolutely essential to the success of this piece that it should be played with the most perfect earnestness and gravity throughout. There should be no exaggeration in costume, make­up or demeanour; and the characters, one and all, should appear to believe, throughout, in the perfect sincerity of their words and actions. Directly the actors show that they are conscious of the absurdity of their utterances the piece begins to drag.

Similarly, in Gilbert's parody of Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet would address the players similarly:

I hold that there is no such antick fellow as your bombastical hero who doth so earnestly spout forth his folly as to make his hearers believe that he in unconscious of all incongruity; whereas, he who doth so mark, label, and underscore his antick speeches as to show that he is alive to their absurdity seemeth to utter them under protest, and to take part with his audience against himself.

In 1893, Gilbert was named a Justice of the Peace in Harrow Weald. When Who's Who was revised to include biographical details, Gilbert refused to co-operate until the editors sent him the proof of an entry they proposed to run unless he sent back a corrected version. Their draft referred to him as "librettist for the operas of Sir Arthur Sullivan" and resulted in Gilbert sending his correct details back. Although he announced a retirement from the theatre after the poor initial run of his last work with Sullivan, The Grand Duke (1896), he continued to produce plays up until the year of his death including an opera, Fallen Fairies, with Edward German (Savoy 1909), and a one-act play set in a condemned cell, The Hooligan (Colliseum 1911). Gilbert also continued to personally supervise the various revivals of his works by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.

Gilbert was knighted in 1907 in recognition of his contributions to drama. Sullivan had been knighted for his contributions to music almost a quarter of a century earlier, in 1883. Gilbert was, however, the first British writer ever to receive a knighthood for his plays alone — earlier dramatist knights such as Sir William Davenant and Sir John Vanbrugh, were knighted for political and other services.

On 29 May 1911, he was giving swimming lessons to two young ladies at the lake of his home Grim's Dyke when one of them began to flail around. Gilbert dived in to save her but suffered a heart attack in the middle of the lake and drowned.

He was buried in a cemetary in Stanmore.

In the following list, the title appears in the first column, along with any further information (such as the source of an adaptation). The genre appears in the second column – if the piece had music, the composer's name is listed in parentheses. The theatre and date of first performance appear in the third and fourth columns. All theatres were in London, unless otherwise stated. The works are listed in the approximate order of composition. (In a few cases, the first performance was many years after the work was first published.)

• Ainger, Michael (2002). Gilbert and Sullivan – A Dual Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Crowther, Andrew (2000). Contradiction Contradicted – The Plays of W. S. Gilbert. Associated University Presses. ISBN 0-8386-3839-2.

• Gilbert, W. S. (1890). Foggerty's Fairy and Other Tales. London: George Routledge and Sons.

• Gilbert, W. S. (1985). Peter Haining, ed. (ed.). The Lost Stories of W.S. Gilbert. London(?): Robson Books. ISBN (US) 0-88186-735-X / (Britain) 0-86051-337-8. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help) (Contains mostly stories from Foggerty's Fairy and Other Tales.)

• Gilbert, W. S. (1969). Edited and with an Introduction by Jane W. Stedman. (ed.). Gilbert Before Sullivan – Six Comic Plays by W. S. Gilbert. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)

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Author:W. S. Gilbert

• The W. S. Gilbert Society
• Works by W. S. Gilbert at Project Gutenberg
• The Gilbert & Sullivan Archive's W. S. Gilbert page
• The Babliophile, An Internet Magazine for the Seriously Deranged W.S. Gilbert Enthusiast
• Views on Gilbert by Seymour Hicks and Ellaline Terriss