W. S. Gilbert
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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. Gilbert also published numerous pieces of light verse known as the Bab Ballads, many of which were accompanied by his own comic drawings.
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Early life
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 juge 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.
First plays
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. Terence Rees discovered a play called Uncle Baby from 1863, but whether this is indeed by Gilbert or his father is disputed. Further confusion is created by another play, with the ridiculously 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 (though 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.
A few quotes from La Vivandiêre: or, True to the Corps! (a burlesque of Donizetti's The Daughter of the Regiment) will give the spirit of these:
(Note the italicised words are the traditional way in these plays of drawing attention to an appalling pun.)
SERGEANT SULPIZIO:
- Come, stop these starts,
- Your case is not uncommon in these parts!
- Long years ago upon a battle plain,
- The Captain of my company was slain,
- But ere he died, he handed to my care
- A pretty baby beautifully fair,
- In this silk handkercheif the captain wropped it,
- [producing handkerchief.]
- But 'ere I could adopt it, he had hopped it!
- The baby grew up exquisite indeed,
- Now she's the fairest flower you ever seed.
MARIA:
- (innocently) The fairest flower? Whoever can that be?
- (suddenly) Why that describes me, father to a T.
And later, Maria again:
- 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!
[Source: A copy of the original libretto]
As good as some of these are, it wouldn't be until 1869 that the first truly Gilbertian plays (with original plots and rather fewer atrocious puns) would begin to appear.
The Gallery of Illustration entertainments
- "The stage was at a low ebb, Elizabethan glories and Georgian artificialities had alike faded into the past, 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.
- Oratorio was then at the height of its vogue, and Shakespearean drama as interpreted by the Kean, Macready, and Kendal school still held its public; but at the other extreme there were only farc'es or the transplanted operettas of Offenbach, Lecocq and other French composers, which were as a rule very indifferently rendered, and their librettos so badly translated that any wit or point the dialogue might have possessed was entirely lost."
- —Jessie Bond[1]
It was to fill this gap that Thomas German Reed opened his Gallery of Illustration, and brought in Gilbert as one of his main playwrights. After his first offering – No Cards, a somewhat forgettable light farce full of costumed identities with music by Reed himself – Gilbert paired with Frederick Clay on[ [2] Ages Ago], the first of a long and successful series of collaborations which would continue until Clay's death.
The plot is typically Gilbertian: In the haunted Scottish Castle of Glen Cockaleekie, where the deed, much like Brigadoon is only ever found once every hundred years, Ebenezer Tare has decided, that as possession is nine-tenths of the law, he might as well be in possession of it until such time as the deed shows up again. Being your typical money-grubbing elderly relative, he refuses to let his niece Rosa marry her poor suitor, Columbus Hebblethwaite. That night the paintings of the castle's former owners come to life, step out of their frames (As would happen again in Ruddigore several decades later). However, there's a problem: They were all painted at different ages, so Lord Carnaby (65), has a grandmother (Lady Maud), of 17. And lusts after her, no less. Eventually, though, and after some wrangling, the paintings pair off with each other, get a painting of a solicitor to marry them, and then leave the deed behind, giving the property (of course) to Hebblethwaite, the poor suitor. He strikes a deal whereby Tare is allowed to stay on if he gets to marry Rosa, and all ends happily.
The Collaboration with Sullivan
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 was not a failure. It outran five of its nine competitors for the 1871 holiday season, and it appeared on the programme for an April 1972 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.
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 Trial's success, 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.
Image:Ws gilbert cartoon.pngCarte then assembled a syndicate and formed the Comedy Opera Company to launch a series of original English comic operas. The Sorcerer was the first work to be presented by the new company, opening at the Opera Comique 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).
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 financial dispute. Their last two works, Utopia Limited (1893) and The Grand Duke (1896), were less successful.
Gilbert and Sullivan had many rifts in their career, partly caused by the fact that each saw himself allowing his work to be subjugated to the others, and partly caused by the gap in their social status. Sullivan was knighted in 1883, not long after the company moved to its new home, the Savoy Theatre. However this knighthood was not so much for his popular and financially rewarding work with Gilbert, but more for his more 'serious' music such as the musical drama The Martyr of Antioch (It must be said here, though, that Gilbert was the one responsible for arranging the original epic poem into something suitable for music, and some of the songs in that work are, in fact, Gilbert's original work), first produced late in 1881. Sullivan was at ease among the wealthy and titles who would become his friends and patrons. Gilbert was a loner who did not choose to move in those social circles. He was not knighted until 1907, and also in recognition of his more "serious" stage work. 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 Vanburgh, were knighted for political and other services. Gilbert filled his plays with a strange mixture of cynicism about the world and "topsy-turvydom" in which the social order was turned upside down. The latter in particular, did not go down well with Sullivan's desire for realism (not to mention his vested interest in the status quo).
Sullivan, too, had a career of his own. Two ballets, a symphony, a cello concerto, and number of large-scale choral pieces, incidental music to five of Shakespeare's plays and, of course, other operatic works, including Ivanhoe, which opened D'Oyly Carte's new Royal English Opera House (now the Palace Theatre) in Cambridge Circus in 1891.
Later years
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 an excellent 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.
On 29 May 1911, he was giving swimming lessons to two young ladies at his lake 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.
References
- Template:Cite book (Contains mostly stories from Foggerty's Fairy and Other Tales.)