David Eden suggests, without any concrete evidence to support the claim, that this play was written in collaboration with his father. His stage career went no further until December , when both his burlesque Dulcamara and a pantomime, Hush-a-Bye Baby , were produced. In the next three years his name became familiar through association with these workmanlike burlesques, which were considered at the time unusually tasteful and intelligent, though the modern reader might find this difficult to believe.
However, flashes of sharp satire are sometimes visible through the welter of puns. Burlesque was essentially spectacular theatre, and the artistic unity of the script was secondary to the demands of "star turns", ballet, and stage machinery. For the only time in his career, Gilbert the dramatist was not in control of how his plays were performed: the stars were stars, but he was a mere author. Most of the biographies provide very little information by which her personality can be deduced, apart from the bare statement that she was soothing and conciliatory where he was abrasive and confrontational.
The latest biography, by Jane Stedman, suggests something more: not as tough as a bone, but certainly with a will of her own. She seems to have ruled in the domestic sphere, and there are even hints that Gilbert may have feared her anger.
We still know very little about her; but this is more than we have ever been told before. Three months before the first performance of Gilbert's last burlesque, The Pretty Druidess 19th June , the first of his pieces for the Gallery of Illustration, No Cards , was produced 29th March The environment of this small, civilised theatre was to allow him in the succeeding years to develop a personal style, without the excessive interference from stage-managers which he could expect in other theatres.
His six musical plays for the Gallery show the quick emergence of Gilbert's unique tone of voice, and at least three of them are also supreme examples of his work. At the same time, he was developing a more restrained style, which he displayed in some blank-verse "fairy comedies" at the Haymarket Theatre.
These are, admittedly, rather dull to modern tastes, but they do demonstrate his desire to drag the English drama out of the trough in which everyone admitted it had been wallowing, and to give theatre audiences something rather more refined and tasteful than the usual run of farce and burlesque.
At the same time as all this, he was also learning from Tom Robertson the basics of stage direction. He began to direct his own plays and so to realise on the stage the things which he had imagined when scribbling at his desk. He directed Thespis in December , and had also directed the Liverpool production of La Vivandiere in He was one of the first of that era to insist on the artistic integrity of dramatic production, allowing unheard-of subtleties to be developed in the presentation.
This was a time of great productivity for him: saw the premieres of no fewer than seven new Gilbert plays though admittedly one of them was merely a dramatisation of Great Expectations. He was writing farces, operetta libretti, extravaganzas, fairy comedies, adaptations from novels, translations from the French, and even the occasional serious drama.
It is no wonder that the pressure of work forced him to resign from Fun : he was rapidly making a reputation for himself as a leading light in modern drama, and he no longer had the time for mere ephemeral journalism. In he collaborated with Gilbert a Beckett on probably the most audacious play of his career, The Happy Land , a political satire which was briefly banned because it portrayed caricatures of Gladstone and two of his ministers. In this and such other plays as The Realm of Joy and Charity , he deliberately challenged accepted opinion and picked at the boundaries of what could be said in the theatre.
It would be easy enough to call him an iconoclast and leave it at that; but of course the truth is not so simple. He was that by natural inclination; but by conscious decision he also wanted to be respected professionally - and that as a dramatist, which was at that time one of the least respected literary professions around. Throughout his life he strove to change this, and as a matter of fact he did much to prepare the ground upon which Wilde and Shaw were to tread so unreflectingly twenty years later.
One of the things which, it was felt, held a dramatist back from respectability was that plays were not published in a form suitable for existence in a gentleman's library: the great play-publishers of the seventies, Samuel French and Thomas Hailes Lacy, published their plays in the cheapest style possible, for the use of actors rather than the home reader: they were pamphlets rather than real books, not very carefully proofread and generally unattractive to the eye.
In late Chatto and Windus published a volume of Gilbert's plays, in a form designed to appeal to the general reader: it was attractively bound, the type was clear, and most of the stage jargon had been excised. Such a book of plays, designed for the "gentleman's library", was not a common thing at this time, and such examples as did appear tended to be the crowning symbol of respectability for long-established dramatists such as Tom Taylor or J.
Subscribe to our email list and be amongst the first to get the latest news, entertainment alerts and special offers. Please have a look at our Privacy Policy for more information on how we use your personal data. Share this post! Facebook Twitter Pinterest. By continuing to browse this site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. The story is apocryphally told of how the death of Gilbert's composer necessitated the hiring of another, and so D'Oyly arranged for the pair to meet; two weeks later the operetta was ready for rehearsal in fact, they first met in the autumn of and produced Palace of Truth together that November.
Their next three works -- The Sorcerer , H. Of eleven dramatic works which Gilbert wrote during the s, seven were scored by Sullivan. The quarrel that eventually destroyed the nineteenth-century theatre's most effective partnership began when Gilbert voiced his concern about the excessive cost of the carpets for the new playhouse. The rift continued unabated until , after which they collaborated on only two significant works: Utopia, Limited 7 October and The Grand Duke 7 March Knighted by Edward VII in , Gilbert died four years later when, aged 74, he attempted to rescue a drowning woman.
Despite the continuing popularity and calibre of his work, Gilbert's verse does not usually appear in anthologies of nineteenth-century British verse, the exception being Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom's Victorian Prose and Poetry Oxford, , which features under "Poetry of the Nineties" Bunthorne's song, "The Aesthete," from Patience.
The Best of Gilbert and Sullivan. EMI Classics. EMI Records, , Chambers Biographical Dictionary , ed.
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