Victorian theater
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Gilbert and Sullivan – Together
In the 1870s, Arthur Sullivan was a rising young composer whose reputation was growing steadily. At the same time, William S. Gilbert was a rising young dramatist whose plays were attracting an increasingly wider audience. They lived in the same city, they had friends in common, and each probably knew of the other’s work—we know Gilbert had heard Sullivan’s music, because he had reviewed Sullivan and Burnand’s operetta, Cox and Box, as the theater critic for Fun magazine. They had even collaborated on a Christmas entertainment, Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old. It was a successful venture in its limited way, but both men evidently considered the project a one-off.…
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Entertaining house guests, Victorian-style
Before the Internet—even before television and radio—beamed professional entertainment directly into our homes, what did people do for fun? Our Victorian ancestors, especially those of the middle and upper classes, had plenty of leisure time to fill. One way to enjoy oneself was to invite friends over to stay for a while—three days was the standard visit. But once you had your circle of intimates gathered at your country home, what were you to do with them? Welcoming your guests The proper time for arrival was mid-afternoon, around teatime. Guests often arrived by train, so a good host would arrange for the guests to be met at the train station.…
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Christmas with the Gilberts
Though William and Kitty Gilbert never had any children of their own, they both enjoyed the company of young people and loved to give lavish parties for the children of friends and family. One young lady who enjoyed their parties was Kate Terry Gielgud – the daughter of actress Kate Terry and Arthur James Lewis (a silk merchant of the firm of Lewis & Allenby), and the mother of famed actor Sir John Gielgud. In Kate Terry Gielgud: An Autobiography (1953), she explained, “Both author and composer were friends of my parents, and Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert invited us every year to Christmas parties in their house…” Born in 1868,…
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Jilted Brides and “Trial By Jury”
During the Victorian era, only a woman could break off an engagement without suffering any consequences. A romantic relationship wasn’t over until the woman said it was over. This was mostly the result of Victorian views about the proper roles of men and women: Men were supposed to be strong and protective, while women were weak and emotional. (See more on Gender Roles here) Because Victorian women required protection, when a man offered or promised such protection, he had to honor that promise. The breach of promise suit – a legal claim that allowed a jilted person to obtain financial damages from their intended – grew into the standard remedy for…
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W.S. Gilbert – The Dragon at the Stage Door
Many Victorians assumed that actresses were “no better than they should be” (i.e. very bad indeed). According to Hesketh Pearson, in Gilbert and Sullivan, “In those days actresses were considered to be saleable property. Their social status was extremely low, and the average middle-class Englishman scarcely differentiated the back of a stage from a brothel.” However, that certainly wasn’t the case for the actresses in the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. William S. Gilbert insisted on all his players behaving with utmost propriety. Jessie Bond, the long-time Savoyard actress who created many of Gilbert and Sullivan’s most delightful contralto roles, from Hebe in HMS Pinafore to Pitti-Sing in The Mikado to…
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W.S. Gilbert – Tilting at Social Windmills
Nothing succeeds like success! Although W. S. Gilbert is known mainly for his brilliant comic operas with Arthur Sullivan, he wrote many other plays, some of which addressed serious social issues and which turned out to be the inspiration for later works by other playwrights. Here are a few examples: Charity (1874) is a play about Mrs. Van Brugh, a good woman who, in her youth, lived with a man without benefit of marriage, and they had an illegitimate child. Now a widow of 35 years’ standing, she has dedicated her life to helping those in need. She has almshouses, and scandalizes the village by letting in not only good Anglicans,…
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W.S. Gilbert – Kidnapped!
Sometimes real life imitates art. Or it inspires art. William S. Gilbert’s plots involving stolen babies were inspired by his own life: As a baby, he was kidnapped by bandits. When Gilbert was not yet 2 years old (as the story goes), and a few months before his sister Jane was born in October 1838, his parents were traveling around the Continent and they stopped in Naples, Italy. In Naples, his parents had hired a maid to look after their young son. As the maid and baby were out on a walk, a couple of men approached her and said that the “English gentleman” wanted his child returned to him right…
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Which Came First, the Music or the Words?
When writing a song, what does a composer start with – the tune, or the lyrics? Do you come up with words to fit a particular melody, or do you read the words and imagine a tune that would fit the words? The answer is, different composers and lyricists work in different ways. For Gilbert and Sullivan, the journey from musical idea to finished song took an interesting path: Gilbert would write lyrics that fit a popular tune he had in mind. Then he would give the words to Sullivan, without telling him what song he’d used. Sullivan would study the rhythm of the words and come up with a tune that…
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Gilbert & Sullivan 101: All Fourteen Operas
So, just in case you came in late and need a refresher, here is a list of all of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas. (Just to be even more basic, William S. Gilbert wrote the words and Arthur Seymour Sullivan wrote the music.) Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old (1871 Christmas entertainment for John Hollingshead’s Gaiety Theatre, where it received its first performance on December 26, 1871 and ran for 63 performances. Although it has often been described as a failure, it outlasted most of the Christmas entertainments that season.) Plot: The gods on Mount Olympus are old and tired, so they decide to take a holiday. Since somebody…
- Victorian feminism, Victorian love and marriage, Victorian theater, Victorian women, Victoriana, W S Gilbert
Was W. S. Gilbert a Victorian Feminist?
What did W.S. Gilbert think about women? During the Victorian era, the division between the worlds of men and women seemed particularly wide, with many popular male writers making efforts to restrict women to the domestic sphere of influence. But as society at large changed, the role of women in public life was expanded – women began to be admitted to colleges and universities, reformers such as John Stuart Mill advocated for women’s right to vote, and women were increasingly able to participate in the world outside their homes. So what was William S. Gilbert’s attitude toward women in the public arena? “Gilbert always enjoyed the company of women, particularly…
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W.S. Gilbert the Recycler
Today I am plundering the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive (which is moving soon to gilbertandsullivanarchive.org) to show how William S. Gilbert “recycled” some of his early literary ideas into the bases of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas we know today. Before Gilbert began writing his comic operas, he was well-known for his witty magazine articles and for a series of comically grotesque poems, collectively known as The Bab Ballads. (“Bab” was William’s childhood nickname, and was the pseudonym he used for this series of poems.) You can find them all collected in the G&S archive here. From “The Student” to “The Sorcerer” In 1865, Gilbert wrote a parody of…
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Sullivan’s Musical Humor
[amazon text=Amazon&cat=local&last=5&wishlist_type=Similar]Fans of Gilbert and Sullivan immediately get Gilbert’s sense of humor and wordplay. He was famous for his wit. But when it came to the music, Sullivan was every bit as elegant a humorist. Throughout his collaboration with Gilbert, Sullivan added touches of musical humor to their operas – references which Victorian audiences might have picked up on quicker than we do today. It’s not that recognizing musical references is some kind of lost art; it just depends on how familiar we are with the music that’s being quoted. Today, we understand allusions to recent songs and musical styles. For instance, many of us would catch the reference to…
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10 Fun Facts about Gilbert and Sullivan
NOTE: I corrected some erroneous information in this post, which was pointed out to me by an alert reader! Thanks for the heads-up. Sir William Schwenk Gilbert, born 18 November 1836, originally trained to become a barrister. He was elected to the Northern Circuit and prosecuted his first case in Liverpool in March 1866, against an Irish woman accused of stealing a coat. His account of the proceedings, from Gilbert and Sullivan A Dual Biography, by Michael Ainger, went as follows: “No sooner had I got up than the old dame, who seemed to realise that I was against her, began shouting, ‘Ah, ye divil, sit down. Don’t listen to…