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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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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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W.S. Gilbert: Writerly Beginnings
What is to become of me? Am I destined to revolutionize the art of comic writing? Am I the man who is destined to write the burlesques and extravaganzas of the future? Are managers of theaters and editors of light literature doomed to fall prostrate at my feet in humble obeisance? Is it to me that society at large must look for amusement for the next (say) forty years? To these questions I unhesitatingly reply, “I am! They are! It is!” – William S. Gilbert, writing as “A Trembling Beginner,” in The Art of Parody, Fun (9 Sept 1865) In 1861, W.S. Gilbert was a 25-year-old clerk in…
