The Bab Ballads (1869)
Comic verse written and illustrated for the magazine Fun under a childhood nickname; the operas plundered them for plots and characters
Literature · Playwrights
W. S. Gilbert
1836–1911 · English
Victorian comic drama; comic verse
William Schwenck Gilbert was a barrister who became the sharpest comic dramatist of the Victorian stage, writing light verse and illustrations as "Bab" before turning to the theatre. With Arthur Sullivan he produced fourteen comic operas for Richard D'Oyly Carte, but he also wrote some seventy other plays, including the blank-verse Pygmalion and Galatea and the mercilessly cynical farce Engaged. As much a director as an author, he rehearsed his companies with military exactness and effectively invented the modern role of the stage director in Britain. He was knighted in 1907, the first British dramatist so honoured for his plays.
How to spot them
- ▸'Topsy-turvydom': an absurd premise pursued with pedantic logic until it collapses
- ▸Comic verse signed 'Bab', with the author's own spindly illustrations
- ▸A quarrel over the cost of new front-of-house carpets that broke up the most successful partnership in British theatre
- ▸Clue patterns: Grim's Dyke, the Savoy, D'Oyly Carte, the lozenge plot, knighted 1907
- ▸Died of a heart attack in his own lake while going to the aid of a drowning swimming pupil
Key works
Engaged (1877)
Farce whose lovers turn instantly mercenary whenever money is mentioned; a direct ancestor of The Importance of Being Earnest
Pygmalion and Galatea (1871)
Blank-verse 'mythological comedy' about a sculptor's statue brought to life; one of his greatest commercial successes
The Palace of Truth (1870)
Blank-verse fairy comedy in which a magic castle forces every visitor to say exactly what they think
"I am the very model of a modern Major-General" (1879)
Patter song whose speaker knows everything about vulgar fractions and nothing whatever about soldiering
"Three little maids from school are we" (1885)
Trio for Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing and Peep-Bo in the operetta set in the fictional town of Titipu
"When I was a lad I served a term" (1878)
The First Lord of the Admiralty explains that he polished up the handle of the big front door and never went to sea
"My object all sublime / I shall achieve in time — / To let the punishment fit the crime" (1885)
The Mikado's catalogue of humane and comically exact retributions
Key ideas
- Topsy-turvydom: grant one impossible premise — a fairy who marries a mortal, a pirate apprenticed by mistake — then reason from it with absolute legal rigour.
- Satire by displacement: Japan, Venice, Cornwall and fairyland let him mock the House of Lords, the Royal Navy, the law and aesthetic fashion without giving offence.
- The playwright as director: he pre-blocked every move with a model stage and wooden figures, forbade ad-libbing and gagging, and drilled the chorus as actors rather than scenery.
- Respectable comedy: he insisted his companies stay free of the innuendo of the older burlesque, which is why Victorian families could be brought to the Savoy.
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in London on 18 November 1836; his father was a naval surgeon turned novelist, who illustrated nothing but wrote a good deal.
- •As a small child in Naples he was reportedly seized by brigands and ransomed for £25 — a story he liked to tell and reused on stage.
- •He was called to the Bar in 1863 but practised with little success, averaging a handful of briefs a year before turning to journalism.
- •The nickname 'Bab' was his own baby name; he signed his verse and drawings with it in the magazine Fun from 1861.
- •His first piece with Sullivan, the Christmas entertainment Thespis, was staged in 1871; the score is almost entirely lost.
- •Richard D'Oyly Carte's Savoy Theatre, opened in 1881, was the first public building in the world lit throughout by electricity.
- •Sullivan repeatedly refused Gilbert's 'lozenge plot', in which a magic charm transforms characters into what they pretend to be — the recurring flashpoint of their working life.
- •The 'carpet quarrel' of 1890 began when Gilbert objected to Carte charging the partnership £500 for new carpets in the Savoy's front of house; the three ended up in court.
- •American managers could stage H.M.S. Pinafore without paying a penny, so the next piece was copyrighted by a token performance at the Royal Bijou Theatre, Paignton, on 30 December 1879, the day before its real opening in New York.
- •He bought the Grim's Dyke estate at Harrow Weald in 1890 and served as a Justice of the Peace and a Deputy Lieutenant of Middlesex.
- •Knighted in 1907, he grumbled that the honour was granted to him as a 'playwright' — a term he compared to a wheelwright, a mere mender of plays.
- •He died on 29 May 1911 in the lake at Grim's Dyke, suffering a fatal heart attack while swimming to the aid of a young woman, Ruby Preece, to whom he was giving a lesson.
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Sources
- The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive — Gilbert Biography
- Jane W. Stedman — W. S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — W. S. Gilbert