Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (18 November 1836 – 29 May 1911) was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for his collaboration with the composer Arthur Sullivan, which produced fourteen comic operas. The most famous of these include H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre, The Mikado.Kenrick, John. G&S Story: Part III, accessed 13 October 2006; and Powell, Jim. William S. Gilbert's Wicked Wit for Liberty accessed 13 October 2006. The popularity of these works was supported for over a century by year-round performances of them, in Britain and abroad, by the repertory company that Gilbert, Sullivan and their producer Richard D'Oyly Carte founded, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. These Savoy operas are still frequently performed in the English-speaking world and beyond.Bradley, Chapter 1 and passim.
Gilbert's creative output included over 75 plays and libretti, and numerous short stories, poems and lyrics, both comic and serious. After brief careers as a government clerk and a lawyer, Gilbert began to focus, in the 1860s, on writing light verse, including his Bab Ballads, short stories, theatre reviews and illustrations, often for Fun magazine. He also began to write burlesques and his first comic plays, developing a unique absurdist, inverted style that would later be known as his "topsy-turvy" style. He also developed a realistic method of stage direction and a reputation as a strict theatre director. In the 1870s, Gilbert wrote 40 plays and libretti, including his German Reed Entertainments, several blank-verse "fairy comedies", some serious plays, and his first five collaborations with Sullivan: Thespis, Trial by Jury, The Sorcerer, H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. In the 1880s, Gilbert focused on the Savoy operas, including Patience, Iolanthe, The Mikado, The Yeomen of the Guard and The Gondoliers.
In 1890, after this long and profitable creative partnership, Gilbert quarrelled with Sullivan and Carte concerning expenses at the Savoy Theatre; the dispute is referred to as the "carpet quarrel". Gilbert won the ensuing lawsuit, but the argument caused hurt feelings among the partnership. Although Gilbert and Sullivan were persuaded to collaborate on two last operas, they were not as successful as the previous ones. In later years, Gilbert wrote several plays, and a few operas with other collaborators. He retired, with his wife Lucy, and their ward, Nancy McIntosh, to a country estate, Grim's Dyke. He was knighted in 1907. Gilbert died of a heart attack while attempting to rescue a young woman to whom he was giving a swimming lesson in the lake at his home.
Gilbert's plays inspired other dramatists, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw,Feingold, Michael, "Engaging the Past", The Village Voice, 4 May 2004 and his comic operas with Sullivan inspired the later development of American musical theatre, especially influencing Broadway librettists and lyricists. According to The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Gilbert's "lyrical facility and his mastery of metre raised the poetical quality of comic opera to a position that it had never reached before and has not reached since".The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume XIII, Chapter VIII, Section 15 (1907–21)
Early life and career
Beginnings "No sooner had the learned judge 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."— My Maiden BriefGilbert, W. S. Foggerty's Fairy and Other Tales (1890), pp. 158–59. (Gilbert claimed this incident was autobiographical.)How, Harry. Illustrated Interviews No. IV. – Mr. W. S. Gilbert, Strand Magazine, vol. 2, October 1891, pp. 330–341, via the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive
Gilbert was born at 17 Southampton Street, Strand, London. His father, also named William, was briefly a naval surgeon, who later became a writer of novels and short stories, some of which his son illustrated. Gilbert's mother was the former Anne Mary Bye Morris (1812–1888), the daughter of Thomas Morris, an apothecary.Stedman, Jane W. "Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck (1836–1911)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004, online edition, May 2008, accessed 10 January 2010 Gilbert's parents were distant and stern, and he did not have a particularly close relationship with either of them. They quarrelled increasingly, and following the break-up of their marriage in 1876, his relationships with them, especially his mother, became even more strained.Pearson, pp. 16–17 Gilbert had three younger sisters, two of whom were born outside England because of the family's travels during these years: Jane Morris (b. 1838 in Milan, Italy – 1906), who married Alfred Weigall, a miniatures painter; Mary Florence (b. 1843 in Boulogne, France – 1911); and Anne Maude (1845–1932). The younger two never married.Ainger, family tree and pp. 15–19Eden, David. Gilbert: Appearance and Reality, p. 44, Sir Arthur Sullivan Society (2003) Gilbert was nicknamed "Bab" as a baby, and then "Schwenck", after the surname of his great-aunt and great-uncle, who were also his father's godparents.
As a child, Gilbert travelled to Italy in 1838 and then France for two years with his parents, who finally returned to settle in London in 1847. He was educated at Boulogne, France, from the age of seven (he later kept his diary in French so that the servants could not read it),Morrison, Robert, "The Controversies Surrounding Gilbert's Last Opera", The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, 2 August 2011, accessed 4 April 2024 then at Western Grammar School, Brompton, London, and then at the Great Ealing School, where he became head boy and wrote plays for school performances and painted scenery. He then attended King's College London, graduating in 1856. He intended to take the examinations for a commission in the Royal Artillery, but with the end of the Crimean War, fewer recruits were needed, and the only commission available to Gilbert would have been in a line regiment. Instead he joined the Civil Service: he was an assistant clerk in the Privy Council Office for four years and hated it. In 1859, he joined the Militia, a part-time volunteer force formed for the defence of Britain, which he served in until 1878 (in between writing and other work), reaching the rank of captain.Pearson, p. 16. In 1863, he received a bequest of £300 that he used to leave the civil service and take up a brief career as a barrister (he had already entered the Inner Temple as a student). His legal practice was not successful, averaging just five clients a year.Gilbert, W. S. ed. Peter Haining – Introduction
To supplement his income from 1861 on, Gilbert wrote a variety of stories, comic rants, grotesque illustrations, theatre reviews (many in the form of a parody of the play being reviewed),Stedman, Jane W. W. S. Gilbert's Theatrical Criticism. London: The Society for Theatre Research, 2000. and, under the pseudonym "Bab" (his childhood nickname), illustrated poems for several comic magazines, primarily Fun, started in 1861 by H. J. Byron. He published stories, articles, and reviews in papers such as The Cornhill Magazine, London Society, Tinsley's Magazine and Temple Bar. In addition, Gilbert was the London correspondent for L'Invalide Russe and a drama critic for the Illustrated London Times. In the 1860s he also contributed to Tom Hood's Christmas annuals, to Saturday Night, the Comic News and the Savage Club Papers. The Observer newspaper in 1870 sent him to France as a war correspondent reporting on the Franco-Prussian War.
The poems, illustrated humorously by Gilbert, proved immensely popular and were reprinted in book form as the Bab Ballads.Stedman (1996), pp. 26–29. He would later return to many of these as source material for his plays and comic operas. Gilbert and his colleagues from Fun, including Tom Robertson, Tom Hood, Clement Scott and F. C. Burnand (who defected to Punch in 1862) frequented the Arundel Club, the Savage Club, and especially Evans's café, where they had a table in competition with the Punch 'Round table'.Stedman (1996), pp. 16–18.
After a relationship in the mid-1860s with the novelist Annie Thomas,Ainger, p. 52 Gilbert married Lucy Agnes Turner (1847–1936), whom he called "Kitty", in 1867; she was 11 years his junior. He wrote many affectionate letters to her over the years. Gilbert and Lucy were socially active both in London and later at Grim's Dyke, often holding dinner parties and being invited to others' homes for dinner, in contrast to the picture painted by fictionalisations such as the film Topsy-Turvy. The Gilberts had no children, but they had many pets, including some exotic ones.Ainger, p. 148 and Stedman (1996), pp. 318–20. See also Bond, Jessie. Reminiscences, Chapter 16 and McIntosh, Nancy. "The Late Sir W. S. Gilbert's Pets" in the W. S. Gilbert Society Journal, Brian Jones, ed. Vol. 2 No. 18: Winter 2005 (reprinted from Country Life, 3 June 1911), pp. 548–56
First plays Gilbert wrote and directed several plays at school, but his first professionally produced play was Uncle Baby, which ran for seven weeks in the autumn of 1863.
In 1865–66, Gilbert collaborated with Charles Millward on several pantomimes, including one called Hush-a-Bye, Baby, On the Tree Top, or, Harlequin Fortunia, King Frog of Frog Island, and the Magic Toys of Lowther Arcade (1866).Stedman (1996), pp. 34–35. Gilbert's first solo success came a few days after Hush-a-Bye Baby premiered. His friend and mentor, Tom Robertson, was asked to write a pantomime but did not think he could do it in the two weeks available, and so he recommended Gilbert instead. Written and rushed to the stage in 10 days, Dulcamara, or the Little Duck and the Great Quack, a burlesque of Gaetano Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, proved extremely popular. This led to a long series of further Gilbert opera burlesques, pantomimes and farces, full of awful puns (traditional in burlesques of the period),Gilbert, W. S. La Vivandière, or, True to the Corps! (a burlesque of Donizetti's The Daughter of the Regiment) though showing, at times, signs of the satire that would later be a defining part of Gilbert's work. For instance:
This was followed by Gilbert's penultimate operatic parody, Robert the Devil, a burlesque of Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera, Robert le diable, which was part of a triple bill that opened the Gaiety Theatre, London, in 1868. The piece was Gilbert's biggest success to date, running for over 100 nights and being frequently revived and played continuously in the provinces for three years thereafter.Stedman (1996), p. 62
In Victorian theatre, "[to degrade] high and beautiful themes ... had been the regular proceeding in burlesque, and the age almost expected it" However, Gilbert's burlesques were considered unusually tasteful compared to the others on the London stage. Isaac Goldberg wrote that these pieces "reveal how a playwright may begin by making burlesque of opera and end by making opera of burlesque."Goldberg (1931), p. xvii Gilbert would depart even further from the burlesque style from about 1869 with plays containing original plots and fewer puns. His first full-length prose comedy was An Old Score (1869).Crowther, Andrew. Introduction to script of "An Old Score", reprinted at the Haddon Hall website , accessed 21 July 2016
German Reed entertainments and other plays of the early 1870s