Gilbert before Sullivan: six comic plays,

by W.S. Gilbert, Jane W. Stedman (Editor)

Priscilla Horton and her husband, Thomas German Reed were a famous theatrical couple whose "Gallery of Illustration" offered respectable family entertainment to proper Victorians who shunned the normal playhouse. Their performances, Miss Stedman writes: "became an English equivalent of the Bouffes Parisiens but 'quite free from coarseness' as the Athenaeum pointed out." Among the many talents this couple helped shape were those of both Gilbert and Sullivan who were in the Gallery's stable of the sixties but had not yet teamed.

The six one-act plays with music collected here were written by Gilbert for the Reeds and staged between 1869 and 1875. Miss Stedman, in her engaging introduction, traces Gilbert's apprenticeship and comments on these early prototypes of the Savoy operas. In so doing she entertainingly defines the nature of Victorian comedy.

The book is charmingly illustrated with Gilbert's own line drawings, and includes the complete score of Ages Ago, the forerunner of Ruddigore. The other plays are No Cards, A Sensation Novel, Happy Arcadia, Eyes and No Eyes, and Our Island Home. The last of these is published here for the first time, and the others, collected for the first time, are hard to find. In rescuing these plays from near-oblivion, Miss Stedman will have won the gratitude of all who can never get enough of the Savoy operas.

1 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

British playwright and lyricist Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (18 November 1836 – 29 May 1911) wrote a series of comic operas, including Her Majesty's Ship Pinafore (1878) and The Pirates of Penzance (1879), with composer Sir Arthur Sullivan.

This English dramatist, librettist, poet, and illustrator in collaboration with composer Sullivan produced fourteen comic operas, which include The Mikado , one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre.

Opera companies, repertory companies, schools and community theatre groups throughout and beyond the English-speaking world continue to perform regularly these operas as well as most of their other Savoy operas. From these works, lines, such as "short, sharp shock", "What, never? Well, hardly ever!", and "Let the punishment fit the crime," form common phrases of the English language.

Gilbert also wrote the Bab Ballads , an extensive collection of light verse, which his own comical drawings accompany.

His creative output included more than 75 plays and libretti, numerous stories, poems, lyrics and various other comic and serious pieces. His plays and realistic style of stage direction inspired other dramatists, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. According to The Cambridge History of English and American Literature , the "lyrical facility" of Gilbert "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."