Gilbert Engaged

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-913724-77-1
Verlag: Renard Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

Engaged, W.S. Gilbert's most popular stage work after the comic operas he produced in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan, is a farcical comedy that has long lived in the literary shadows - although wildly neglected today, the play influenced literary names as great as George Bernard Shaw, and directly inspired Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Centring on a rich young man's search for a wife and his uncle and best friend's attempts to hinder him, the play toys with conventional notions of love and sincerity. In this edition, which also contains notes and an essay by the undisputed authority on W.S. Gilbert, Andrew Crowther, Engaged deserves to step out into the spotlight once more.

William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) was a dramatist, poet, author, illustrator and librettist. Although he was a prolific writer, producing around 75 plays and dramatic works, he is best known today for the comic operas he produced in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan, including HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, which continue to enjoy huge popularity worldwide.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gilbert, W. S.

Leseproben

introduction

W.S. Gilbert and

engaged

William Schwenck Gilbert was one of the celebrities of the age. The critic William Archer felt able to declare in his 1882 book English Dramatists of To-Day: ‘Mr Gladstone is not, Lord Beaconsfield [Benjamin Disraeli] was not, more famous. They have only made the laws of a people – Mr Gilbert has written the songs, and, better still, invented the popular catch-words not of one but two great nations.’ This was written in the midst of Gilbert’s career, with his most successful work, The Mikado, still before him. A few years later, in 1887, Gilbert was able to assert to Sir Arthur Sullivan without too much hyperbole that they were ‘as much an institution as Westminster Abbey.’

Today, his main claim to fame is as the wordsmith of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, but he was also – indeed, as he would have argued, first and foremost – a dramatist in his own right. He wrote over seventy works for the stage, of which the fourteen comic operas with Sullivan form only a small minority. He wrote comedies, farces, ‘issue’ dramas and tragedies, as well as comic opera libretti for other composers.

Archer called Gilbert ‘the most striking individuality, the most original character our theatre of today can boast… in all his work we feel that there is an “awakened” intellect, a thinking brain behind it.’ In an age of fast, disposable drama designed for a largely unthinking audience, this characteristic was something of a novelty.

What makes the best of Gilbert’s works remain alive to us today is that sense of an ever-lively ‘thinking brain’ which startles us still with its sharp and merciless humour. In none of his works is it sharper or more merciless than in Engaged.

Gilbert’s mentor as a dramatist was his older contemporary T.W. (Tom) Robertson (1829–71). In the 1860s, they were colleagues at the comic paper Fun. They would attend the first nights of the latest London plays together, discussing and dissecting the pieces afterwards, and they divided between them the responsibility of writing their often scathing reviews for the Illustrated Times. It was Robertson who taught Gilbert the importance of directing (or, in the Victorian term, ‘stage-managing’) one’s own plays, and, more vitally, taught him how to do it.

Robertson’s plays, if they are remembered today at all, have a reputation for sweet sentimentality; but there is also in them an undertone of critical wit. For example, his 1870 play M.P. concludes with the characters speculating what the titular initials might stand for: their suggestions include ‘Most Perfidious’ and ‘Mouth-Patriotism’. Robertson’s humour was known to be harsher and more sardonic in person than he let show in his plays. Gilbert’s first ‘serious’ play, An Old Score (1869), was clearly indebted to Robertson, though it went much further in its social criticism than Robertson ever dared.

The titles of Robertson’s plays – Society, Caste, Progress, School, M.P., War – suggest an almost didactic intent, though any such intent was never more than intermittently apparent in the plays themselves. The title of Gilbert’s Engaged recalls Robertson; and perhaps Gilbert was also recalling Robertson’s cynical attitude to society during the writing of this, his masterpiece of non-musical drama.

Engaged is, first and foremost, a very funny play, full of crazy situations and barbed wit. At a more ‘serious’ level, it can be read as a deliberate act of disruption. It takes the conventions of mid-Victorian drama and upends them. In every scene, there is a sense of something awry. The stock figures – noble hero, innocent heroine, evil villain, virtuous peasant, ‘good old man’ – all find themselves exhibiting strangely changed characteristics and taking on each other’s roles, maintaining their usual rhetoric but with altered meanings. The supposed hero, Cheviot Hill, is a mean, lecherous and bad-tempered cad. Belvawney, costumed in the black cloak of a melodramatic villain and bearing a villain’s long moustache and dark glasses, turns out to be the nearest thing to a hero that the play can offer. The baby-talking heroine keeps herself surprisingly well informed about stocks and shares; and as for the Good Old Man, he appears to have no redeeming features whatsoever. Every character, even Belvawney, is ultimately shown to be motivated by sheer selfishness and greed. As the French critic Augustin Filon said twenty years later in his book The English Stage (1897): ‘So cruel a farce had never been seen… The spectators laughed, but the jest was too bitter for their palate. It was at once too unreal and too true.’

The play certainly divided opinion. Its first performance on the 3rd of October 1877 was greeted with ‘an outburst of cheers and dissatisfaction’, according to a review in The Echo on the 10th of October.

The audience’s divided response to the play was also reflected in the critical reaction, which has been summarised by Michael R. Booth in his compilation of ‘Criticism of Engaged’ in English Plays of the Nineteenth Century, III: Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). Much of the criticism was remarkably vitriolic, to the extent that one can only surmise a touched nerve. The review in the Figaro on the 10th of October 1877 was perhaps the most extreme example:

To tell the story of Engaged is more than can be expected of anyone who assisted at its first representation. One does not care to relate the details of a rough passage across the Channel, if one is not proof against seasickness. The recapitulation of the symptoms of nausea is neither pleasant to the sufferer, nor edifying to his audience. Let our readers conceive a play in three acts, during which every character only opens his or her mouth to ridicule, in the coarsest manner, every feeling that is generally held in respect by any decent man or woman… From beginning to end of this nauseous play not one of the characters ever says a single word or does a single action that is not inseparable from the lowest moral degradation; while, much to the delight of that portion of the audience who believe that to scoff at what is pure and noble is the surest sign of intellectual pre-eminence, speeches in which the language ordinarily employed by true feeling is used for the purpose of deriding every virtue which any honest man reverences, even if he does not possess, are tediously reiterated by actresses whom one would wish to associate only with what is pure and modest… To answer that ‘all this is a burlesque’ seems to us but a poor defence; the characters are dressed in the ordinary costume of the present day; the language, as we have said, is precisely that which would be employed in serious drama; there are few if any of those amusing exaggerations which, in true burlesque, dispel, almost before it has time to form, any idea that the speaker is really in earnest. We do not believe that, except among the most repulsive comedies of the seventeenth century, or in the very lowest specimens of French farce, can there be found anything to equal in its heartlessness Mr Gilbert’s latest original work.

It’s worth noting here that, in the Victorian age, burlesque was different from what we might understand by the term today. It was a kind of theatrical parody, usually in rhymed verse and dotted with songs using the popular tunes current at the time. The humour was of the broadest kind, composed mainly of puns and slapstick.

Other reviews of Engaged were almost as scathing, calling it a ‘snarling mockery’ (Hornet, 10th October 1877) and ‘a premeditated insult’ (Theatre, 16th October 1877).

Elsewhere, the critics were more complimentary, though agreeing in regard to its shocking nature. The Daily Telegraph (6th October 1877) proclaimed: ‘[Gilbert] strips off the outward covering concealing our imperfections, and makes us stand shivering. The failings we are aware of, the thoughts we scarcely dare utter are proclaimed to the world and diagnosed...