PENGUIN CLASSICS
Playwright/lyricist WILLIAM S. GILBERT (1836–1911) and composer ARTHUR S. SULLIVAN (1842–1900) defined operetta or comic operas in Victorian England with a series of their internationally successful and timeless works known as the Savoy Operas.
ED GLINERT was born in Dalston, London, and read Classical Hebrew at Manchester University. In 1983 he set up City Life, Manchester’s listings magazine, and he has since worked for Radio Times, Private Eye and Mojo. He is the co-author of Fodor’s Rock & Roll Traveler USA and Fodor’s Rock & Roll Traveler Great Britain and Ireland, and recently edited The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith, and annotated two volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories, all for Penguin Classics.
MIKE LEIGH is a film-maker and dramatist. His 1999 film Topsy-Turvy examined Gilbert and Sullivan’s world at the time of the original productions of Princess Ida and The Mikado. It won two Oscars. His other films include Nuts in May, Life is Sweet, Naked, Secrets and Lies and Vera Drake. Among his many plays are Babies Grow Old, Abigail’s Party, Ecstasy, Goose-Pimples and Two Thousand Years. He is a Vice President of the Sir Arthur Sullivan Society.
Edited by ED GLINERT
with an Introduction by MIKE LEIGH
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
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First published 2006
Published in paperback in Penguin Classics 2008
1
Chronology, Notes and Further Reading copyright © Ed Glinert, 2006
Introduction copyright © Mike Leigh, 2006
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978-0-14-190014-8
Introduction
Chronology
THESPIS
TRIAL BY JURY
THE SORCERER
HMS PINAFORE
THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE
PATIENCE
IOLANTHE
PRINCESS IDA
THE MIKADO
RUDDIGORE
THE YEOMEN OF THE GUARD
THE GONDOLIERS
UTOPIA LIMITED
THE GRAND DUKE
A Note on the Text
Notes
Further Reading
One night in 1999, Jim Broadbent and I were in the audience at the New York Film Festival. Our Gilbert and Sullivan film, Topsy-Turvy, in which Jim plays Gilbert, had been screened the previous evening. To-night it was the turn of Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s delightful surreal comedy about people popping through a magic door and finding themselves inside John Malkovich’s head, thus instantly becoming that film star.
Suddenly, Jim and I looked at each other. This was a quintessentially Gilbertian ‘magic lozenge’ plot. Having immersed ourselves for the previous couple of years in the life, work and preoccupations of W. S. Gilbert, we were well versed in his predilection for devices that turn you, with significant dramatic consequences, into somebody else, or into a different version of yourself.
The magic lozenge was the bugbear of Gilbert and Sullivan’s working relationship. Every time Gilbert proposed the idea, Sullivan rejected it. He disliked fantastical devices that tampered with reality. He always wanted ‘to set a story of human interest and probability’ as he wrote to Gilbert in 1884.
Of course, they had done the lozenge in their first fully-fledged collaboration. The Sorcerer, with its love philtre. But what Sullivan failed to spot was that every one of the subsequent operas was a lozenge story without the lozenge, in that they all involve transformation of identity, and that, far from failing to deal with human emotions, Gilbert’s metaphorical world enabled him to do precisely that, albeit in his own idiosyncratic way.
The inscription on Gilbert’s memorial on the Thames Embankment in London reads, ‘His Foe was Folly, and his Weapon Wit’. This is too coy. Gilbert saw the world as a chaotic place, in which our lives are brutal accidents of birth, fate and human blunder, a jungle of confusion and delusion, where we all aspire to be other than what we are, and where nobody is really who or what they seem to be.
Power. Status. Rank. Duty. Hypocrisy and affectation. Youth and old age. Gilbert’s obsessions inform all these operas, his greatest being the arbitrary nature of society’s absurd rules and regulations. He was a failed barrister in his youth and a lay magistrate in his old age. He loved the English legal world, not least for its theatricality, and he himself was compulsively litigious. But, for all his appearance as the very model of conservative respectability, his merciless lampooning of the heartless constraints of laws and etiquette reveal him, underneath it all, to have been a genuine free spirit and a true anarchist. Doubtless he would have denied these descriptions, but his subversive tendencies are beyond dispute, and he could hardly have been called a conformist.
The two principal elements of all the Savoy Operas are Law and Identity. Magic crops up in just three of them, but material change caused by supernatural intervention is only a variation on the manipulation of laws and rules. There are love stories galore, but for the most part these do not drive the plot, and taken out of context they are sentimental and dull. As such, they are seldom distinguishable from the common fodder of ordinary light musical theatre, or indeed of Victorian melodrama.
If a key to understanding the operas is to see Gilbert as an anarchist, it may also be useful to approach them as the work of a proto-surrealist. With great fluidity and freedom, he continually challenges our natural expectations, and he does this on two levels. First, within the framework of the story, he makes bizarre things happen, and turns the world on its head. Thus, the Learned Judge marries the Plaintiff, the soldiers metamorphose into aesthetes, and so on, and nearly every opera is resolved by a deft moving of the goalposts.
But concurrently, Gilbert plays with different levels of reality, using para-theatrical conventions, that is, making characters refer implicitly to the fact that they are on a stage in a play, outside the framework of the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief.
Am I alone,
And unobserved? I am!
Then let me own
I’m an aesthetic sham!
Read the whole of this confession by Bunthorne in Patience. Gilbert’s joke, of course, is that Bunthorne is not unobserved – the audience is watching him. And he can only be talking to the audience. He is not discovering something new about himself before our very eyes, unlike the soliloquies of Hamlet or Macbeth, or even Malvolio, which must be played as real people talking to themselves, with total psychological truth. When Shakespeare needs to talk to the audience as such, he invents a non-character, like the Chorus in Henry V.
The most extreme exercise in surrealism in this series is of course The Mikado, a puppet show cheerfully devoid of any sense of the real world as we know it. The far-fetched nature of its abstraction – it has nothing to do with Japan – and the craziness of its logic surely account for its being the most durable and popular of the operas. It abounds with para-theatrical devices:
KO-KO: Congratulate me, gentlemen, I’ve found a volunteer!
CHORUS: The Japanese equivalent for Hear, Hear, Hear!
And the Mikado himself observes, ‘it’s an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances’.
The Yeomen of the Guard, uniquely, is grounded in the real world and, as such, is the odd man out. It is probably a romantic rather than a comic opera, although it does contain some very funny moments, and the plot still involves disguise and mistaken identity.
‘Comic operas’ is what Gilbert and Sullivan called these shows. They are certainly not mere ‘light’ operas, which are soft-centred romantic offerings; nor are they ‘operettas’, which are frilly, frothy affairs, devoid of any shade of the dark side.
For it is their dark side, their hard edge, that so distinguishes the Savoy Operas. Perhaps they may more usefully be described as grotesque operas. Far from being pejorative, this epithet most accurately evokes their true nature and spirit.
Or are they not absurd operas? Gilbert undoubtedly anticipated the Theatre of the Absurd, as did Alfred Jarry, whose Ubu Roi outraged Paris audiences in 1896. Ionesco’s Rhinoceros is surely a magic-lozenge play, albeit a mournfully unfunny one, and it is no surprise that Samuel Beckett was a confirmed G&S aficionado.
The operas have often been misunderstood. They are referred to as satires, which they are not. There may be satirical elements in Iolanthe or Utopta Limited, but Gilbert’s true intention is never to draw specific parallels. He merely holds up his mirror to the world, and reflects on its madness. Similarly misunderstood is his much-criticized attitude to elderly women. He is not attacking them; he is doing no more than to lament the way life is. We all grow old, and the plain and the ugly have a harder time than the beautiful.
If these shows have fallen into disrepute over the years, it is because directors have failed to understand their raw edge. This results in boring, bland, sentimental, self-conscious, often gratuitously camp productions, which entirely miss the point.
What, then, is ‘Gilbertian’? The word has been in the English language for over a century, and to understand it, we need to analyse the stylistic alchemy of Gilbert’s art as a dramatist. As we have seen, he views the world through a distorting lens of irony and paradox. His genius is to fuse opposites with an imperceptible sleight of hand. The Gilbertian formula is to blend the surreal with the real, and the caricature with the natural. In other words, to tell a perfectly outrageous story in a completely deadpan way. Indeed, to disguise a subversive anarchist bomb as bourgeois respectability.
We have discussed Gilbert the surrealist. But he was also a master of theatrical naturalism. Between 1863 and 1911, he wrote over seventy plays. Apart from his comic operas, translations of Donizetti and Offenbach, pantomimes and burlesques, a substantial proportion of his popular work consisted of naturalistic fourth-wall plays, all of them Gilbertian in their irony. These ranged from Engaged (1877), a farce about greed, which still enjoys revivals in the twenty-first century, to The Hooligan (1911), in which a condemned simpleton suffers a fatal heart attack in his prison cell.
Gilbert belonged to a small group of dramatists who reacted against the undisciplined melodramatic mess of the earlier Victorian theatre, so accurately evoked by Dickens in his portrayal of Mr Crummles and his company in Nicholas Nickleby.
One of these was Tom Robertson, who was a major influence on Gilbert in two ways. As a dramatist, his so-called ‘cup-and-saucer’ plays like Ours (1866) and Caste (1867) depicted the world in a new, fresh, realistic way; and as a director (or stage-manager, as they called it in those days), he introduced Gilbert both to the revolutionary notion of disciplined rehearsals and to mise-en-scène or unity of style in the whole presentation – direction, design, music, acting.
Before this period, directing as we know it did not exist. On the continent, Wagner pioneered it at Bayreuth, as did the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen with his court theatre. In London, the actor-managers Macready, Kean, and, later, Irving, organized their productions around their own egocentric performances. But it was Robertson and Gilbert who were the first real directors, and Robertson’s early death in 1871 left Gilbert as the main pioneer of this new craft.
That Gilbert was a good director is not in doubt. He was able to extract from his actors natural, clear performances, which served the Gilbertian requirements of outrageousness delivered straight. He knew what he wanted – and he got it, and he was certainly a perfectionist. But whether his famously confrontational personality made him something of a dogmatic autocrat, such as some of us modern practitioners in this field might question, is altogether another matter.
A further key to understanding Gilbert is to savour his talents as a visual artist. Had he never written a word, his work as an illustrator would have stood the test of time. All that survives in print now are his many drawings for the Bab Ballads, the comic verses he wrote for Fun magazine in the 1860s. These have been published over the years in various collections, including, most recently, James Ellis’s definitive Harvard University Press edition (1980). Gilbert added the Songs of a Savoyard – favourites from these operas – in editions from 1898, and in 2000 Jim Broadbent recorded a selection for Penguin Audiobooks, under my direction.
The Bab Ballads are masterpieces. They rank with Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and no appreciation of the Savoy Operas is complete without studying them. There are two reasons for this.
Firstly, they contain the sources for many of the ideas, themes and plots of the operas. Thus, for example, HMS Pinafore derives from ‘Captain Reece’:
Of all the ships upon the blue
No ship contained a better crew
Than that of worthy CAPTAIN REECE,
Commanding of The Mantelpiece.
He was adored by all his men,
For worthy CAPTAIN REECE, RN,
Did all that lay within him to
Promote the comfort of his crew.
Driven by duty, and committed to furnishing his crew’s every last desire, the Captain agrees not only to supply all his female relations as their brides, but also to marry his boatswain’s widowed mother himself:
‘Well, well, the Chaplain I will seek,
We’ll all be married this day week-
At yonder church upon the hill;
It is my duty, and I will!’
The sisters, cousins, aunts and niece,
And widowed ma of CAPTAIN REECE,
Attended there as they were bid;
It was their duty, and they did.
Secondly, within the Bab verses, we find the two opposing strands of Gilbert’s vision, the ridiculous and the real, the comic and the tragic. ‘The Story of Prince Agib’ begins:
Strike the concertina’s melancholy string!
Blow the spirit-stirring harp like anything!
Let the piano’s martial blast
Rouse the echoes of the past
For AGIB, the prince of Tartary, I sing!
Of AGIB, who, amid Tartaric scenes,
Wrote a lot of ballet-music in his teens:
His gentle spirit rolls
In the melody of souls-
Which is pretty, but I don’t know what it means.
Of AGIB, who could readily, at sight,
Strum a march upon the loud Theodolite.
He would diligently play
On the Zoetrope all day,
And blow the gay Pantechnicon all night.
By contrast, in ‘At a Pantomime’, Gilbert describes the old men in the audience as they watch the actor on the stage:
The old ones, palsied, blear and hoar,
Their breasts in anguish beat–
They’ve seen him seventy times before,
How well they know the cheat!
They’ve seen that ghastly pantomime,
They’ve felt its blighting breath,
They know that rollicking Christmas-time
Meant cold and want and death–
Starvation – Poor law Union fare,
And deadly cramps and chills,
And illness – illness everywhere –
And crime, and Christmas bills.
They know Old Christmas well, I ween,
Those men of ripened age;
They’ve often, often, often seen
That actor off the stage.
They see in his gay rotundity
A clumsy stuffed-out dress;
They see in the cup he waves on high
A tinselled emptiness.
Those aged men so lean and wan,
They’ve seen it all before;
They know they’ll see the charlatan
But twice or three times more.
And so they bear with dance and song,
And crimson foil and green;
They wearily sit, and grimly long
For the Transformation Scene.
And here we come to the heart of the matter. Gilbert was, above all, a great poet. This volume is a cornucopia of delights. Open it randomly at any page, and you will not fail to find a gem. It is easy to understand how W. S. Gilbert so inspired Arthur Sullivan.
Each of these men was an extremely skilled craftsman in his own right. But the key to their success is that they knew how to write for each other. For all their legendary conflict, they had extraordinary rapport. Despite their contrasting personalities – Sullivan ebullient and jolly, Gilbert sardonic and dour – they shared a sense of humour. Nothing else Sullivan wrote holds a candle to the music provoked by Gilbert’s inventive words. What he did to those words was to challenge and subvert them, and to enhance them by bringing out their flavour and their meaning by interlacing and surrounding them with unpredictable succulent riches.
Much of Sullivan’s serious and other lighter work is interesting and enjoyable. Without the Savoy Operas, he would certainly deserve a place in the pantheon of minor composers, not only for ‘The Lost Chord’ and ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, but for such pieces as his ‘Di Ballo’ Overture, his Cello Concerto and his grand opera, Ivanhoe.
And the Bab Ballads alone would have earned Gilbert his place in posterity, although a dozen of his plays will stand up to revival when the world rediscovers them.
Nevertheless, it is obvious that without each other, both Gilbert and Sullivan would probably have sunk without trace. Together, they created a unique body of work that places them up there alongside Molière, Congreve, Sheridan, Rossini, Donizetti, Offenbach and Feydeau, even the Mozart of Cosí fan tutte and The Marriage of Figaro. They paved the way for Wilde, Pinero, Shaw and Noel Coward; and all the lyricists and composers of the great twentieth-century American musicals cited G&S as their major influence and inspiration.
Sullivan’s frustration was that he never had time to write proper music: he was convinced that he frittered away his life and his talents on the trivia of the Savoy Operas. How wrong he was!
As I have said, these operas have been much discredited by stale productions. Of course, some people simply loathe them on principle, courtesy of pompous elderly relatives and schoolteachers with awful singing voices. Others associate them with suffering the ignominy of playing members of the opposite sex in school productions of dubious motivation.
But approached fresh, they are great shows – strong and youthful, and resonant with meaning. It was a joy to behold the whole cast falling in love with the material when we shot Topsy-Turvy-and the film crew, too!
When we were rehearsing the film, some of us went, somewhat apprehensively, to see King’s College, London, Gilbert and Sullivan Society in The Pirates of Penzance. (King’s was Gilbert’s alma mater.) This turned out to be one of the great nights out at the theatre, as the young, amateur cast explored every moment with originality, wit and musical relish. It was hilarious, and it was hard to accept that it had not been somehow updated or rewritten. But not a word or a note had been touched.
The same was true of Martin Duncan’s laser-sharp and deeply refreshing 2003 production of The Gondoliers at Chichester, which at the time of writing is being explored afresh at the English National Opera. Staged in 1950s style, it is amazingly modern and real – and utterly Gilbertian. And again, not a word has been changed.
When the old D’Oyly Carte Company died its inevitable natural death a quarter of a century ago, one could have been forgiven for thinking these operas would share the same fate. Yet at that very time, Joseph Papp’s brilliant New York version of The Pirates was enjoying worldwide success. Jonathan Miller followed, with his inspired Mikado, relocated to an English hotel in the 1920s.
The operas are now as popular as ever. Gilbert and Sullivan are probably amazed, if they are watching from up there. But I think it not the least bit remarkable.
Mike Leigh
March 2006
The early years of William Schwenck Gilbert are frustratingly shrouded in mystery and biographers have been unable to unearth any more information than Gilbert himself revealed. We know that he was descended from a family of Wiltshire yeomen and that his grandfather, a tea merchant, lived at the since demolished 17 Southampton Street, off London’s Strand, where Gilbert was born. Of his mother, Anne Morris, we know little. His father, William Gilbert, was a naval surgeon and novelist. The middle name, Schwenck, was added in honour of his great aunt and godmother, Mary Schwenck.
In contrast to W. S. Gilbert’s vague early years, Arthur Sullivan enjoyed an uncomplicated childhood in Lambeth, south London. His father was a bandmaster at the Royal Military College, and the young Sullivan was composing at the age of eight, soon mastering a variety of wind instruments. In his late teens he won a scholarship to study in Leipzig, where Franz Liszt listened to his final thesis. His professional career was a never-to-be-resolved battle between his frustration at the populist glory he received for composing the Savoy Operas at the expense, he believed, of the greater artistic kudos he may have gained for being Britain’s greatest nineteenth-century composer. Other than his collaborations with Gilbert, Sullivan composed the music to the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, a grand opera, Ivanhoe, and several major choral works, including The Light of the World, The Martyr of Antioch and The Golden Legend.
1836 18 November, William Schwenck Gilbert born. He had three younger sisters, Jane, Maud and Florence. Spent early years touring Europe with his parents. His family nickname was ‘Bab’.
1838 Kidnapped by bandits in Naples and ransomed for £25.
1842 13 May, Arthur Sullivan born.
1854 Longing to become a chorister, Sullivan pleads with his father to be allowed to join the Chapel Royal School with the entreaty, ‘Father, Purcell was a Chapel Royal boy.’ Duly gains a place.
1856 Sullivan wins joint first prize in a Mendelssohn competition and a place at the Royal Academy of Music.
1857 Gilbert graduates from King’s College, London, with a BA and takes job at the Privy Council office in London. Begins writing farces and burlesques, all of which are rejected for publication.
1861 As ‘Bab’, Gilbert begins writing his Bab Ballads (published 1869) for Fun, a rival to Punch.
1862 April 15, Sullivan’s orchestral suite to Shakespeare’s The Tempest performed at the Crystal Palace in front of an audience that includes Charles Dickens, who tells him: ‘I am not a music critic, but I do know that I have just listened to some very remarkable music.’
1863 Gilbert called to the Bar after studying law at the Inner Temple, London.
31 October, what may have been Gilbert’s first play, Uncle Baby, performed at the Lyceum Theatre, Covent Garden, London, but doubt surrounds his authorship; it may be a collaboration with his father.
Sullivan composes his Symphony in E flat (the ‘Irish Symphony’), first performed, successfully, at the Crystal Palace in March 1866.
1866 29 December, Gilbert’s Dulcamara, or The Little Duck and the Great Quack performed at St James’s Theatre, London. He later claimed it to be his first dramatic production.
1867 6 August, Gilbert marries Lucy Agnes Turner (’Kitty’), daughter of an Indian army officer, in Kensington; no children.
1869 Autumn, Gilbert and Sullivan meet at the Royal Gallery of Illustration, Lower Regent Street, London, during rehearsals for a Gilbert-Frederick Clay musical, Ages Ago.
1871 G&S collaborate for the first time on Thespis; or, The Gods Grown Old; 26 December, opens at the Gaiety Theatre, London (its music now lost). Gilbert sees the openings of two non-musical plays: On Guard (Court Theatre, 28 October) and Pygmalion and Galatea (Haymarket, 9 December).
1875 25 March, Trial By Jury (published in the April 1868 edition of Fun) opens at the Royalty Theatre, London.
1877 17 November, The Sorcerer, their first deliberately planned collaboration, premiered at the Opéra Comique, London, by the Comedy Opera Company which was formed by Richard D’Oyly Carte to promote English light opera.
Sullivan’s brother, Fred, who was playing the Judge in Trial by Jury, dies of pneumonia. The composer writes ‘The Lost Chord’ in his memory.
1878 25 May, HMS Pinafore premiered at the Opéra Comique. That year Gilbert’s serious drama, The Ne’er Do Weel, flops.
1879 Gretchen, a blank verse tragedy, closes after three weeks. 30 December, The Pirates of Penzance first performed at the Royal Bijou Theatre, Paignton, Devon.
1881 23 April, Patience opens at the Opéra Comique. Gilbert’s other main work that year, Foggerty’s Fairy, a supernatural farce, lasts only three weeks. 10 October, the newly built Savoy Theatre (see Patience headnote), largely created with G&S productions in mind, opens in London with a performance of Patience.
1882 25 November, Iolanthe is premiered at the Savoy Theatre.
1883 22 May, Sullivan knighted.
1884 5 January, Princess Ida opens at the Savoy Theatre.
1885 14 March, The Mikado opens at the Savoy Theatre.
1886 16 October, Sullivan’s oratorio, ‘The Golden Legend’, well received during the Leeds Festival.
1887 22 January, Ruddigore opens at the Savoy Theatre.
1888 3 October, The Yeomen of the Guard opens at the Savoy Theatre.
1889 7 December, The Gondoliers opens at the Savoy Theatre. G&S partnership splits up acrimoniously soon after, following the so-called Great Carpet Quarrel (see headnote to Utopia Limited).
1891 31 January, Sullivan’s only Grand Opera, Ivanhoe, opens at D’Oyly Carte’s newly built English Opera House (now the Palace Theatre, Cambridge Circus), London.
1893 G&S reunited; 7 October, Utopia Limited opens at the Savoy Theatre.
1896 7 March, The Grand Duke, the last collaboration, opens at the Savoy Theatre. Gilbert goes into semi-retirement at Grim’s Dyke, his Harrow mansion.
1897 27 September, Gilbert’s The Fortune Hunter, a serious melodrama, opens in Birmingham to poor reviews. He is so upset by its failure, writes nothing further until 1904, spending much time in his role as a magistrate in Harrow.
1900 22 November, Sullivan dies a lonely death in London after contracting bronchitis.
1906 December, D’Oyly Carte’s widow, Helen Lenoir, begins series of Savoy Opera revivals under Gilbert’s stage direction.
1907 22 May, Gilbert knighted.
1911 Premiere of his swan song, The Hooligan, a short piece inspired by Alexandre Dumas’s Derniers Jours d’un condamné à mort (1829), about the last hours of a condemned convict.
1911 29 May, Gilbert dies of heart failure while attempting to rescue a young woman he is teaching to swim in his own lake. His last words were: ‘Put your hands on my shoulders and don’t struggle.’
Gods
Thespians
THESPIS
SILLIMON
TIMIDON
TIPSEION
PREPOSTEROS
STUPIDAS
SPARKEION
NICEMIS
PRETTEIA
DAPHNE
CYMON
Chorus of Stars
ACT I – Ruined Temple on the Summit of Olympus
ACT II – The same Scene, with the Ruins Restored
SCENE – The ruins of the Temple of the Gods on the summit of Mount Olympus.2 Picturesque shattered columns, overgrown with ivy, with entrances to temple (ruined). Fallen columns on the stage. Three broken pillars. At the back of the stage is the approach from the summit of the mountain. In the distance are the summits of adjacent mountains. At first all this is concealed by a thick fog, which clears presently.
[Enter through fog Chorus of Stars, coming off duty, as fatigued with their night’s work.]
CHORUS OF STARS: | Throughout the night, |
The constellations | |
Have given light | |
From various stations. | |
When midnight gloom | |
Falls on all nations, | |
We will resume | |
Our occupations. |
|
SOLO: | Our light, it’s true, |
Is not worth mention, | |
What can we do | |
To gain attention, | |
When, night and noon, | |
With vulgar glaring, | |
A great big Moon | |
Is always flaring? |
CHORUS: Throughout the night, etc.
[During Chorus enter DIANA,3 an elderly Goddess. She is carefully wrapped up in Cloaks, Shawls, etc. A hood is over her head, a respirator in her mouth, and galoshes on her feet. During the chorus she takes these things off, and discovers herself dressed in the usual costume of the Lunar Diana, the Goddess of the Moon.]
DIANA [shuddering]: Ugh! How cold the nights are! I don’t know how it is, but I seem to feel the night air a great deal more than I used to. But it is time for the sun to be rising. [Calls] Apollo.4
APOLLO [within]: Hollo!
DIANA: I’ve come off duty – it’s time for you to be getting up.
[Enter APOLLO. He is an elderly ‘buck’ with an air of assumed juvenility, and is dressed in dressing-gown and smoking cap.]
APOLLO [yawning]: I shan’t go out to-day. I was out yesterday and the day before and I want a little rest. I don’t know how it is, but I seem to feel my work a great deal more than I used to.
DIANA: I’m sure these short days can’t hurt you. Why, you don’t rise till six and you’re in bed again by five: you should have a turn at my work and see how you like that – out all night!
APOLLO: My dear sister, I don’t envy you – though I remember when I did – But that was when I was a younger sun. I don’t think I’m quite well. Perhaps a little change of air will do me good. I’ve a great mind to show myself in London this winter; they’ll be very glad to see me. No! I shan’t go out to-day. I shall send them this fine thick wholesome fog and they won’t miss me. It’s the best substitute for a blazing sun – and like most substitutes, nothing at all like the real thing. [To fog] Be off with you.
[Fog clears away and discovers the scene described.]
[Hurried music. MERCURY5 shoots up from behind precipice at back of stage. He carries several parcels afterwards described. He sits down, very much fatigued.]
MERCURY: Home at last! A nice time I’ve had of it.
DIANA: You young scamp, you’ve been down all night again. This is the third time you’ve been out this week.
MERCURY: Well, you’re a nice one to blow me up for that.
DIANA: I can’t help being out all night.
MERCURY: And I can’t help being down all night. The nature of Mercury requires that he should go down when the sun sets, and rise again, when the sun rises.
DIANA: And what have you been doing?
MERCURY: Stealing on commission. There’s a set of false teeth and a box of Life Pills – that’s for Jupiter6 – An invisible peruke7 and a bottle of hair dye – that’s for Apollo – A respirator and a pair of galoshes – that’s for Cupid8 – A full-bottomed chignon, some auricomous fluid, a box of pearl-powder, a pot of rouge, and a hare’s foot9 – that’s for Venus.10
DIANA: Stealing! you ought to be ashamed of yourself!
MERCURY: Oh, as the god of thieves I must do something to justify my position.
DIANA and APOLLO [contemptuously]: Your position!
MERCURY: Oh I know it’s nothing to boast of, even on earth. Up here, it’s simply contemptible. Now that you gods are too old for your work, you’ve made me the miserable drudge of Olympus – groom, valet, postman, butler, commissionaire, maid of all work, parish beadle and original dustman.
APOLLO: Your Christmas boxes ought to be something considerable.
MERCURY: They ought to be, but they’re not. I’m treated abominably. I make everybody and I’m nobody – I go everywhere and I’m nowhere – I do everything and I’m nothing. I’ve made thunder for Jupiter, odes for Apollo, battles for Mars11 and love for Venus. I’ve married couples for Hymen,12 and six weeks afterwards, I’ve divorced them for Cupid – and in return I get all the kicks while they pocket the halfpence. And in compensation for robbing me of the halfpence in question, what have they done for me?
APOLLO: Why they’ve – ha! ha! they’ve made you the god of thieves!
MERCURY: Very self-denying of them – there isn’t one of them who hasn’t a better claim to the distinction than I have.
MERCURY: | Oh, I’m the celestial drudge, |
From morning to night I must stop at it, | |
On errands all day I must trudge, | |
And I stick to my work till I drop at it! | |
In summer I get up at one, | |
(As a good-natured donkey I’m ranked for it), | |
Then I go and I light up the Sun, | |
And Phoebus13 Apollo gets thanked for it! | |
Well, well, it’s the way of the world, | |
And will be through all its futurity; | |
Though noodles are baroned and earled, | |
There’s nothing for clever obscurity! |
|
I’m the slave of the gods, neck and heels, | |
And I’m bound to obey, though I rate at ‘em; | |
And I not only order their meals, | |
But I cook ‘em, and serve ‘em, and wait at ‘em. | |
Then I make all their nectar – I do – | |
(Which a terrible liquor to rack us is) | |
And whenever I mix them a brew, | |
Why all the thanksgivings are Bacchus’s!14 | |
Well, well, it’s the way of the world, etc. |
|
Then reading and writing I teach, | |
And spelling books many I’ve edited! | |
And for bringing these arts within reach, | |
That donkey Minerva15 gets credited. | |
Then I scrape at the stars with a knife, | |
And plate-powder16 the moon (on the days for it), | |
And I hear all the world and his wife | |
Awarding Diana the praise for it! | |
Well, well, it’s the way of the world, etc. |
[After song – very loud and majestic music is heard.]
DIANA and MERCURY [looking off]: Why, who’s this? Jupiter, by Jove!
[Enter JUPITER, an extremely old man, very decrepit with very thin straggling white beard. He wears a long braided dressinggown, handsomely trimmed, and a silk night-cap on his head. MERCURY falls back respectfully as he enters.]
JUPITER: Good day, Diana – ah, Apollo – Well, well, well, what’s the matter? what’s the matter?
DIANA: Why, that young scamp Mercury says that we do nothing, and leave all the duties of Olympus to him! Will you believe it, he actually says that our influence on earth is dropping down to nil.
JUPITER: Well, well – don’t be hard on the lad – to tell you the truth, I’m not sure that he’s very far wrong. Don’t let it go any further, but, between ourselves, the sacrifices and votive offerings have fallen off terribly of late. Why, I can remember the time when people offered us human sacrifices – No mistake about it – human sacrifices! think of that!
DIANA: Ah! those good old days!
JUPITER: Then it fell off to oxen, pigs and sheep.
APOLLO: Well, there are worse things than oxen, pigs and sheep!
JUPITER: So I’ve found to my cost. My dear sir – between ourselves it’s dropped off from one thing to another until it has positively dwindled down to preserved Australian beef! What do you think of that!
APOLLO: I don’t like it at all.
JUPITER: You won’t mention it – it might go further –
DIANA: It couldn’t fare worse.
JUPITER: In short, matters have come to such a crisis that there’s no mistake about it – something must be done to restore our influence, the only question is, What?
MERCURY [coming forward in great alarm]:
[Enter MARS.]
Oh incident unprecedented! I hardly can believe it’s true! |
|
MARS: | Why bless the boy, he’s quite demented! Why, what’s the matter, sir, with you? |
APOLLO: | Speak quickly, or you’ll get a warning! |
MERCURY: | Why mortals up the mount are swarming, Our temple on Olympus storming, In hundreds – aye in thousands, too! |
ALL: | Goodness gracious, How audacious! Earth is spacious, Why come here? Our impeding Their proceeding Were good breeding, That is clear! |
DIANA: |
Jupiter, hear my plea, Upon the mount if they light, There’ll be an end of me, I won’t be seen by daylight! |
APOLLO: | Tartarus17 is the place These scoundrels you should send to – Should they behold my face My influence there’s an end to! |
JUPITER [looking over precipice]:
What fools to give themselves so much exertion! | |
DIANA: | “ “ A government survey, I’ll make assertion! |
APOLLO: | “ “ Perhaps the Alpine club at their diversion! |
MERCURY: | “ “ They seem to be more like a ‘Cook’s Excursion’.18 |
ALL: | Goodness gracious, etc. |
APOLLO: |
If, mighty Jove, you value your existence, Send them a thunderbolt with your regards! |
JUPITER: | My thunderbolts, though valid at a distance, Are not effective at a hundred yards. |
MERCURY: | Let the moon’s rays, Diana, strike ‘em flighty, Make ‘em all lunatics in various styles! |
DIANA: | My Lunar rays unhappily are mighty Only at many hundred thousand miles. |
ALL: |
Goodness gracious, etc. |
[Exeunt JUPITER, APOLLO, DIANA and MERCURY into ruined temple.]
[Enter SPARKEION and NICEMIS climbing mountain at back.]
SPARKEION: Here we are at last on the very summit and we’ve left the others ever so far behind! Why, what’s this?
NICEMIS: A ruined Palace! A Palace on the top of a mountain. I wonder who lives here? Some mighty king I dare say, with wealth beyond all counting, who came to live up here –
SPARKEION: To avoid his creditors! It’s a lovely situation for a country house, though it’s very much out of repair.
NICEMIS: Very inconvenient situation.
SPARKEION: Inconvenient?
NICEMIS: Yes – how are you to get butter, milk and eggs up here?
No pigs – no poultry – no postman. Why, I should go mad.
SPARKEION: What a dear little practical mind it is! What a wife you will make!
NICEMIS: Don’t be too sure – we are only partly married – the marriage ceremony lasts all day.
SPARKEION: I’ve no doubt at all about it. We shall be as happy as a king and queen, though we are only a strolling actor and actress.
NICEMIS: It’s very kind of Thespis to celebrate our marriage day by giving the company a picnic on this lovely mountain.
SPARKEION: And still more kind to allow us to get so much ahead of all the others. Discreet Thespis! [Kissing her.]
NICEMIS: There now, get away, do! Remember the marriage ceremony is not yet completed.
SPARKEION: But it would be ungrateful to Thespis’s discretion not to take advantage of it by improving the opportunity.
NICEMIS: Certainly not; get away.
SPARKEION: On second thoughts, the opportunity’s so good it don’t admit of improvement. There! [Kisses her.]
NICEMIS: How dare you kiss me before we are quite married.
SPARKEION: Attribute it to the intoxicating influence of the mountain air.
NICEMIS: Then we had better go down again. It is not right to expose ourselves to influences over which we have no control.
DUET – SPARKEION and NICEMIS | |
SPARKEION: | Here far away from all the world, |
Dissension and derision, | |
With Nature’s wonders all unfurled | |
To our delighted vision, | |
With no one here | |
(At least in sight) | |
To interfere | |
With our delight, | |
And two fond lovers sever, | |
Oh do not free, | |
Thine hand from mine, | |
I swear to thee | |
My love is thine, | |
For ever and for ever! | |
NICEMIS: |
On mountain top the air is keen, |
And most exhilarating, | |
And we say things we do not mean | |
In moments less elating. | |
So please to wait; | |
For thoughts that crop | |
En tête-à-tête, | |
On mountain top, | |
May not exactly tally | |
With those that you | |
May entertain, | |
Returning to | |
The sober plain | |
Of yon relaxing valley. |
SPARKEION: Very well – if you won’t have anything to say to me, I know who will.
NICEMIS: Who will?
SPARKEION: Daphne19 will.
NICEMIS: Daphne would flirt with anybody.
SPARKEION: Anybody would flirt with Daphne. She is quite as pretty as you and has twice as much back-hair.
NICEMIS: She has twice as much money, which may account for it.
SPARKEION: At all events she has appreciation. She likes good looks.
NICEMIS: We all like what we haven’t got.
SPARKEION: She keeps her eyes open.
NICEMIS: Yes-one of them.
SPARKEION: Which one?
NICEMIS: The one she doesn’t wink with.
SPARKEION: Well, I was engaged to her for six months, and if she still makes eyes at me, you must attribute it to force of habit. Besides, remember – we are only half-married at present.
NICEMIS: I suppose you mean that you are going to treat me as shamefully as you treated her. Very well, break it off it you like. I shall not offer any objection. Thespis used to be very attentive to me, and I’d just as soon be a manager’s wife as a fifth-rate actor’s!
[Chorus heard, at first below, then enter DAPHNE, PRETTEIA, PREPOSTEROS, STUPIDAS, TIPSEION, CYMON and other members of THE SPIS ‘s company climbing over rocks at back. All carry small baskets.]
Climbing over rocky mountain,
Skipping rivulet and fountain,
Passing where the willows quiver,
By the ever-rolling river,
Swollen with the summer rain,
Threading long and leafy mazes,
Dotted with unnumbered daisies,
Scaling rough and rugged passes,
Climb the hardy lads and lasses,
Till the mountain top they gain.
FIRST VOICE: | Fill the cup and tread the measure, Make the most of fleeting leisure, Hail it as a true ally, Though it perish bye and bye! |
SECOND VOICE: |
Every moment brings a treasure Of its own especial pleasure; Though the moments quickly die, Greet them gaily as they fly! |
THIRD VOICE: |
Far away from grief and care, High up in the mountain air, Let us live and reign alone In a world that’s all our own. |
FOURTH VOICE: |
Here enthroned in the sky, Far away from mortal eye, We’ll be gods and make decrees, Those may honour them who please. |
CHORUS: |
Fill the cup and tread the measure, etc. |
[After CHORUS and COUPLETS, enter THESPIS climbing over rocks.]
THESPIS: Bless you, my people, bless you. Let the revels commence. After all, for thorough, unconstrained, unconventional enjoyment give me a picnic.
PREPOSTEROS [very gloomily]: Give him a picnic, somebody!
THESPIS: Be quiet, Preposteros – don’t interrupt.
PREPOSTEROS: Ha! ha! shut up again! But no matter.
[STUPIDAS endeavours, in pantomime, to reconcile him. Throughout the scene PREPOSTEROS shows symptoms of breaking out into a furious passion and STUPIDAS does all he can to pacify and restrain him.]
THESPIS: The best of a picnic is that everybody contributes what he pleases, and nobody knows what anybody else has brought till the last moment. Now, unpack everybody, and let’s see what there is for everybody.
NICEMIS: I have brought you – a bottle of soda water – for the claret cup.
DAPHNE: I have brought you – a lettuce for the lobster salad.
SPARKEION: A piece of ice – for the claret cup.
PRETTEIA: A bottle of vinegar – for the lobster salad.
CYMON: A bunch of burrage20 for the claret cup!
TIPSEION: A hard-boiled egg – for the lobster salad!
STUPIDAS: One lump of sugar for the claret cup!
PREPOSTEROS: He has brought one lump of sugar for the claret cup! Ha! ha! ha! [Laughing melodramatically.]
STUPIDAS: Well, Preposteros, and what have you brought?
PREPOSTEROS: I have brought two lumps of the very best salt for the lobster salad.
THESPIS: Oh – is that all?
PREPOSTEROS: All! Ha! Ha! He asks if it is all! [STUPIDAS consoles him.]
THESPIS: But I say – this is capital, as far as it goes – nothing could be better, but it don’t go far enough. The claret, for instance! I don’t insist on claret – or a lobster – I don’t insist on lobster, but a lobster salad without a lobster, why it isn’t lobster salad. Here, Tipseion!
TIPSEION [a very drunken bloated fellow, dressed however with scrupulous accuracy and wearing a large medal round his neck]: My master? [Falls on his knees to THESPIS and kisses his robe.]
THESPIS: Get up – don’t be a fool – Where’s the claret? We arranged last week that you were to see to that?
TIPSEION: True, dear master – But then I was a drunkard!
THESPIS: You were.
TIPSEION: You engaged me to play convivial parts on the strength of my personal appearance.
THESPIS: I did.
TIPSEION: You then found that my habits interfered with my duties as low comedian.
THESPIS: True-
TIPSEION: You said yesterday that unless I took the pledge you would dismiss me from your company.
THESPIS: Quite so.
TIPSEION: Good. I have taken it. It is all I have taken since yesterday. My preserver! [Embraces him.]
THESPIS: Yes, but where’s the wine?
TIPSEION: I left it behind, that I might not be tempted to violate my pledge.
PREPOSTEROS: Minion! [Attempts to get at him – is restrained by STUPIDAS.]
THESPIS: Now, Preposteros, what is the matter with you?
PREPOSTEROS: It is enough that I am down-trodden in my profession. I will not submit to imposition out of it. It is enough that as your heavy villain I get the worst of it every night in a combat of six. I will not submit to insult in the day time. I have come out, ha! ha! to enjoy myself!
THESPIS: But look here, you know – virtue only triumphs at night from seven to ten – vice gets the best of it during the other twenty-one hours. Won’t that satisfy you? [STUPIDAS endeavours to pacify him.]
PREPOSTEROS [irritated, to STUPIDAS]: Ye are odious to my sight! get out of it!
STUPIDAS [in great terror]: What have I done?
THESPIS: Now what is it, Preposteros, what is it?
PREPOSTEROS: I a – hate him and would have his life!
THESPIS [to STUPIDAS]: That’s it – he hates you and would have your life – now go and be merry.
STUPIDAS: Yes, but why does he hate me?
THESPIS: Oh – exactly. [To PREPOSTEROS] Why do you hate him?
PREPOSTEROS: Because he is a minion!
THESPIS: He hates you because you are a minion. It explains itself. Now go and enjoy yourselves. Ha! ha! It is well for those who can laugh – let them do so – there is no extra charge. The light-hearted cup and the convivial jest for them – but for me – what is there for me?
SILLIMON: There is some claret cup and lobster salad [handing some].
THESPIS [taking it]: Thank you. [Resuming] What is there for me but anxiety – ceaseless gnawing anxiety that tears at my very vitals and rends my peace of mind asunder? There is nothing whatever for me but anxiety of the nature I have just described. The charge of these thoughtless revellers is my unhappy lot. It is not a small charge and it is rightly termed a lot, because they are many. Oh why did the gods make me a manager?
SILLIMON [as guessing a riddle]: Why did the gods make him a manager?
SPARKEION: Why did the gods make him a manager?
DAPHNE: Why did the gods make him a manager?
PRETTEIA: Why did the gods make him a manager?
THESPIS: No-no – what are you talking about? what do you mean?
DAPHNE: I’ve got it – don’t tell us –
ALL: No-no – because-because –
THESPIS [annoyed]: It isn’t a conundrum – it’s a misanthropical question. Why cannot I join you? [Retires up-stage centre.]
DAPHNE [who is sitting with SPARKEION to the annoyance of NICEMIS, who is crying alone]: I’m sure I don’t know. We do not want you. Don’t distress yourself on our account – we are getting on very comfortably – aren’t we, Sparkeion?
SPARKEION: We are so happy that we don’t miss the lobster or the claret. What are lobster and claret compared with the society of those we love! [Embracing DAPHNE.]
DAPHNE: Why, Nicemis, love, you are eating nothing. Aren’t you happy, dear?
NICEMIS [spitefully]: You are quite welcome to my share of everything. I intend to console myself with the society of my manager. [Takes THESPIS’s arm affectionately.]
THESPIS: Here, I say – this won’t do, you know – I can’t allow it – at least before my company – besides, you are half-married to Sparkeion. Sparkeion, here’s your half-wife impairing my influence before my company. Don’t you know the story of the gentleman who undermined his influence by associating with his inferiors?
ALL: Yes, yes, – we know it.
PREPOSTEROS [furiously]: I do not know it! It’s ever thus! Doomed to disappointment from my earliest years – [STUPIDAS endeavours to console him.]
THESPIS: There – that’s enough. Preposteros – you shall hear it.
THESPIS: | I once knew a chap who discharged a function On the North South East West Diddlesex21 junction, He was conspicuous exceeding, |