W.S. Gilbert
W.S. Gilbert

Author: Jane W. Stedman

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 9780198161745

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Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) was the most brilliant dramatist of Victorian England. A daring and cynical playwright, the forerunner of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, he was also a prolific journalist and humorous poet (his Bab Ballads are still widely read), and he achieved worldwide fame through his long collaboration with the composer Arthur Sullivan, a collaboration that created such classics as H. M. S. Pinafore, The Mikado, and all the other Savoy operas. Now the story of this remarkable writer's life - and of his stormy relationship with Sullivan - is here chronicled by a renowned authority on Gilbert and on the theatrical and literary scene in Victorian London. For this biography, Jane W. Stedman has returned to original sources, has interviewed survivors, and has scoured a whole variety of Victorian periodicals for reviews, and personal comment. Gilbert emerges as a much more complex and interesting figure than has previously been thought. The book is a worthy companion piece to Arthur Jacobs's recent biography Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician.

Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan

Author: Michael Ainger

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2002-11-21

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 0195349008

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'A Gilbert is of no use without a Sullivan.' With these words, W.S. Gilbert summed up his reasons for persisting in his collaboration with Arthur Sullivan despite the combative nature of their relationship. In fact, Michael Ainger suggests in Gilbert and Sullivan the success of the pair's work is a direct result of their personality clash, as each partner challenged the other to produce his best work. After exhaustive research into the D'Oyly Carte collection of documents, Ainger offers the most detailed account to date of Gilbert and Sullivan's starkly different backgrounds and long working partnership. Having survived an impoverished and insecure childhood, Gilbert flourished as a financially successful theater professional, married happily and established himself as a property owner. His sense of proprietorship extended beyond real estate, and he fought tenaciously to protect the integrity of his musical works. Sullivan, the product of a supportive family who nourished his talent, was much less satisfied with stability than his collaborator. His creative self-doubts and self-demands led to nervous and physical breakdowns, but it also propelled the team to break the successful mode of their earliest work to produce more ambitious pieces of theater, including The Mikado and The Yeoman of the Guards . Offering previously-unpublished draft libretti and personal letters, this thorough double-biography will be an essential addition to the library of any Gilbert and Sullivan fan.

Plays by W. S. Gilbert
Plays by W. S. Gilbert

Author: George Rowell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1982-03-04

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9780521235891

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This edition includes four plays and one libretto, covering more than twenty years of the dramatist's career: The Palace of Truth (1870), Sweethearts (1874), Princess Toto (1876), Engaged (1877) and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1891). The collection demonstrates that Gilbert was an original dramatist in his own right. The sophisticated irony of his plays challenged the conventions of the Victorian burlesque and sentimental comedy by demanding, and receiving, an intelligent response from the audience. George Rowell's useful and thorough introduction, which presents the theatrical background to Gilbert's development, also shows the dramatist's influence on Pinero, Wilde and Shaw. Gilbert's style combines a technique rarely realistic and stretching to fantasy with a tone apparently cynical and in fact deeply pessimistic. This odd pairing of fantasy and fatalism was recognized by his own and later generations as 'Gilbertian' and the term has been widely applied even outside the theatre.

The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud
The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

Author: Peter Gay

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1993-09-17

Total Pages: 717

ISBN-13: 0393243451

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With the same sweep, authority, and originality that marked his best-selling Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay here takes us on a remarkable journey through middle-class Victorian culture. Gay's search through middle-class Victorian culture, illuminated by lively portraits of such daunting figures as Bismarck, Darwin and his acolytes, George Eliot, and the great satirists Daumier and Wilhelm Busch, covers a vast terrain: the relations between men and women, wit, demagoguery, and much more. We discover the multiple ways in which the nineteenth century at once restrained aggressive behavior and licensed it. Aggression split the social universe into insiders and outsiders. "By gathering up communities of insiders," Professor Gay writes, the Victorians "discovered--only too often invented--a world of strangers beyond the pale, of individuals and classes, races and nations it was perfectly proper to debate, patronize, ridicule, bully, exploit, or exterminate." The aggressions so channeled or bottled could not be contained forever. Ultimately, they exploded in the First World War.

Writers, Readers, and Reputations
Writers, Readers, and Reputations

Author: Philip Waller

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 1194

ISBN-13: 0199541205

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Philip Waller explores the literary world in which the modern best-seller first emerged, with writers promoted as stars and celebrities, advertising both products and themselves.