: W.S. Gilbert
: Engaged
: Renard Press
: 9781913724771
: 1
: CHF 3.60
:
: Dramatik
: English
: 128
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
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.

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 bookEnglish 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 comicoperaswith 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 inEngaged.

Gilbert’s mentor as a dramatist was his oldercontemporaryT.W. (Tom) Robertson (1829–71). In the 1860s, they were colleagues at the comic paperFun. 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 scathingreviewsfor theIllustrated Times. It was Robertson who taught Gilbert the importance of directing (or, in theVictorianterm, ‘stage-managing’) one’s own plays, and, more vitally, taught h