VICTORIAN LAUGHTER: THE COMIC OPERAS OF GILBERT AND SULLIVAN (COMEDY, POPULAR CULTURE, BRITAIN)

This study explores the comic operas written by W. S. Gilbert and composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan with special regard to their great popularity among the Victorian middle class and within the context of the volatile Savoy partnership. The success of the operas, I maintain, depended upon the abilities of Gilbert, Sullivan and the producer D'Oyly Carte to present musical entertainment that appealed directly to a large group for whom continental opera and the music-hall were equally unacceptable.;The most successful of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas combine the conservative social theme with exotic or military settings and bright but unchallenging musical accompaniment. This formula assured popular success for nearly twenty years, until petty jealousies and mistrust began to threaten the partnership. The last Savoy operas reflect not only strained creativity, but also D'Oyly Carte's ambitions for a larger audience, Sullivan's late determination to devote himself to serious music, Gilbert's fears of losing his composer and producer, and the advancing age and recurrent illness of the three theatrical collaborators.;Far from goading his audiences with political satire and radical ideas, Gilbert soothed the social fears and hopes of the newly affluent middle class. In the world of the Savoy operas, trouble is characteristically represented by the social-riser whose upper-class ambitions are jeopardized by his lower-class clumsiness. The plot revolves around the punishment of the parvenu and the rewarding of his rival, who is discovered to be a misplaced or disguised patrician. In H.M.S. Pinafore, The Mikado, and The Gondoliers, for example, the upward mobility (actually reinstatement) of one character is contrasted with the humiliation of another, a balance which creates the illusion of a social system at once flexible enough to admit the truly superior, however hidden, and strong enough to hold back the unworthy, however determined. Through the drama of the pushing boor and the well-mannered gentlemen, Gilbert invited his audience to identify with privilege and to dissociate themselves from the solecisms and overeagerness many feared would betray their origins. The conservative tale told, the audience left the Savoy reassured of their own social positions and confident that the gates of class were secure against the threat of radical democracy.