[BITList] Neither vegetable nor mineral

[John Feltham]

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> To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
> visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2011-05-29
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> Gilbert, Sir  William Schwenck  (1836-1911), playwright, the eldest child and only son of William Gilbert  (1804-1890), author and surgeon, and his second wife, Anne Mary Bye Morris (1812/13-1888), was born on 18 November 1836 at 17 Southampton Street, London, the home of his maternal grandfather, Dr Thomas Morris.
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> Early years, education, and legal career
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> At first Gilbert was nicknamed Bab for 'Baby', a name he later used as a signature for his verses and drawings. Within the family he was called Schwenck, the surname of his great-aunt who had acted as mother to William Gilbert when he was early orphaned. Bab/Schwenck had three younger sisters: Jane Morris, who married Alfred Weigall, a miniature painter; and Mary Florence and Anne Maude, neither of whom married.
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> Dr William Gilbert, though he qualified as a surgeon, soon ceased practice and travelled en famille in France, Germany, and Italy. Bab learned French well and at the age of seven went to school in Boulogne. Afterwards he attended Western Grammar School, Brompton, London, and the prestigious Great Ealing School where, although by his own admission lazy and unpopular, he rose to be head boy and to write plays for performance by his schoolfellows and himself. He also painted scenery.
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> In March 1853 Gilbert enrolled as an 'occasional student' at King's College, London, and after six months entered the department of general literature and science as a regular student. He was instrumental in temporarily changing the college Engineering Society into a Shakespearean Reading and Dramatic Society, of which he became secretary. Having completed work for his BA in 1856, he read for a competitive examination to become an officer in the Royal Artillery. The Crimean War was being waged, but fortunately for Victorian drama it ended abruptly and the examination was indefinitely postponed. Three years later he compensated for his disappointment by joining the volunteers-first the Civil Service Rifles, then the West Yorkshire militia, and finally the Royal Aberdeenshire Highlanders as a lieutenant, and later captain, from which he retired in 1878 with the honorary rank of major.
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> After taking his BA in 1857, Gilbert became an assistant clerk in the education department of the Privy Council Office. Upon inheriting £300, he left to become a barrister, having already entered the Inner Temple as a student. He was called to the bar on 17 November 1863 and wrote a short story about his first brief for the Cornhill Magazine in December. After practising in London, he joined the northern circuit in March 1866, but without much success. In 1861, however, he had become a contributor to a new comic weekly, Fun, edited by H. J. Byron, which at its height would rival Punch's circulation.
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> Fun and works of the 1860s
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> Gilbert had already appeared in print, having in 1858 translated the laughing song from Scribe's and Auber's Manon Lescaut. His childhood friend Euphrosyne Parepa (later Madame Parepa-Rosa) was singing it in French at Promenade Concerts and had asked him to render it in English for the playbill.
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> For some dozen years of Fun Gilbert turned out fillers, squibs, puns, biting social criticism, grotesque drawings, verses including the 'Bab Ballads', illustrated burlesque playlets (which were really shrewd reviews of current plays), and two long series of character sketches by the Comic Physiognomist, also illustrated. Under Tom Hood the younger, editor from 1865 to 1874, Gilbert's work became a leading feature of Fun. He occasionally contributed drawings and verse to Punch until its editor, Mark Lemon, rejected 'The yarn of the Nancy Bell' (Fun, 3 March 1866) as 'too cannibalistic' and insisted that Gilbert sever all connections with Fun without the promise of a permanent position on Punch. Gilbert refused. In the 1860s, however, he continued to publish stories, articles, and reviews in the Cornhill Magazine, London Society, Tinsley's Magazine, and Temple Bar; to be London correspondent for L'Invalide Russe; and to be drama critic for the Illustrated London Times and briefly for the Daily News, Sunday Times, and The Observer, which in 1870 was to send him temporarily to France as a war correspondent reporting on the Franco-Prussian War. In the 1860s he also contributed to Tom Hood's Christmas annuals, to Saturday Night, the Comic News, and the Savage Club Papers. In 1869 his first collection of The 'Bab' Ballads was published by John Camden Hotten, who proved to be much less than forthright; so Gilbert turned to George Routledge & Sons, who published successive collections of the ballads until the end of the century, after which Macmillan took them over. During this decade Gilbert also illustrated works written by his father, who had commenced publishing in 1857. These included 'The Seven-Leagued Boots' in Good Words for the Young (1869), The Magic Mirror (1866), and King George's Middy (1869).
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> Meanwhile, Gilbert had been writing plays, which first found a stage when Uncle Baby (1863), a comedietta, was produced at the Lyceum Theatre in London on 31 October. It was neither a failure nor a noticeable success, but at Christmas 1866 his first acknowledged burlesque proved decidedly popular. This was Dulcamara! or, The Little Duck and the Great Quack, performed at the St James's Theatre (29 December 1866) under the lesseeship of Miss Herbert to whom the dramatist Tom Robertson had recommended Gilbert. The plot was a travesty of Donizetti's opera L'elisir d'amore, while many lines satirized Dr Robert Hunter, who had very recently brought a well-publicized libel suit against the Pall Mall Gazette and had been awarded a contemptuous farthing. Gilbert charged 30 guineas, which W. S. Emden, the acting manager, reduced to pounds with the advice never again to sell so good a piece for so little. Gilbert never did. He continued to write burlesques: La vivandiere (Liverpool, 15 June 1867; Queen's Theatre, London, 22 January 1868), a travesty of Donizetti's La figlia del reggimento, was followed by The Merry Zingara, or, The Tipsy Gypsy and the Pipsy Wipsy (Royalty Theatre, London, 21 March 1868), a play drawn from Bunn and Balfe's The Bohemian Girl. Robert the Devil, or, The Nun, the Dun, and the Son of a Gun, a parody of Weber's opera, was first performed at the opening of the Gaiety Theatre on 21 December 1868, with Nellie Farren as Mercury. A Gilbertian version of Bellini's Norma, entitled The Pretty Druidess, or, The Mother, the Maid, and the Mistletoe Bough, was produced for the opening of the Charing Cross Theatre on 19 June 1869. These met with varying degrees of approval, being well received by most reviewers, who praised their use of operatic airs rather than the more customary popular songs such as 'Skidamalink'. Like the Bab ballads, the burlesques provided suggestions for the librettos Gilbert would write. He also experimented with an innovative 'respectful perversion' of Tennyson's long poem The Princess (Olympic Theatre, 8 January 1870), highly regarded by critics and forming the basis for the later libretto of Princess Ida.
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> Having already written anonymously some portion of Charles Millward's Astley pantomime Hush-a-bye, baby, on the tree top, or, Harlequin fortunia, King Frog of Frog Island, and the magic toys of Lowther Arcade (Christmas 1866), Gilbert essayed a pantomime of his own. Hastily flung together, half-rehearsed on the stage of the Lyceum Theatre by E. T. Smith on 26 December 1867, Harlequin Cock Robin and Jenny Wren, or, Fortunatus and the water of life, the three bears, the three gifts, the three wishes, and the little man who woo'd the little maid introduced the cancan to England. The press praised Gilbert but was outraged by the dance. The playwright, however, derived some articles from the experience, including 'My pantomime' (Era Almanack, 1884), but he resolved from then on to control any stage on which his works might be performed. He also wrote farces: A Colossal Idea (unperformed); a translation of a French comedy entitled Allow me to Explain (Prince of Wales's Theatre, 4 November 1867); and Highly Improbable (Royalty Theatre, 5 December 1867). The first two are conventional, but the third anticipates a more individual style.
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> On 6 August 1867 Gilbert married Lucy Agnes Blois Turner (1847-1936), the posthumous daughter of Captain Thomas Metcalfe Blois Turner. Her mother was Herbertina Compton, whose father, Sir Herbert Compton, was lord chief justice of Bombay. Lucy was not Gilbert's first love, however; in 1866 he had proposed marriage to Annie Thomas, a prolific 'advanced' novelist with a keen sense of humour. She rejected him, presumably at her mother's behest, and instead married a curate. Gilbert and his wife had no children, but he was much loved by the offspring of his friends.
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> Plays from 1869 to 1884
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> Two years later Gilbert began a satisfying association with Thomas German Reed and his wife, Priscilla Horton Reed, at their Gallery of Illustration. This tiny theatre in Regent Street carefully avoided all theatrical terminology; for instance, roles were termed 'assumptions'. Limiting itself to very small casts, it attracted both sophisticated playgoers and those who would not visit theatres. Gilbert wrote six entertainments for the Reeds: No Cards (29 March 1869); Ages Ago (22 November 1869), the most popular piece in the gallery's repertory, and revived many times; Our Island Home (20 June 1870); A Sensation Novel (30 January 1871); Happy Arcadia (28 October 1872); and Eyes and No Eyes (St George's Hall, 5 July 1875). The casts included the Reeds, Fanny Holland, Arthur Cecil, and Corney Grain. In most cases German Reed himself provided original music, but Frederic Clay set Ages Ago and Happy Arcadia. These works, too, prefigured elements of Gilbert's more famous librettos. Clay also collaborated with Gilbert on two longer works: The Gentleman in Black (Charing Cross Theatre, 26 May 1870), the plot of which ended with one of Gilbert's favourite time juggles; and Princess Toto (Nottingham, 1 July 1876; Liverpool, 24 July 1876; London, Strand Theatre, 2 October 1876), which was not a great success in London because of miscasting.
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> The decade of the 1870s was Gilbert's most prolific one. He went briefly to Paris as The Observer's correspondent for the Franco-Prussian War and had the farce 'A Medical Man' published in a collection called Drawing-Room Plays and Parlour Pantomimes (1870). He began collaborating with Arthur Seymour Sullivan  (1842-1900), whom he had met at the Gallery of Illustration in 1869, when Cox and Box by Sullivan and Francis Burnand was the Reeds' second most popular entertainment. (Although both remembered being introduced by Clay, it is likely that they met earlier, albeit briefly.) Together they wrote Thespis, or, The Gods Grown Old for John Hollingshead, performed at his Gaiety Theatre (26 December 1871) with Nellie Farren and J. L. Toole. Typical of Gilbert's 'invasion plots', in which characters 'invade' another society and alter it, usually for the worse, Thespis features a troupe of actors taking over from the Olympian gods. It was a successful enough play after it had shaken down, but musician and author did not come together again until Trial by Jury four years later.
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> Instead, Gilbert's most imposing work in the early 1870s lay in his fairy comedies, blank verse plays in which magic is an essential ingredient. The enchantment of The Palace of Truth (19 November 1870), for instance, was followed by the vivification of a marble statue in the enormously popular Pygmalion and Galatea (9 December 1871). Fairies themselves were featured in The Wicked World (4 January 1873), a bitter sexual comedy in which love invades and nearly destroys fairyland, and a magic veil provides an important plot element in Broken Hearts (Court Theatre, 9 December 1875). Except for the last, these were staged at the Haymarket Theatre, managed by John Baldwin Buckstone, who played the comic lead in each, with Madge Robertson (Mrs Kendal) and W. H. Kendal as romantic leads. A charge that The Wicked World was indecent led to Gilbert's libel suit against the Pall Mall Gazette in which the jury declared both parties innocent. It also led to a burlesque, The Happy Land, under the nom de plume F. Tomline (later F. Latour Tomline), with assistance from Gilbert A Beckett. Originally intended for merely private performance, it was, instead, performed at the Court Theatre (3 March 1873). Gilbert had substituted politics for love, and the male characters were made up to resemble the prime minister, William Gladstone, and two cabinet members. The lord chamberlain ordered The Happy Land closed, but after the make-up was changed, and some lines altered, it was reopened to the great delight of audiences who flocked to the theatre. Gilbert then adapted Meilhac's and Halevy's Le roi Candaule as The Realm of Joy (Royalty Theatre, 18 October 1873), in which he satirized the lord chamberlain as 'The Lord High Disinfectant'.
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> Concurrently, Gilbert worked for the Court Theatre, newly opened by the actress Marie Litton, for whom he wrote Randall's Thumb (25 January 1871), Creatures of Impulse (15 April 1871), Great Expectations, an adaptation of Dickens's novel (29 May 1871), On Guard (28 October 1871), The Wedding March (15 November 1873), and The Blue-Legged Lady (4 March 1874). The first two were dramatizations of two of his short stories, and Creatures of Impulse was considered innovative because it did not end with a romantic pairing off. The last two were adapted from the French of Labiche and Marc-Michel, The Wedding March proving one of Gilbert's often revived pieces; The Blue-Legged Lady was a failure and Gilbert forgot all about it.
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> The Haymarket next staged a Gilbert problem play, which antedated those by Arthur Wing Pinero but was not a success in spite of a good cast. Charity (3 January 1874) attacked the sexual double standard and included a thief/prostitute whom Gilbert depicts as a victim of environment, a favourite theme of his. Another, Ought we to visit her? (Royalty Theatre, 17 January 1874), adapted from a novel by Mrs Edwardes, emphasized the good-heartedness of an actress and the bad-heartedness of the self-righteous community which rejects her. It too was unsuccessful. Gilbert also twice adapted Meilhac's and Halevy's Le reveillon, first as Committed for Trial (Globe Theatre, 24 January 1874) and then as On Bail (Criterion Theatre, 3 February 1877). Later in 1874 he made a great hit with a little sentimental play, Sweethearts (Prince of Wales's Theatre, 7 November 1874), in which the accomplished actress Mrs Bancroft surpassed herself. Gilbert returned to farce with the three-act Tom Cobb (St James's Theatre, 24 April 1875) and with Engaged (Haymarket Theatre, 3 October 1877), his most cynical comedy, in which characters profess high-flown motives but are really actuated by money. Some reviewers were shocked; some compared him to Jonathan Swift.
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> Gilbert continued to experiment with serious drama. Dan'l Druce (Haymarket Theatre, 11 September 1876), its initiating incident drawn from George Eliot's Silas Marner, was applauded; The Ne'er-do-Weel (Olympic Theatre, 25 February 1878), even when revised as The Vagabond, did not hold the stage; and Gretchen (Olympic Theatre, 24 March 1879) was a failure. 'I called it Gretchen, the public called it rot', Gilbert supposedly said  (Dark and Grey, 56). In 1877 Gilbert also found himself in a pamphlet war with Henrietta Hodson, an actress, who accused him of persecuting her by interrupting rehearsals, and talking loudly to friends while she was on stage. She also maintained that he was fond of humiliating actresses, vain, and, in an earlier letter, capable of forgery. This has often been taken as evidence of Gilbert's intolerable temper, but many of Hodson's so-called 'facts' prove false when examined dispassionately, especially since Gilbert had kept pressed copies of his letters. All of the written evidence favours him.
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> More pleasantly, Gilbert wrote one of the acts for a charity pantomime, The Forty Thieves, given in February, March, and April of 1878. He loved to act and played Harlequin in it, learning to do 'trips' and 'window-leaps' and to dance a hornpipe for his role. After the 1870s he wrote fewer plays, though his short Comedy and Tragedy (Lyceum Theatre, 26 January 1884) was an admirable vehicle for the beautiful American actress Mary Anderson. His 1881 comedy, Foggerty's Fairy (Criterion Theatre, 15 December 1881), was judged too complicated for its audience.
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> Collaboration with Sullivan and others
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> During the late 1870s and until 1889, Gilbert concentrated on librettos for the Savoy operas, as they were called, after the theatre which Richard D'Oyly Carte built for them in 1881. Carte brought 'Gilbert and Sullivan' together to furnish a short piece for the Royalty Theatre, where he was business manager for Selina Dolaro. Gilbert had already expanded his 'Trial by Jury' in Fun (11 April 1868) to be set by Carl Rosa, but the premature death of his wife, Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, caused him to disband his company for some time. Arthur Sullivan now wrote a score rapidly, and the piece was first performed on 25 March 1875 before an enthusiastic audience. Fred Sullivan, Arthur's brother, played the comic lead, and Trial by Jury proved far more popular than Offenbach's La perichole, the full-length piece it accompanied.
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> Gilbert and Sullivan then collaborated on a longer opera, The Sorcerer (Opera Comique, 17 November 1877), in which a love potion added to the communal teapot scrambles the relationships of the characters. Fred Sullivan had died and was replaced by George Grossmith, making his professional debut. When Mrs Howard Paul was engaged for Lady Sangazure, she brought with her a young member of her touring company, Rutland Barrington, whose stolidity proved an amusing contrast to the mercurial Grossmith. Together they and Richard Temple, a bass, appeared in most of Gilbert and Sullivan's operas as continuing favourites. On 11 October 1884 a somewhat revised Sorcerer was revived and greeted happily.
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> For the original Sorcerer a Comedy Opera Company (Limited) had been formed with Carte as manager, which also produced HMS 'Pinafore', or, The Lass that Loved a Sailor (25 May 1878). After a slow start the opera became immensely popular, running for over 500 performances and pirated widely by amateur and professional companies in the United States, which underwent a 'Pinafore' mania. Carte sent out three touring companies and began a kind of Carte 'empire' in the provinces.
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> Since American productions brought no profit to Carte, Sullivan, or Gilbert, they determined to go to New York, arriving in November 1879 to mount their own 'legitimate' 'Pinafore' and to premiere their new opera, The Pirates of Penzance, or, The Slave of Duty. Blanche Roosevelt, an American soprano, Jessie Bond (who had entered the company for 'Pinafore'), Alfred Cellier, the musical director, and other English singers went too. After a disagreement with the New York orchestra over payment, 'Pinafore' opened on 1 December and Pirates on new year's eve 1879 at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, to a fashionable and appreciative audience. In England one of Carte's touring companies mounted an almost impromptu performance of Pirates in Paignton, Devon, for copyright purposes. In the United States the works of Gilbert and Sullivan recurrently suffered from copyright disputes and unauthorized productions, especially of The Mikado, in which American judges found there was no infringement.
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> In London, Carte was now free of the Comedy Opera Company; Pirates opened at the Opera Comique on 3 April 1880 with Grossmith, Barrington, Temple, and Marion Hood. This was followed by Patience, or, Bunthorne's Bride (23 April 1881), a comic treatment of both the much satirized Aesthetes and their supposed opposites, a chorus of military men. Gilbert's even-handed satire was unique among that of Punch and others who attacked the Aesthetes alone. Six months later, on 10 October, Patience transferred to Carte's new Savoy Theatre, the first in the world to be lit entirely by electricity. After more than 500 performances of Patience came Iolanthe, or, The Peer and the Peri (25 November 1882), political satire mixed with a band of fairies, and Princess Ida, or, Castle Adamant (5 January 1884), a more muted work, dealing with women's education as had Tennyson's The Princess. In it, Rosina Brandram took over the contralto roles permanently from Alice Barnett.
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> For the next opera Gilbert constructed a 'lozenge plot', as Sullivan called it, in which by taking a lozenge or using some such magic device, people either became what they pretended to be or revealed their hidden selves. Although Gilbert had been successful with 'lozenge plots' earlier, Sullivan considered them lacking in human interest and consistently rejected them, which led to quarrels. Fortunately Gilbert found another subject, and the opera which now burst upon a delighted public was The Mikado (14 March 1885), which ran for two years in London and was frequently revived, reaching more than 1000 performances before Sullivan's death in 1900. It is the happiest of the Savoy operas, even though it deals with the threat of execution, and proved inexhaustible throughout the twentieth century. When The Mikado finally ended its run, Ruddygore replaced it (22 January 1887). This was much less popular, being a satire on melodrama with the noble sentiments of the genre turned to the cash nexus and self-interest. The title was respelt Ruddigore and changes made in text and music, but it was not revived in London until 1921, a year after the first revival of Princess Ida. Nevertheless, Gilbert said that he made £7000 from this 'failure'. It was followed by a splendid revival of HMS 'Pinafore' and after that by first revivals of The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado.
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> After another proffered and rejected 'lozenge plot', Gilbert and Sullivan produced a more serious opera in The Yeomen of the Guard (3 October 1888), which they considered their best work. The public preferred more fun, but it ran for 423 performances, and its bitter jester, Jack Point, is one of Gilbert's best creations. 'There is a Shakesperian halo about the whole', was the comment of the Morning Post. During 1888 Gilbert was also building a new theatre, the Garrick, on Charing Cross Road and preparing a serious drama, Brantinghame Hall (29 November) for the St James's Theatre, now managed by Barrington. This may have been an old unacted play, revised for Gilbert's dark, Amazonian protegee, Julia Neilson. It was the worst failure of his career; Clement Scott, the leading reactionary critic, attacked both author and actress. Although Scott had often been the object of libel suits, the press took his part, and only one reviewer praised Brantinghame Hall. Gilbert resolved to write no more serious plays, though in 1897 he did The Fortune Hunter for Miss Fortescue, who played it in Edinburgh and the provinces without great success.
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> In Edinburgh, Gilbert gave an interview which led to a contemptuous Era editorial; he sued the proprietor for libel, but the jury failed to agree. On 16 September 1889 The Brigands, which Gilbert had adapted from Offenbach's opera in 1871 but which had not been performed, was now played in Plymouth and in London (Avenue Theatre) in a debased version. This elicited an unsuccessful legal appeal from Gilbert. A more ebullient opera, The Gondoliers (7 December 1889), followed, Sullivan having once more rejected the 'lozenge plot'. Sparkling and happy, it ran for well over a year at the Savoy Theatre but was a virtual failure in the United States.
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> Gilbert and his wife now went to India for a long visit, he leaving behind a volume of short stories, Foggerty's Fairy and other Tales, to be published for the Christmas trade. When they returned in April 1890 he discovered that preliminary expenses for The Gondoliers had reached an astonishingly high figure, which included a new carpet for the front of the house. This precipitated the so-called 'carpet quarrel', which drew Sullivan in on Carte's side. Far more than the carpet was involved, and Gilbert eventually took legal action. An erroneous affidavit from Sullivan to which the composer stubbornly clung lost the case for Gilbert and maintained the breach between them, even after Carte and Gilbert had become reconciled. Nevertheless, Gilbert dedicated his Songs of a Savoyard to Sullivan.
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> During this time Gilbert bought a country estate, Grim's Dyke in Harrow Weald, Middlesex; he became a justice of the peace for Middlesex, unusual in refusing to assume that a policeman's evidence was invariably accurate. In 1902 he became a deputy lieutenant of Middlesex. He did not collaborate with Sullivan again until Utopia (Limited) (7 October 1893), but in 1891 he and Alfred Cellier worked together on The Mountebanks (Lyric Theatre, 4 January 1892). It had a moderate success in England and abroad in spite of Gilbert's having to make hasty revisions because of Cellier's dilatoriness and death in late December 1891. Later in 1892 Gilbert's travesty of Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, formed part of a triple bill at the Court Theatre, and he turned The Wedding March into Haste to the Wedding, with a simple score by George Grossmith (Criterion Theatre, 27 July 1892). It did not succeed. By early 1893 Gilbert was reconciled with Sullivan and had begun to consider a new libretto for the Savoy: Utopia (Limited), his most elaborate political satire produced at great expense and with great eclat. The leading soprano, Nancy McIntosh, an American, was a Gilbert discovery; Sullivan, however, was of two minds about her voice and eventually refused to have her in another opera. In spite of initial enthusiasm, Utopia (Limited) ran for only 245 performances. Gilbert turned next to Osmond Carr as collaborator and staged His Excellency (Lyric Theatre, 27 October 1894), originally intended for Sullivan and the Savoy. Barrington, Grossmith, Bond, and McIntosh were in the cast, but despite a hilarious chorus of dancing hussars, it ran only until April 1895. Gilbert himself, who at times suffered from migraine and gout, now became very ill and could not work on a new opera (The Grand Duke) until August 1895. It began a run of 123 performances on 7 March 1896, a failure by Savoy standards. Neither Utopia (Limited) nor The Grand Duke has, at the time of writing, been revived professionally except for one fully staged version of the first and one concert version of the second during the D'Oyly Carte centenary celebration in 1975. Amateurs in the twentieth century, however, staged both.
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> Final years, personality, and significance
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> Sullivan died in 1900; after that Gilbert continued to write, but less frequently and never again for a long run. The Fairy's Dilemma (Garrick Theatre, 3 May 1904), however, has been called the best satire on pantomime ever written  (M. Booth, ed., English Plays of the Nineteenth Century, 1976, 5.52). Other works by Gilbert during this time include The 'Pinafore' Picture Book (1908); The Story of 'The Mikado' (1921); and a pamphlet, My Case Against the Rev. J. Pullein Thompson, protesting against a clergyman's mismanagement of a charity in which Gilbert had interested himself. His last libretto, Fallen Fairies (Savoy Theatre, 15 December 1909), based on The Wicked World, with music by Edward German, failed utterly but not altogether deservedly. His last play was a short, grim prison drama for the Coliseum (27 February 1911) in which James Welch played a weak-minded coster boy convicted of murder. Another example of his views on the importance of environment, it out-Galsworthyed Galsworthy as critics exclaimed with surprised approbation.
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> In 1907 Gilbert was knighted, the first dramatist ever to receive that accolade, and in 1908-9 he took part in the unsuccessful attempt by dramatists to modify or abolish theatrical censorship. He was elected to the Garrick Club in 1906, having long been a member of the Beefsteak and Junior Carlton clubs.
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> Like many other Victorians, Gilbert's nature was litigious; he was quick-tempered, but not so irascible as legend has made him. He objected to blood sports and was a generous though often anonymous contributor to charity. He continued to direct revivals of the Savoy operas for Helen D'Oyly Carte, an astute businesswoman long associated with her husband in theatre management, and he continued to coach actresses and to examine for the Academy of Dramatic Arts. Nancy McIntosh lived with the Gilberts at Grim's Dyke, fulfilling the duties of a daughter of the house and acting as companion to Lady Gilbert until the latter's death in 1936. Gilbert died of heart failure at Grim's Dyke on 29 May 1911, having swum too rapidly to save a girl who mistakenly supposed she was drowning in his artificial lake. His body was cremated, and his ashes were buried on 2 June in the churchyard of St John the Evangelist in Great Stanmore, Middlesex.
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> During his fifty years of dramatic life Gilbert had helped to raise the income, the status, and the literary standards of playwrights. He had taken a leading part in turning an actor's theatre into a director's theatre and in establishing the respectability of the stage. He was scrupulous in acknowledging the indebtedness, if any, of his own pieces. His use of the comic was so individual as to create the adjective 'Gilbertian', and he has never been successfully imitated. He believed that 'all humour, properly so called, is based upon a grave and quasi-respectful treatment of the ridiculous and absurd'  (P. H. Fitzgerald, The Savoy Opera and the Savoyards, 1899, 14n.). His political wit has seldom or never been equalled by librettists:
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> I always voted at my party's call,
> And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
> (HMS 'Pinafore', 1878, act I)
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> I often think it's comical
> How Nature always does contrive
> That every boy and every gal,
> That's born into this world alive,
> Is either a little Liberal,
> Or else a little Conservative.
> (Iolanthe, 1882, act II)
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> Government by Party! Introduce that great and glorious element ... and all will be well! No political measures will endure, because one Party will assuredly undo all that the other Party has done; and while grouse is to be shot, and foxes worried to death, the legislative action of the country will be at a standstill. Then there will be sickness in plenty, endless lawsuits, crowded jails, interminable confusion in the Army and Navy, and, in short, general and unexampled prosperity! (Utopia (Limited), 1893, act II)
> Although he was not a revolutionary satirist, he satirized both Conservatives and Liberals, and indeed all political principles, from the middle ground of common sense.
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> Gilbert's mordant sense of irony and his lively sense of the absurd therefore mingle with and balance each other. In his comic works three elements constantly meet: the invasion theme, the 'lozenge plot', and topsyturvydom, the principles of which he enunciated in a Bab ballad, 'My Dream' (Fun, 19 March 1870), and in an extravaganza, Topsy-Turvydom (Criterion Theatre, 21 March 1874). This is essentially an inversion in which physical laws are subservient to logic and moral opposites change places. Gilbert hated hypocrisy, and his operatic characters freely and innocently admit their own deficiencies, which non-Gilbertian persons would try to hide.
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> In creating librettos Gilbert's approach was akin to writing a brief, always with the intention of ultimately expressing his meaning in as few words as possible. He began by writing out the plot as a narrative, which he laid aside and wrote out again, comparing the two versions. He might continue to do so. Next he wrote individual scenes with what he called 'epitomes' (rough outlines) of dialogue; and after this, lyrics as the mood took him. The final text was discussed with Sullivan for appropriate musical situations, and even after the first night they might together make changes. Gilbert constantly reused and reworked elements of his earlier prose and verse until they reached a state of perfection, usually in the final form of the Savoy operas. His early work as a drama critic emphasized clear enunciation and accuracy in costumes, sets, and other elements of staging, and his own plays and librettos were as precise as he could make them. From Tom Robertson, whose stagecraft he admired, he learned to use small, illuminating bits of stage 'business' and insisted on sufficient rehearsal time, preferably four or five weeks. He worked out positions on a miniature stage with wooden markers for characters. Perhaps his most significant innovations were his dictate that comic characters should take themselves seriously on stage, and his transformation of the chorus into a corporate character who participated in the action rather than being a mere musical echo. At times he designed costumes for his works, and thus was the most complete homme du theatre that the English stage had ever known.
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> Jane W. Stedman 
> 
> Sources  J. W. Stedman, W. S. Gilbert: a classic Victorian and his theatre (1996) + R. Allen, W. S. Gilbert: an anniversary survey and exhibition checklist (1963) + W. S. Gilbert, 'An autobiography', The Theatre, 4th ser., 1 (1883), 217-24 + J. W. Stedman, 'Gilbert's stagecraft: little blocks of wood', International conference on Gilbert and Sullivan [Lawrence, Kansas May 1970], ed. J. Helyar (1971), 195-211 + R. Allen, ed., The first night Gilbert and Sullivan (1958) + J. W. Stedman, 'From dame to woman: W. S. Gilbert and theatrical transvestism', Suffer and be still: women in the Victorian age, ed. M. Vicinus (1972), 20-37 + C. Rollins and J. Witts, The D'Oyly Carte Company in Gilbert and Sullivan operas: a record of productions, 1875-1961 (1962) + S. Dark and R. Grey, W. S. Gilbert: his life and letters (1923) + W. O. Skeat, King's College London, Engineering Society, 1847-1957 [1957] + J. W. Stedman, 'Introduction', Gilbert before Sullivan: six comic plays, ed. J. W. Stedman (1967) + J. Ellis, ed., introduction, in W. S. Gilbert, The Bab ballads, ed. J. Ellis (1970) + J. R. Stephens, The censorship of English drama, 1824-1901 (1980) + A. Jacobs, Arthur Sullivan: a Victorian musician (1984) + W. Archer, Real conversations (1904) + H. How, Illustrated interviews (1893) + P. Fitzgerald, The Savoy opera and the savoyards (1899) + T. Rees, 'introduction', in W. S. Gilbert, 'Uncle Baby': a comedietta, ed. T. Rees (1968) + H. Pearson, Gilbert: his life and strife (1957) + BL, W. S. Gilbert MSS, Add. MSS 49289-49353, 54315, 54999 + Morgan L., Gilbert and Sullivan collection + J. W. Stedman, W. S. Gilbert's theatrical criticism (2000) + d. cert. [William Gilbert] + d. cert. [Anne Mary Bye Gilbert] + b. cert. [Lucy Agnes Blois Turner] + d. cert. [Lucy Agnes Blois Gilbert]
> Archives BL, corresp. and papers, incl. literary MSS, Add. MSS 49289-49353, 54315 + Hunt. L., letters; marked copies of Fun + Morgan L., collection + NRA, corresp. and literary papers | BL, corresp. with Macmillans, Add. MS 54999 + NYPL, Berg Collection, Isaac Goldberg MSS + U. Reading L., letters to George Bell + V&A, theatre collections, D'Oyly Carte MSS, letters to Lord Chamberlain's licensee
> Likenesses  Window & Grove, photograph, c.1871 · Elliott & Fry, photograph, c.1883 · F. Holl, oils, 1886, NPG [see illus.] · Barraud, photograph, 1890, NPG · R. Lehmann, drawing, 1893, BM · Langfier, photograph, c.1899 · H. G. Herkomer, oils, 1908, Garr. Club · G. Frampton, bas-relief head on bronze tablet, 1913, Victoria Embankment, London · H. Furniss, three pen-and-ink sketches, NPG · A. Lucchesi, bronze statuette, probably Bushey Heath Cottage Hospital · Spy [L. Ward], chromolithograph, caricature, NPG; repro. in VF (21 May 1881) · Walery, photograph, NPG; repro. in Men and Women of the Day, 3 (1890) · T. W. Wilson and F. Walton, oils, W. Sussex RO, Goodwood collections · chalk drawing (in middle age), V&A, theatre collections · oils (as young man), repro. in L. Baily, The Gilbert and Sullivan book, new edn (1966)
> Wealth at death  £118,028 2s.: resworn probate, 9 Aug 1911, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
> 
> 
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