Sunday, September 20, 2015

Oh, what precious nonsense! - reading Gilbert and Sullivan

The one thing I knew about W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s operetta Patience, or Bunthorne’s Bride (1881) is that its central character, Reginald Bunthorne the Fleshly Poet, was a caricature of young Oscar Wilde.  So the one thing I knew was half wrong.

The flock of women in love with Bunthorne ask that he read his new poem.

BUNTHORNE.  Shall I?

ALL THE DRAGOONS.  No!

[The Dragoons are 1) in love  with the women enraptured by the poet and 2) per a song a few pages earlier, a mixture of Bismarck, Fielding, Thackeray, Thomas Aquinas and Trollope, so sensible prosy fellows]



BUN.  It is a wild, weird, fleshly thing; yet very tender, very yearning, very precious.  It is called, “Oh, Hollow! Hollow! Hollow!”

PATIENCE.  Is it a hunting song?  [a joke nearly lost now]

BUN.  A hunting song?  No, it is not a hunting song.  It is the wail of the poet’s heart on discovering that everything is commonplace.  To understand it, cling passionately to one another and think of faint lilies.  (Act I)

So if half wrong, also half right.  Other details clearly identify Bunthorne as if not specifically Dante Gabriel Rossetti at least a paid-in-full pre-Raphaelite, obsessed with phony baloney medievalisms.  But the women “play on lutes, mandolins, etc.” (pre-Raphaelite) but are also “dressed in aesthetic draperies” (rather more Wildean) and think the uniform of the Dragoons should be “made Florentine fourteenth-century” but then “surmounted with something Japanese.”  A little of this, a little of that.

PATIENCE.  Well, it seems to me to be nonsense.

LADY SAPHIR.  Nonsense, yes, perhaps – but, oh, what precious nonsense!

A little self-description there by W. S. Gilbert.  If anyone is wondering why I am reading Patience – and not just that one, but H. M. S. Pinafore (1878) and The Pirates of Penzance (1879) – which tends to be a little hard on the contribution of Arthur Sullivan, the reason is first that in a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan I only catch about half of the words and second I can linger over the jokes. 

SERGEANT.  No matter; our course is clear.  We must do our best to capture these pirates alone.  It is most distressing to us to be the agents whereby our erring fellow-creatures are deprived of that liberty which is so dear to us all – but we should have thought of that before we joined the Force.

ALL POLICE.  We should!

SERGEANT.  It is too late now!

ALL.  It is!   (The Pirates of Penzance, Act II)

Awfully funny performed, but similarly funny on the page, funny enough to reread immediately.

In other words, I read the plays to read  them.  In practice, they are a pleasure to read.  They are basically forty-page Bab Ballads, illustrations and all.  Sorry, Arthur.

8 comments:

  1. Well, I wouldn't have thought of Wilde OR Rossetti, but I'm not 19th century fiction expert.

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  2. Yes, I may be getting into the Victorian weeds here. The lilies are one of the details that must have led the audience to Wilde. He had the habit of publicly giving huge bouquets of lilies to actresses. He made the lilies a trademark.

    Not that there are not plenty of lilies in pre-Raphaelite paintings.

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  3. Gilbert's non-Sullivan plays are often delightful too. His one-act Hamlet parody surprised me. And Gilbert himself played Claudius! http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/gilbert/plays/rosencrantz/script.html

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  4. Did lilies have particular significance for the Victorians? It was Swinburne's Dolores, "our Lady of Pain" who "change[d] in a trice
    The lilies and languours of virtue
    For the raptures and roses of vice".

    Actually, that makes Wilde's gifts of lilies to actresses even odder - a sort of "Just kidding." with his appearance of decadence.

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  5. Did lilies have particular significance for the Victorians? It was Swinburne's Dolores, "our Lady of Pain" who "change[d] in a trice
    The lilies and languours of virtue
    For the raptures and roses of vice".

    Actually, that makes Wilde's gifts of lilies to actresses even odder - a sort of "Just kidding." with his appearance of decadence.

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  6. Ho ho, Stoppard was not as original as I had thought. Good stuff; thanks, Doug.

    I have been wondering about the lilies too. Swinburne claimed to have been poisoned by the scent of lilies. One of those actresses Wilde serenaded was actually named Lillie. But they weren't all named "Lily."

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  7. The first 30 or so times i listened to each of the operas, i was focused specifically on the music and perhaps the sonorities and musical aspects of the words rather than their meanings, much less what was actually going on in the drama. So between us, i think we have probably levelled the Gilbert/Sullivan balance there.

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  8. It all evens out. I did spot check some of the songs - wait, how does that sound? Usually it sounded like something from Gilbert and Sullivan. A treat to hear.

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