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This review, entitled Gilbert Alone, was written by Andrew Crowther. Savoyard Books is very grateful to Andrew for allowing the use of his work on our web-site.
[N.B.: This is a slightly revised version of a review which I wrote in the Spring of 1996 for the British Sunday Times. The paper rejected it on the grounds that they had already reviewed the book - which was not, in fact, the case, though they did publish a superficial and uninformative review by Humphrey Carpenter, about a month later. Not that I'm bitter in any way. AJC.]
Once upon a time, in the Victorian Age, there was a man called W.S. Gilbert, who wrote plays and humorous verse. One day, he met another man, a composer called Arthur Sullivan. Each was incapable of writing anything worthwhile alone, but together they created something immortal - the Savoy Operas. They were like two halves of a single brain, each lost apart from the other.
This is the usual story that is told of Gilbert and Sullivan. Only very occasionally do we see anything that suggests a different tale: for instance, Arthur Jacobs' definitive 1984 biography of Sullivan. The last time Gilbert was allowed a biography all to himself was in 1957, with Hesketh Pearson's partial portrait Gilbert: His Life and Strife. This and the two previous ones, by Edith Browne in 1907 and jointly by Sidney Dark and Rowland Grey in 1923, were all based round the assumption that Gilbert only came into his own with Sullivan.
Jane W. Stedman's W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and his Theatre changes all this. For the first time we are given Gilbert's full story, from his early days in the Bohemian society of London journalism right up to the comfortable, country-squire life he led up to his death in 1911.
His was not a wild or exciting life, on the plan of, say, Hemingway: it is a fair sample of his quest for adventure that he tried to fight in Crimea, but the war ended before he could join up. But anyone who is genuinely interested to understand Gilbert's life and character would be well advised to read this book and to go to Pearson and the others only as supplements.
The story that is told is quite simple. When Gilbert started writing for the stage, he had one quite clear aim in mind: to reform theatrical practice. He wanted to break the supremacy of the actor and the special-effects man, and make the dramatist the supreme force on the London stage. In this ambition he substantially succeeded: building on the efforts of predecessors like Robertson and Planché, Gilbert was able to insist that his plays were produced under his direction, with sets and costumes produced according to his specifications. Everything related to the production was to be subordinated to his authorial vision.
His time as a dramatic critic in the 1860s convinced him that dramatic writing, too, was in desperate need of reform. His friend Tom Robertson, who wrote a handful of plays with simple, unbombastic, naturalistic dialogue, pointed the way forward in this respect. Though Gilbert himself could not write naturalistically, he was able to identify the melodramatic conventions of the day and to ridicule them mercilessly in his plays. What is even better, he was able to ridicule them for the right reasons: he identified the intellectual or moral fallacy behind the dramatic convention, and then drew it out and laughed at it. Look at H.M.S. Pinafore or The Pirates of Penzance for examples of this.
He was also struggling, in the early years of the 1870s, to create a new kind of serious drama, one which would tackle the live issues of the day as the usual melodramas did not. His play Charity (1874) is a very good example: Stedman identifies it as a very, very early "problem play", concerned with the sexual double-standard.
It needs to be emphasised that Gilbert was deliberately testing the edges of what could be done on stage, throughout the 1870s. His political satire The Happy Land (1873), which presented its audience with unabashed caricatures of Gladstone and two of his ministers and attacked the Liberal government with complete frankness, was banned by the Lord Chamberlain shortly after its first performance; a slightly toned-down version was allowed, with the actors forbidden to make-up as recogniseable politicians, but that only added a pleasant air of conspiracy to the proceedings.
His 1877 play Engaged is a brilliant satire on the money-obsessed society of the day, and despite several revivals of the play in the 1970s and 80s it is still far too little-known.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Gilbert was experimenting in one of the most intellectually conservative fields of the day. In order to succeed he had to ride and survive the opposition of leading actors, managers and critics - not to mention the Lord Chamberlain. For much of this period it was largely a case of Gilbert contra mundum. It is not too much to say that he was the enfant terrible of the London stage.
But when he met Richard D'Oyly Carte, who proposed that he resume a collaboration with the composer Arthur Sullivan, the whole course of his career changed. If not from that moment in 1875, then from the time of the success of H.M.S. Pinafore in 1878, his financial future was assured, and he became an accepted success of the age.
His gift for antagonism and standing his ground against all odds, which had been so necessary before, suddenly became redundant. Yet it had become such a habit with him that he could not give it up. Disputes bubbled beneath the surface between him, Sullivan and Carte: and sometimes they exploded. Most of the time the issues at stake were important, and Gilbert's objections reasonable, though often overstated. But as he grew older his disputes became more arbitrary and unreasonable. The famous "Carpet Quarrel", which temporarily broke up the partnership in 1889, may have been partly of this character.
Though he and Sullivan teamed up again for two more operas, their mutual trust was largely broken by this stage, and Gilbert's creativity was on the wane. The handful of plays which he wrote in his last period are largely tired and verbose, with the exception of the last play of all, The Hooligan (1911) - Stedman comments that "this mixture of irony, of social theme, and of grubby realism suggests that Gilbert was beginning a new career", though it was rather too late for the 74-year-old writer to think of that. He died in that same year.
Stedman has done a tremendous amount of research to produce this book: it is a completely new account of Gilbert's life, owing only minimal amounts to the previous versions. The new material is particularly evident in her account of Gilbert's life before it was taken over with the Sullivan collaboration. Indeed, for this section one often gets the impression that there is much more material than can comfortably be fitted into the space. Gilbert wrote 36 plays during the 1870s, and faced with such productivity Stedman seems constrained to give us a mere whistle-stop tour of the material. There is certainly much more to be said about this, in some respects the most interesting, period in his life: in that sense Stedman's book is not a definitive biography, but a marking out of territory for future explorers.
If there is one criticism I must make about the book, it is that it is sometimes seems little more than a bare statement of fact: "This happened, then this happened, then...." The most enjoyable biographies are those which take a number of important themes and use them to bring a sense of unity and narrative drive to the whole - but this, it seems to me, is not among the book's many virtues. For instance, I have highlighted the "story" of Gilbert's aggressive manner above, but that is not particularly pointed out by Stedman herself.
More seriously, while she discusses the innovative nature of Gilbert's non-Sullivan plays, and very intelligently, she does not do the same for the Sullivan collaborations, presumably because they are so much better-known. This is understandable, but it leaves in the reader's mind an impression of the Savoy Operas as mere commercial pot-boilers about which nothing interesting can be said - which is far from the case. It is not quite clear what her attitude is to the operas - whether they are a sell-out compared to the earlier plays, or their artistic culmination.
But that is not to detract significantly from the worth of the book as a whole. I repeat that it represents a huge leap forward in Gilbert research. Even those who, like myself, thought they knew most of what there is to know about the man, find themselves having to reconsider and reconstruct, almost from the bottom.
Gilbert's plays may be considered the start of modern British drama - or, at least, one possible start. Shaw dismissed Gilbert as a barren paradoxer, which Stedman calls a kicking away of the ladder by which Shaw had risen: certainly both he and Wilde owed much to Gilbert. But such historical wrangles are of no interest to anyone but academics: the only real question is, Would Gilbert's plays stand up today? It is Stedman's opinion, and mine, that some of them would - perhaps half a dozen.
After seeing one of the modern revivals of Engaged, a reviewer called it a better play than The Importance of Being Earnest Exaggeration? Of course. But it does, at least, suggest that Gilbert has something to say to us today, and an interesting way of saying it. I wonder how much longer we shall have to wait before a theatre company next puts this little theory to the test.
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