75 Facts About WS Gilbert

Sir William Schwenck WS Gilbert was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for his collaboration with composer Arthur Sullivan, which produced fourteen comic operas.

WS Gilbert began to write burlesques and his first comic plays, developing a unique absurdist, inverted style that would later be known as his "topsy-turvy" style.

WS Gilbert developed a realistic method of stage direction and a reputation as a strict theatre director.

In 1890, after this long and profitable creative partnership, WS Gilbert quarrelled with Sullivan and Carte concerning expenses at the Savoy Theatre; the dispute is referred to as the "carpet quarrel".

WS Gilbert won the ensuing lawsuit, but the argument caused hurt feelings among the partnership.

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In later years, WS Gilbert wrote several plays, and a few operas with other collaborators.

WS Gilbert retired, with his wife Lucy, and their ward, Nancy McIntosh, to a country estate, Grim's Dyke.

WS Gilbert died of a heart attack while attempting to rescue a young woman to whom he was giving a swimming lesson in the lake at his home.

WS Gilbert's plays inspired other dramatists, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, and his comic operas with Sullivan inspired the later development of American musical theatre, especially influencing Broadway librettists and lyricists.

WS Gilbert's father, named William, was briefly a naval surgeon, who later became a writer of novels and short stories, some of which his son illustrated.

WS Gilbert's mother was the former Anne Mary Bye Morris, the daughter of Thomas Morris, an apothecary.

WS Gilbert's parents were distant and stern, and he did not have a particularly close relationship with either of them.

WS Gilbert was nicknamed "Bab" as a baby, and then "Schwenck", after the surname of his great aunt and great uncle, who were his father's godparents.

WS Gilbert then attended King's College London, graduating in 1856.

WS Gilbert intended to take the examinations for a commission in the Royal Artillery, but with the end of the Crimean War, fewer recruits were needed, and the only commission available to Gilbert would have been in a line regiment.

WS Gilbert published stories, articles, and reviews in papers such as The Cornhill Magazine, London Society, Tinsley's Magazine and Temple Bar.

Poems, illustrated humorously by WS Gilbert, proved immensely popular and were reprinted in book form as the Bab Ballads.

WS Gilbert wrote many affectionate letters to her over the years.

WS Gilbert wrote and directed several plays at school, but his first professionally produced play was Uncle Baby, which ran for seven weeks in the autumn of 1863.

WS Gilbert's first full-length prose comedy was An Old Score .

From 1869 to 1875, WS Gilbert joined with one of the leading figures in theatrical reform, Thomas German Reed, whose Gallery of Illustration sought to regain some of theatre's lost respectability by offering family entertainments in London.

WS Gilbert created six musical entertainments for the German Reeds, some with music composed by Thomas German Reed.

WS Gilbert's genius is to fuse opposites with an imperceptible sleight of hand, to blend the surreal with the real, and the caricature with the natural.

Together, these plays and their successors such as The Wicked World, Sweethearts, and Broken Hearts, did for WS Gilbert on the dramatic stage what the German Reed entertainments had done for him on the musical stage: they established that his capabilities extended far beyond burlesque, won him artistic credentials, and demonstrated that he was a writer of wide range, as comfortable with human drama as with farcical humour.

WS Gilbert collaborated with Gilbert Arthur a Beckett on The Happy Land, a political satire, which was briefly banned because of its unflattering caricatures of Gladstone and his ministers.

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Once he became established, WS Gilbert was the stage director for his plays and operas and had strong opinions on how they should best be performed.

WS Gilbert was strongly influenced by the innovations in "stagecraft", now called stage direction, by the playwrights James Planche and especially Tom Robertson.

WS Gilbert attended rehearsals directed by Robertson to learn this art first-hand from the older director, and he began to apply it in some of his earliest plays.

WS Gilbert sought realism in acting, settings, costumes, and movement, if not in content of his plays .

WS Gilbert shunned self-conscious interaction with the audience, and insisted on a style of portrayal in which characters were never aware of their own absurdity, but were coherent internal wholes.

WS Gilbert required that his actors know their words perfectly, enunciate them clearly and obey his stage directions, ideas new to many actors of the day.

WS Gilbert was able to extract from his actors natural, clear performances, which served the Gilbertian requirements of outrageousness delivered straight.

WS Gilbert prepared meticulously for each new work, making models of the stage, actors and set pieces, and designing every action and bit of business in advance.

WS Gilbert will stand on the stage beside the actor or actress, and repeat the words with appropriate action over and over again, until they are delivered as he desires them to be.

WS Gilbert was famous for demonstrating the action himself, even as he grew older.

WS Gilbert himself went on stage occasionally, including several performances as the Associate in Trial by Jury, as substitute for the injured Kyrle Bellew in a charity matinee of Broken Hearts, and in charity matinees of his one-act plays, such as King Claudius in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

WS Gilbert worked again with Clay on Happy Arcadia, and with Alfred Cellier on Topsyturveydom, as well as writing several farces, operetta libretti, extravaganzas, fairy comedies, adaptations from novels, translations from the French, and the dramas described above.

In 1868, WS Gilbert had published a short comic sketch in Fun magazine titled "Trial by Jury: An Operetta".

In 1873, WS Gilbert was asked by the theatrical manager, Carl Rosa, to write a work for his planned 1874 season.

However, Rosa's wife Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, a childhood friend of WS Gilbert's, died after an illness in 1874 and Rosa dropped the project.

Later in 1874 WS Gilbert offered the libretto to Richard D'Oyly Carte, but Carte could not use the piece at that time.

WS Gilbert contacted Gilbert, asked about the piece, and suggested Sullivan to set the work.

WS Gilbert continued his quest to gain respect in and respectability for his profession.

WS Gilbert wrote two serious works during this time, Broken Hearts and Dan'l Druce, Blacksmith .

Also during this period, WS Gilbert wrote, Engaged, which inspired Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.

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WS Gilbert insisted on precise and authentic sets and costumes, which provided a foundation to ground and focus his absurd characters and situations.

WS Gilbert arranged the original epic poem by Henry Hart Milman into a libretto suitable for the music, and it contains some original work.

In 1878, WS Gilbert realised a lifelong dream to play Harlequin, which he did at the Gaiety Theatre as part of an amateur charity production of The Forty Thieves, partly written by himself.

WS Gilbert trained for Harlequin's stylised dancing with his friend John D'Auban, who had arranged the dances for some of his plays and would choreograph most of the WS Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

WS Gilbert had referred to the new technology in Pinafore in 1878, only two years after the device was invented and before London even had telephone service.

WS Gilbert's working relationship with Sullivan sometimes became strained, especially during their later operas, partly because each man saw himself as subjugating his work to the other's, and partly due to their opposing personalities.

WS Gilbert was often confrontational and notoriously thin-skinned, though given to acts of extraordinary kindness, while Sullivan eschewed conflict.

WS Gilbert imbued his libretti with "topsy-turvy" situations in which the social order was turned upside down.

On each occasion, after a few months' pause, WS Gilbert responded with a libretto that met Sullivan's objections, and the partnership continued successfully.

WS Gilbert believed that this was a maintenance expense that should be charged to Carte alone.

WS Gilbert stormed out and wrote to Sullivan that "I left him with the remark that it was a mistake to kick down the ladder by which he had risen".

WS Gilbert contended that Carte had at best made a series of serious blunders in the accounts, and at worst deliberately attempted to swindle the others.

WS Gilbert brought suit, and after The Gondoliers closed in 1891, he withdrew the performance rights to his libretti, vowing to write no more operas for the Savoy.

WS Gilbert next wrote The Mountebanks with Alfred Cellier and the flop Haste to the Wedding with George Grossmith, and Sullivan wrote Haddon Hall with Sydney Grundy.

WS Gilbert eventually won the lawsuit and felt vindicated, but his actions and statements had been hurtful to his partners.

WS Gilbert offered a third libretto to Sullivan, but WS Gilbert's insistence on casting Nancy McIntosh, his protegee from Utopia, led to Sullivan's refusal.

WS Gilbert's continued living there, even after Gilbert died, until Lady Gilbert's death in 1936.

WS Gilbert's last play, The Hooligan, produced just four months before his death, is a study of a young condemned thug in a prison cell.

WS Gilbert was knighted on 15 July 1907 in recognition of his contributions to drama.

WS Gilbert was the first British writer ever to receive a knighthood for his plays alone – earlier dramatist knights, such as Sir William Davenant and Sir John Vanbrugh, were knighted for political and other services.

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On 29 May 1911, WS Gilbert was about to give a swimming lesson to two young women, Winifred Isabel Emery, and 17-year-old Ruby Preece in the lake of his home, Grim's Dyke, when Preece got into difficulties and called for help.

WS Gilbert dived in to save her but suffered a heart attack in the middle of the lake and died at the age of 74.

WS Gilbert was cremated at Golders Green and his ashes buried at the churchyard of St John's Church, Stanmore.

WS Gilbert was just as large-hearted when he was poor as when he was rich and successful.

WS Gilbert was no plaster saint, but he was an ideal friend.

WS Gilbert saw his friendship with theatre critic Clement Scott turn bitter.

Similarly, WS Gilbert had written several plays at the behest of comic actor Ned Sothern.

WS Gilbert's mind was naturally fastidious and clean; he never asserted himself, never tried to make an effect.

WS Gilbert was great-hearted and most understanding, with an underlying poetry of fancy that made him the most delicious companion.

WS Gilbert was soft-hearted as a babe, but there was nothing of the hypocrite about him.