W.S. Gilbert
“His foe was folly, and his weapon wit.” These words written on the memorial to W.S. Gilbert perfectly describe the writer’s career and music comedy legacy with Arthur Sullivan. Born in London in 1836, William Schwenck Gilbert started his professional life writing reviews of performances under a nickname and illustrating the novels of his father, who had been a naval doctor before turning to writing. As W.S. Gilbert, he began writing plays and operatic burlesques. His first successful play, Dulcamara (1866), poked fun at the opulence and seriousness of grand opera. A commission to write the words for a composer, Arthur Sullivan, brought them together in 1871 for Thespis. Although the production was not very successful, their next co-production was, Trial by Jury in 1875. In the following years for D’Oyly Carte’s theatre, Gilbert and Sullivan would create a new kind of music comedy tweaking the Victorian lifestyle with memorable words and music, including: The Sorcerer (1877), H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1880), Patience (1881), The Mikado (1885), The Yeoman of the Guard (1888), and The Gondoliers (1889). As the relationship began with money, it ended over money. Gilbert, who also oversaw each production’s staging, filed a lawsuit against D’Oyly Carte to receive a larger share. Sullivan, who had never been close friends with Gilbert, sided with D’Oyly Carte. Gilbert left them in 1890. Gilbert and Sullivan did create two more works some years later, Utopia (1893) and The Grand Duke (1896), but neither was as successful as their earlier collaborations with D’Oyly Carte’s company. Gilbert was knighted in 1907, the first person to be so honored based solely on their work as a dramatist. In 1911, Gilbert died from a heart attack while trying to rescue a young woman who was drowning at the lake at his home. He had been teaching her how to swim.
