Abstract
Goron explores the idea that the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company emerged from a specific set of social conditions and ‘Victorian Values’ which affected theatre production and audience expectations in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The chapter outlines the core ‘Victorian values’ espoused by respectable, middle-class Victorian society. Examples from the opera libretti, from the lives of Gilbert, Sullivan, their manager, Richard D’Oyly Carte, and from the stars of the Savoy Theatre are used throughout the chapter to illustrate and comment on the middle-class ideology which underpinned their work.
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Notes
- 1.
1. Mason (1994) expresses some criticism of Booth’s findings, but the questionable areas concern the unskilled and semi-skilled sectors, rather than the middle-class sectors, which are my focus here. Mason’s comment that Booth’s ‘scheme has stood the test of time’, as well as its use by Best (1971) and Perkin (1969) to inform their work on nineteenth-century social structure, would appear to validate its use.
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2. WSG, interviewed 1889, mentions the Savoy chorus: ‘Many of them have been with us for twelve years, getting salaries at the rate of £85 a year, and working for themselves in the day’ (Era, 12 July 1889).
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3. AS to Clementina Sullivan, 20 December 1897. Cited in Jacobs (1986, p. 135).
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4. Gilbert’s spiky early journalism for Fun (a more subversive alternative to Punch), the ironic social criticism implicit in plays such as An Old Score (1869), Charity (1874) and Engaged (1877), the pungent political satire which caused The Happy Land (1873) to be banned by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, and the prescient social realism of his final short play, The Hooligan (1911), would suggest that the satirical content of the Savoy operas, though certainly true to some aspects of the author’s world view, was constructed with the specific intention of satisfying conventional bourgeois sensibilities. The less comfortable depictions of human nature exhibited in the play texts named above received some critical censure, and were less remunerative than the Savoy works. For a discussion of these texts in relation to their reception and to WSG’s creative personality, see Crowther (2011, pp. 78–108, 130–3, 231–2, and Chap. 4).
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5. Perkin, using the triadic model of three classes, imagined as ‘horizontal’ strata, one on top of the other, envisages these antagonisms as ‘vertical’ social divisions, cutting through each class layer (1989, pp. 62–84).
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6. ‘A word of Scandinavian origin, meaning slender, slim, graceful or neat’ (Bradley 2001, p. 888).
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7. Topical Times, December 1889.
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8. Opposing double choruses are often to be found when major dramatic conflicts come to a head. A striking example occurs at such a point in Patience, where the love-struck maidens lament Bunthorne’s forthcoming marriage, while their former fiancés, the Dragoons, express their outrage at the turn of events. Both sing completely different but intersecting melodic lines. In Act Two of Pirates, the convention is used for comic effect when the heroic female melody, intended to inspire the unwilling policemen to confront the approaching pirates, contrasts ironically with the plodding reticence of the policemen themselves.
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9. An exception to this might be Iolanthe, in which the male peers sprout wings, are turned into fairies and are whisked off to fairyland. However, crucially, it is the female fairies that in the end compromise the rules of their society and embrace supposedly ‘natural’ female inclinations by accepting male partners.
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10. Era, 25 January 1874.
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11. Era, 25 January 1874.
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12. Kaye, W. (1860). The Cornhill Magazine, Vol. 2, pp. 7, 729.
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13. WSG was a member of the Junior Carlton and Garrick Clubs (Stedman 1996, p. 365), as well as being a keen yachtsman. Rutland Barrington makes frequent mention of his sporting prowess playing for various ‘theatrical’ teams, and D’Oyly Carte touring companies regularly played teams from other organisations (Joseph 1994, pp. 99–100).
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14. WSG’s estate was worth £111,971 at his death. AS’s, depleted by gambling losses and the continual support of his dead brother’s family, was valued at £56,536. RDC, whose business interests were more extensive than those of his Savoy colleagues, left £240,817 (Ainger 2002, pp. 391–2, 443). AS and WSG received knighthoods, in 1883 and 1907 respectively.
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15. Despite the existence of the Royal General Theatrical Fund, a private insurance scheme founded in 1839, many artists did not avoid the disgrace of penury (Sanderson 1984, pp. 87–90). Rutland Barrington was such a one. He suffered a paralytic stroke in 1919, and died penniless in Battersea Workhouse infirmary in 1922. His previously unmarked pauper’s grave in Morden cemetery was provided with a headstone funded by private donations in 1997 (Walters 1998, p. 19).
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Goron, M. (2016). The Gilbert and Sullivan Operas and ‘Middle-Class’ Ideals. In: Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Respectable Capers'. Palgrave Studies in British Musical Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59478-5_2
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