WILLIAM SCHWENK GILBERT
Here is W. S. Gilbert, the librettist of the prolific musical partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan, shown in Punch magazine aboard his second yacht, Chloris—a 110 ton yawl.
In April 1881, Gilbert wrote to Lady Katharine Coke about the new boat and his latest opera Patience, both of which were about to be launched that month: 1
April 10, 1881.
Dear Lady Katharine—
I am delighted to hear that you will come to our “premiere.” My new yacht Chloris is to be launched on the 30th, just a week after the launch of the play. Mr. and Mrs. Ionides have promised to run down to Wyvenhoe to witness the ceremony. We shall be delighted if you and the young lady whom my constitutional bashfulness scarcely permits me to call Sybil can manage to join them. We propose to picnic on board, after the event.
The new piece is to be called Patience; or, Bunthorne’s Bride, I only hope the name is not significant of a virtue which the audience will be called upon to exercise.
Please give my love to the young lady whom my unconquerable diffidence will, even now, hardly allow me to call Sybil, and with kind regards, in which my wife joins me, believe me to be,
Sincerely yours,
W. S. GILBERT2
As Wildeans will know, Patience; or, Bunthorne’s Bride was a satire on the aesthetic movement of the 1870s and ’80s that became closely associated with Oscar Wilde. Or, rather, he with it. This is a subtle distinction because originally the character of Bunthorne was based loosely on an amalgam of the Rossetti and Swinburne types.
It was only after Wilde’s gravitation towards aesthetic identity, and then his complete adoption of the part (in the costume of his 1882 lecture tour), that he and Bunthorne became synonymous.
To illustrate the point, consider the following lines from Patience which, despite now being closely associated with Wilde, were first invoked in the comic verse that accompanies the Punch cartoon of W. S. Gilbert:
Lines from Patience
(April 1881)
Yet, spite of all your pains,
The interesting fact remains—
A most intense young man,
A soulful-eyed young man,
An ultra-poetical,
Super-æsthetical,
Out-of-the-way young man!
The Gilbert Cartoon
(August 1881)
But in spite of some Temptations…
He remains—
A Sorcerer Young Man,
A Pinafore Pirates Man,
A brilliant what I call quite idi-yacht-ical
Ballady Bab Young Man.
Evidently, the seemingly pointed aesthetic lines from Patience were sufficiently disconnected from any third party that they could be used as verbal cues in pastiche of their author.
It is also significant that Wilde had already appeared in the same series of ‘Punch’s Fancy Portraits’ in June of that year with no allusion to Patience. On that occasion reference was made to Wilde’s recently published, and poorly received, Poems (June, 1881).
Also referenced in the Gilbert verse are his earlier operettas: The Sorcerer (1877), H.M.S. Pinafore; or, The Lass that Loved a Sailor (1878), and The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty (1879), as well as The Bab Ballads (Gilbert’s collection of light verse, 1865-71)—and, of course, what was seen as Gilbert’s idiotic yachting.
© John Cooper, 2024.
Footnotes:
- Patience was launched at the Opera Comique, London, on April 23, 1881, Chloris was launched at Wyvenhoe, Essex on April 30, 1881. ↩︎
- Sidney Dark and Rowland Grey, W. S. Gilbert, His Life and Letters, (Methuen & Co., Ltd.; New York: George H. Doran Co., 1923) 181. ↩︎
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