Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (review)

Unmodified rapture should best describe the scholarly response to this exciting contribution to a broad swath of disciplines: Gilbert and Sullivan scholarship, theatre history, gender theory, and Victorian studies generally. Building on the seminal work of Alan Fischler's Modified Rapture: Comedy in W. S. Gilbert's Savoy Operas (1991), Ian Bradley's The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan (1996), Jane W. Stedman's W. S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre (1996), Gayden Wren's A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Art of Gilbert and Sullivan (2001), and John Wolfson's Final Curtain: The Last Gilbert and Sullivan Operas (1976), Carolyn Williams's book makes a vital contribution to a field of unusually high quality if not density. Hers is a scholarship without borders, mixing in provocative combinations and with refreshing acumen a range of schools and a variety of critical voices, from nineteenth-century music reviewers to twentieth-century literary theorists, including even a contemporary graduate student. Organized in an appealingly elegant evolutionary arc, the book moves through three developmental phases of the W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan collaboration, known for the purposes of critical shorthand as the Savoy operas. Williams discusses each work with a peripheral vision that animates the complex domain each opera commands without allowing the rhetorical chronology to muddy the book's analytical clarity.

Thematically and structurally, the book revolves around the concept of parody, which Williams uses brilliantly as a strategy for reassessing Gilbert and Sullivan scholarship and as a maverick tool for remapping the complex and labile world of Victorian theatre and its cultural engagements. Her central and most fruitful insights about parody coalesce in its relationship to history. Seeing parody as a "modernizing negation" that preserves forms whose very preservation marks their eclipse, Williams accesses an array of lost theatrical genres, allowing her to distill from each of the Savoy operas the pure ingredients that constitute each recipe as developed in the Gilbert and Sullivan test kitchen (11): Italian and French grand opera, French opera bouffe, Italian opera buffa, German supernatural drama, ballad opera, music hall, pantomime, burlesque, and especially extravaganza and melodrama. Because its irony can often suggest that a culture has relaxed its grip on a particular ideological practice, parody in Williams's understanding reveals insights that have eluded other critics. For example, Williams's compelling explanation for the failure of Princess Ida (1884) rests on the fact that the idea of a women's college was by the opera's debut no longer a self-evident absurdity or an antiquated eccentricity. In contrast, the Japonism that informs The Mikado (1885) makes fun of an English ethnocentrism old enough to be ripe for critique.

The distillation of pure forms not only provides a working knowledge of the fundamental terms governing the world of Victorian entertainment but also allows Williams to guide her readers through the forest of Victorian theatre history, pointing out all of the richest and most provocative landmarks from technical innovations (such as the electricity that enabled the fairies of Iolanthe [1882] to sport lights on their foreheads) to dramatic practices (such as melodrama's use of the exaggerated "attitude" and its relationship to the aesthetics of posing [110]). Moreover, it clears a multitude of intellectually exciting paths: to see H. M. S. Pinafore (1878), for example, as a parody of burlesque, a form which typically refers to a single precursor, is to recognize the influence of Giuseppi Verdi's Il Trovatore (1853); to see Pinafore as a parody of extravaganza, which typically refers to a more generalized set of familiar figures, is to recognize its borrowed literary types and devices (the Nursemaid, the Virtuous Tar, the "baby switching" [120]); to see Pinafore as a parody of melodrama is to recognize the absurdity of its sudden social transformations; and to see Pinafore as a parody of specifically nautical melodrama, which inflects the conventions of melodrama according to the residues of English sentimental attachment to...