The Art and the Business of W.S. Gilbert's Engaged

The Art and the Business of W.S. Gilbert's Engaged BERT CARDULLO Stanley Kauffmann has characterized W.S. Gilbert's Engaged (1877) as a play that could not have been written in a theologically secure society and that makes an aesthetic leap by not including a normative character within the confmes of its comedy.' Gilbert wrote about forty plays, mostly comedies, of which Engaged is arguably the best. They have been unjustly neglected in favor ofthe comic operas that he wrote with Arthur Sullivan, and in favor ofthe subsequent satiric plays of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Engaged is a savage satire on a society devoted to the pursuit of money. It was written when Britain had acquired the largest empire in the world and was rapidly industrializing. On the one hand, advances in technology and science were increasing people's faith in the ability of men to solve the problems of society; on the other hand, the disruptions of society caused by the huge increase in popUlation, the relocation of farm laborers to the city, and the oppression of workers were increasing people's need to achieve financial security at any cost. In this world, an active, benevolent God began to be seen as having less and less of a place. Engaged has no normative character - a "good" person with whom we could identify and against whom we could judge all the other characters - because, Gilbert implies, there cannot be one in such a world. Anyone who attempts to remain above the fight for money does so atthe peril of his life; yet, anyone who joins in the fight does so at the peril of his integrity, if not his very identity. A normative character in Engaged would imply the existence of an all-providing God, something that Gilbert did not want to do. The burden of responsibility or judgment in this play is on the spectator; his laughter allows him to be superior to the characters only until he leaves the theater, when he must become acharacter in the same world, albeit in less exaggerated form, that he saw represented on the stage. Cheviot Hill is the one character in Engaged who has money; everyone else wants to get it. Cheviot is also miserly - perhaps not so bad a way to be in a W.S. Gilbert's Engaged world where money equals survival. The plot revolves around his search for a wife and his friend Belvawney's attempts to keep him from marrying. Cheviot's father pays Belvawney 1,000 pounds a year "so long as Cheviot shall live single, but at his death or marriage the money goes over to [his] uncle Symperson.,,2 Symperson wants Cheviot to marry his daughter, Minnie. Cheviot falls in love with and proposes to every beautiful woman whom he meets, including Minrue and Belvawney's fiancee, Belinda - thus the plot complications and his father's desire to keep him single, so that he does not hastily contract an "undesirable" marriage. In the end Belinda is united with Cheviot and his fortune, Minnie with Belvawney and his lack of one; while Mrs. Macfarlane, the innkeeper, embraces Symperson and his I,ooo-pound pension, and her daughter, Maggie, settles for the "peasant lad" Angus after having entertained hopes of marriage to Cheviot. Even as, in a world oftheological certainty, people live their lives (ideally) in worship and irrritation of God or Christ, 'in Engaged's world of cosrrric uncertainty people live their lives in worship and even irrritation of money, the new god. The cosrrric uncertainty of the world is reflected in the uncertainty or confusion about identities of the characters. Money is the only certainty or absolute; the people in the play base their identities on it, and will sacrifice their feelings in order to acquire it. Thus Belinda can say that she loves Belvawney "with an imperishable ardour which mocks the power ofwords" (p. 9), but she will not marry him until he can assure her that his I ,ooo-pound income per year is permanent. And, believing that she is married to Cheviot, whose name she does not know yet and whom she cannot find (he declared...