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

W. S. Gilbert (1836-1911) was an English dramatist, librettist, poet, and illustrator best known for his fourteen comic operas produced in collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, of which the most famous include H. M. S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theater, The Mikado. These, as well as most of Gilbert and Sullivan's other Savoy operas, continue to be performed regularly throughout the English-speaking world and beyond by opera companies, repertory companies, schools, and community theater groups. But Gilbert also wrote about forty "straight" plays, mostly comedies, of which Engaged (1877) is arguably the best. They have been unjustly neglected, I believe, in favor of the comic operas that he wrote with Arthur Sullivan and of the subsequent satiric plays of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

Gilbert's Engaged could not have been written in a theologically secure society, in part because the play makes an aesthetic leap by excluding a normative character from the confines of its comedy. It is a savage satire about a society devoted to the pursuit of money, 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 human beings 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 at the 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 apparently did not wish to do. The burden of responsibility or judgment in this play is solely on the spectator: his laughter allows him to be superior to the characters only until he leaves the theater, when he must become a character in the same world, albeit in less exaggerated form, which 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 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" (9). Symperson wants Cheviot to marry his daughter, Minnie. Cheviot falls in love with and proposes to every beautiful woman whom he meets, including Minnie and Belvawney's fiancée, 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 1,000-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 of theological certainty, people live their lives (ideally) in worship and imitation of God or Christ, in Engaged's world of cosmic uncertainty, people live their lives in worship and even imitation of money, the new god. The cosmic uncertainty of this world is reflected...