The Princess is a
blank verseBlank verse is a type of poetry, distinguished by having a regular meter, but no rhyme. In English, the meter most commonly used with blank verse has been iambic pentameter ....
farcicalA farce is a comedy written for the stage or film which aims to entertain the audience by means of unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include sexual innuendo and word play, and a fast-paced...
play, in five scenes with music, by
W. S. GilbertSir William Schwenck Gilbert 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...
which travesties Alfred Lord Tennyson's humorous 1847 narrative poem,
The Princess: A MedleyThe Princess is a serio-comic blank verse narrative poem, written by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1847. Tennyson was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1850 to 1896 and remains one of the most popular English poets....
. It was first produced at the
Olympic TheatreThe Olympic Theatre, sometimes known as the Royal Olympic Theatre, was a 19th-century London theatre, opened in 1806 and located at the junction of Drury Lane, Wych Street, and Newcastle Street. The theatre specialised in comedies throughout much of its existence...
in London on January 8 1870.
Gilbert called the piece "a whimsical allegory ...a respectful operatic per-version" of Tennyson's poem. The play was a modest success, playing through April and enjoying a provincial tour.
The Princess is a
blank verseBlank verse is a type of poetry, distinguished by having a regular meter, but no rhyme. In English, the meter most commonly used with blank verse has been iambic pentameter ....
farcicalA farce is a comedy written for the stage or film which aims to entertain the audience by means of unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include sexual innuendo and word play, and a fast-paced...
play, in five scenes with music, by
W. S. GilbertSir William Schwenck Gilbert 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...
which travesties Alfred Lord Tennyson's humorous 1847 narrative poem,
The Princess: A MedleyThe Princess is a serio-comic blank verse narrative poem, written by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1847. Tennyson was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1850 to 1896 and remains one of the most popular English poets....
. It was first produced at the
Olympic TheatreThe Olympic Theatre, sometimes known as the Royal Olympic Theatre, was a 19th-century London theatre, opened in 1806 and located at the junction of Drury Lane, Wych Street, and Newcastle Street. The theatre specialised in comedies throughout much of its existence...
in London on January 8 1870.
Gilbert called the piece "a whimsical allegory ...a respectful operatic per-version" of Tennyson's poem. The play was a modest success, playing through April and enjoying a provincial tour. Gilbert liked the theme so much that he adapted the play as the libretto to
Princess IdaPrincess Ida, or Castle Adamant, is a comic opera with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It was their eighth operatic collaboration of fourteen. Princess Ida opened at the Savoy Theatre on January 5 1884, for a run of 246 performances...
(1884), one of his
Savoy OperaThe Savoy Operas denote a style of comic opera that developed in Victorian England in the late 19th century, with W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan as the original and most successful practitioners. The name is derived from the Savoy Theatre, which impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte built to house the...
s with
Arthur SullivanSir Arthur Seymour Sullivan MVO was an English composer, of Irish and Italian descent, best known for his operatic collaborations with librettist W. S. Gilbert, including such continually-popular works as H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mikado...
.
The Princess is a satire of women's education, a controversial subject in 1847, when
Queen's CollegeQueen's College is an all-girls English independent school located in Harley Street, London. It was founded in 1848 by F. D. Maurice, Professor of English Literature and History at King's College London. Originally it was at number 66, later renumbered to 45. Later still it expanded into number 49...
first opened in London, and in 1870 (
GirtonGirton College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. The college was established on 16 October 1869 by Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon, as the first residential women's college in England. The college became mixed in 1977 with the arrival of the first male...
opened in 1869), but less so by 1884.
Background
The Princess came fairly early in Gilbert's playwriting career, after his very successful one-act
comic operaComic opera, or light opera, denotes a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending.Forms of comic opera first developed in late 17th century Italy. By the 1730s, a new operatic genre, opera buffa, emerged as an alternative to opera seria...
,
Ages AgoAges Ago is a musical entertainment with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert and music by Frederic Clay that premiered on 22 November 1869 at the Royal Gallery of Illustration. It marked the beginning of a seven year long collaboration between the two. The piece was revived at St...
(1869) and before
Our Island HomeOur Island Home is a one-act musical entertainment with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert and music by Thomas German Reed that premiered on June 20 1870 at the Royal Gallery of Illustration...
(1870, another such piece). The play was Gilbert's first of the 1870s, a decade during which he wrote more than thirty-five plays, encompassing most genres of comedy and drama, including his series of blank verse "fairy comedies", beginning with
The Palace of TruthThe Palace of Truth is a three-act blank verse "Fairy Comedy" by W. S. Gilbert first produced at the Haymarket Theatre in London on November 19 1870, adapted from Madame de Genlis's fairy story, Le Palais de Vérite. The play ran for a very successful 230 performances and then toured the British...
later in 1870 and his first operas with Arthur Sullivan. In 1870, Gilbert was establishing his "topsy-turvy" style and proving that his capabilities extended well beyond his early
burlesqueBurlesque is a genre of entertainment also known as Travesty. Prior to Burlesque becoming associated with striptease, it was a form of musical and theatrical parody in which an opera or piece of classical theatre is adapted in a broad, often risqué style very different from that for which it was...
s and extravaganzas.
The Princess is one of several Gilbert plays, including
The Wicked WorldThe Wicked World is a blank verse play by W. S. Gilbert in three acts. It opened at the Haymarket Theatre on January 4 1873. The play is an allegory loosely based on a short illustrated story of the same title by Gilbert, written in 1871 and published in Tom Hood's Comic Annual, about how pure...
,
Broken HeartsBroken Hearts is a blank verse play by W. S. Gilbert in three acts styled "An entirely original fairy play". It opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London on December 9 1875 and toured the provinces in 1876...
, and the later operas,
IolantheIolanthe, or The Peer and the Peri, is a comic opera with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It is one of the Savoy operas and is the seventh collaboration of the fourteen between Gilbert and Sullivan....
,
Princess Ida, and
Fallen FairiesFallen Fairies; or, The Wicked World, is a two-act comic opera, with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert and music by Edward German. Premiering at London's Savoy Theatre on December 15 1909, it failed miserably, closing after just 50 performances...
, where the introduction of males into a tranquil world of women brings "mortal love" that wreaks havoc with the status quo. Stedman calls this a "Gilbertian invasion plot".
The play is a farcical burlesque of Tennyson's 1847 narrative blank-verse poem,
The PrincessThe Princess is a serio-comic blank verse narrative poem, written by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1847. Tennyson was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1850 to 1896 and remains one of the most popular English poets....
. Gilbert's play is also written in blank verse and retains Tennyson's basic serio-comic story line about a heroic princess who runs a women's college and about the prince who loves her. He and his two friends infiltrate the college disguised as female students. Gilbert returned to his play in 1883, adapting it as one of his operas with
Arthur SullivanSir Arthur Seymour Sullivan MVO was an English composer, of Irish and Italian descent, best known for his operatic collaborations with librettist W. S. Gilbert, including such continually-popular works as H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mikado...
, entitled
Princess IdaPrincess Ida, or Castle Adamant, is a comic opera with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It was their eighth operatic collaboration of fourteen. Princess Ida opened at the Savoy Theatre on January 5 1884, for a run of 246 performances...
. When Tennyson published his poem, women's higher education was a novel, even radical concept. When Gilbert wrote
The Princess in 1870, women's higher education was still an innovative idea. Girton College, the first university-level women's college in Britain, had been established at the
University of CambridgeThe University of Cambridge , located in the City of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom, is the second oldest university in the English-speaking world and the fourth oldest in Europe...
in 1869. However, by the time Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated on
Princess Ida in 1883, a women's college was a well-established concept.
Westfield CollegeWestfield College was a small college situated in Kidderpore Avenue, Hampstead, London, and a constituent college of the University of London from 1882 to 1989. The college originally admitted only women as students and became coeducational in 1964. In 1989, Westfield College merged with Queen Mary...
, London's first women's college, had opened in 1882 and is cited as a model for Castle Adamant, the women's college in
Princess Ida.
The lyrics to the songs in
The Princess were set to popular tunes from popular
operettaOperetta is a genre of light opera, light in terms both of music and subject matter. It is also closely related, in English-language works, to forms of musical theatre.-Operetta in French:...
and
grand operaGrand Opera is a genre of 19th-century opera generally in four or five acts, characterised by large-scale casts and orchestras, and lavish and spectacular design and stage-effects, normally with plots based on or around dramatic historic events...
of the time, including works by
HervéHervé, real name Louis Auguste Florimond Ronger, was a French singer, composer, librettist, conductor and scene painter, whom Ernest Newman, following Reynaldo Hahn, credited with inventing the genre of operetta in Paris.-Life:Hervé was born in Houdain near Arras...
and
Jacques OffenbachJacques Offenbach was a German-born French composer and cellist of the Romantic era and one of the originators of the operetta form...
. The three young men are played by women, so that, during a large part of the play, women are playing men disguised as women. Gilbert had been eager to try a "blank verse burlesque in which a picturesque story should be told in a strain of mock-heroic seriousness." The satire in the piece is of a higher intellectual order than usual burlesques playing in London at the time (and indeed than many of Gilbert's earlier pieces), and the publicity for the play touted this. The dialogue in
Princess Ida is little changed from that in
The Princess.
Roles
- King Hildebrand
- Prince Hilarion, his Son
- Cyril and Florian, his friends, Noblemen of King Hildebrand's Court
- King Gama
- Prince Arac, Prince Guron, and Prince Scynthius, his Sons
- Atho, King Hildebrand's Chamberlain
- First Officer and Second Officer
- Gobbo a Porter
- Princess Ida, Daughter of King Gama and Principal of the Ladies' University
- Lady Psyche, Professor of Experimental Science
- Lady Blanche, Professor of Abstract Philosophy
- Melissa, her Daughter
- Bertha, Ada, Chloe, Sacharissa, Sylvia, Phoebe, Amarinthe, and Laura, Lady Undergraduates
Scenes and story
The play is divided into five scenes:
- SCENE FIRST — Court in King Hildebrand's Palace.
- SCENE SECOND — The Gates of Castle Adamant.
- SCENE THIRD — Grounds of Castle Adamant.
- SCENE FOURTH — Hildebrand's Camp before Ida's Castle.
- SCENE FIFTH — Inner Gate of Castle Adamant.
The plot is essentially the same as the later opera: Ida's misshapen father, King Gama, and his three hulking sons arrive at the court of King Hildebrand. They bring news that the beautiful Princess Ida, to whom Hildebrand's son, Prince Hilarion, was betrothed in infancy, will not honour her marriage vows. She rules a women's university and excludes all men from entering. Hilarion and two companions disguise themselves as female students and sneak inside the walls, but they are soon discovered, eventually causing chaos and panic, during which the prince has occasion to save Ida's life. Hildebrand agrees to give Ida a chance: The outcome of a tournament pitting her three brothers against Hilarion and his two friends will decide whether she must marry the Prince. In the battle, the Prince and his friends wound Ida's brothers, after which she accepts the Prince as her husband, admitting that she loves him (in Tennyson's poem, the Prince is defeated, but Ida, nursing him to health, comes to love him).
External links