Word: baronets
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...plot's broader outlines have to do with a witch's curse that dooms each baronet of Ruddigore to commit a crime a day, on pain of an agonizing death administered by his ancestors. They're so utterly ridiculous that Gilbert apparently lost all interest in them, tacking on a perfunctory legalistic technicality of an ending to take off the curse and bring the ancestors to life--selectively, because he didn't have enough female leads to marry them...
...full, singing tone from his fine orchestra, as is only proper, since Ruddigore has more than its share of set-apart showpieces--Thomas D. Fuller's hornpipe in the first act, the respectable caper Edith Marshall as a reformed Mad Margaret dances with Pell Osborn as a reformed wicked baronet in the second, the astonishing materialization of the Ruddigore ancestors, led by David Buchner, from their picture gallery--as well as a first-act finale that includes one madrigal, with lyrics about how nice the seasons are, that's one of the lovliest things Sullivan ever wrote...
...readers of D.H. Lawrence. On trial in the Old Bailey was a handsome Irishman named Maurice O'Regan, 33, charged with forging three checks to a total of $34,400. Maurice had been butler, chauffeur, valet, handyman and cook to Sir Francis Henry Grenville Peek, 56, fourth baronet of Rousdon. But with raven-haired, Jamaica-born Lady Caroline Peek, 37, the testimony revealed, Maurice's services had gone considerably further...
Whimsy is unavoidable. A dotty baronet has received a consignment of cut-rate statues from his alcoholic twin brother. The stone gods and goddesses include, naturally, Venus. A ring slipped on Venus' finger by a nervous bridegroom brings her to life, and love is reborn in a cold climate. The cast of characters, Burgess has explained, is drawn fondly from stock theatrical figures: "The boneheaded gold-hearted country squire in plus fours, the pert and resourceful servant, the grim but reliable chatelaine, the sweet guileless young lovers, the comic Anglican clergyman." Only a writer who can bring such scarecrows...
Died. Sir Osbert Sitwell, 76, fifth baronet, illustrious man of British letters, who with his equally famed sister, Dame Edith, and brother Sacheverell, devoted a lifetime to baiting the established ideas and figures of his age while celebrating the splendor of the past; of a heart at tack; in Montagnana, Italy. "I belonged," he once wrote, "to the prewar era, a proud citizen of the great free world of 1914, in which comity prevailed." Not for him the modern age, in which "the sabre-toothed tiger and the ant are our paragons, and the butterfly is condemned for its wings...