Word: gilbertian
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Here is Barrie leaping the barriers of restraint. The play brims with mocking, alert humor, almost Gilbertian in the intent to set the world right by standing it on its head. It is filled with nimble characterization, satirizing everything boldly, from headwaiters to financial heirarchs. But it is a question whether the tired business man will quite enjoy being banged over the head so liberally...
With the poetry there is always the delicious humor. The logic of the Queen, the Princess's self-sufficient, practical step-mother, is not more unanswerable than Gilbertian when she suggests the way for the girl to escape the doom foretold by the stars--that she is to be ate and devoured by a scaly Green Dragon from the North. Marriage, argues the Queen, is the way of escape. Dragons from time immemorial have eaten King's daughters but not Kings' wives. "In all the inventions made by poets did any of you ever hear of a Dragon swallowing...
...France and Russia, whose foreign policy in Morocco and Persia has helped to bring this war, in which Germany was tempted to invade Belgium, and Italy to land in Albania! Where under high heaven is there either "national honor, human justice or universal principles of righteousness" in this perfectly Gilbertian complexity of aims, policies and national alignments...