Word: gilberts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Gilbert & Sullivan Book should therefore find an eager public, if not a wide one at $9. Yet, for the price, Author Leslie Baily has given full measure: his is both the liveliest and the most complete account ever rendered of the great collaborators, their private lives and public works...
Whom jest had joined together, peevishness took 25 years to put asunder. In those 25 years, Gilbert & Sullivan filled the English theater with such rollick as it had scarcely known before. Pinafore, Patience, The Mikado, The Gondoliers and the rest were something new under the limelight: real comedy operas whose music, in its own fribble fashion, was better written than most of the "serious" stuff of its time, and whose plots and lines were among the cleverest on the contemporary stage. These were smash hits, and today, after more than half a century, they are fresh hits every time...
Ransomed Poet. Gilbert was the older of the two by six years, and a personal devil of quiddity seems to have rocked his earliest cradle. At the age of two, while on a trip to Italy with his parents, he was snatched from his nurse's arms by two Neapolitan toughs, and held for a ransom of ?25. Papa paid. As Author Baily observes, "it was a bargain...
...Gilbert proved "a clever, bright boy, who was extremely lazy," and a rather unpromising young man, very tall and very skinny, who came averagely out of Kings College, London, and took a minor civil service job. Soon, to appease the boredom, he was squiggling little poems and doodles...
...Literature," wrote Max Beerbohm, "has many a solemn masterpiece that one would without a qualm barter for that absurd and riotous one." In society, as in print, Gilbert began to establish himself as a formidable zany. When asked, for instance, if he had "seen a member of this club with one eye called Matthews," Gilbert shot back: "What's his other eye called?" He turned this compulsion for dialogue to the writing of plays, and was already the leading comic writer of the London stage when he was introduced to Sullivan...