Abstract
In the Introduction Goron establishes the scope of his study, which will transport the reader on a journey from the world of late-Victorian manners and mores into the Savoy Theatre, and onto its stage. Goron explains the originality of his intention—an attempt to focus the methods of recent historical studies of Victorian theatre on the Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration. The Introduction explains the key concepts behind this study, particularly how notions of class and ideology can be used to analyse the workings of a theatrical organisation, the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, as well as its key cultural product, the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The company folded in 1982 due to the removal of state funding by the British Arts Council. Rising production expenses had resulted in a reliance on this contribution to its running costs to keep the company on the road. See Bradley (2005, p. 41–52).
- 2.
It could be argued that the comprehensive and sustained criticism of British institutions in Utopia, Limited (1893), which depicts, in one memorable moment, representatives of the British armed forces, the city, the law, the Lord Chamberlain’s office and local government cavorting as performers in a minstrel show, presents a harsher view of society than any of the other operas. Contemporary reviews do not focus on any perceived increase in satirical intent, however. The next and final opera, The Grand Duke (1896), is noticeable for its absence of satire, and its similarities to the new genre, musical comedy, and to fin de siècle continental operetta, neither of which emphasised social satire. From a twenty-first-century perspective, Utopia, Limited may appear more uncompromising than it did in its own time.
- 3.
For the purpose of this discussion, the term middle class—without inverted commas—will be used to denote a reading of class based on late-nineteenth-century classifications of occupation and income. ‘Middle-class’—with the commas—will denote a looser definition, which combines the notion of a value-based ideology with economic considerations. The term ‘bourgeois’ will be used as an alternative to the latter designation, rather than in its strictly Marxist sense of those who own the means of production and exploit the proletariat.
- 4.
They constituted around 75 per cent of total population (Perkin 1989, pp. 29–30).
- 5.
A similar model is used by Asa Briggs in his chapter ‘Victorian Values’ (1988). Briggs identifies a set of key ‘values’ which typify the Victorian mentality. His topics include entrepreneurship, hard work, cleanliness, ‘self help’, duty, patriotism and the ‘domestic sphere’.
- 6.
I would argue that terms such as ‘the late Victorian middle-class’ can be used to facilitate an understanding of the way a particular society functions, if they are seen as ‘models’—‘intellectual construct(s) which simplify reality in order to emphasize the recurrent, the general and the typical which [… are presented] in the form of clusters, traits or attributes’ (Burke 1992, p. 28). Associated dangers of generalisation and simplification can be countered by the argument that the purpose of models is to simplify in order to make the real world more comprehensible (Burke 1992, pp. 28–33).
- 7.
Marxist explanations of the formation of modern British society focus on the interrelationships of mutually antagonistic classes, with specific self-evident ‘identities’. They use class formations and relationships—most significantly the notion of mutual class antagonism—to provide an overarching, explanatory account of British society from the industrial revolution onwards.
- 8.
Newer accounts argued that the upper classes retained the real power. Rather than being dominated by a newly enfranchised bourgeois hegemony, the old order still held the upper hand, as more than half of Britain’s wealth and a majority of cabinet posts remained in the possession of the aristocracy in the period covered by this study (Boyd and Macwilliam 2007, pp. 27–28; Hewitt 2008, p. 3).
- 9.
For example, Thompson (1988) and Tosh (1999) afford the terms upper, middle and working class little definition, and use them as a commonly accepted shorthand method of describing Victorian society. Oost (2009) and Mason (1994) qualify their usage of class quite distinctly, but in different ways. For Mason, income and occupation are the important class delineators; for Oost, consumption and social behaviour.
- 10.
See Bailey (1998), Davidoff and Hall (2002) and Rappaport (2000).
- 11.
Raymond Williams’s theory of cultural dominance provides the most useful model by which broad issues concerning the interaction between the material basis of society, its beliefs (‘ideology’) and its cultural production can be explained. Williams’s basic position is that ‘in any society, in any period, there is a central system of practices, meanings and values which we can call dominant and effective’ (1980, p. 38). Such a system ‘saturates society and even constitutes the substance and limit of common sense for most people under its sway [… so] that it corresponds to the reality of social experience.’
- 12.
This is the ‘materialism’ in Knowles’s ‘materialist semiotics’. Cultural materialism, as expounded by Dollimore and Sinfield (1985) locates ‘cultural production—including the production of theatre—within its historical, cultural and material contexts’ (Knowles 2004, p. 11) in order to reveal the underlying ideological meanings, particularly those pertaining to issues of power and social dominance, present in any text.
References
Bradley, I. (2001). The complete annotated Savoy Operas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barrington, R. (1908). Rutland Barrington, by himself. London: Grant Richards.
Bond, J. (1930). The life and reminiscences of Jessie Bond the Old Savoyard. London: John Lane the Bodley Head.
Cellier, F., & Bridgeman, C. (1914). Gilbert, Sullivan and D’Oyly Carte. London: Pitman.
Grossmith, G. (1888). A society clown: Reminiscences. Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith.
Bailey, P. (1998). Popular culture and performance in the Victorian City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Borsay, P. (2006). A history of leisure. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Boyd, K., & Macwilliam, R. (2007). Rethinking the Victorians. In K. Boyd & R. McWilliam (Eds.), The Victorian studies reader. London: Routledge.
Bradley, I. (2005). Oh Joy! Oh Rapture! The enduring phenomenon of Gilbert and Sullivan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bratton, J. (2003). New readings in theatre history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Briggs, A. (1988). Victorian values. In: Search of Victorian values. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Burke, P. (1992). History and social theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cannadine, D. (1998). Class in Britain. London: Yale University Press.
Crowther, A. (2000). Contradiction contradicted—The plays of W.S. Gilbert. London: Associated University Presses.
Davidoff, L., & Hall, C. (2002). Family fortunes: Men and women of the English middle class, 1780–1850. London: Routledge.
Davis, T. C., 1991. Actresses as Working Women - Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture. London: Routledge.
Davis, T. (2000). The economics of the British Stage 1800–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davis, J., & Emeljanow, V. (2001). Reflecting the audience: London theatregoing, 1840–1880. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press.
Dillard, P. (1991). ‘How quaint the ways of paradox’—An annotated Gilbert and Sullivan bibliography. Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press.
Dollimore, J., & Sinfield, A. (1985). Political Shakespeare: New essays in cultural materialism (1st ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Gunn, S. (1999). The public sphere, modernity and consumption: New perspectives on the history of the English middle class. In A. Kidd & D. Nicholls (Eds.), Gender, civic culture and consumerism: Middle class identity in Britain (pp. 1800–1940). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Hayter, C. (1987). Gilbert and Sullivan. London: Macmillan.
Hewitt, M. (2008). Class and the classes. In C. Williams (Ed.), A companion to nineteenth-century Britain. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hibbert, C. (1976). Gilbert and Sullivan and their Victorian World. New York: American Heritage Publishing.
Joyce, P. (1994). Democratic subjects: The self and the social in nineteenth-century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kidd, A., & Nicholls, D. (1999). History, culture and the middle classes. In: Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle Class Identity in Britain 1800 – 1940. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Knowles, R. (2004). Reading the material theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lee, J. (2010). The Japan of pure invention. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mason, M., 1994. The Making of Victorian Sexuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McConachie, B., 2007. Historicizing the Relations of Theatrical Production. In: Critical Theory and Performance. Michigan: University of Michigan Press., pp. 284–94.
Oost, R. B. (2009). Gilbert and Sullivan: Class and the Savoy Tradition, 1875–1896. Farnham: Ashgate.
Perkin, H. (1969). The origins of modern English society 1780–1880. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Perkin, H. (1989). The rise of professional society: England since 1880. London: Routledge.
Rappaport, E. (2000). Shopping for pleasure: Women in the making of London’s West End. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rollins, C., & Witts, R. (1962). The D’Oyly Carte Opera company in Gilbert and Sullivan Operas. A record of productions 1875 – 1961. London: Michael Joseph.
Thompson, F. M. L. (1988). The rise of respectable society. London: Fontana.
Tosh, J. (1999). A man’s place. Masculinity and the middle-class home in late Victorian England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Wahrman, D. (1995). Imagining the middle class: The political representation of class in Britain, c. 1770 – 1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Webb, J., Schirato, T., & Danaher, G. (2002). Understanding Bourdieu. London: Sage.
Williams, R. (1980). Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory. In R. Williams (Ed.), Problems in materialism and culture. London: Verso.
Williams, C. (2011). Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, genre, parody. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wilson, F. (1989). An introduction to the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas. New York: Pierpoint Morgan Library.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Goron, M. (2016). Introduction. In: Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Respectable Capers'. Palgrave Studies in British Musical Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59478-5_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59478-5_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-59477-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-59478-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)