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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Theatre, drama > Musical theatre
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Modified Rapture - Comedy in W. S. Gilbert's Savoy Operas (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,878
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Modified Rapture - Comedy in W. S. Gilbert's Savoy Operas (Hardcover)
Series: Victorian Literature and Culture Series
Expected to ship within 10 - 17 working days
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The professional success achieved by W. S. Gilbert was unique in
nineteenth-century English theater: he was the first dramatist ever
to be knighted for his stage works, which yielded him a fortune
that his less prosperous playwriting predecessors could scarcely
have imagined. The Savoy operas-so called after the theater at
which most of them were originally produced-were comedies. But
comedy, in its traditional form, was hardly congenial to the
prevailing social prejudices of the Victorian age: it features the
triumph of rebelliousness over laws and rules, ridicules the
keepers of the established order, and celebrates the victory of the
erotic instinct over repression. Spectacles of this kind were
especially uncomfortable for the newly arrived middle class, intent
on making itself conspicuous for its dedication to respectability
and duty. In fact, before Gilbert's Savoy productions, many of the
bourgeoisie refused altogether to patronize the English stage,
where the dominant form was comedy in its various guises. Beginning
with H. M. S. Pinafore, Fischler demonstrates how Gilbert made it
his business to cater to the sensibilities of the middle class
through the structure he imposed on his plots, the approach he took
to characterization, and the treatment he accorded erotic love, the
quintessential theme of comedy. The book's conclusions not only
illuminate Gilbert's own comic practice but point the way toward a
new understanding of the transactions between comedy in general and
the spirit of the Victorian age.
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