|
''The Princess'' is a blank verse farcical play, in five scenes with music, by W. S. Gilbert which adapts and parodies Alfred Lord Tennyson's humorous 1847 narrative poem, ''The Princess: A Medley''. It was first produced at the Olympic Theatre in London on 8 January 1870. Gilbert called the piece "a whimsical allegory ... a respectful operatic per-version" of Tennyson's poem. The play was a modest success, playing for about 82 performances through April and enjoying a provincial tour.〔(Information about the play )〕〔Moss, Simon. ("The Princess" ) at ''Gilbert & Sullivan: a selling exhibition of memorabilia'', c20th.com, accessed 16 November 2009〕 Gilbert liked the theme so much that he adapted the play as the libretto to ''Princess Ida'' (1884), one of his Savoy Operas with Arthur Sullivan. ''The Princess'' is a satire of women's education, a controversial subject in 1847, when Queen's College first opened in London, and in 1870 (Girton opened in 1869), but less so by 1884. ==Background== ''The Princess'' came fairly early in Gilbert's playwriting career, after his very successful one-act comic opera, ''Ages Ago'' (1869) and before ''Our Island Home'' (1870, another such piece). The play was Gilbert's first of the 1870s, a decade during which he wrote more than thirty-five plays, encompassing most genres of comedy and drama, including his series of blank verse "fairy comedies", beginning with ''The Palace of Truth'' later in 1870 and his first operas with Arthur Sullivan. In 1870, Gilbert was establishing his "topsy-turvy" style and proving that his capabilities extended well beyond his early burlesques and extravaganzas. ''The Princess'' is one of several Gilbert plays, including ''The Wicked World'', ''Broken Hearts'', and the later operas, ''Iolanthe'', ''Princess Ida'', and ''Fallen Fairies'', where the introduction of males into a tranquil world of women brings "mortal love" that wreaks havoc with the status quo.〔(Introduction to ''Broken Hearts'', ) ''The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive'', accessed 10 March 2009〕 Stedman calls this a "Gilbertian invasion plot".〔Stedman (p. 95): In "a Gilbertian invasion" plot, outsiders change a tranquil society, as where the Thespians take control of Olympus in ''Thespis'', and the Flowers of Progress remodel Utopia in ''Utopia, Limited''.〕 The play is a farcical burlesque of Tennyson's 1847 narrative blank-verse poem, ''The Princess''. Gilbert's play is also written in blank verse and retains Tennyson's basic serio-comic story line about a heroic princess who runs a women's college and about the prince who loves her. He and his two friends infiltrate the college disguised as female students. Gilbert returned to his play in 1883, adapting it as one of his operas with Arthur Sullivan, entitled ''Princess Ida''. When Tennyson published his poem, women's higher education was a novel, even radical concept.〔Queen's College, London, the first women's college, had been founded in 1847, but it was not quite a higher education institution in the modern sense: it admitted girls and women from the age of twelve upwards. See Scott, Patrick. ("Tennyson, Interpreter of Mid-Victorian Britain" ), 1992 exhibit on Tennyson's works, including "The Princess"] and (British History Online )〕 When Gilbert wrote ''The Princess'' in 1870, women's higher education was still an innovative idea.〔Mack, Beverly B. and Heidi A. Strobel, ("Scholars and Scholarship" ), ''Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History'', edited by Bonnie G. Smith, Oxford University Press, 2008, accessed 1 September 2009.〕 Girton College, the first university-level women's college in Britain, had been established at the University of Cambridge in 1869.〔Even so, it was not recognised as a full constituent of the university until 1948. See (Girton's official website )〕 However, by the time Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated on ''Princess Ida'' in 1883, a women's college was a well-established concept. Westfield College, London's first women's college, had opened in 1882 and is cited as a model for Castle Adamant, the women's college in ''Princess Ida''.〔In 1983, Janet Sondheimer published a history of the college called (''Castle Adamant in Hampstead.'' )〕 The lyrics to the songs in ''The Princess'' were set to popular tunes from popular operetta and grand opera of the time, including works by Hervé and Jacques Offenbach. The three young men are played by women, so that, during a large part of the play, women are playing men disguised as women. Gilbert had been eager to try a "blank verse burlesque in which a picturesque story should be told in a strain of mock-heroic seriousness." The satire in the piece is of a higher intellectual order than usual burlesques playing in London at the time (and indeed than many of Gilbert's earlier pieces), and the publicity for the play touted this.〔Gilbert, W. S. "An Autobiography" in ''Theatre'', NS 1 (Apr. 1883), p. 220, quoted in Stedman, p. 77.〕 The dialogue in ''Princess Ida'' is little changed from that in ''The Princess''. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Princess (W. S. Gilbert play)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|