Modified Rapture: Comedy in W. S. Gilbert's Savoy Operas

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 ag…