Beginnings Gilbert was born at 17
Southampton Street,
Strand, London. His father, also named
William, was briefly a
naval surgeon, who later became a writer of novels and short stories, some of which his son illustrated. Gilbert's mother was the former Anne Mary Bye Morris (1812–1888), the daughter of Thomas Morris, an apothecary. Gilbert's parents were distant and stern, and he did not have a particularly close relationship with either of them. They quarrelled increasingly, and following the break-up of their marriage in 1876, his relationships with them, especially his mother, became even more strained. Gilbert had three younger sisters, two of whom were born outside England because of the family's travels during these years: Jane Morris (b. 1838 in
Milan, Italy – 1906), who married Alfred Weigall, a miniatures painter; Mary Florence (b. 1843 in
Boulogne, France – 1911); and Anne Maude (1845–1932). The younger two never married. Gilbert was nicknamed "Bab" as a baby, and then "Schwenck", after the surname of his great-aunt and great-uncle, who were also his father's godparents. then at Western Grammar School,
Brompton, London, and then at the
Great Ealing School, where he became head boy and wrote plays for school performances and painted scenery. He then attended
King's College London, graduating in 1856. He intended to take the examinations for a commission in the
Royal Artillery, but with the end of the
Crimean War, fewer recruits were needed, and the only commission available to Gilbert would have been in a
line regiment. Instead he joined the
Civil Service: he was an assistant clerk in the
Privy Council Office for four years and hated it. In 1859, he joined the
Militia, a part-time volunteer force formed for the defence of Britain, which he served in until 1878 (in between writing and other work), reaching the rank of captain. In 1863, he received a bequest of
£300 that he used to leave the civil service and take up a brief career as a
barrister (he had already entered the
Inner Temple as a student). His legal practice was not successful, averaging just five clients a year. To supplement his income from 1861 on, Gilbert wrote a variety of stories, comic rants, grotesque illustrations, theatre reviews (many in the form of a parody of the play being reviewed), and, under the pseudonym "Bab" (his childhood nickname), illustrated poems for several comic magazines, primarily
Fun, started in 1861 by
H. J. Byron. He published stories, articles, and reviews in papers such as ''
The Cornhill Magazine, London Society, Tinsley's Magazine
and Temple Bar
. In addition, Gilbert was the London correspondent for L'Invalide Russe
and a drama critic for the Illustrated London Times''. In the 1860s he also contributed to
Tom Hood's Christmas annuals, to
Saturday Night, the
Comic News and the
Savage Club Papers.
The Observer newspaper in 1870 sent him to France as a war correspondent reporting on the
Franco-Prussian War. He would later return to many of these as source material for his plays and comic operas. Gilbert and his colleagues from
Fun, including
Tom Robertson,
Tom Hood,
Clement Scott and
F. C. Burnand (who defected to
Punch in 1862) frequented the Arundel Club, the
Savage Club, and especially Evans's café, where they had a table in competition with the
Punch 'Round table'. After a relationship in the mid-1860s with the novelist
Annie Thomas, Gilbert married Lucy Agnes Turner (1847–1936), whom he called "Kitty", in 1867; she was 11 years his junior. He wrote many affectionate letters to her over the years. Gilbert and Lucy were socially active both in London and later at
Grim's Dyke, often holding dinner parties and being invited to others' homes for dinner, in contrast to the picture painted by fictionalisations such as the film
Topsy-Turvy. The Gilberts had no children, but they had many pets, including some exotic ones.
First plays Gilbert wrote and directed several plays at school, but his first professionally produced play was
Uncle Baby, which ran for seven weeks in the autumn of 1863. by Gilbert and
Charles Millward In 1865–66, Gilbert collaborated with
Charles Millward on several
pantomimes, including one called
Hush-a-Bye, Baby, On the Tree Top, or, Harlequin Fortunia, King Frog of Frog Island, and the Magic Toys of Lowther Arcade (1866). Gilbert's first solo success came a few days after
Hush-a-Bye Baby premiered. His friend and mentor, Tom Robertson, was asked to write a pantomime but did not think he could do it in the two weeks available, and so he recommended Gilbert instead. Written and rushed to the stage in 10 days,
Dulcamara, or the Little Duck and the Great Quack, a
burlesque of
Gaetano Donizetti's ''
L'elisir d'amore'', proved extremely popular. This led to a long series of further Gilbert opera burlesques, pantomimes and
farces, full of awful
puns (traditional in burlesques of the period), though showing, at times, signs of the satire that would later be a defining part of Gilbert's work. In Victorian theatre, "[to degrade] high and beautiful themes ... had been the regular proceeding in burlesque, and the age almost expected it" Gilbert would depart even further from the burlesque style from about 1869 with plays containing original plots and fewer puns. His first full-length prose comedy was
An Old Score (1869).
German Reed entertainments and other plays of the early 1870s '', 1870 Theatre, at the time Gilbert began writing, had fallen into disrepute. Badly translated and adapted French
operettas and poorly written, prurient
Victorian burlesques dominated the London stage. As
Jessie Bond vividly described it, "stilted tragedy and vulgar farce were all the would-be playgoer had to choose from, and the theatre had become a place of evil repute to the righteous British householder." Bond created the mezzo-soprano roles in most of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and is here leading into a description of Gilbert's role reforming the Victorian theatre. The environment of the German Reeds' intimate theatre allowed Gilbert quickly to develop a personal style and freedom to control all aspects of production, including set, costumes, direction and stage management. These works were a success, with Gilbert's first big hit at the Gallery of Illustration,
Ages Ago, opening in 1869.
Ages Ago was also the beginning of a collaboration with the composer
Frederic Clay that would last seven years and produce four works. It was at a rehearsal for
Ages Ago that Clay formally introduced Gilbert to his friend, Arthur Sullivan. The Bab Ballads and Gilbert's many early musical works gave him much practice as a lyricist even before his collaboration with Sullivan.
, The Illustrated London News'', 22 March 1873, illustrated by
D. H. Friston Many of the plot elements of the German Reed Entertainments (as well as some from his earlier plays and Bab Ballads) would be reused by Gilbert later in the
Gilbert and Sullivan operas. These elements include paintings coming to life (
Ages Ago, used again in
Ruddigore), a deaf nursemaid binding a respectable man's son to a "pirate" instead of to a "pilot" by mistake (
Our Island Home, 1870, reused in
The Pirates of Penzance), and the forceful mature lady who is "an acquired taste" (
Eyes and No Eyes, 1875, reused in
The Mikado). During this time, Gilbert perfected the 'topsy-turvy' style that he had been developing in his Bab Ballads, where the humour was derived by setting up a ridiculous premise and working out its logical consequences, however absurd.
Mike Leigh describes the "Gilbertian" style as follows: "With great fluidity and freedom, [Gilbert] continually challenges our natural expectations. First, within the framework of the story, he makes bizarre things happen, and turns the world on its head. Thus the Learned Judge marries the Plaintiff, the soldiers metamorphose into aesthetes, and so on, and nearly every opera is resolved by a deft moving of the goalposts ... His genius is to fuse opposites with an imperceptible sleight of hand, to blend the surreal with the real, and the caricature with the natural. In other words, to tell a perfectly outrageous story in a completely deadpan way." At the same time, Gilbert created several "fairy comedies" at the
Haymarket Theatre. This series of plays was founded upon the idea of self-revelation by characters under the influence of some magic or some supernatural interference. The first was
The Palace of Truth (1870), based partly on a story by
Madame de Genlis. In 1871, with
Pygmalion and Galatea, one of seven plays that he produced that year, Gilbert scored his greatest hit to date. Together, these plays and their successors such as
The Wicked World (1873),
Sweethearts (1874), and
Broken Hearts (1875), did for Gilbert on the dramatic stage what the German Reed entertainments had done for him on the musical stage: they established that his capabilities extended far beyond burlesque, won him artistic credentials, and demonstrated that he was a writer of wide range, as comfortable with human drama as with farcical humour. The success of these plays, especially
Pygmalion and Galatea, gave Gilbert a prestige that would be crucial to his later collaboration with as respected a musician as Sullivan. During this period, Gilbert also pushed the boundaries of how far satire could go in the theatre. He collaborated with
Gilbert Arthur à Beckett on
The Happy Land (1873), a political satire (in part, a parody of his own
The Wicked World), which was briefly banned because of its unflattering caricatures of
Gladstone and his ministers. Similarly,
The Realm of Joy (1873) was set in the lobby of a theatre performing a scandalous play (implied to be the
Happy Land), with many jokes at the expense of the
Lord Chamberlain (the "Lord High Disinfectant", as he is referred to in the play). In
Charity (1874), however, Gilbert uses the freedom of the stage in a different way: to provide a tightly written critique of the contrasting ways that Victorian society treated men and women who had sex outside of marriage. These works anticipated the 'problem plays' of
Shaw and
Ibsen.
As director Once he became established, Gilbert was the stage director for his plays and operas and had strong opinions on how they should best be performed. He was strongly influenced by the innovations in "stagecraft", now called stage direction, by the playwrights
James Planché and especially
Tom Robertson. He sought realism in acting, settings, costumes, and movement, if not in content of his plays (although he did write a romantic comedy in the "naturalist" style, as a tribute to Robertson,
Sweethearts). He shunned self-conscious interaction with the audience, and insisted on a style of portrayal in which characters were never aware of their own absurdity, but were coherent internal wholes. reacts. In Gilbert's 1874 burlesque,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the character Hamlet, in his speech to the players, sums up Gilbert's theory of comic acting: "I hold that there is no such antick fellow as your bombastical hero who doth so earnestly spout forth his folly as to make his hearers believe that he is unconscious of all incongruity". Robertson "introduced Gilbert both to the revolutionary notion of disciplined rehearsals and to mise-en-scène or unity of style in the whole presentation – direction, design, music, acting." A major innovation was the replacement of the star actor with the disciplined ensemble, "raising the director to a new position of dominance" in the theatre. "That Gilbert was a good director is not in doubt. He was able to extract from his actors natural, clear performances, which served the Gilbertian requirements of outrageousness delivered straight." He would not work with actors who challenged his authority. George Grossmith wrote that, at least sometime, "Mr. Gilbert is a perfect autocrat, insisting that his words should be delivered, even to an inflection of the voice, as he dictates. He will stand on the stage beside the actor or actress, and repeat the words with appropriate action over and over again, until they are delivered as he desires them to be." Even during long runs and revivals, Gilbert closely supervised the performances of his plays, making sure that the actors did not make unauthorised additions, deletions or paraphrases. Gilbert was famous for demonstrating the action himself, even as he grew older. Gilbert himself went on stage occasionally, including several performances as the Associate in
Trial by Jury, as substitute for the injured
Kyrle Bellew in a charity matinee of
Broken Hearts, and in charity matinees of his one-act plays, such as King Claudius in
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. ==Collaboration with Sullivan==