Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan by Andrew Crowther

Author:Andrew Crowther
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752463858
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

From this moment Gilbert seems determined to make his work more brutally disorientated than ever before: the honest lowland lad sells his fiancée to a stranger for £2; a baby-talking young woman proves to have more financial acumen than any other character in the piece; her benevolent papa is a selfish, greedy old rogue, who at one point tries to convince another character to commit suicide; and everyone acts throughout from the lowest, most mercenary motives. As in The Palace of Truth, they speak brutal truths as if they are polite fictions: ‘Belvawney, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I will not disguise from you that, not having seen you for three months, I was in hopes that I had got rid of you for ever.’6 And in the middle of it all there stands the anti-heroic figure of Cheviot Hill, rude, boorish, stingy and a serial flirt, appalling and strangely likeable:

I wonder if I’m taking a prudent step. Marriage is a very risky thing; it’s like Chancery, once in it you can’t get out of it, and the costs are enormous. There you are – fixed. Fifty years hence, if we’re both alive, there we both shall be – fixed. That’s the devil of it. It’s an unreasonably long time to be responsible for another person’s expenses. I don’t see the use of making it for as long as that. It seems greedy to take up half a century of another person’s attention. Besides – one never knows – one might come across somebody else one liked better.7

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