Variation on a Theme

W. S. Gilbert professed dislike of Shakespeare, and was particularly irritated by Hamlet. The latter indeed was his King Charles's Head, cropping up through allusion and analogy in unexpected places throughout his works, and responsible incidentally for one of his jokes which has passed into our speech, when he said to Tree. of his performance that he 'never saw anything so funny in my life, and yet it was not in the least vulgar'. He made two determined direct attempts to dismiss the haunting theme, in the skit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the comic opera The Mountebanks. In the former, which reads drearily to-day and can hardly have been entirely redeemed by the author's gusto when taking part in it in private theatricals, Ophelia vents Gilbert's impatience with Hamlet's soliloquies and magniloquence, and the English reverence for the play, by tricking him into presenting a 'damned' tragedy written long before by Claudius but received as a farce; in penalty for which he is banished to be a bore in England, and Ophelia is free to marry Rosencrantz. The Mountebanks exhibit Hamlet and Ophelia as their prize clockwork figures, and when by magic two real characters are transformed into the automatons they regard it as great nonsense that the girl should have to commit suicide because her lover will not marry her when, after all, he wishes to.

These unsatisfactory attempts to dispose of the matter illustrate merely the exemplification in Gilbert of a psychological truism—he, too, 'protests too much', and shows affinity by his preoccupation. But in another, and a very fine, work he hit on the humorous approach to the theme of guilt tragically embodied in Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, and The Brothers Karamazov, in the progression traced by Freud; and happened to stage neatly a dramatization of the latter's technical theory of humour itself.1

Of all the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, Ruddigore 'dates' least, and from the time of the first post-war generation it has grown in