H.M.S. Pinafore - Analysis - Satiric and Comic Themes

Satiric and Comic Themes

Biographer Jane Stedman wrote that Pinafore is "satirically far more complex" than The Sorcerer. She commented that Gilbert uses several ideas and themes from his Bab Ballads, including the idea of gentlemanly behaviour of a captain towards his crew from "Captain Reece" (1868) and the exchange of ranks due to exchange at birth from "General John" (1867). Dick Deadeye, based on a character in "Woman's Gratitude" (1869), represents another of Gilbert's favorite (and semi-autobiographical) satiric themes: the misshapen misanthrope whose forbidding "face and form" makes him unpopular although he represents the voice of reason and common sense. Gilbert also borrows from his 1870 opera, The Gentleman in Black which includes the device of baby-switching.

Historian H. M. Walbrook wrote in 1921 that Pinafore "satirizes the type of nautical drama of which Douglas Jerrold's Black-Eyed Susan is a typical instance, and the 'God's Englishman' sort of patriotism which consists in shouting a platitude, striking an attitude, and doing little or nothing to help one's country". In 2005, Australian opera director Stuart Maunder noted the juxtaposition of satire and nationalism in the opera, saying, "they all sing 'He is an Englishman', and you know damn well they're sending it up, but the music is so military ... that you can't help but be swept up in that whole jingoism that is the British Empire." In addition, he argued that the song ties this theme into the main satire of class distinctions in the opera: "H.M.S. Pinafore is basically a satire on ... the British love of the class system .... t this moment, all of the men on board say, 'But of course can marry daughter, because he's British, and therefore he's great'".

One of Gilbert's favourite comic themes is the elevation of an unqualified person to a position of high responsibility. In The Happy Land (1873), for example, Gilbert describes a world in which government offices are awarded to the person who has the least qualification to hold each position. In particular, the one who has never heard of a ship is appointed to the cabinet post of First Lord of the Admiralty. In Pinafore, Gilbert revisits this theme in the character of Sir Joseph, who rises to the same position by "never go to sea". In the later Gilbert and Sullivan operas, the characters Major-General Stanley, in Pirates, and Ko-Ko in The Mikado are similarly appointed to high office though lacking the necessary qualifications. Gilbert also pokes fun at party politics, implying that when Sir Joseph "always voted at party's call", he sacrificed his personal integrity. The "commercial middle class" (which was Gilbert's main audience) is treated as satirically as are social climbers and the great unwashed. In addition, the apparent age difference between Ralph and the Captain, even though they were babies nursed together, satirises the variable age of Thaddeus in The Bohemian Girl. The Times wrote, in reviewing the 1929 production, that Pinafore was quintessentially Gilbertian in that the absurdities of a "paternal" Captain and the "ethics ... of all romanticism" are accepted "unflinchingly" and taken to their logical conclusion: "It is the reference to actuality that is essential; without it, the absurdity will not stand starkly out".

A theme that pervades the opera is the treatment of love across different social ranks. In the previous Gilbert and Sullivan opera, The Sorcerer, a love potion causes trouble by inducing the villagers and wedding guests to fall in love with people of different social classes. In Pinafore, the captain's daughter, Josephine, loves and is loved by a common sailor, but she dutifully tells him, "your proffered love I haughtily reject". He expresses his devotion to her in a poetic and moving speech that ends with "I am a British sailor, and I love you". It finally turns out that he is of a higher rank than she. This is a parody of the Victorian "equality" drama, such as Lord Lytton's The Lady of Lyons (1838), where the heroine rejects a virtuous peasant who makes a similarly moving speech, ending with "I am a peasant!" It then turns out that he has become her social superior. Furthermore, in Pinafore, Sir Joseph assures Josephine that "love levels all ranks". In Tom Taylor's The Serf, the heroine again loves a worthy peasant who turns out to be of high rank, and she declares happily at the end that "love levels all". In a satire of the libertarian traditions of nautical melodrama, Sir Joseph tells the crew of the Pinafore that they are "any man's equal" (excepting his), and he writes a song for them that glorifies the British sailor. Conversely, he brings the proud captain down a notch by making him "dance a hornpipe on the cabin table". Jones notes that the union between Ralph and Josephine "becomes acceptable only through the absurd second-act revelation of Buttercup's inadvertent switching of the infants" and concludes that Gilbert is a "conservative satirist ultimately advocated preserving the status quo ... set out to show love definitely does not level all ranks".

There is a divide among Gilbert and Sullivan scholars as to whether Gilbert is, as Jones argues, a supporter of the status quo whose focus is merely to entertain or, on the other hand, predominantly to satirise and protest "against the follies of his age". Gilbert scholar Andrew Crowther posits that this disagreement arises from Gilbert's "techniques of inversion – with irony and topsyturvydom", which lead to "the surface meaning of his writings" being "the opposite of their underlying meaning". Crowther argues that Gilbert desires to "celebrate" society's norms while, at the same time, satirising these conventions. In Pinafore, which established many patterns for the later Savoy operas, Gilbert found a way to express his own conflict that "also had tremendous appeal to the general public". He creates "a highly intelligent parody of nautical melodrama ... controlled by the conventions it mocks". While nautical melodrama exalts the common sailor, in Pinafore Gilbert makes the proponent of equality, Sir Joseph, a pompous and misguided member of the ruling class who, hypocritically, cannot apply the idea of equality to himself. The hero, Ralph, is convinced of his equality by Sir Joseph's foolish pronouncements and declares his love for his Captain's daughter, throwing over the accepted "fabric of social order". At this point, Crowther suggests, the logic of Gilbert's satiric argument should result in Ralph's arrest. But to satisfy convention, Gilbert creates an obvious absurdity: the captain and Ralph were switched as babies. By an "accident of birth", Ralph is suddenly an appropriate husband for Josephine, and both the social order and the desire for a romantic happy ending are satisfied at once. Crowther concludes, "We have an opera which uses all the conventions of melodrama and ridicules them; but in the end it is difficult to see which has won out, the conventions or the ridicule." Thus, Pinafore found broadbased success by appealing to the intellectual theatregoer seeking satire, the middle-class theatre-goer looking for a comfortable confirmation of the "existing social order" and the working-class audience who saw a satisfying melodramatic victory for the common man.