The Princess (play) - Background

Background

The Princess came fairly early in Gilbert's playwriting career, after his very successful one-act comic opera, Ages Ago (1869) and before Our Island Home (1870, another such piece). The play was Gilbert's first of the 1870s, a decade during which he wrote more than thirty-five plays, encompassing most genres of comedy and drama, including his series of blank verse "fairy comedies", beginning with The Palace of Truth later in 1870 and his first operas with Arthur Sullivan. In 1870, Gilbert was establishing his "topsy-turvy" style and proving that his capabilities extended well beyond his early burlesques and extravaganzas. The Princess is one of several Gilbert plays, including The Wicked World, Broken Hearts, and the later operas, Iolanthe, Princess Ida, and Fallen Fairies, where the introduction of males into a tranquil world of women brings "mortal love" that wreaks havoc with the status quo. Stedman calls this a "Gilbertian invasion plot".

The play is a farcical burlesque of Tennyson's 1847 narrative blank-verse poem, The Princess. Gilbert's play is also written in blank verse and retains Tennyson's basic serio-comic story line about a heroic princess who runs a women's college and about the prince who loves her. He and his two friends infiltrate the college disguised as female students. Gilbert returned to his play in 1883, adapting it as one of his operas with Arthur Sullivan, entitled Princess Ida. When Tennyson published his poem, women's higher education was a novel, even radical concept. When Gilbert wrote The Princess in 1870, women's higher education was still an innovative idea. Girton College, the first university-level women's college in Britain, had been established at the University of Cambridge in 1869. However, by the time Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated on Princess Ida in 1883, a women's college was a well-established concept. Westfield College, London's first women's college, had opened in 1882 and is cited as a model for Castle Adamant, the women's college in Princess Ida.

The lyrics to the songs in The Princess were set to popular tunes from popular operetta and grand opera of the time, including works by Hervé and Jacques Offenbach. The three young men are played by women, so that, during a large part of the play, women are playing men disguised as women. Gilbert had been eager to try a "blank verse burlesque in which a picturesque story should be told in a strain of mock-heroic seriousness." The satire in the piece is of a higher intellectual order than usual burlesques playing in London at the time (and indeed than many of Gilbert's earlier pieces), and the publicity for the play touted this. The dialogue in Princess Ida is little changed from that in The Princess.