Background
W. S. Gilbert created several blank verse "fairy comedies" at the Haymarket Theatre for John Baldwin Buckstone and starring William Hunter Kendal and his wife Madge Robertson Kendal (sister of the playwright Tom Robertson), in the early 1870s. These plays, influenced by the fairy work of James Planché, are 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 in 1870, a fantasy adapted from a story by Madame de Genlis. Second was Pygmalion and Galatea (1871), a satire of sentimental, romantic attitudes toward myth, and The Wicked World was third.
These plays, together with Sweethearts (1874), Charity, 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 and won him artistic credentials as a writer of wide range, who was as comfortable with human drama as with farcical humour. Although these fairy comedies represented a step forward for Gilbert, the blank verse is a drawback, as it limits Gilbert's vital prose style.
The plot of The Wicked World clearly fascinated Gilbert. Not only did he write a short story on the theme in 1871, but he also co-wrote a parody of it, The Happy Land (1873), and he returned to it in his 1909 comic opera, Fallen Fairies. Gilbert sued The Pall Mall Gazette, which had called The Wicked World indecent because of the references to "mortal love" in the script. Gilbert lost the case, but he had the satisfaction of having his play found inoffensive in a court of law.
Like a number of Gilbert's blank-verse plays, The Wicked World treats the subject of the consequences that ensue when an all-female world is disrupted by men, and the romantic complications they bring. His plays The Princess (1870) and Broken Hearts (1875), and his operas Iolanthe (1882) and Princess Ida (1884), are all treatments of this basic idea. Stedman calls this a "Gilbertian invasion plot". Another of Gilbert's recurring themes that is present in this play, as well as in Broken Hearts, The Yeomen of the Guard, and other Gilbert works, is his distrust of heroic men.
Read more about this topic: The Wicked World
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