Issue #0

The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan

Plot

"There are the witty and charming librettos that have delighted generations of fans. Complete and authentic, these are the texts on which modern performances and recordings are based. Among the songs are scattered over seventy of the amusing, quirky pictures W. S. Gilbert drew to illustrate them, and a chronology prepared for this edition sketches the author's lives and careers. This is a book that no lover of Gilbert and Sullivan, musical comedy, or the English theater will want to be without... Gilbert's librettos are delightful to read; his dialogue, often ironic and very funny, may have given us more epigrams even than Shaw's or Wilde's; his verses for Sullivan's music are the most fastidiously turned and inventively rhymed in all lyric comedy. As the Savoy Operas enter their second century, Gilbert's reputation as the supreme wordsmith of light opera remains secure." -- page 4 of cover.