The Happy Land
The Happy Land is a play with music written in 1873 by W. S. Gilbert (under the pseudonym F. Latour Tomline) and Gilbert Arthur à Beckett. The musical play burlesques Gilbert's earlier play, The Wicked World. The blank verse piece opened at the Royal Court Theatre on 3 March 1873 and enjoyed a highly successful run, soon touring, and then being immediately revived at the same theatre in the autumn of 1873.[1][2]
For other uses, see Happy Land (disambiguation).
The play created a scandal by breaking regulations against the portrayal of public characters, parodying William Ewart Gladstone, Robert Lowe, and Acton Smee Ayrton, respectively the Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and First Commissioner of Works. Three characters were made up and costumed to look like the caricatures of Gladstone, Lowe and Ayrton that had appeared in Vanity Fair. The scandal was great enough to be included in the Annual Register's "Chronicle of Remarkable Occurrences."[1] The play was censored by Britain's Lord Chamberlain, which ironically caused it to become unusually popular.
The Happy Land also anticipated some of the themes in the political satire seen in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, including unqualified people in positions of authority, like Sir Joseph in H.M.S. Pinafore, selecting government by "competitive examination" as in Iolanthe, and especially the importation of English exemplars to "improve" a naive civilisation, as in Utopia, Limited.
Antecedents and development of Gilbertian satire[edit]
Gilbert created several blank verse "fairy comedies" at the Haymarket Theatre in the early 1870s beginning with The Palace of Truth (1870) and Pygmalion and Galatea (1871). The Wicked World was the third of these, and The Happy Land followed so soon on its heels that the two plays ran simultaneously. The plot of The Happy Land and The Wicked World clearly fascinated Gilbert. Not only had he written a short story on the theme in 1871, but he returned to it in his 1909 comic opera, Fallen Fairies. Indeed, the general theme of mortals disturbing the peaceful state of affairs in fairyland is featured in a number of other Gilbert works, including the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Iolanthe (1882).[22]
Gilbert followed The Happy Land with The Realm of Joy, set in the lobby of a theatre performing a thinly-disguised The Happy Land, which directly parodies the scandal, even describing the costumes used.[23] In The Happy Land, The Realm of Joy (1873) and Charity (1874), Gilbert stretched the boundaries of how far social commentary could go in the Victorian theatre. The Realm of Joy poked many jokes at the Lord Chamberlain.[24] Charity critiqued the contrasting ways in which Victorian society treated men and women who had sex outside of marriage, which anticipated the 'problem plays' of Shaw and Ibsen.[25]
The Happy Land is an example of Gilbert's "repeated ridicule of idealistic panaceas for curing social ills [among which was] Gilbert's conception of popular government as an imprac- tical theory. In the operas these schemes range from the notion that "true love [is] the source of every earthly joy," in The Sorcerer; through the prescription of "Republican [equality]" as a remedy for social ills in The Gondoliers; to the systematic plan for political and social reforms brought from England by the Flowers of Progress for the benefit, and ultimate corruption, of the south sea island kingdom of Utopia in Utopia Limited" and its salvation through the institution of party politics.[26]