Pinafore and Aft

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 409, 24 April 1947, Page 10

Pinafore and Aft

"| HE last quarter-of-an-hour of H.M.S. Pinafore, which was all the power cut allowed me last. Sunday. afternoon, was at any rate sufficient to leave me feeling as well disposed to the characters and their creator as Captain Corcoran was to Little Buttercup. But the comparison is scarcely accurate, since Captain Corcoran loved Little Buttercup for. herself and not for her achievement (baby-farming even in the benighted *seventies was a despised occupation) whereas in Gilbert’s case the opposite is true. Biography is an over-rated science. We might paraphrase the poet and remark that: Jiives of great men oft remind us That at home they weren’t so bland We far off may see behind us Cloven footprints in the sand. Fortunately a work of art exists in its own right, so that we are not tempted to undervalue Antony’s protestations to Cleopatra when we learn that Shakespeare left Ann Hathaway his secondbest bed, or think Alice a prig because her ercator saw fit to take Gilbert heavily to task for his use of that indefensible word "damme" in his Pinafore (The NZBS had no such scruple). Certainly there are things about Gilbert’s outlook that we should like changed, though this is not one of them. We deplore his baiting of Sullivan, the ungentlemanliness of his comment on his wife’s appearance after she has been landed from one of the original automobiles into a hedge ("She looked like a large and quite unaccountable bird’s nest’’), the anti-feminism of his retort when he heard that suffragettes, crying ‘Votes for Women!" had chained themselves to the railings of the Houses of Parliament ("I shall chain myself to the railings of Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital and cry ‘Beds for Men!’") There may be a bit of Dick Deadeye in Gilbert, but damme, it would be too bad if biography revealed him to be all unquctable Ralph Rackstraw.