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     I wish I had the time and above all the ability, to
proceed more systematically, to show line by line which
aspects of Victorian life Gilbert satirizes; then to listen
to Sullivan's scores and observe measure by measure how
sometimes he endorses Gilbert's satire, as, e.g.  in the
Major-General catalogue aria, and the Policemen's chorus, and
how, more often, it seems to me, he contests his librettist's
satire, and escapes into romantic fantasy and feeling.
(before turning to something like "Onward Christian
Soldiers", for which he also supplied the melody.)  The
relationship between Gilbert's hard nosed satire and
Sullivan's elegiac lyricism seems to me itself ironic.  I
must come to terms with irony as the emblem of the societal
paradox, as the mark of the incongruity between private
individuality and public personality, between self and
society: irony at one and the same time, an expression of
that incongruity and the often desperate communicative
attempt to surmount it. Such is my interpretation of Socratic
(and Kierkegaardian) irony.  In this context, what seems to
me a most important and widely unrecognized characteristic of
the Jewish-Christian tradition is the total absence of irony
and humor. It boggles the mind: a Bible with thousands of
edifying verses without even a single smile.  [Goethe
recognized this, in the Prologue in Heaven (Faust, Part One)
he has Mephistopheles address the Lord: My pathos would
surely make you laugh, but for the fact that you've broken
the habit (of laughing).  (Mein Pathos braechte Dich gewiss
zum Lachen, Haettst Du Dir nicht das Lachen abgewoehnt.)]

     But the real God (as distinct from unsmiling Jehovah-
Jesus) did have a sense of humor. He created Victoria as a
latter-day Penthesilea and the empire over which she ruled as
the Amazon Kingdom of our time. On the face of it, one might
expect the feminists to be drooling with satisfaction over
the fact that a woman ruled the most powerful empire of her
time. But they have good reason to try to forget her.  I read
the Flora Hastings saga, only two years into Victoria's
reign, as the defining myth of her regency.  I read in that
account a violation of privacy so monumental and so pervasive
that, if he were not illiterate, it would make our president
green with envy.  For the rest, I see the widow's weeds which
Victoria sported, to have been symbols not of mourning, - one
can mourn for fifty years no more than one can hold ones
breath of five minutes, - but of symbols of despair for a
failed regency, for a deeply flawed culture. cf:
http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1989-0/haller.htm
I see Victoria as a tragic figure, and I interpret G&S as the
dialectical or maybe even the diabolical celebration of her
tragedy.  To the extent that this is true, their work takes
its place alongside Shakespeare's Histories.

     In the context of social psychology, I interpret the
humiliation of the male that is implicit in his subjection to
a female monarch to be balanced, and indeed outweighed by the
license granted to him by Her Majesty's Government to enslave
and exploit socially inferior females.  I interpret the
abrogation of women's rights in the early part of Victoria's
reign as compensation to English manhood for ceding the
governance of the empire to a woman.  To phrase it
differently: the human tragedy of societally countenanced
prostitution was made publically acceptable by the radiance
of a virtuous and chaste female monarch.  Arguably the role
that Queen Victoria played as the paradigm of English purity
and virtue, is analogous to the sanctity of the Virgin Mary
in Roman Catholicism, whose mythical purity appears to render
acceptable, if not indeed to justify, a broad spectrum of
injustice and injury to women.

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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
