 
                         20060225.01

                        Iolanthe (1)

     I retrieved the DVD of Iolanthe from the library last
night.  Still have a lot of listening to do, particularly
since I can't understand the words without a libretto, (which
I read on a second computer screen adjacent to the DVD
display), and while I read the libretto, I can't listen and
watch. So it will require several runs.

     Have no idea how demure or flamboyant the fairies'
costumes in 19th century performances might have been. What
appears on the computer screen doesn't look very Victorian to
me. I thought the fairy queen's summons of Iolanthe had the
same cadence as Il Commendatore's announcement to Don
Giovanni that he was coming to dinner.

          LA STATUA:
          Don Giovanni, a cenar teco
          M'invitasti e son venuto!


     As Iolanthe floated to the surface of the lily pond, I
wondered whether I was watching the resurrection of Ophelia,
with the fairy queen in the role of Gertrude. The fairy queen
was imperious and stout; in one scene where she was munching
a piece of cake, her double chin was quite prominent. Didn't
Victoria at times have a weight problem? And for that matter,
could the Victorians have contemplated any queen, even a
fairy queen, without implicit reference to Victoria? The
fairy queen had condemned to death any fairy who married a
mortal, but perhaps here, as elsewhere in Gilbert and
Sullivan  "marriage" has an extra- supra- or infra-marital
meaning.  Consider this text from the Pirates:

========================================================

GIRLS:    Too late!
PIRATES:       Ha, ha!
GIRLS:              Too late!
PIRATES:                 Ho, ho!
          Ha, ha, ha, ha!  Ho, ho, ho, ho!

           ENSEMBLE

(Pirates pass in front of Girls.)

            PIRATES

Here's a first-rate opportunity
To get married with impunity,
And indulge in the felicity
Of unbounded domesticity.
You shall quickly be parsonified,
Conjugally matrimonified,
By a doctor of divinity
Who is located in this vicinity.
By a doctor of divinity,
Who resides in this vicinity,
By a doctor, a doctor, a doctor of divinity, of divinity.

(Girls pass in front of Pirates.)

           GIRLS

We have missed our opportunity
Of escaping with impunity;
So farewell to the felicity
Of our maiden domesticity!
We shall quickly be parsonified,
Conjugally matrimonified,
By a doctor of divinity,
Who is located in this vicinity.
By a doctor of divinity,
Who resides in this vicinity,
By a doctor, a doctor, a doctor of divinity, of divinity.

===========================================================

     It's the philologist in me that values this text as a
key to Gilbert's use of the term marriage, which here is
clearly a violent non-consensual intimate relation.  (Pinafore)
(I can euphemize and victorianize with the best of them.) 
I believe that this re-definition of "marriage" is apposite
also to Iolanthe's "marriage" to the Lord Chancellor,
and is, more generally, a redefinition that should at least
be considered in all instances of "marriage" in Gilbert's
libretti.

     Our house has cooled off. The air temperature over my
desk is now forty degrees. During the night, I had the oil
burner firing 5 minutes every hour, from midnight to 7 a.m.
That kept the water temperature at about 50. Outside the
thermometer was as low as fifteen.

     Maybe the cold has, in the end, affected the brain. In
any case, as I reread the text of the Ensemble again, I ask
myself, what's this parsonification all about, and who could
be this doctor of divinity who resides in this vicinity. And
I start smirking although there's nobody watching. Could it
be that in the Pirates, Gilbert is making fun not only of
Queen Victoria, of the House of Peers, of the Pirates
themselves, but also of Arthur Sullivan, and that

"a doctor, a doctor, a doctor of divinity, of divinity"

is a word painting of Arthur Sullivan's baton beat in the
orchestra pit which is the "vicinity" where the "doctor of
divinity", Dr. Sullivan, conducts his musical matrimonification?
And that it is Dr. Sullivan's musical matrimonification which
sanctifies for the benefit of his Victorian audience, other-
wise (literally) unspeakable actions and events?

     Is is extravagant to contemplate Iolanthe as a stand-in
for the thousands of women, victims of violent non-consensual
(or consensual) intimate relations, who were required by
Queen Victoria's society to abandon their infants to the
"baby farmers", and some if not many of whom preferred to
dwell with frogs in the deep, rather than in the open air
among their sisters and brothers who despised them.

     Victoria I see as a tragic figure, a figure draped in
black standing in a field of human devastation such as
Charles Dickens described, devastation for which she is
nominally responsible.  She recognized neither the
devastation nor the tragedy.  I am persuaded that she was a
relatively unimaginative person of moderate intelligence who
was trapped in the conventions of her status and her role.
It is, however, the task of the historian not only to see
the personalities he purports to understand and explain,
as they saw themselves, or as their contemporaries saw them,
but also to see them in esthetic, ethical and moral
perspectives that they could never have entertained. 
Sometimes the perspective of the poet is helpful.

     I find Victoria's dress of widow's weeds, to which she
clung for forty years after her husband's death, very
dramatic.  Dress, for most women, is very important; they try
to communicate by their appearance what they cannot otherwise
express. It seems to me very unlikely that Victoria could
have explained adequately what her widow's weeds meant to her
or were intended to mean to others. I am inclined to defer my
own interpretation until I know a great deal more about her,
at which time their meaning will probably be self-evident.

                      * * * * *
Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
