Ages Ago

Ages Ago, sometimes stylised as Ages Ago! or Ages Ago!!, is a musical entertainment with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert and music by Frederic Clay that premiered on 22 November 1869 at the Royal Gallery of Illustration. It marked the beginning of a seven-year collaboration between Gilbert and Clay. The piece was a critical and popular success and was revived many times, including at St. George's Hall, London in 1870 and 1874, and in New York in 1880.

By the 1850s, the London stage had fallen into disrepute. Shakespeare's plays were staged, but most of the entertainments consisted of poorly translated French operettas, risque Victorian burlesques and vulgar broad farces. To bring family-friendly entertainment back to the theatre, Thomas German Reed and his wife Priscilla opened their Gallery of Illustration in 1855 and brought in Gilbert in 1869 as one of their many playwrights. The Gallery of Illustration was a 500-seat theatre with a small stage that only allowed for four or five characters with accompaniment by a piano, harmonium and sometimes a harp.

After Gilbert's first offering for the Gallery of Illustration – No Cards, with music by Reed, Gilbert paired with Clay on Ages Ago, the first of a successful series of collaborations between the author and composer that would continue for the next seven years. In the eight months between the productions of No Cards, and Ages Ago, Gilbert's dramatic style had developed. Ages Ago, with its double-layered plot and its complex relationships among the characters, is more sophisticated than No Cards, which was a simple farce. In addition, the lyrics move the plot forward more than in the earlier work.

Ages Ago earned praise from the critics, outran its companion piece, the popular Cox and Box, and was frequently revived over the next decade. It was Gilbert's and the Gallery's greatest success to that date, running for 350 performances in 1869. A review in the Penny Illustrated Paper described the piece as "a very brilliant, sparkling operetta, full of ingenious fun in the plot and dialogue, and exhibiting a good deal of grace and freshness in the music. ... The piece went off most successfully, a satisfactory proof that extravaganzas written without vulgarity can be relished by the public. The dialogue is smart as well as polished, and contains several hits on current town topics, not one of which misses fire."

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