Engaged (play)

Engaged is a three-act farcical comic play by W. S. Gilbert. It premiered at the Haymarket Theatre on 3 October 1877, the same year as The Sorcerer, one of Gilbert's comic operas written with Arthur Sullivan, which was soon followed by the collaborators' great success in H.M.S. Pinafore. Engaged was well received on the London stage and then in New York City, where the first production of the play opened in February 1879. The work then enjoyed many revivals on both sides of the Atlantic and continues to be produced today.

Engaged has been W. S. Gilbert's most popular stage work aside from the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. A New York Times review of an 1886 production of Engaged (dated 24 February of that year) noted that "the laughter was almost incessant." Makers wrote: "Engaged [is] unquestionably the finest and funniest English comedy between Bulwer-Lytton's Money and Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, (1895) which it directly inspired".Engaged may also have inspired George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man and Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests.

The play is a burlesque of romantic drama and is written in the "topsy-turvy" satiric style of many of Gilbert's Bab Ballads and the Savoy Operas: one character pledges his love, in the most poetic and romantic language possible, to every single woman in the play; the innocent Scottish rustics are revealed to be making a living through throwing trains off the lines and then charging the passengers for services, and, in general, romance is gladly thrown over in favour of monetary gain.

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