Eyes and No Eyes

Eyes and No Eyes, or The Art of Seeing is a one-act musical entertainment with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert and music originally by Thomas German Reed that premiered on 5 July 1875 at St. George's Hall in London and ran for only a month. The original music was lost, and twenty years later new music was composed by "Florian Pascal" (a pseudonym for Joseph Williams, Jr. (1847–1923), a music publisher who acquired the copyright to the show) and published but not then performed. The piece is still occasionally played by amateur societies and was presented at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in 2006. Light Opera of New York presented it on 15 October 2008 in New York City.

This work is the last in a series of six one-act musical plays written by Gilbert for Thomas German Reed and his wife Priscilla between 1869 and 1875. The German Reeds presented respectable, family-friendly musical entertainments beginning in 1855, at a time when the theatre in Britain had gained a poor reputation as an unsavoury institution and was not attended by much of the middle class. Shakespeare was played, but most of the entertainments consisted of poorly translated French operettas, risqué Victorian burlesques and incomprehensible broad farces.

Gilbert took his title from a children's story, "Eyes and No Eyes; or, The Art of Seeing", in the 1799 collection of early children's literature, Evenings at Home. The plot is loosely based on Hans Andersen's 1837 story, "The Emperor's New Clothes". Gilbert wrote in a programme note: "Hans Andersen has a tale in which two persons, for reasons of their own, pretend that an imaginary and non-existent garment is visible only to true and faithful men. As a natural consequence every one pretends that he can see it. On this hint the piece is founded." Both stories would have been familiar to Gilbert's audience. As the theatrical newspaper The Era commented, "Everyone must remember the nursery story of 'Eyes and No Eyes', but how few there are who appear to profit by the lesson it teaches!"

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