The Pretty Druidess

The Pretty Druidess; Or, The Mother, The Maid, and The Mistletoe Bough is an operatic burlesque by W. S. Gilbert. It was produced at the opening of the new Charing Cross Theatre on 19 June 1869 and ran until September of that year.

The work was the last of five such burlesques that Gilbert wrote in the late 1860s. As in his other operatic burlesques, he chose a selection of operatic and popular tunes and wrote new words to fit them. The plot of the piece was loosely based on Vincenzo Bellini's 1831 opera Norma, with dialogue in rhyming couplets full of complicated word-play and dreadful puns.

Burlesques of this period featured actresses en travesti in tights or in dresses as short as possible without provoking the legal authorities. Gilbert later turned against this practice, and in his Savoy Operas no characters were played by members of the opposite sex.

Gilbert's four earlier operatic burlesques, Dulcamara, or the Little Duck and the Great Quack (1866), La Vivandière; or, True to the Corps! (1867), The Merry Zingara; or, the Tipsy Gipsy and the Pipsy Wipsy (1868) and Robert the Devil, or The Nun, the Dun, and the Son of a Gun (1868) had parodied comic or romantic operas. The critic of The Morning Post had asserted that parodying comic opera was a much more difficult undertaking than parodying tragic opera, and instanced Norma as "an eminently tragic work", far easier to burlesque.

The work was written for the opening of the new Charing Cross Theatre. It was the last of three pieces on the bill, following a short operetta, Coming of Age, and the main item of the evening, a three-act drama, Edendale, about families split by the American Civil War. The part of Norma was taken by Mary Frances Hughes, well-known on the London stage since her debut in November 1853. The hero, Pollio (a tenor in Bellini's original), was played as a breeches role by Cecily Nott, another favourite, who had made her debut in 1851, aged 18 or 19, a protégée of Louis Antoine Jullien. The role of the novice Adalgisa was played by Kathleen Irwin, who had made her London debut earlier the same evening, in Edendale.

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