The Princess (play)

The Princess is a blank verse farcical play, in five scenes with music, by W. S. Gilbert which adapts and parodies Alfred Lord Tennyson's humorous 1847 narrative poem, The Princess: A Medley. It was first produced at the Olympic Theatre in London on 8 January 1870.

Gilbert called the piece "a whimsical allegory ... a respectful operatic per-version" of Tennyson's poem. The play was a modest success, playing for about 82 performances through April and enjoying a provincial tour. Gilbert liked the theme so much that he adapted the play as the libretto to Princess Ida (1884), one of his Savoy Operas with Arthur Sullivan. The Princess is a satire of women's education, a controversial subject in 1847, when Queen's College first opened in London, and in 1870 (Girton opened in 1869), but less so by 1884.

The Princess came fairly early in Gilbert's playwriting career, after his very successful one-act comic opera, Ages Ago (1869) and before Our Island Home (1870, another such piece). The play was Gilbert's first of the 1870s, a decade during which he wrote more than thirty-five plays, encompassing most genres of comedy and drama, including his series of blank verse "fairy comedies", beginning with The Palace of Truth later in 1870 and his first operas with Arthur Sullivan. In 1870, Gilbert was establishing his "topsy-turvy" style and proving that his capabilities extended well beyond his early burlesques and extravaganzas. The Princess is one of several Gilbert plays, including The Wicked World, Broken Hearts, and the later operas, Iolanthe, Princess Ida, and Fallen Fairies, where the introduction of males into a tranquil world of women brings "mortal love" that wreaks havoc with the status quo. Stedman calls this a "Gilbertian invasion plot".

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