William Schwenk Gilbert

William Schwenk Gilbert is better known today as W. S. Gilbert. His seventy-five plays and his light poetry have been forgotten, but his reputation lives on as the man who wrote the lyrics to some of the most popular comic operettas ever written. You can get a taste of these by listening to ‘The Mikado’ and ‘The Pirates of Penzance’. His partnership with Arthur Sullivan produced many examples – fourteen in all – and made him a household name. However, the relationship between the two men was not a comfortable one and they eventually separated. Although Gilbert was certainly a kind man, he had a bad temper and was very sensitive too: by all accounts, he was not the easiest man to work with. In the last ten years of his life – he died at the age of seventy-four in 1911 – he had almost stopped writing plays and never worked on opera again after the break-up of his partnership with Sullivan. His death was caused by a heart attack, when he dived into a lake at his home to rescue a drowning teenager.