Sandy Rovner writes about PATIENCE Novelist, playwright, poet and still much quoted wit, Oscar Wilde and the Gilbert & Sullivan opera Patience (or “Bunthorne’s Bride”) were made for each other. Both of the rival “aesthetic” poets in Patience (Reginald Bunthorne and Archibald Grosvenor) are clearly drawn from Wilde’s own flamboyant character. Wilde was sent by Richard D’Oyly Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan’s producer, on an American tour to be—in the words of one critic—“a Sandwich Board” advertising D’Oyly Carte’s U.S opera tour, wallowed in the comparison, and apparently played it to the hilt. In Patience, librettist William S. Gilbert pokes fun at the group of Victorian poets known as the pre-Raphaelites who affected aestheticism and purity in poetry and painting and in their affected personal characteristics as well. The character Bunthorne’s first recited poem in Patience, for example, is an aesthetic ode written about a common intestinal complaint. The pre-Raphaelites loved the middle ages and the renaissance (approximately the 12 th-15 th centuries) and idealized both in their art and poetry.		Oscar Wilde: learn more about his D'Oyly Carte tour of the United States

The characters in Patience mix up their history, though, with Bunthorne singing that “art stopped short in the celebrated court of the Empress Josephine,” Napoleon Bonaparte’s first wife who lived in the early decades of the 19 th century. What kept the opera from aging when the aesthetic movement died only a couple of decades after its birth was the fun poked at all those with affectations, and also the rivalries between the poets Bunthorne and Grosvenor and between both poets and the “heavy dragoons” for the affections of all the ladies.

Can you name any other famous members of the Aesthetic Movement in England and some things they either wrote or painted? Here are some—in addition to Oscar Wilde, who wrote The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Canterville Ghost: the ex-patriot American James Whistler whose painting of his mother is one of the world’s most famous and poets Algernon Swinburn, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

James McNeill Whistler: Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)	James McNeill Whistler: detail of the central shutters on the east side of Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room (Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)	Dante Gabriel Rossetti was also a painter: left, Proserpine (Tate Gallery, London); right, La Ghirlandata (Bridgeman Art Library, London)

Act One opens with a chorus of lovestick maidens enamored of the poet Reginald Bunthorne, the Nick Lachey of his day. They are all engaged to a platoon of Heavy Dragoons they met “last summer,” but it is Bunthorne for whom they now swoon. Bunthorne admits in a sung aside that he is a fake and that it is the admiration he craves, not the love. Then Lady Jane, the oldest of the maidens, breaks the news that Bunthorne loves Patience, the village milkmaid. Patience is one of Gilbert’s air-head ingénue heroines who admits to having loved her great aunt and when pressed recalls a baby boy she played with as a one-year old. One of the lovesick maids teaches her that love is a duty—“no wonder they seem so unhappy,” Patience says.

Meanwhile Archibald Grosvenor wanders in. He is unhappy because any woman he happens to meet, falls in love with him at first sight. Aha. He turns out to be the two-year-old Patience played with and loved all those many (14 maybe) years ago but alas, she realizes it that it would be pleasure rather than a duty to love him, and so she decides she cannot fall in love. Gilbert’s heroines always get things just a teensy bit wrong or a teensy bit too much. So after one of the charming G&S ballads –“Prithee Pretty Maiden”—they agree, even though they are in love, to part.

Now the soldiers come in and Bunthorne and the love-sick maidens and the soldiers sing of their unhappiness with Bunthorne and the loss of their loves. Bunthorne bemoans Patience’s initial rebuff and brings in his lawyer with a bunch of raffle tickets, having decided to raffle himself off. But then miserable Patience who has given up Grosvenor agrees to marry Bunthorne. Suddenly Grosvenor enters and proclaims himself a “broken hearted troubadour” who is both aesthetic and poetic. The maidens now have a new object for their affections. “So we Looooove you,” they sing. “Horror,” sing the soldiers. “Horror,” sing Bunthorne and Patience. “They love me, horror, horror, horror,” sings Grosvenor and Act One ends.

Do you know anyone as airheaded as Patience or as infatuated as the “lovesick maidens” or as full of themselves as Bunthorne and Grosvenor? Do real people act like this, or are these characters on stage exaggerations of real people?

Act Two : The Lovesick Maidens have quickly transferred their adoration to Grosvenor. Bunthorne, deprived of his daily dose of admiration from all except the ever faithful Lady Jane has become cranky and cross to Patience. Patience still yearns for her Archie, and Archie still yearns for her.

Gilbert is never kind to his contraltos of a certain age and Lady Jane is no exception as she sings of her waning beauties and spreading waistline. But it is Jane who suggests a way to get rid of Grosvenor. Meanwhile the soldiers are practicing gymnastic positions to entice the LMs. (Lovesick Maidens). It all comes together with the confrontation of the two poets (Fleshly Bunthorne and Idyllic Grosvenor), and even the Duke of Dunstable takes a bride. Bunthorne, at the end, is left with a “tulip or a lil-EYE.”

For more information: Ian Bradley’s Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan, Harry Benford’s Gilbert and Sullivan Lexicon, and The Gilbert and Sullivan Book by Leslie Baily. There is a videotape of the 2002 Savoyet Patience at the Festival in Buxton, England.

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