Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan (The Norton library)

From Trial by Jury to The Pirates of Penzance: the complete librettos of all fourteen Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

Gilbert's verses for Sullivan's music are the most fastidiously turned and inventively rhymed in all lyric comedy. As the Savoy Operas enter their second century on a swell of renewed popularity, Gilbert's reputation as the supreme wordsmith of light opera remains secure.

Complete and authentic, these are the librettos on which modern performances and recordings are based. Scattered among the songs are over seventy of the amusing, quirky pictures Gilbert drew to illustrate them. A chronology prepared for this edition sketches the authors' lives and careers. This is a book that no lover of Gilbert and Sullivan, musical comedy, or indeed the English theater will want to be without.

From Thespis to The Grand Duke, here are all the words to all the operettas on which William Schenk Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan collaborated. A fixture in Anglo-American music theater and humor for well over a century, their wit retains its edge after all these years. Norton offers the libretti available in handy, totable book form and generously illustrates them with Gilbert's accomplished pen-and-ink drawings.