359:) arrive at the court of King Hildebrand. They bring news that the beautiful Princess Ida, to whom Hildebrand's son, Prince Hilarion, was betrothed in infancy, will not honour her marriage vows. She rules a women's university and excludes all men from entering. Hilarion and two companions (also played by women) disguise themselves as female students and sneak inside the walls, but they are soon discovered, eventually causing chaos and panic, during which the prince has occasion to save Ida's life. Hildebrand agrees to give Ida a chance: The outcome of a tournament pitting her three brothers against Hilarion and his two friends will decide whether she must marry the Prince. In the battle, the Prince and his friends wound Ida's brothers, after which she accepts the Prince as her husband, admitting that she loves him (in Tennyson's poem, the Prince is defeated, but Ida, nursing him to health, comes to love him).
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249:. The three young men are played by women, so that, during a large part of the play, women are playing men disguised as women. Gilbert had been eager to try a "blank verse burlesque in which a picturesque story should be told in a strain of mock-heroic seriousness." The satire in the piece is of a higher intellectual order than the pun-filled burlesques playing in London at the time, and the publicity for the play touted this. The dialogue in
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192:. Gilbert's play is also written in blank verse and retains Tennyson's basic serio-comic story line about a heroic princess who runs a women's college and about the prince who loves her. He and his two friends infiltrate the college disguised as female students. Gilbert returned to his play in 1883, adapting it as one of his operas with
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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
133:(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
475:, the first women's college, had been founded in 1847, but it was not quite a higher education institution in the modern sense: it admitted girls and women from the age of twelve upwards. See Scott, Patrick.
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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
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The plot is essentially the same as the later opera: Ida's misshapen father, King Gama, and his three hulking sons (played as
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Bertha, Ada, Chloe, Sacharissa, Sylvia, Phoebe, Amarinthe, and Laura – Misses Joy, Clyfoard, Moore, Alma,
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Cyril and
Florian, his friends, Noblemen of King Hildebrand's Court – Augusta Thompson and Miss Montgomery
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Princess Ida, Daughter of King Gama and
Principal of the Ladies' University – Mattie Reinhardt
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The play is a farcical burlesque of
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in 1869. However, by the time Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated on
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in 1870, women's higher education was still an innovative idea.
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Lady Blanche, Professor of Abstract Philosophy – Mrs. Poynter
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First Officer and Second Officer – Arthur Brown and Mr. Davis
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Prince Hilarion, his Son – Maria Simpson (Mrs. W. H. Liston)
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Gilbert & Sullivan: a selling exhibition of memorabilia
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in 1883, a women's college was a well-established concept.
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An illustration for the 1890 edition of Tennyson's poem
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Scene Fourth – Hildebrand's Camp before Ida's Castle.
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W. S. Gilbert, A Classic Victorian & His Theatre
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331:The play is divided into five scenes:
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