The Ne'er-do-Weel

By the time he wrote The Ne'er-do-Weel, W. S. Gilbert had produced 50 previous works for the theatre and was one of England's leading playwrights.

[1][2] Successes the previous year had included a comedy, Engaged, and a comic opera with composer Arthur Sullivan, The Sorcerer.

[3][4] Gilbert wrote the play, Dan'l Druce, Blacksmith, but when the play opened at the Haymarket Theatre in September 1876, Hermann Vezin took the title role instead of Sothern, in a cast featuring the young actor Johnston Forbes-Robertson and the 19-year-old Marion Terry, sister of the famous actress Ellen Terry.

[8] Sothern corresponded frequently with Gilbert and had many requirements and suggestions for the piece in terms of length, setting and number of characters, among other things, that "the seriousness should be brightened up with comedy" and that an important part of the plot should be a "story of a man making some great sacrifice for the girl he madly loves".

[9] Sothern's conflicting requests for dramatic and comic situations made it difficult for Gilbert to write an internally consistent play.

In August, Sothern replied, partly approving the plot sketch, but worrying about how the love story would play out.

[10] Sothern also became concerned that, because Gilbert had made the play's heroine a widow rather than a virgin, audiences would not be sympathetic to her.

Sothern requested that the husband die of a heart attack immediately after their wedding, so that she might remain in a state of innocence.

After further discussions, in March 1877 Sothern asked Gilbert to revise the piece, renewing his request that the widow be a maiden.

[13] Despite various rewrites, Sothern continued to be dissatisfied with the piece, and in July 1877, he asked Gilbert to take it back, now offering him a forfeiture fee of 1,000 guineas.

[13][14] Gilbert arranged for Henry Neville, lessee of London's Olympic Theatre, to produce The Ne'er-do-Weel, and rehearsals began in January 1878.

[15] Neville played the role written for Sothern, and the cast again featured Johnston Forbes-Robertson as well as Gilbert's protege, Marion Terry.

It was poorly received, and the critics found fault with Gilbert's combination of melodrama and comedy in the same play.

[17] For example, The Times review lamented that Gilbert introduced into passages of "real human passion and ... real human feeling, some grotesque turn of thought, or extravagance of whim painfully at variance with the spirit of the scene, and which ... is unable to provoke laughter for its own sake".

[11] Gilbert withdrew the play after only six performances, and Neville printed a note (pictured above) in the programme of the next production at the Olympic acknowledging the poor reception of the second half of the piece, promising to offer a rewritten piece "with the least delay possible" and begging the excuse that writing "an entirely original play" in English was a difficult task.

[19] After some delay due to an attack of the gout and Gilbert's busy schedule, he rewrote the piece (particularly the third act), mostly to remove some of the comic episodes and to take out the character of Richard Quilt.

The well-born and talented Jeffery sank into a life of "poverty and wretchedness" after the girl he loved deserted him, at her family's request, to marry another man.

Before Jeffery can leave, Richard Quilt sneaks into the Seton home to steal some love letters from Jessie to Gerard, planning blackmail.