The Palace of Truth
The Palace of Truth is a three-act blank verse "Fairy Comedy" by W. S. Gilbert first produced at the Haymarket Theatre in London on 19 November 1870, adapted in significant part from Madame de Genlis's fairy story, Le Palais de Vérite.
[1] The play ran for approximately 140 performances and then toured the British provinces and enjoyed various revivals even well into the 20th century.
[3] After more than a century of inquiry, researchers in 2012 concluded that the three genera of Lemurs were named after characters in The Palace of Truth in 1870 by British zoologist John Edward Gray.
[4] Gilbert created several blank verse "fairy comedies" at the Haymarket Theatre for actor-manager John Baldwin Buckstone and starring William Hunter Kendal and his wife Madge Robertson Kendal (sister of the playwright Tom Robertson) in the early 1870s.
[5] The Palace of Truth was the first of these, followed by Pygmalion and Galatea (1871), a satire of sentimental, romantic attitudes toward myth, The Wicked World (1873), and Broken Hearts (1875).
[9] Some of Gilbert's later works drew on The Palace of Truth for plot elements or their logical development, including his hit play, Engaged (1877), where characters say openly what would ordinarily be hidden and admit what, in Victorian society, would be inadmissible.
[10] Gilbert and Edward German discussed making The Palace of Truth into an opera, but after the failure of Fallen Fairies, the idea was abandoned.
An exchange in the piece, where the character of Zoram, the court composer and a poseur, makes the following complicated musical remark, was tried out by Gilbert on his future collaborator, Arthur Sullivan, some months before the play was produced (Gilbert had looked up the definition of "harmony" in the Encyclopædia Britannica and translated it into blank-verse, as follows):[12] Act I – The garden of the King's Country House.
The Queen, jealous, wonders why the King visits the Palace of Truth once a month, while she has never been there in eighteen years of marriage.
Everyone else tells the truth: The Princess's singing is terrible; Chrysal did not mean one word that he said at court; Zoram (the composer) doesn't know one note from another, etc.
Act III – On the Avenue of Palms at night Chrysal has a sword and is ready for the duel with Zoram.
