The Wicked World

It opened at the Haymarket Theatre on 4 January 1873 and ran for a successful 145 performances, closing on 21 June 1873.

[1] The play is an allegory loosely based on a short illustrated story of the same title by Gilbert, written in 1871 and published in Tom Hood's Comic Annual, about how pure fairies cope with a sudden introduction to them of "mortal love."

Gilbert envisioned the set as resembling John Martin's 1853 painting The Plains of Heaven: vaporous mountains and headlands around ethereal blue and a flowering slope on which sit white-clad angels.

Gilbert also specified that the women characters 'in costume & general appearance – should suggest the idea rather of angels than of conventional fairies, and they exhibit an 'overweening sense of righteousness,' arising from their freedom from sin.

[2] W. S. Gilbert created several blank verse "fairy comedies" at the Haymarket Theatre for John Baldwin Buckstone and starring William Hunter Kendal and his wife Madge Robertson Kendal (sister of the playwright Tom Robertson), in the early 1870s.

Second was Pygmalion and Galatea (1871), a satire of sentimental, romantic attitudes toward myth, and The Wicked World was third.

They established that his capabilities extended far beyond burlesque and won him artistic credentials as a writer of wide range, who was as comfortable with human drama as with farcical humour.

Not only did he write a short story on the theme in 1871, but he also co-wrote a parody of it, The Happy Land (1873), and he returned to it in his 1909 comic opera, Fallen Fairies.

Gilbert sued The Pall Mall Gazette, which had called The Wicked World indecent because of the references to "mortal love" in the script.

[citation needed] Fairies Mortals Prologue In a rhymed declaration, a character explains that the author aims to show that "Love is not a blessing, but a curse!"

They are also curious about "the gift of Love", which, Selene tells them, is the one compensation mortals have been given for all the evils they must endure on earth.

These counterparts are "barbaric knights", engaged in fighting a duel with each other at the moment that they are transported into the clouds, and Sir Ethais is wounded.

The fairies complain to each other about Selene's conduct: "Surely this knight might well have learnt on earth/Such moral truths as she is teaching him."

The servant, finding himself surrounded by beautiful women, concludes: "By some mistake my soul has missed its way,/And slipped into Mahomet's Paradise!"

Selene, seeing the justice of this, resigns as Fairy Queen, and the coronet is placed on Darine's head.

Sir Ethais apologises to Selene for betraying her love, but he is appalled by the bitter intensity of her feelings, which is the result of a mortal passion being put into an immortal body.