My wife and I recently went to a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. It was perfectly professional, well-sung, and very enjoyable. However, I began, on the drive home, to think too much about it.
At the end of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, the social complexities of class and station are resolved through the revelation by Buttercup that had earlier cared for two babies, one “of low condition”, the other “a regular patrician”. The correction of this mix-up leads to the reversal of position between Ralph and Captain Corcoran, and paves the way for the union of Ralph, formally a “low tar”, but now Captain, and the former Captain’s daughter, Josephine. Buttercup now is able in her position to marry the former Captain, and Sir Joseph, the First Lord of Admiralty, his cousin, Hebe. The opera ends with general rejoicing, and with the presumed marriages, as befits a comedy, of all.
If Ralph and Captain Corcoran were switched as babies, then they must be roughly the same age. Which means that Ralph is old enough to be Josephine’s father. And that Buttercup is old enough to be Corcoran’s mother, indeed more or less was his mother early on. And that the general commingling of nuptials between individuals of such different ages must certainly be as, if not more, shocking than the class differences that this reversal resolved. The Oedipal overtones are obvious.
Furthermore: Sir Joseph himself has been up to this point been surrounded by a virtual harem of “his sisters and his cousins,/whom he reckons up by dozens,/and his aunts”. It is after all Hebe who claims “Then good-bye to your sisters,/and your cousins, and your aunts./Especially your cousins”, not Sir Joseph. He own promises to be “true to the devotion that my love implies”, but his love heretofore has been a devotion to the whole of that harem, not welcome circumstance, one assumes, for Hebe.
So while Pinafore is not subverting social classes and divisions, however humorously it may make fun of these relationships in a light-hearted way, it is perhaps posing and affirming new sexual relationship modalities, especially within the English. Remember that Ralph, and through Ralph by implication all other participants, “in spite of all temptations,/To belong to other nations,/He remains an Englishman.” The combination of national identity politics with affirmation of the politics of social class evident in the repeat of the “He is an Englishman” (spoken of Sir Joseph) chorus that ends the opera.
So Pinafore is suggesting that the English do have sexual relations (off-stage) that we might find surprising while affirming the supremacy of Englishness at the end.
Which is why we generally don’t think too much about Pinafore.
Marginalia and Aphoristica 