In 1882, the British theater impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte sent a charming Oxford graduate named Oscar Wilde to tour the United States on a lecture circuit. This publicity stunt primed audiences for the staging of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operetta Patience, or Bunthorne’s Bride, which satirized aesthetes like Wilde and their flourishing zeal for all things beautiful. Realizing that the subtler jokes in Gilbert’s libretto might be lost on American audiences with limited exposure to Aestheticism’s principles and personalities, D’Oyly Carte engaged Wilde and billed the young man as the expert on all things Aesthetic.
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Oscar Wilde’s Wild West | Legion of Honor. I guess the joke was on Gilbert and Sullivan, then. By the way, thanks for opening an exhibit on the weekend that Caltrans is closing the Bay Bridge, Legion of Honor. It’s not like I wanted to see it. (Ok, ok, I’ll see it during the week. It’s not like I don’t have a lot of work to do anyway.) |
