Pirates Glossary and Notes

"I know the scientific names of beings animalculous - "  An animalcule, diminutive of animal, is a microscopic organism, such as an amoeba or a paramecium, that is usually regarded as an animal.

"Men who stick at no offences will anon be here -" Since the pirates were to be off at "the top of the tide", it is not clear why Frederic should be expecting them to return so soon, to be a threat to the General’s daughters.

Actually, the ‘person in authority’ was Caesar Augustus, who, following the lead of his predecessor Julius, named the month of August after himself and took the twenty-ninth day from February to make August as long as July.

 "About binomial theorem I’m teem-ing with a lot of news - "  A binomial is a mathematical expression consisting of an additive combination of two terms, such as (ax+by).  Sir Isaac Newton was the first to develop the rule by which any power of a binomial could be evaluated as combinations of powers of the individual terms.  In the Major-General’s mathematical ability, there is an echo of Gilbert’s Bab Ballad  ‘My Dream’, which tells of a land where the babies are highly numerate:
                For, as their nurses dandle them,
                They crow binomial theorem,
                With views (it seems absurd to us)
                On Differential Calculus.

"Blushing buds of ever-blooming beauty - "  An example of Gilbert’s fondness for alliteration; also, an unusually gallant, florid form of expression for a young man who hasn’t seen a young woman since he was eight years old.

"Let the pirate bumper pass - "  A drinking vessel filled to the brim, especially for drinking a toast.

"Long been gnawed by the cankering tooth of mystery - "  Eroding, consuming, ulcerous, secretly infecting; from the same root as cancer.

"And tell you every detail of Caractacus’s uniform - "  More correctly, Caratacus, the Romanised form of the Celtic name of the British chieftain Caradoc, not to be confused with the later Sir Caradoc (q.v.) of the Round Table.  He was a chieftain of lands in what are now the counties of Hertfordshire and Essex, and unsuccessfully resisted the invasion of the Roman legions sent by Emperor Claudius in 43 AD.  After several defeats by the legions, he escaped to northern Britain, but was betrayed and handed over to the Romans.  Claudius exhibited his captive in a triumphal procession in Rome. Caratacus conducted himself with such dignity that he was pardoned and allowed to live out his days in honourable captivity.  It is questionable, however, whether he ever wore a uniform.

"No pirate band will take its stand at the Central Criminal Court - "  Familiarly known as the Old Bailey.  The original Old Bailey was built by King Henry VIII in 1539 at Cheapside, and was used for many celebrated criminal trials.  In 1834 it was officially designated as the major criminal court in the land.  It was also referred to as ‘Ancient Bailey’ in the Judge’s song in Trial by Jury.  The present court building, still known as Old Bailey, was built on the site of Newgate Prison in the first decade of this century.

"Here’s your crowbar and your centrebit - "  A drill used for making large circular holes in wood or metal.  A burglar would use it to drill through doors, in order to unlock them from the inside.

see Mauser.

"You are very dear to me, as you know, but I must be circumspect - "  Prudent or cautious. This is also a remarkably commonsensical observation for a lad who hadn’t seen any other woman since he was eight years old.

More alteration could have been used, since the song still seems quite incongruous: they would hardly have had to "scale rough and rugged passes" in making their way to a Cornish beach.  The Olympian flavour of the song also shows in Kate’s phrase, "Far away from mortal men, we’ll be queens and make decrees". By virtue of this reuse, this song and "Little maid of Arcadee", which was reused in Iolanthe, are the only surviving parts of the music for Thespis.

"In conics I can floor pecularities parabolous - "  A branch of mathematics concerned with the geometric properties of the plane curves formed by the intersection of a plane surface with a cone; more generally, the study of the properties of the general quadratic equation in two variables.

"Scene. - A rocky seashore on the coast of Cornwall. - "   The southwestmost county in England, in the form of a long, thin peninsula, fronting on both the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean; also the locale of the fictitious fishing village of Rederring, the setting for the first act of Ruddygore.  The adjective form is Cornish.

"When a coster’s finished jumping on his mother - "   One who sells fruit, vegetables or other goods from a cart, barrow or stand in the streets, especially in London.  These people had a reputation for drunken and bullying habits.  Coster is from the Elizabethan name costard for a kind of large English apple; a monger is a dealer in a specific commodity, such as an ironmonger.

"We knew your taste for curious quips, for cranks and contradictions queer - "  A sudden unexpected turn of speech.

"A keener hand at scuttling a Cunarder - "  An ocean liner of the Cunard Steamship Co Ltd, founded in 1839 by Samuel Cunard.  It was on a Cunarder, the Bothnia, that Gilbert, Sullivan and several of the principals of the Pinafore/Pirates company sailed to the United States in October 1879.  The Cunard Line is perhaps best known now for its flagship the QE2, the only remaining superliner in service.

"Who has ventured to approach our all but inaccessible lair?  Can it be Custom House? - "  Officers of Her Majesty’s Department of Customs and Excise, who are concerned with smuggling.  Frederic’s apprehension at their possible appearance is an indication that the ‘pirates’ were mainly smugglers.  Custom House seems a strange term to use for revenuemen.

"Your silent matches, your dark lantern seize - "  A lantern with sliding panels over the windows, that can be closed up to conceal the light within.

"Pray observe the magnanimity they display to lace and dimity - "  A sheer, crisp cotton fabric, with raised thread patterns, used chiefly for curtains and dresses; from the Medieval Greek for ‘double-threaded’.  Here, of course, the magnanimity is being displayed to the wearers of lace and dimity.

"All hail, Divine Emollient! - "  A god-like element that soothes, assuages or mollifies, such as Poetry.

"Ah, the doing and undoing that the rogue could tell - "  In colloquial British English, to ‘do’ someone is to cheat them, and to ‘undo’ someone is to seduce them.  Thus the roving breeze may well have been meant to be a rogue indeed.

"I quote, in elegiacs, all the crimes of Heliogabalus - "  Elegiac couplets in the classical Greek poetic style; mournful, melancholy verse.  It is said that rewriting a given piece of text into Latin elegiacs was an exercise commonly assigned to English ‘public’ schoolboys.

"For when threatened with emeutes - "  An anglicised pronunciation of the French emeute, meaning brawl, riot or civil disorder.

"For having brought dishonour on the family escutcheon - "  Strictly speaking, the actual shield on which a coat of arms is displayed; in this usage, it includes the complete coat of arms along with the shield.

"You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap year, on the twenty-ninth of February - "  Gilbert takes some dramatic licence with the time of the opera here.  At the beginning of Act I, Frederic is celebrating the end of his twenty-first year, presumably on February 29.  But almost immediately thereafter, when the women’s chorus enters, they sing of "by the ever-rolling river, swollen with the summer rain".  It is the season for picnics on the Cornish seashore and even ‘paddling’ in the waters of the English Channel.  It is said that the south coast of Cornwall has the mildest and most equable climate in Great Britain, but ‘paddling’ would have to wait until May or June at the earliest.

Gilbert was himself forty-six when he wrote Pirates.  At the age of thirty-one, in Trial by Jury, he wrote mockingly of a woman as being able to "pass for forty-three, in the dusk with the light behind her".  He seems to have found women in their forties a particular target for satire.

"Then I can hum a fugue of which I’ve heard the music’s dim afore - "  A musical composition based on a short theme that is harmonised in counterpoint and then is reintroduced repeatedly.  It is a Gilbertian whimsy to imagine a single person humming a fugue, which by its nature requires the sounding of more than one note at a time.

"I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies - "  Gerard Dou (1613 - 1675), a Dutch portrait painter and pupil of Rembrandt.

"The glass is rising very high - "  A barometer; a high or rising reading on the ‘glass’ or barometer is often a good prediction of good weather to come.

"A keener hand at scuttling a Cunarder or cutting out a P & O never shipped a handspike - "  To ship an object is to put it in position for performing its function.  A handspike is a heavy bar or lever, generally of wood, with a handle on one end and with the other end shaped to fit snugly into a socket on a capstan or windlass.  Handspikes are used as lever arms for turning a capstan, in order to pull up an anchor or a heavy chain.

"True, and until then you are bound to protect our interests.  Hear, hear! - "  In British usage, a cry of approval, of Parliamentary origin.  When a Member of Parliament would rise to speak on a strongly controversial issue, the opposition would often cough, hum, or in other ways try to distract or drown out the speaker.  Then those favoring the speaker would cry “Hear him, hear him!”; this was shortened to “Hear, hear!” and generalised to express approval even when no distractions were present.

" This is one of two examples in Pirates of the simultaneous singing of two songs with completely different tempi and moods; the other is in Act II, when Mabel and Edith sing "Go, ye heroes, go to glory" over the policemen’s "When the foeman bares his steel".  Sullivan used this device several times in the Savoy operas.

"For today our pirate ‘prentice rises from indentures freed - "  Originally, a document that was written out and signed in duplicate, side-by-side on parchment, then torn down the middle, so that the matching indentations on the two pieces of parchment would show they had been part of the same document; in Law, a contract binding an apprentice to the service of a master for a specified term.  It is a Gilbertian whimsy that apprenticeship to an outlaw, such as a pirate, could be an enforceable contract.

"I’m very good at integral and differential calculus - "  Two branches of mathematics that together form the infinitesimal calculus.  Differential calculus is concerned with calculating such things as the rate of change of one function with respect to another, while integral calculus is concerned with calculating such things as areas and volumes of regions defined by functions.

To cure this, Pope Gregory reformed the calendar by dropping 10 days from the month of October 1485, and by changing the leap year rule so that century years are not leap years unless they are evenly divisible by 400.  Non-Catholic countries mainly regarded this as a Papist plot, and refused to adopt the reform until much later; Great Britain made the change in 1752.  The Gregorian calendar still leaves the average year 26 seconds longer than the solar year, but that amounts to a full day only once every 3300 years.

"Your life-preserver - you may want to
hit - "  In British usage, a bludgeon or a stout stick, sometimes loaded with a padded ball of lead; often carried by travellers for defence against highwaymen and Victorian ‘muggers’. Some sources have suggested that it was called a ‘life-preserver’ because it could be used to stun victims without killing them.

Wolseley delighted in publicity and so was pleased to be regarded as the model for the Major-General; it is said that he had memorised the patter song and enjoyed singing it for friends and family at home.

"By a complete malediction - "  The uttering of a curse; also, being under a ban or a curse.

"In fact, when I know what is meant by ‘mamelon’ and ‘ravelin’ - "  Archaic French terms for field works in military fortifications.  A mamelon is a small rounded earthwork or hummock.  A ravelin is a triangular embanked salient or strong-point outside the main ditch of a fortification, and is also a neat rhyme for javelin, which is a light spear, generally metal-tipped.

"From Marathon to Waterloo - "  A Greek city that was the site of a famous victory by the Greeks over the Persians in 490 BC.  A messenger carrying news of the victory ran the twenty six miles from the battle site to Athens, then dropped dead on arrival.  Also, a long distance footrace, covering a distance of 26 miles and 385 yards, or any of various contests of endurance, named in commemoration of this event.  The particular choice of battles listed here is thought to have been taken from Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, which had first been published in 1851 and was still very popular a generation later.  In it, the first battle described is Marathon and the last is Waterloo.

"Oh, dry the glistening tear that dews that martial cheek - "  A similar image occurs near the end of Act I in Patience, in the Duke of Dunstable’s solo: "Our soldiers very seldom cry, and yet - I need not tell you why - a tear-drop dews each martial eye!"

"Tell me, have you ever known what it is to be an orphan - "  It is an odd coincidence that Sir Garnet Wolseley, who was the real-life model for many aspects of the modern Major-General (q.v.), was himself half-orphaned at the age of seven, when his father died, leaving his mother to bring up four sons and three daughters by herself.

It is curious that ‘servants’ and ‘luncheon’ are mentioned here and are not heard of again; the General later enters unaccompanied.

"In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous - "  Pertaining to parabolas, one of the family of conic plane curves; usually parabolic, but Gilbert needed a rhyme for Heliogabalus.

"Until to somebody occurred a startling paradox - "  A statement that seems to be self-contradictory or absurd, even though possibly well-founded or essentially true.

"You shall quickly be parsonified, conjugally matrimonified - "  Yet another Gilbertianism, for the process of being married by a clergyman or parson.

"(Enter the GENERAL’S daughters, all in white peignors and night-caps - )"  A woman’s loose-fitting dressing gown; from the French for ‘a garment worn while combing the hair’.

"Papa, don’t believe them; they are pirates - the famous Pirates of Penzance - "  An important centre for fishing, trade and tourism on the south coast of the county of Cornwall; a popular seaside resort, especially for retired artists; the western terminus of the main West Country railway line from London; the most westerly town in England; pronounced with the accent on the second syllable.

The story of Captain Bang also anticipates the plight of Frederic.  At the age of seven, Bang said he wanted to be a pilot, in order to enjoy a seafaring life.  His indulgent parents consented and sent him with his nurse to be apprenticed to a pilot.  She mistook her instructions and apprenticed him to a pirate of her acquaintance, binding him to serve until the age of 21.

In early productions of Pirates in the United States, the Pirate King referred instead to the White Star Line, which was thought to be better known to American audiences.  It was founded in 1869 and operated services on both the North Atlantic and the Australian routes.  The best known of the White Star liners was the Titanic.  In 1934 the line was merged with Cunard (q.v.) to form Cunard White Star Ltd.

"(Enter Police, marching in single file - )"  Sullivan had a particular reason for responding favourably to Gilbert’s conception of a men’s chorus of singing policemen.  As organist at St Michael’s in Chester Square, a fashionable West End church, in the late 1860’s, Sullivan had made its choir one of the best in London.  Describing it later, he wrote, "We were well off for sopranos and altos, but at first I was at my wit’s end for tenors and basses.  However, close by the church was the Cottage Row Police Station, and here I completed my choir.  The Chief Superintendent there entered heartily into my scheme, and from the police I gathered six tenors and six basses, with a few spares.  And capital fellows they were.  However tired they’d be when they came off duty, they never missed a practise.  I used to think of them at times when I was composing Pirates."

This waltz song, with its colouratura trills and cadenzas - the "farmyard effects’, as Sullivan called them - was at least in part a deliberate parody of the ‘operacrobatics’ which had become fashionable in operas by Gounod and other French and Italian composers; parody or not, it is, nonetheless, an outstanding example of the genre.  It is also a delightful example of the contrast, familiar in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, between words with serious import and music that is utterly lighthearted.  The text of her solo is almost hymnlike in its moral tone, while the musical setting is that most sensuous of 19th-century musical forms, the waltz.

"I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard  Dows and Zoffanies - "  The Italian artist Raffaello Sanzia (1483-1520), also known as Raphael, was one of the creators of the art movement that became the Renaissance.  In 19th Century England, a group of artists calling themselves the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sought to recreate a pre-Renaissance style of painting.  It was the affectations of this group, and of the aesthetic movement that grew out of it, that Gilbert satirised in Patience.

"You’ll say a better Major-General has never sat a gee - "  Gee and haw are commands to a horse to steer to the right or left.  Gee up is a command to start up.  By extension, gee was a commonly used 19th Century slang term for a horse; it is said that the term gee-gee is still used by children.  Thus sat a gee means rode a horse.

"A keener hand at scuttling a Cunarder - "  To sink a ship, generally by opening holes in the hull below the waterline.

"Your silent matches, your dark lantern seize - "  Early matches were made by coating the ends of wooden sticks with sulfur and tipping them with potassium chlorate.  They were then ignited, not by striking them against an abrasive surface, as now, but by dipping them in a bottle containing a mixture of asbestos and sulfuric acid.  This process was silent, though rather cumbersome.

"He will be faithful to his sooth - "  Archaic for betrothal or pledge.

"Though thou hast surely strayed, take heart of grace - "  Defined by Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, as ‘to pluck up one’s courage’, presumably from the Paulist doctrine that our strength comes from God’s grace.

"That birthday will not be reached by me till nineteen forty - "  Since Frederic has a birthday every four years, he would reach his twenty-first birthday at age eighty-four.  If that was to occur in 1940, we might expect Gilbert intended him to have been born in 1856 and to have completed twenty-one years in 1877, two years before the writing of Pirates.  If this is Gilbert’s intent, then it appears he forgot that, according to the Gregorian calendar, the year 1900 was not a leap year (q.v.).  It cannot been of entirely academic interest to Mabel to know whether she would have had to wait until Frederic was all of eighty-eight years old, or merely eighty-four years.

"Well, it’s the top of the tide, and we must be off - "  High tide; getting a ship out of port is easiest when the tide starts running out, just after high tide.

"We will go and collect our band and attack Tremorden Castle this very night - "  This is a fictitious location, but plausible for a Cornish setting.  In Cornish, the prefix tre means hamlet or homestead, and is found in many family names and place names in Cornwall; for example, the village of Tremore, near Bodmin.

"Is he to die, unshriven, unannealed?  Oh, spare him! - "  To shrive is to hear the confession of a penitent and to give absolution.  To anneal, which actually should be anele, is to anoint, as with oil.  Ele is from the Old English oele , which comes from the Latin oleum.  These are parts of the service of extreme unction, a Christian sacrament in which a priest anoints and prays for a dying person.

"As a compliment valedictory, if he’s telling a terrible story. - "  Uttered or bestowed in bidding or on taking a farewell.

"Just bear in mind that we are Wards in Chancery, and father is a Major-General - "  Minors under the guardianship of the Court of Chancery; usually, inheritors whose fortunes are administered by the court until they reach their majority or later.  Even with allowance made for Gilbert’s special fondness for this term (he makes Phyllis one in Iolanthe), it is not clear why the Major-General’s daughters are in this category.  Normally, minors are made wards if they are orphans, or to protect them from their parents.  Neither reason seems to apply here.  It is possible that, with so many daughters to provide for, Stanley would have had them made Wards in Chancery so that money they were to inherit from other sources could be made available for their upbringing.

Here, categorical is used in the sense of without exception or omission.