William Schwenck Gilbert

British playwright and lyricist Sir William Schwenck Gilbert wrote a series of comic operas, including

Her Majesty's Ship Pinafore

(1878) and

The Pirates of Penzance

(1879), with composer Sir Arthur Sullivan. This English dramatist, librettist, poet, and illustrator in collaboration with this composer produced fourteen comic operas, which include

The Mikado

, one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre. Opera companies, repertory companies, schools and community theatre groups throughout and beyond the English-speaking world continue to perform regularly these operas as well as most of their other Savoy operas. From these works, lines, such as "short, sharp shock", "What, never? Well, hardly ever!", and "Let the punishment fit the crime," form common phrases of the English language.

Gilbert also wrote the

Bab Ballads

, an extensive collection of light verse, which his own comical drawings accompany.

His creative output included more than 75 plays and libretti, numerous stories, poems, lyrics and various other comic and serious pieces. His plays and realistic style of stage direction inspired other dramatists, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. According to

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature

, the "lyrical facility" of Gilbert "and his mastery of metre raised the poetical quality of comic opera to a position that it had never reached before and has not reached since."