Sir Ruthven had been living in disguise as a yeoman farmer called Robin Oakapple, but at the end of Act 1 he is unveiled and forced to take up his baronetcy and the family curse associated with it, which is what he'd been trying to avoid. He reintroduces himself as a bad bart in this sung verse, which Sullivan set to sinister music:
I once was as meek as a new-born lamb,Now, Gilbert and Sullivan companies know that the name Ruthven is pronounced 'Rivven', and that fact is noted by Ian Bradley in his Annotated G&S when the name first appears in Act 1. But at this point, Bradley makes a mistake, his only one that I've noticed. He says that "without the elision" means that this one time, the name should be pronounced as spelled, and since his volume originally came out in 1984 I've noted that most G&S performances follow his advice, whereas earlier on they didn't.
I'm now Sir Murgatroyd - ha! ha!
With greater precision
(Without the elision),
Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd - ha! ha!
But Bradley is wrong! Look at the earlier line: "I'm now Sir Murgatroyd." (A complete error on Gilbert's part, by the way - 'Sir Lastname' is never used in Britain and is the mark of complete illiteracy - but Gilbert, for all his genius, was often clumsy where scansion forced his hand.) The elision is of the entire first name and not of a letter or syllable. Accordingly it is put back in in the subsequent line, but there's nothing about how it's pronounced. If I were playing the part, I would insist on pronouncing it normally. (Although if I were good enough to play principal roles in G&S, I'd prefer to be cast as Ruthven's brother Despard, with B. as his wife, Mad Margaret, so that we could perform the song celebrating their release from durance vile, which you can watch Vincent Price with Ann Howard in here.)
G. E. Dunn had already discussed the two possibilities in his G&S Dictionary (1936):
ReplyDelete'This is capable of two explanations. (i) shortening of Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd to "Sir Murgatroyd." (ii) The pronunciation of Ruthven as it is spelt, instead of the more usual way "Rivven," adopted by the peer of that title. The second is the more likely explanation, partly because (ii) is of "greater precision" while (i) is not, and partly because a true elision is the contraction of a letter in a word, and not the elimination of a whole word.'
His last point is just wrong. While of course "elision" has a predominant use in linguistics for the omision of sounds within a word, it can also be used more generally for the omision of words or phrases, and was used so by Gilbert's contemporaries, e.g. "the elision of the word 'washing' in Bridget Jones's letter" (T. Hood).
Whether or not there is elision in the linguistic sense in the pronunciation "Rivven" (which is open to argument), there is no reason to assume that Gilbert wasn't using the word in its general sense.
His previous point is also wrong. Putting in a first name where it was absent is surely of greater precision, while mispronouncing that name is not.
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