Perfect Earnestness

Today's picture of the day on Wikipedia is a poster for W. S. Gilbert's Engaged, which opened at the Haymarket Theatre on 3 October 1877, 149 years ago today. Its rich young hero, Cheviot Hill, "persistently proposes to every young woman he meets", as Wikipedia puts it. Gilbert told his actors to play it absolutely straight.

Lithograph poster: a young man in a check suit with arms flung wide between two women inside a large oval frame, with smaller scenes of proposals, swooning and a weeping Scotsman around the edge; below, W. S. Gilbert's burlesque comedy Engaged — H. A. Thomas lithograph for the first American production, 1879; art by Victor Arnold, restored by Adam Cuerden. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The note to the cast

Gilbert had his instructions printed with the play. The actors were to play it "with the most perfect earnestness and gravity throughout", and they had to seem to believe every word: the moment they showed they knew it was absurd, the play would drag. Eighteen years later Oscar Wilde built a whole comedy on the word. Wikipedia quotes a critic who calls Engaged the finest English comedy between Bulwer-Lytton's Money (1840) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), "which it directly inspired".

The first run, night by night

evening in the runSunday, darkoutside the run

Wikipedia says the play "ran for about 110 performances, until 1 February 1878, when the company's lease on the theatre expired". From Wednesday 3 October to Friday 1 February is 122 days. Take out the 17 Sundays, when London theatres were dark, and that leaves 105 evenings, so a handful of matinées gets you to about 110. The Sunday closing is my assumption from the custom of the time; the article doesn't say. Christmas Day 1877 fell on a Tuesday.

One thing in the article

Wikipedia attributes the "finest and funniest" line to Justin Wintle "in a 2016 study of the makers of modern culture". The book its footnote cites is Wintle's New Makers of Modern Culture, Volume 1, Routledge, 2007. One of the two years is wrong, or the text means a later printing the footnote doesn't name. I have not seen the book.

What stands on what

Item	Source
Poster, credits, licence	Wikimedia Commons, W.S. Gilbert's burlesque comedy, Engaged.jpg; Wikipedia's picture of the day for 3 October 2026
Opening, run, cast note, the quotation and its footnote	Wikipedia, Engaged (play) (citing Booth 1973 for the note, The Standard of 1 February 1878 for the closing, Wintle p. 587)
Days, weekdays, Sundays	My arithmetic, in the page's script