W. S. Gilbert

Two Songs from The Mikado (1885)

If You Want to Know Who We Are

If you want to know who we are,
We are gentlemen of Japan:
On many a vase and jar,
On many a screen and fan,
We figure in lively paint:
Our attitude’s queer and quaint—
You’re wrong if you think it ain’t, oh!

If you think we are worked by strings
Like a Japanese marionette,
You don’t understand these things:
It is simply Court etiquette.
Perhaps you suppose this throng
Can’t keep it up all day long?
If that’s your idea you’re wrong, oh!

A More Humane Mikado

A more humane Mikado never
Did in Japan exist;
To nobody second,
I’m certainly reckoned
A true philanthropist.
It is my very humane endeavour
To make, to some extent,
Each evil liver
A running river
Of harmless merriment.

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time—
To let the punishment fit the crime,
The punishment fit the crime;
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment,
Of innocent merriment!

All prosy dull society sinners,
Who chatter and bleat and bore,
Are sent to hear sermons
From mystical Germans
Who preach from ten to four.
The amateur tenor, whose vocal villainies
All desire to shirk,
Shall, during off-hours,
Exhibit his powers
To Madame Tussaud’s waxwork.
The lady who dyes a chemical yellow,
Or stains her grey hair puce,
Or pinches her figger,
Is blacked like a nigger
With permanent walnut juice.
The idiot who, in railway carriages,
Scribbles on window panes,
We only suffer
To ride on a buffer
In Parliamentary trains.

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time—
To let the punishment fit the crime,
The punishment fit the crime;
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment,
Of innocent merriment!

The advertising quack who wearies
With tales of countless cures,
His teeth, I’ve enacted,
Shall all be extracted
By terrified amateurs.
The music-hall singer attends a series
Of masses and fugues and ‘ops’
By Bach, interwoven
With Spohr and Beethoven,
At classical Monday Pops.
The billiard-sharp whom anyone catches
His doom’s extremely hard—
He’s made to dwell
In a dungeon cell
On a spot that’s always barred.
And there he plays extravagant matches
In fitless finger-stalls,
On a cloth untrue
With a twisted cue
And elliptical billiard balls.

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time—
To let the punishment fit the crime—
The punishment fit the crime;
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment,
Of innocent merriment!

Shortly after The Mikado premiered at the Savoy Theatre on March 14, 1885, the Japanese Ambassador to London wrote a formal protest about the ‘misrepresentation of Japanese life’ in the work, but it nonetheless went on to become the most successful English operetta of the nineteenth century, running for 672 successive performances. In addition to many audio and video recordings, the full text is available in mass market paperbacks, in the UK here, the US here.