Alexander's Gilbert and Sullivan Online Quiz

INTRODUCING THE QUIZ...

In which of the operas did Gilbert himself appear?

Which opera mentions the game of cricket?

Who was the Archbishop of Titipu?...

Birds, Beasts, Bab Sketches, Bishops in their Shovel Hats...

These, and many other things besides, are among the questions and topics on which you can test your knowledge in these twenty Quizzes about the fourteen operas which were the collaboration of Gilbert and Sullivan.

A little patience will be required if you are visiting this site for the first time. The Bab Sketches, used randomly on these pages, will take a little time to download.

It orginally appeared under the title of

Alexander's Gilbert and Sullivan Quiz
or
Innocent Merriment

incorporating

Sublime Objects
or
Not-so-Good as Innocent Merriment.

The original print quiz is over a decade and a half old, and this online version takes into account the beauties of computer and internet technology to make it accessible to any online Savoyard. Questions which were devised for the original quiz were not, of course, internet-friendly; and to make them so, I have changed them to alternative answer questions which can be easily translated to the internet. Others which did not easily lend themselves to being converted to alternative answer questions have been included in the random trivia which can be brought up at the bottom of every quiz.

Each quiz has ten questions. There are twenty quizzes in all, and you can proceed through each in turn going to the "next level" after each one, provided you answer correctly the requisite number of questions.

Proceeding to the next level does not imply an increased level of difficulty: such a thing is way too subjective for an internet audience. You can consider one quiz to be of equal difficulty to any other: hopefully in each one you will a challenge of some kind.

The questions are designed particularly for those new to Gilbert and Sullivan, or those with an average interest. Better-than-average Savoyards aiming towards the Empyrean heights could find many of the questions somewhat infra-dig. If they so prove, please remember that they are conceived as a source of innocent merriment to Gilbert and Sullivan Quizzers everywhere.

For those who love internet quizzes, this is, to the best of my knowledge, the most comprehensive Gilbert and Sullivan quiz currently available on the internet. You can contact me with comments and suggestions and, of course, corrections at scuttaj@pacific.net.au. And, if you'll give me your attention, I will tell you what I am.

A randomly-selected Bab Sketch from my own online library of all the Bab Sketches associated with the Savoy Operas appears on the left of every quiz page including these introductory pages. The ones that don't are the ones which use Bab Sketches as the basis for the questions. My online library are scans taken from original antiquarian copies of Songs of a Savoyard of 1890 and The Bab Ballads incorporating Songs of a Savoyard of 1897, and the differences in the sketches used in these separate publications are incorporated somewhere in the quizzes.

The beauty of the sketches as they appear on the printed page of these beautiful nineteenth century publications transliterates into computer-friendly pixels only with what WSG would reluctantly agree was “modified rapture”. Like winter, however, even computer-Babs have a beauty all their own; especially to liven up otherwise completely text-based pages.

A reasonably up-to-date Javascript-enabled browser will be required to make the quiz work on your computer.

Alexander Scutt
June, 2004