Gilbert and Sullivan he offered a compromise that Sullivan eventually accepted. The two would write a light opera for the Savoy, and at the same time, Sullivan a grand opera ("Ivanhoe") for a new theatre that Carte was constructing to present British grand opera. After a brief impasse over the choice of subject, Sullivan accepted an idea connected with Venice and Venetian life, as "this seemed to me to hold out great chances of bright colour and taking music." "The Gondoliers" (1889) takes place partly in Venice and partly in a kingdom ruled by a pair of gondoliers who attempt to remodel the
Gilbert and Sullivan and institutions more freely by clothing them in superficial Japanese trappings. Gilbert wrote, "The Mikado of the opera was an imaginary monarch of a remote period and cannot by any exercise of ingenuity be taken to be a slap on an existing institution." G. K. Chesterton compared it to Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels": "Gilbert pursued and persecuted the evils of modern England till they had literally not a leg to stand on, exactly as Swift did... I doubt if there is a single joke in the whole play that fits the Japanese. But all the jokes in the play fit