The Wicked World The Wicked World The Wicked World is a blank verse play by W. S. Gilbert in three acts. It opened at the Haymarket Theatre on 1873 and ran for a successful 145 performances, closing on 1873. The play is an allegory loosely based on a short illustrated story of the same title by Gilbert, written in 1871 and published in Tom Hood's "Comic Annual", about how pure fairies cope with a sudden introduction to them of "mortal love." Set in "Fairy Land", the action occurs within the space of 24 hours. Gilbert envisioned the set as resembling John Martin's 1853
Acis and Galatea of the 50 Nereids. In Ovid's "Metamorphoses" she appears as the beloved of Acis, the son of Faunus and the river-nymph Symaethis, daughter of the River Symaethus. When a jealous rival, the Sicilian Cyclops Polyphemus, killed him with a boulder, Galatea then turned his blood into the Sicilian River Acis, of which he became the spirit. This version of the tale occurs nowhere earlier and may be a fiction invented by Ovid, "suggested by the manner in which the little river springs forth from under a rock". According to Athenaeus, ca 200 CE, the story was first concocted by Philoxenus