William Hunter Kendal Young Marlowe to her Kate Hardcastle. He was also Captain Beauclerc in "Diplomacy", William in "William and Susan", W. G. Wills's customized rewriting of Douglas Jerrold's "Black-Eyed Susan", and Aubrey Tanqueray to his wife's Paula in Pinero's "The Second Mrs Tanqueray". He was Pygmalion to his wife's Galatea in W. S. Gilbert's "Pygmalion and Galatea" (1871), and the pair starred in the series of "fairy comedies" by Gilbert in the early 1870s, including "The Palace of Truth" (1870), "Broken Hearts", "The Wicked World" (1873) and "Broken Hearts" (1875), as well as Gilbert's drama "Charity" (1874). Kendal and his wife starred
The Merry Zingara V). The success of "Dulcamara" and "La Vivandière" had shown that Gilbert could write entertainingly in this form, peppered with the dreadful puns traditional in burlesques of the period. The libretti also, at times, show signs of the satire that would later be a defining part of his work. They led to Gilbert's more mature "fairy comedies", such as "The Palace of Truth" (1870) and "Pygmalion and Galatea" (1871), and Gilbert's six German Reed Entertainments which, in turn, led to the famous Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Although Gilbert gave up direct parodies of opera within a couple of years of