no equivalent in the published libretto. At least one song is missing, and an entire character, Venus, is mentioned in at least five reviews as stout, elderly, and heavily made-up; she does not appear in the libretto but was listed in the first night programme. Stage directions in the original are slip-shod: characters reappear without an entrance being noted, or enter twice in quick succession, without having exited. In addition, Sullivan told his mother that at least one song was cut after opening night, and there must certainly have been other cuts, given the undue length of the first performance. But the text of the libretto, as published, remained "virtually unchanged" between December 1871 and March 1872. In a letter to Percy Strzelecki on 23 April 1890, Gilbert apologised for the condition of the libretto. He wrote, "I was in the United States when it was published & I had no opportunity of correcting proofs. This will explain the presence of innumerable typographical & other errors." But several scholars conclude that Gilbert must have been remembering a trip the following year, as in the fall of 1871 it "would have been impossible for Gilbert to travel to America and back in time for rehearsals of Thespis." Even after the first printing, there does not seem to have been any effort to correct the errors: There were four separate issues of the libretto between December and March, but no corrections were made. Gilbert's final disposition of the libretto came in 1911, when it was included in the fourth volume of his Original Plays. However, Gilbert died before he could correct proofs for that edition, and so it reprinted the 1871 text, correcting only a few spelling mistakes. Musical numbers The music is known to survive for numbers shown in bold; a ballet also survives, but its location in the order of musical numbers is uncertain. Reviews of the opera hint at three additional numbers not in the libretto, but as their names and exact locations are unknown, they are not listed. Act I "Throughout the night, the constellations" (Women's Chorus, with Solo) "Oh, I'm the celestial drudge" (Mercury) "Oh incident unprecedented" (Mercury, Mars, Apollo, Diana, and Jupiter) "Here far away from all the world" (Sparkeion and Nicemis) "Climbing over rocky mountain" (Chorus with Solos) Picnic Waltz "I once knew a chap who discharged a function" (Thespis) Act I Finale: "So that's