the Drama. While this may be a coincidence, it could also be seen as a response to Offenbach, as his plot places music at the centre of his operetta, but Gilbert's elevates the dramatist. The libretto has been praised by several biographers and historians. One said that "The dialogue contains many an authentic Gilbertian touch." Another found it "a gay, sparkling libretto". Sidney Dark and Rowland Gray wrote that "the book of Thespis is genuine Gilbert, the Gilbert whom nowadays all the world loves.... Thespis once more emphasizes the fact that Gilbert's artistry was hardly affected with the passing of the years. Many of its songs might well have appeared in the later operas." They point out Mercury's "I'm the celestial drudge", which anticipates Giuseppe's "Rising early in the morning" in The Gondoliers, and find the "real brand of Gilbertian topsy-turvydom" in the song about the former head of a railway company, "I once knew a chap who discharged a function". Isaac Goldberg thought that "Thespis looks forward far more often than it glances backward: It forecasts the characteristic methods, and now and then a character, of the later series. Its dialogue is comical, and, if anything, somewhat above the heads of the Gaiety audiences of 1871." Goldberg wrote in 1929 that the libretto "seems to have no specific ancestry.... neither in his burlesques nor in his ballads... had Gilbert played with the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology." However, Gilbert did write a series of humorous sketches parodying the Greek myths, mainly the heroes of the Iliad, for the illustrated magazine Fun in 1864, and Pygmalion and Galatea, which he produced just before Thespis, was a more serious treatment of Greek mythology. Jane W. Stedman points out that Thespis "looks backward to French opéra bouffe", but it is "fundamentally a Gilbertian invasion plot in which outsiders penetrate and affect a given society, often for the worse." She compares the theatrical company in Thespis to the politicians that remodel fairyland in Gilbert's 1873 play The Happy Land and the Englishmen who reform the island nation of Utopia in Utopia, Limited (1893). Elements of Thespis also appear in Gilbert and Sullivan's last opera together, The Grand Duke (1896), where a theatre company replaces the ruler and decides to "revive the classic memories of Athens at its best". The music Sullivan's score generally came in for praise, though critics carped—as they would