He creates "a highly intelligent parody of nautical melodrama ... [though] controlled by the conventions it mocks". While nautical melodrama exalts the common sailor, in Pinafore Gilbert makes the proponent of equality, Sir Joseph, a pompous and misguided member of the ruling class who, hypocritically, cannot apply the idea of equality to himself. The hero, Ralph, is convinced of his equality by Sir Joseph's foolish pronouncements and declares his love for his Captain's daughter, throwing over the accepted "fabric of social order". At this point, Crowther suggests, the logic of Gilbert's satiric argument should result in Ralph's arrest. But to satisfy convention, Gilbert creates an obvious absurdity: the captain and Ralph were switched as babies. By an "accident of birth", Ralph is suddenly an appropriate husband for Josephine, and both the social order and the desire for a romantic happy ending are satisfied at once. Crowther concludes, "We have an opera which uses all the conventions of melodrama and ridicules them; but in the end it is difficult to see which has won out, the conventions or the ridicule." Thus, Pinafore found broadbased success by appealing to the intellectual theatregoer seeking satire, the middle-class theatre-goer looking for a comfortable confirmation of the "existing social order" and the working-class audience who saw a satisfying melodramatic victory for the common man. Songs and musical analysis According to musicologist Arthur Jacobs, Gilbert's plot "admirably sparked off Sullivan's genius". Sullivan embraces the nautical setting; in "We Sail the Ocean Blue", for example, he "presents his twist on a traditional sea shanty". In the Captain's opening song, "I am the Captain of the Pinafore", he admits that his gentlemanliness "never ... well, hardly ever" gives way to swearing at his men, and although he has experience at sea, he "hardly ever" suffers from seasickness. Sullivan "unerringly found the right musical setting for the key phrase 'What never?' ... cunningly sharpened ... through the chromatic touch on the bassoon." Audrey Williamson argued that the music of Pinafore is quintessentially English and free of European influences throughout most of the score, from the "glee" for Ralph, the Boatswain and the Carpenter, to "For He Is an Englishman". The best-known songs from the opera include "I'm called Little Buttercup", a waltz tune introducing the character, which Sullivan repeats in the entr'acte and in the Act II finale to imprint the melody on the mind of the audience; and