consent to embark on a professional operation unless I see my way to a successful result." Of course, joking about death does not originate with The Mikado. The plot conceit that Nanki-Poo may marry Yum-Yum if he agrees to die at the end of the month was used in A Wife for a Month, a 17th-century play by John Fletcher. Ko-Ko's final speech affirms that death has been, throughout the opera, a fiction, a matter of words that can be dispelled with a phrase or two: being dead and being "as good as dead" are equated. In a review of the original production of The Mikado, after praising the show generally, the critic noted that the show's humour nevertheless depends on "unsparing exposure of human weaknesses and follies – things grave and even horrible invested with a ridiculous aspect – all the motives prompting our actions traced back to inexhaustible sources of selfishness and cowardice... Decapitation, disembowelment, immersion in boiling oil or molten lead are the eventualities upon which [the characters'] attention (and that of the audience) is kept fixed with gruesome persistence... [Gilbert] has unquestionably succeeded in imbuing society with his own quaint, scornful, inverted philosophy; and has thereby established a solid claim to rank amongst the foremost of those latter-day Englishmen who have exercised a distinct psychical influence upon their contemporaries." Japanese setting The opera is named after the Emperor of Japan using the term mikado (御門 or 帝 or みかど), literally meaning "the honourable gate" of the imperial palace, referring metaphorically to its occupant and to the palace itself. The term was commonly used by the English in the 19th century but became obsolete. To the extent that the opera portrays Japanese culture, style and government, it is a fictional version of Japan used to provide a picturesque setting and to capitalise on Japonism and the British fascination with Japan and the Far East in the 1880s. Gilbert wrote, "The Mikado of the opera was an imaginary monarch of a remote period and cannot by any exercise of ingenuity be taken to be a slap on an existing institution." The Mikado "was never a story about Japan but about the failings of the British government". By setting the opera in a foreign land, Gilbert felt able to more sharply criticise British society and institutions. G. K. Chesterton compared the opera's satire to that in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's