Engaged is a three-act farcical comic play by W. S. Gilbert. The plot revolves around a rich young man, his search for a wife, and the attempts – from mercenary motives – by his uncle to encourage his marriage and by his best friend to prevent it. After frantic complications and changes of allegiance, all the main characters end up paired off, more or less to their satisfaction. The play opened at the Haymarket Theatre in London on 3 October 1877, the year before Gilbert's first great success with the composer Arthur Sullivan in their comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore. Engaged was well received on the London stage and then in the British provinces, the US, Australia and New Zealand. It was subsequently revived many times and has continued to be produced during the 20th and 21st centuries. The play has been called "unquestionably the finest and funniest English comedy between Bulwer-Lytton's Money [1840] and Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest [1895] which it directly inspired", although some critics found it heartless. Other plays considered by critics to be influenced by Engaged are Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man and Man and Superman. Later playwrights whose works have been seen as drawing on Engaged are Noël Coward and Joe Orton. Background By 1877, Gilbert, now forty years old, was established as a dramatist. After his early burlesques of the 1860s he had turned to writing comic opera libretti and non-musical plays, both comic and serious. His musical successes included Ages Ago (music by Frederic Clay, 1869) and Trial by Jury (music by Arthur Sullivan (1875). His serious and comic non-musical plays included Pygmalion and Galatea (1871), The Wicked World (1873), Sweethearts (1874) and several others that played for well over 100 performances – good runs by the standards of the time. Engaged is written in the "topsy-turvy" satiric style of many of Gilbert's earlier Bab Ballads and his later Savoy Operas. A New York Times reviewer called it "human nature … reversed – giving language to one series of emotions and acting another." Gilbert's previous play had been the drama Dan'l Druce (1876), in which he had sought to portray serious human emotions. It was a moderate success, but for Engaged he returned to his usual absurdist approach, inventing a cast of characters whose motivation is not love but money. Possibly to underline the contrast, in the new play he cast