THE DUKE OF PLAZA TORO

In A Song to Sing, O! the three lovers were birds, which made the lyrics (from Yeoman of the Guard) all the more amusing; here the Duke of Plaza Toro (from The Gondoliers) is a bull--and baffling. The trouble is that there's one matador on the scene, and many bulls, and although one bull is colored differently, the natural assumption is that the comical man is the unheroic Duke. And there are other obfuscation: why a bevy of bulls in the ring instead of a single contender? why equate ""shot (in) the service"" with shot by the matador for resigning? As pictured, the episode just does not correspond closely enough to the words of the text to work, although the pictures are, as before, exceedingly deft.