The Palace of Truth is a three-act blank verse "Fairy Comedy" by W. S. Gilbert first produced at the Haymarket Theatre in London on 19 November 1870, adapted in significant part from Madame de Genlis's fairy story, Le Palais de Vérite.[1] The play ran for approximately 140 performances and then toured the British provinces and enjoyed various revivals even well into the 20th century.[2] There was also a New York production in 1910.[3]
After more than a century of inquiry, researchers in 2012 concluded that the three genera of Lemurs were named after characters in The Palace of Truth in 1870 by British zoologist John Edward Gray.[4]
- ^ St. John-Brenon, Edward. "Mr. W. S. Gilbert's Original Plays", Grand Magazine, March 1905, pp. 309–316, via the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed 24 August 2020
- ^ Information about a 1941 production of the play
- ^ Information about the 1910 Broadway production
- ^ The etymology of the genus Phaner puzzled researchers after Gray's work was published. In 1904, the American zoologist Theodore Sherman Palmer suggested that Phaner derived from the Greek φανερός (phaneros) meaning "visible, evident". In 2012, researchers searched the general literature published around 1870. The Palace of Truth had premiered only 12 days prior to the date written on the preface of Gray's manuscript assigning the genera, and they saw that three character names in the play, King Phanor, Mirza and Azema, corresponded to the genera Phaner (fork-marked lemur), Mirza (giant mouse lemur) and Azema (mouse lemur) described by Gray in the same publication and equally enigmatic. The researchers concluded that Gray saw Gilbert's comedy and named the three lemur genera after its characters. Dunkel, A. R., J. S. Zijlstra and C. P. Groves. "Giant rabbits, marmosets, and British comedies: etymology of lemur names, part 1", Lemur News, vol. 16, 2012, pp. 66–67 ISSN 1608-1439