title: Ghana Empire

text: In the late 19th century, as French forces occupied the region in which ancient Ghana lay, colonial officials began collecting traditional accounts, including some manuscripts written in Arabic somewhat earlier in the century. Several such traditions were recorded and published. While there are variants, these traditions called the most ancient polity they knew of Wagadu, or the "place of the Wago" the term current in the 19th century for the local . The traditions described the kingdom as having been founded by a man named Dinga, who came "from the east" (e.g., Aswan, Egypt), after which he migrated to a variety of locations in western Sudan, in each place leaving children by different wives. In order to achieve power in his final location he had to kill a goblin, and then marry his daughters, who became the ancestors of the clans that were dominant in the region at the time of the recording of the religion. Upon Dinga's death, his two sons Khine and Dyabe contested the , and Dyabe was victorious, founding the kingdom.


title: Ghana Empire

text: French colonial officials, notably Maurice Delafosse, whose works on West African history has been criticised by scholars such Charles Monteil, Robert Cornevin and others for being "unacceptable" and "too creative to be useful to historians" in relation to his falsification of West African genealogies, concluded that Ghana had been founded by the Berbers, a nomadic group originating from the Benue River and linked them to North African and Middle Eastern origins. While Delafosse produced a convoluted theory of an invasion by "Judeo-Syrians", which he linked to the Fulbe, others took the tradition at face value and simply accepted that nomads had ruled first. Raymond Mauny, early archaeology, various traditions, and the Arabic materials in 1961 concluded that foreign trade was vital to the empire's foundation. More recent work, for example by Nehemiah Levtzion, in his classic work published in 1973, sought to harmonize archaeology, descriptive geographical sources written between 830 and 1400 AD, the older traditions of the Tarikhs, from the 16th and 17th centuries and at last the traditions collected by French administrators. Levtzion concluded that local developments, stimulated by trade from North Africa, were crucial in the development of the state, and he tended to favor the more recently collected traditions over the other traditions in compiling his work. While there has not been much further study of either traditions or documents, archaeologists have added considerable nuance. Christopher Ehret observes that the proposed founding date of c. 300 AD fits very well with what is known about the Wagadu state's control of the trans-saharan gold trade.


title: Ghana Empire

text: Archaeological research was slow to enter the picture. While French archaeologists believed they had located the capital, Koumbi Saleh, in the 1920s when they located extensive stone ruins in the general area given in most sources for the capital, others argued that elaborate burials in the Niger Bend area may have been linked to the empire. It was not until 1969, when Patrick Munson excavated at Dhar Tichitt (the site of a culture associated with the ancient ancestors of the Soninke people) in modern-day Mauritania that the probability of an entirely local origin was raised. The Dhar Tichitt site clearly reflected a complex culture present by 1600 BC and had architectural and material culture elements that seemed to match the site at Koumbi Saleh. In more recent work in Dhar Tichitt, and then in Dhar Nema and Dhar Walata, it has become more and more clear that as the desert advanced, the Dhar Tichitt culture (which had abandoned its earliest site around 300 BC, possibly because of pressure from desert nomads, but also because of increasing aridity) moved southward into the still well-watered areas of northern Mali. This now seems the likely history of the complex society that can be documented at Koumbi-Saleh.


title: Ghana Empire

text: In his brief overview of Sudanese history, Ibn Khaldun related that "the people of Mali outnumbered the peoples of the Sudan in their neighborhood and dominated the whole region." He went on to relate that they "vanquished the Susu and acquired all their possessions, both their ancient kingdom and that of Ghana." According to a modern tradition, this resurgence of Mali was led by Sundiata Keita, the founder of Mali and ruler of its core area of Kangaba. Delafosse assigned an arbitrary but widely accepted date of 1230 to the event. This tradition states that "Ghana" Soumaba Cisse, at the time a vassal of the Sosso, rebelled with Kangaba and became part of a loose federation of Mande-speaking states. After Soumaoro's defeat at the Battle of Kirina in 1235 (a date again assigned arbitrarily by Delafosse), the new rulers of Koumbi Saleh became permanent allies of the Mali Empire. As Mali became more powerful, Koumbi Saleh's role as an ally declined to that of a submissive state, and it became the client described in al-'Umari/al-Dukkali's account of 1340.


title: Ghana Empire

text: Ibn Haukal, writing in 951 AD, informs us that the King of Ghana was “the richest king on the face of the earth".


title: Ghana Empire

text: Given the scattered nature of the Arabic sources and the ambiguity of the existing archaeological record, it is difficult to determine when and how Ghana declined and fell. The earliest descriptions of the empire are vague as to its maximum extent, though according to al-Bakri, Ghana had forced Awdaghost in the desert to accept its rule sometime between 970 and 1054. By al-Bakri's own time, however, it was surrounded by powerful kingdoms, such as Sila. Ghana was combined in the kingdom of Mali in 1240, marking the end of the Ghana Empire.


title: Ghana Empire

text: A tradition in historiography maintains that Ghana fell when it was sacked by the Almoravid movement in 1076–77, although Ghanaians resisted attack for a decade, but this interpretation has been questioned. Conrad and Fisher (1982) argued that the notion of any Almoravid military conquest at its core is merely perpetuated folklore, derived from a misinterpretation or naive reliance on Arabic sources. Dierke Lange agrees but argues that this does not preclude Almoravid political agitation, claiming that Ghana's demise owed much to the latter. Sheryl L. Burkhalter (1992) was skeptical of Conrad and Fisher's arguments and suggested that there were reasons to believe that there was conflict between the Almoravids and the empire of Ghana. Furthermore, the archaeology of ancient Ghana does not show the signs of rapid change and destruction that would be associated with any Almoravid-era military conquests.


title: Ghana Empire

text: While there is no clear-cut account of a sack of Ghana in the contemporary sources, the country certainly did convert to Islam, for al-Idrisi, whose account was written in 1154, has the country fully Muslim by that date. Ibn Khaldun, a fourteenth-century North African historian who read and cited both al-Bakri and al-Idrisi, reported an ambiguous account of the country's history as related to him by 'Uthman, a faqih of Ghana who took a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1394, according to which the power of Ghana waned as that of the "veiled people" grew through the Almoravid movement. Al-Idrisi's report does not give any reason to believe that the Empire was smaller or weaker than it had been in the days of al-Bakri, 75 years earlier. In fact, he describes its capital as "the greatest of all towns of the Sudan with respect to area, the most populous, and with the most extensive trade." It is clear, however, that Ghana was incorporated into the Mali Empire, according to a detailed account of al-'Umari, written around 1340 but based on testimony given to him by the "truthful and trustworthy" shaykh Abu Uthman Sa'id al-Dukkali, a long term resident. In al-'Umari/al-Dukkali's version, Ghana still retained its functions as a sort of kingdom within the empire, its ruler being the only one allowed to bear the title "malik" and "who is like a deputy unto him."


title: Ghana Empire

text: According to Ibn Khaldun, following Ghana's conversion, "the authority of the rulers of Ghana dwindled away and they were overcome by the Sosso...who subjugated and subdued them." Some modern traditions identify the Susu as the Sosso, inhabitants of Kaniaga. According to much later traditions, from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Diara Kante took control of Koumbi Saleh and established the Diarisso Dynasty. His son, Soumaoro Kante, succeeded him and forced the people to pay him tribute. The Sosso also managed to annex the neighboring Mandinka state of Kangaba to the south, where the important goldfields of Bure were located.


title: Ghana Empire

text: Most of the information about the economy of Ghana comes from al-Bakri. Al-Bakri noted that merchants had to pay a one gold dinar tax on imports of salt, and two on exports of salt. Other products had fixed dues; al-Bakri mentioned both copper and "other goods." Imports probably included products such as textiles, ornaments and other materials. Many of the hand-crafted leather goods found in old Morocco also had their origins in the empire. Ibn Hawqal quotes the use of a cheque worth 42,000 dinars.


title: Ghana Empire

text: The main centre of trade was Koumbi Saleh. The king claimed as his own all nuggets of gold, and allowed other people to have only 'gold dust'. In addition to the influence exerted by the king in local regions, tribute was received from various tributary states and chiefdoms on the empire's periphery. The introduction of the camel played a key role in Soninke success as well, allowing products and goods to be transported much more efficiently across the Sahara. These contributing factors all helped the empire remain powerful for some time, providing a rich and stable economy that was to last several centuries. The empire was also known to be a major educational hub.


title: Ghana Empire

text: Testimony about ancient Ghana depended on how well disposed the king was to foreign travelers, from whom the majority of information on the empire comes. Islamic writers often commented on the social-political stability of the empire based on the seemingly just actions and grandeur of the king. Al-Bakri, a Moorish nobleman living in Spain questioned merchants who visited the empire in the 11th century and wrote of the king:


title: Ghana Empire

text: Ghana appears to have had a central core region and was surrounded by vassal states. One of the earliest sources to describe Ghana, al-Ya'qubi, writing in 889/90 (276 AH) says that "under his authority are a number of kings" which included Sama and 'Am (?) and so extended at least to the Niger River valley. These "kings" were presumably the rulers of the territorial units often called "kafu" in Mandinka.


title: Ghana Empire

text: The Arabic sources are vague as to how the country was governed. Al-Bakri, far and away the most detailed one, mentions that the king had officials ("mazalim") who surrounded his throne when he gave justice, and these included the sons of the "kings of his country" which we must assume are the same kings that al-Ya'qubi mentioned in his account of nearly 200 years earlier. Al-Bakri's detailed geography of the region shows that in his day, or 1067/1068, Ghana was surrounded by independent kingdoms, and Sila, one of them located on the Senegal River, was "almost a match for the king of Ghana." Sama is the only such entity mentioned as a province, as it was in al-Ya'qubi's day.


title: Ghana Empire

text: In al-Bakri's time, the rulers of Ghana had begun to incorporate more Muslims into government, including the treasurer, his interpreter, and "the majority of his officials."


title: Ghana Empire

text: The empire's capital is believed to have been at Koumbi Saleh on the rim of the Sahara desert. According to the description of the town left by Al-Bakri in 1067/1068, the capital actually consisted of two cities apart but "between these two towns are continuous habitations", so that they might be said to have merged into one.


title: Ghana Empire

text: According to al-Bakri, the major part of the city was called El-Ghaba and was the residence of the king. It was protected by a stone wall and functioned as the royal and spiritual capital of the Empire. It contained a sacred grove of trees in which priests lived. It also contained the king's palace, the grandest structure in the city, surrounded by other "domed buildings". There was also one mosque for visiting Muslim officials. (El-Ghaba, coincidentally or not, means "The Forest" in Arabic.)


title: Ghana Empire

text: The name of the other section of the city is not recorded. In the vicinity were wells with fresh water, used to grow vegetables. It was inhabited almost entirely by Muslims, who had with twelve mosques, one of which was designated for Friday prayers, and had a full group of scholars, scribes and Islamic jurists. Because the majority of these Muslims were merchants, this part of the city was probably its primary business district. It is likely that these inhabitants were largely black Muslims known as the Wangara and are today known as Fulbe/Fulani and Jakhanke. The separate and autonomous towns outside of the main governmental center is a well-known practice used by the Fulbe and Jakhanke Muslims throughout history.


title: Ghana Empire

text: A 17th-century chronicle written in Timbuktu, the "Tarikh al-fattash", gave the name of the capital as "Koumbi". Beginning in the 1920s, French archaeologists excavated the site of Koumbi Saleh, although there have always been controversies about the location of Ghana's capital and whether Koumbi Saleh is the same town as the one described by al-Bakri. The site was excavated in 1949–50 by Paul Thomassey and Raymond Mauny and by another French team in 1975–81. The remains of Koumbi Saleh are impressive, even if the remains of the royal town, with its large palace and burial mounds, have not been located. Another problem for archaeology is that al-Idrisi, a twelfth-century writer, described Ghana's royal city as lying on a riverbank, a river he called the "Nile" following the geographic custom of his day of confusing the Niger and Senegal Rivers, which do not meet, as forming a single river often called the "Nile of the Blacks". Whether al-Idrisi was referring to a new and later capital located elsewhere, or whether there was confusion or corruption in his text is unclear. However, he does state that the royal palace he knew was built in 510 AH (1116–1117 AD), suggesting that it was a newer town, rebuilt closer to the Niger than Koumbi Saleh.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: "Bayonetta" takes place in Vigrid, a fictional city in Europe. The game stars the eponymous character, a witch who is capable of shapeshifting and using various firearms. She possesses magical attacks and she can use her hair to summon demons to dispatch her foes.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: The game features a rating system, which gives players a grade based on their performance, and a combat system similar to the "Devil May Cry" series. Although unlike "Devil May Cry", which features a live Style Rank to directly judge the player, Bayonetta (and subsequent Platinum action games) feature an arena based ranking system, which judges players based on variables such as time, combo size and damage at the end of each individual fight which then gets tallied up at the end of each chapter to determine the final rank.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: "Bayonetta" was the third project released by PlatinumGames, which was founded by former Clover Studio employees. Development began in January 2007, with Hideki Kamiya as the director. The development team's name, "Team Little Angels," is a play on the name of the team who developed the first "Devil May Cry" game, "Team Little Devils." According to Kamiya, "Bayonetta" was completely original, though he drew some inspirations from Scandinavian mythology and played "Devil May Cry 4" for reference. The game was designed to have a core theme of "sexiness" and to feature "fashionable" characters. To this end, Kamiya and artist Mari Shimazaki spent more than a year creating "Bayonetta's" design. Several demos were released prior to launch.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: "Bayonetta" received generally positive reviews. The game was praised for its combat, presentation, and soundtrack, but drew criticism for its story and quick time events. The game was nominated for and won several end-of-the-year accolades, had sold over a million units worldwide by 2010, and has been cited as one of the best video games ever made. An anime film adaptation by Gonzo, "", was released in Japan in November 2013. The game was followed by "Bayonetta 2" (2014) and "Bayonetta 3" (2022).


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: "Bayonetta" is a single-player, third-person 3D action and hack and slash game. The player controls a witch named Bayonetta, is able to use melee and long ranged attacks and is able to select multiple weapons. By pressing a combination of buttons, they are able to use "Wicked Weave" attacks and they are also able to use "Torture Attacks" in which Bayonetta summons a variety of devices to deal strong damage to enemies. Such devices range from chainsaws to iron maidens. One ability Bayonetta has is "Witch Time", which activates when the player makes a well-timed dodge to an attack. This temporarily increases her speed, causing enemies to appear to move in slow-motion, allowing Bayonetta to inflict massive amounts of counter damage before the enemies can react.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: The player can double jump for extra height, perform evasive backflips, and destroy background objects and doors. Camera views can be rotated, enemy targets can be locked on, and weapons can be switched during play. With unlockable transformations, the player can make Bayonetta become a panther or one of various other living creatures to enhance her abilities. Lollipops can be used to heal her, replenish her magic, induce invincibility or increase her strength, although using these items, as well as dying, lowers the score for that chapter. By finding various component items, the player can combine them into new items. Many enemies and objects drop halos when destroyed, which the player can use to buy items, techniques and weapon upgrades. The player can use enemy weapons, either to directly attack or as props for movement. Bayonetta's strongest attacks allow her to summon parts of Madama Butterfly and other demons with her hair.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: During development, five difficulty modes were created: "Very Easy", "Easy", "Normal", "Hard", and "Non-Stop Infinite Climax". On Easy and Very Easy, a "Very Easy Automatic" mode is made available in which the game positions Bayonetta to perform attacks on enemies, and the player only needs to press one button to execute elaborate combos, unless they wish to perform their own choice of movements or attacks. Kamiya posted a video on the game's official website in which character designer Mari Shimazaki demonstrated the mode (which Kamiya "jokingly called 'Mommy Mode) in "Bayonetta". He expected players to first complete the game in 10 to 12 hours, but believed that its rating system (similar to that of Viewtiful Joe, which he directed) and the pursuit of high scores provide replay value. The game has a fixed button configuration; Kamiya said that "there wasn't really a point to changing [it]."


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: "Bayonetta" takes place in Vigrid, a fictional city in Europe. Bayonetta (voiced by Hellena Taylor / Atsuko Tanaka) is a witch who shapeshifts and uses various firearms, along with magical attacks she performs with her hair by summoning demons to dispatch her foes. She awakens after a 500-year sleep and finds herself in an unfamiliar area with no memories of who or what she is. Over time, she begins to remember what caused her current predicament. Five hundred years before the incident that caused Bayonetta's memory loss, there were two factions preserving the balance between darkness and light in the world: the Umbra Witches, who are followers of darkness, and their counterparts, the Lumen Sages, who are followers of light. The factions shared two distinct treasures, the 'Eyes of the World' (separately named the 'Left Eye' and the 'Right Eye') which they used to oversee the just passage of time. Both factions mysteriously disappeared from Vigrid under unknown circumstances. Bayonetta has an ornate piece of jewelry which contains a small red gem, and believes this gem is the Left Eye of the World. While searching for the Right Eye, she occasionally receives flashbacks that make her remember what happened.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: Other characters include (voiced by Yuri Lowenthal / Daisuke Namikawa), who met Bayonetta as a child; Bayonetta's rival and fellow Umbra Witch (voiced by Grey DeLisle / Mie Sonozaki), who wields four guns like Bayonetta; (voiced by Dave Fennoy / Tesshō Genda), the owner of a bar called the Gates Of Hell where Bayonetta can buy various weapons and items; an informant named (voiced by Chick Vennera / Wataru Takagi) who looks and sounds similar to actor Joe Pesci and provides comic relief; a young girl named (voiced by Joy Jillian / Miyuki Sawashiro) whom Bayonetta meets early in the game; and the main antagonist (voiced by Grant Albrecht / Norio Wakamoto).


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: The game settings borrow from Dante's "Divine Comedy": Paradiso (heaven), which generally takes the form of a heavenly yellow or golden valley or palace and is the home of the "Angel" enemies she faces; Purgatorio (purgatory), a metarealm that functions as an "in between" for metaphysical beings and stands alongside yet outside of the plane humans exist on (all beings in and outside of Purgatorio take on a transparent, watery appearance); Inferno (hell), which is not visited in the game, but contains the infernal demons that Bayonetta summons in combat, using her hair as a conduit.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: Bayonetta, a witch who was revived twenty years ago from the bottom of a lake, has no memories of her past. Owning one-half of the "Eyes of the World," Bayonetta leaves for Vigrid when the informant Enzo informs her of rumors that the other half is there.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: Afterward, Bayonetta confronts another Umbra Witch named Jeanne, who seemingly has ties to Bayonetta's past, and a young man named Luka, who blames Bayonetta for his father's death. Eventually, Bayonetta discovers that Jeanne is associated with the angels somehow, and fights her again. Afterwards, she meets a lost child named Cereza, who believes Bayonetta to be her mother and starts following her. Returning to the human world, Bayonetta continues her search for the Right Eye, journeying to an island named Isla del Sol with Luka and Cereza.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: Bayonetta is confronted again by Jeanne, who explains Bayonetta was a child born from an Umbra Witch and a Lumen Sage, a forbidden union. Bayonetta defeats Jeanne, who reveals the reason Bayonetta possesses the Left Eye is because she has accepted her fate. Bayonetta hands Jeanne the gem she had been carrying, making her remember she is Cereza, and that Jeanne was once her friend; it was Jeanne who sealed her away, giving Bayonetta the gem to protect her and the Left Eye. After Jeanne then sacrifices herself to save Bayonetta, she continues through the tower with Luka and Cereza.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: At the top, Bayonetta meets Balder, the last of the Lumen Sages. Balder reveals he is Bayonetta's father, and plans to reunite the three universes by resurrecting Jubileus, the Creator. He also reveals that Bayonetta herself is the Left Eye, but for her to awaken it, she had to regain her memories. For that reason, he brought Cereza, who is Bayonetta as a child, from the past, to awaken her memories. Confronted by Luka, he throws him to his death, revealing he was the one behind the death of Luka's father, and further reveals that he had mind-controlled Jeanne to do his bidding. Bayonetta fights and seemingly kills Balder, and saves Luka.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: After returning Cereza to the past, Bayonetta returns to the present. However, her actions have caused her to awaken the Left Eye, and she collapses. Balder, who had survived the fight, transports himself and the unconscious Bayonetta towards the statue on top of the tower, beginning the resurrection of Jubileus. As the statue launches into space, Jeanne, who had survived, reappears, free from Balder's control. She ascends the launching statue on her motorcycle; reaching Bayonetta, she saves her, but Jubileus comes alive, consuming Balder. Bayonetta defeats Jubileus by summoning Queen Sheba, who punches the deity's soul into the sun. As Jubileus' physical body plummets towards Earth, Jeanne and Bayonetta destroy it.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: The epilogue, mirroring the start of the game, shows Jeanne and Bayonetta continuing to battle against the angels.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: Hideki Kamiya directed development of "Bayonetta" at PlatinumGames since January 2007, and the game was "more-or-less complete" by October 21, 2009. The group developed for Microsoft's Xbox 360 game console, while Sega - with PlatinumGames' support - handed the task of porting the game to Sony's PlayStation 3 to Nex Entertainment. Kamiya had worked on previous games such as "Devil May Cry", "Viewtiful Joe", "Resident Evil" and its sequel, and as such, the game makes occasional references to these games, as well as other Clover Studio games and various Sega franchises, such as a minigame inspired by "Space Harrier". Though he "deliberately created "Bayonetta" from scratch" and has called its story "completely original", Kamiya has admitted using "some names from Scandinavian mythology" and playing "about half of" "Devil May Cry 4" for research.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: Mari Shimazaki designed the game's characters to be "fashionable", with "subdued" features. She designed Bayonetta to fulfill Kamiya's request for a modern, female witch that wears glasses and wields four guns, and the two settled on her original concept for the character despite her work "over a year" on other concepts. Bayonetta emerged as a long-haired, black-clothed witch with a beehive hairdo (a modern representation of the traditional pointy hat) and glasses (which Kamiya pushed for, to "differentiate Bayonetta from other female characters" and to "give her a sense of mystery and intelligence"). Conversely, Shimazaki "didn't require a huge amount of effort" to design Bayonetta's short-haired, red-clothed rival Jeanne, who merely wears her glasses on her head above her eyes. She added plumes to Jeanne's handguns to add movement to the design, and thick makeup to Jeanne's face to "make [her] feel like something out of the 1960s". Though Shimazaki preferred Bayonetta, Jeanne turned out to be the more popular of the two witches among Kamiya and the development team.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: As a fan of folk music, Kamiya named Bayonetta's set of four handguns after the old English ballad "Scarborough Fair", and its individual guns Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Hiroshi Yamaguchi focused on composing music for the game that had a "nice up-tempo beat" and expressed femininity through female choirs, pianos, and other beautiful' instruments"—though some tracks also use pure orchestra or folk instruments.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: Kenichiro Yoshimura transformed Shimazaki's Bayonetta design into a game model and used the digital sculpting tool ZBrush to create normal maps for its details. He worked with Shimazaki on the model's makeup, referred to foreign models with similar bodies, and said that he "really wanted to get Bayonetta's backside perfect" because he was into "that sort of thing...". The language spoken by the Angels and for all Infernal Summons is Enochian, a divine language described by John Dee and his colleague Edward Kelley.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: To Kamiya, the core theme of the game and its protagonist's attacks is "sexiness". To fit the theme of "her femininity and sexuality", the developers made Bayonetta bleed rose petals instead of blood when hit, and used butterfly imagery as part of her moves and outfit. Her giant boot, fist, and monster attacks reveal some of her body—her hair is magically formed into clothes but must be stripped from her body to form these attacks - and when the player targets an enemy, red lips mark the enemy's chest; this led IGN to call the developing game a mix of "action and a great big helping of fan service".


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: At the 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Sega chose Penny Drake to model as Bayonetta after auditioning 100 women. The company then joined men's lifestyle website Maxim.com to run a contest to find women who looked like Bayonetta. The grand prize winner, Andrea Bonaccorso, announced on November 23, 2009, received an Xbox 360, a 50-inch plasma television, and a copy of the 360 version. Sega hired Japanese pop singer MiChi to perform "Something Missing", written for a "Bayonetta" commercial. The commercial, which has since been shown on the official Japanese website, touts the game as "" and features a model dressed as Bayonetta with a lollipop. In the U.S. and the UK, commercials have featured La Roux's "In for the Kill".


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: Demos of "Bayonetta" were released on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live in Japan on October 8, 2009, and internationally on December 3, 2009. The game was released on October 29, 2009, in Japan, and was later released in other regions in 2010: January 5 in North America, January 7 in Australia, and January 8 in Europe. An update for the PlayStation 3 version was released on January 28, allowing players to install the game on their hard drive, dramatically reducing load times.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: A 150-song, five-CD soundtrack was scheduled for a November 4 release. Another soundtrack CD, "Rodin's Selection", was created for inclusion with pre-ordered copies of the game. It comes packaged in a brown jacket styled as a menu from Rodin's bar "The Gates of Hell". Sega of Europe released an "∞ (Non-Stop) Climax Edition" in the UK, France, Spain, and Australia, which included the game, the "Rodin's Selection" tracks packaged in a black-and-red jacket, and an artbook. Pre-orders in Australia and "most European territories" included a replica of one of Bayonetta's "Scarborough Fair" guns.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: "Bayonetta: Witch of Vigrid", a book with pictures of Bayonetta and an "interview" with her, was released in Japan on October 22, 2009. By then, a "Bayonetta" theme had been made available for the Google Chrome browser. A song, "Reaping Beauty", by MC Lars and featuring Beefy, Random, Tina Root of Small Halo and SMP was included on the second re-release of Lars' album "21 Concepts (But a Hit Ain't One)". The song is inspired by "Bayonetta", and references the Bayonetta and many of the aesthetic and gameplay elements.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: On April Fools' Day 2017, Sega released "8-bit Bayonetta", also known as "Angel Land", for free on Windows, which was also available on the PlatinumGames' 404 page in 2015. While the game uses 8-bit era graphics and was simplified in gameplay, only allowing Bayonetta to jump and fire at a few enemies and considered part of the April Fools' Day pranks, players found several bits of pieces in the achievements that pointed to a countdown timer on Sega's website ending on April 11, 2017, as well as other data mining suggesting a possible port of the "Bayonetta" game to Windows. At the end of the timer, it was confirmed that "Bayonetta" was coming to Windows, supporting 4K graphics and other improvements from the original versions. A spokesperson for PlatinumGames said that they have become interested in porting more of their games to Windows, though the decision to do so has been a choice of their respective publishers; Sega has been supportive of personal computer releases as of late. PlatinumGames's development efforts to port the game to the Wii U aided in the completion of the Windows port.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: For "Bayonetta's" tenth anniversary, Sega announced a compilation for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The retail release includes a steelbook and "Bayonetta", alongside another PlatinumGames game "Vanquish", on a single disc, with support for 4K 60fps visuals for PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X users. Both games can also be purchased digitally either individually or collectively at a discount price. The compilation was released on February 18, 2020.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: The "Bayonetta Original Soundtrack" was released in Japan on November 4, 2009. The album contains five discs with 150 tracks used in the game, composed by Hiroshi Yamaguchi, Masami Ueda, Rei Kondoh, Takayasu Sodeoka, Norihiko Hibino, Takahiro Izutani, Yoshitaka Suzuki, Erina Niwa, and Naoto Tanaka. It was also released on the North American iTunes Store on the same day, spanning five Volumes in total. The North American release of the soundtrack does not include any version of "Fly Me To The Moon". Helena Noguerra provided the main vocals for the theme of Bayonetta.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: An anime film, , was directed by Fuminori Kizaki and produced by Gonzo, with screenplay by Mitsutaka Hirota and character designs by Ai Yokoyama. The film was announced at Tokyo Game Show 2013 and released in ten Japanese theaters for two weeks on November 23, 2013. It was released on Blu-ray Disc and DVD in Japan on January 24, 2014. A manga adaptation illustrated by Mizuki Sakakibara was published in two parts in Kodansha's "Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine" on November 9, 2013, and December 9, 2013, respectively.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: Critics generally lauded the graphical presentation and Bayonetta. Cam Shea of "IGN" Australia said in March 2009 that "Bayonetta" looked "stunning", and called Bayonetta their "new favourite video game character ever". They compared her to "Devil May Cry" protagonist Dante, with his "playfulness and versatility", but with "some of the most visually inventive combat" they've seen. Similarly, "GameSpy"'s Gerald Villoria praised the game in July that year as highly original to the point that it could end up like the poor-selling "Ōkami" (another Kamiya-directed game) because "the premise, the characters, the action sequences" were different from anything he had ever played, and called its lead a "constantly moving", "remarkably multi-faceted" character "presented in an ultra-stylish way".


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions in general were also commented on. A few days before "Bayonetta" release, Japanese gaming publication "Famitsu" awarded the Xbox 360 version a perfect 40 out of 40. The PlayStation 3 version received a slightly lower rating, criticized for its lesser visual quality, frame rate and control problems compared to the Xbox 360 version. At the 2009 Tokyo Game Show, Daniel Feit of "Wired News" played both versions and felt that while the 360 version was "a little brighter and more colorful", the PS3 version's cutscenes resembled "watching a movie through a sepia filter". "GameSpot"s video review lamented duller graphics and inconsistent frame rates for its PS3 port. 1UP's staff again played a PS3 version for 15 minutes on the weekend of August 31 that year, at PlatinumGames' "Feel Bayonetta" event. They said that it "was very blurry" compared to a 360 version displayed there, and that its frame rate "was all over the place", and as a result, it was "often hard to keep track of the action [in one scene]". Ryan Clements of "IGN" said that while the PS3 version was "still a fun game", it had "a lot of problems", mainly being "the excessive slowdown and loading".


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: The gameplay received general praise from critics. Matt Leone of "1UP.com" said of the pre-release version of the game's PS3 port that when he discovered he could "hold down the final button in the string to continuously fire gunshots" he observed that it looked "incredibly cool when you kick someone and then keep your leg pointed at their face". "Edge" awarded the game a score of 10 out of 10, praising the game's combat system for both having depth and being able to be learnt easily. "Edge" singled out the upgrade from Normal to Hard difficulties as the point where the game transitions from "the great to the legendary", concluding that it was "difficult to recall another third-person actioner" that felt "so worth mastering". "GamesRadar"'s Nathan Irvine also said that the game nailed "the epic scale of everything" that unfolded in front of the player and "manner in which it's delivered", believed it was better than "God of War Collection", "Devil May Cry 4", and "Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2", and praised its "superb action" and humor. However, he said the only time its plot made sense was "right at the end", and complained about some of the game's "insanely frustrating" Quick Time Events (QTEs). Staff at "GameSpot" UK labelled the "Witch Time" mechanic a "cool move" and one of the two boss battles they fought were "pretty intense", and said that it was "easy to see the similarities" between the game and "Devil May Cry". They also opined that "rampant violence and sexism" was common in the game. One comment in regards to the third person perspective was from IGN UK's Martin Robinson, who said that it was not ""Devil May Cry", "Ninja Gaiden" or "God of War"" that served as the game's best point of reference but rather ""Super Mario Galaxy"" - he commented on how "Bayonetta," like "Galaxy", "loves to tinker with the player's sense of perspective". Daniel Feit found the game's commands easy to learn and perform, but criticized the camera for focusing "on her and the wall" instead of "the enemies cornering her" and felt that some of her "Wicked Weave" attacks could "also obscure the action". Clements labelled its voice work "a bit campy but still extremely enjoyable", but said the game's plot was "all over the place" and was not as well told as "game stories like "Mass Effect" and "Uncharted"". However, "Gamearena" felt that the gameplay would not appeal to many, commenting that "Devil May Cry" was seen by many to be "too campy and over-the-top" and "Bayonetta" made it look "monochrome".


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: The game in general was praised by "Eurogamer", who commented that the game exemplified "so much of what commentators claim has died in the Japanese game industry" and said that "Bayonetta" was a "blast of creative brilliance, both technically accomplished, strategically deep and infused with rare imagination". But the Associated Press review opined that the game """would have blown [them] away 15 years ago" and felt that "Bayonetta" did not give the player "anything to do except fight".


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: Daan Koopman at Nintendo World Report, reviewing the Wii U version, rated the game an 8/10, stating that "Bayonetta" was "still a glorious action game" and that "time has not really changed that one bit". He also praised the addition of the Nintendo-themed costumes, for their humor and functions.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: The game was nominated for the Freedom Tower Award for Best Remake as part of the "Bayonetta 1 and Bayonetta 2 Collection" at the New York Game Awards.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: "Bayonetta" was one of twelve games to receive a 2009 Japan Game Awards "Future Division" award at the 2009 Tokyo Game Show.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: Sinobi, a Japanese blog known for its early sales data, reported that "Bayonetta" sold 138,000 copies—93,000 for the PS3 and 45,000 for the 360—on its day of release in the country. Media Create reported the PS3 version sold 135,242 copies and was the top-selling game during its week of release there, while the 360 version sold 64,325 copies and charted at number seven. Phil Elliott of GamesIndustry.biz called the 360 version's lower sales figures "a very strong performance for the Microsoft platform, relative to installed base". The two releases fell to number eight and number 15 respectively the following week. By March 31, 2010, "Bayonetta" sold 1.35 million units worldwide. In a 2013 interview with Polygon, PlatinumGames' president Tatsuya Minami said "Bayonetta" was their best-selling game but that the sales did not beat their expectations. By the time of its Wii U port, the game had sold over 2 million units across Xbox 360 and PS3.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: About a month after its release on Windows, Sega Europe's Vice President of Publishing John Clark said that the Windows version had sold more than 170,000 units, and that Sega was "really happy" about this performance.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: A sequel, "Bayonetta 2", was announced in September 2012 as a Wii U game to be published by Nintendo. The game, released in Japan in September 2014 and in North America and Europe in December 2014, features a port of the original "Bayonetta", which adds costumes based on Nintendo properties including "Super Mario", "The Legend of Zelda", "Star Fox" and "Metroid", as well as touch screen controls and dual audio tracks.


title: Bayonetta (video game)

text: Another sequel, "Bayonetta 3", was announced during the Game Awards 2017 in December as a Nintendo Switch game, alongside the announcement of Switch ports for the previous two games.


title: 2007 NFL Draft

text: The 2007 National Football League Draft was the 72nd annual meeting of National Football League (NFL) franchises to select newly eligible American football players. It took place at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, New York, on April 28 and April 29, 2007. The draft was televised for the 28th consecutive year on ESPN and ESPN2. The NFL Network also broadcast coverage of the event, its second year doing so. There were 255 draft selections: 223 regular selections (instead of the typical 224) and 32 compensatory selections. A supplemental draft was also held after the regular draft and before the regular season. This was the first draft presided over by new NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.


title: 2007 NFL Draft

text: The first round was the longest in the history of the NFL draft, lasting six hours, eight minutes. One of the big stories of the draft was the fall of Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn. Quinn had been projected as a potential first overall pick in early mock drafts and had been invited to attend the draft in person, but he wasn't selected until the 22nd pick in the first round by the Cleveland Browns, who acquired the pick in a trade with the Dallas Cowboys. LSU quarterback JaMarcus Russell was selected first overall by the Oakland Raiders after he had replaced Quinn as the projected first selection among most analysts following his performance in the 2007 Sugar Bowl against Quinn and Notre Dame. Russell is considered by many as one of the biggest draft busts in NFL history, and was out of the NFL after only three seasons. Quinn also had a largely unsuccessful pro career.


title: 2007 NFL Draft

text: Those selections notwithstanding, "Bleacher Report" named the 2007 draft class the "greatest draft class in the last 25 years" in 2012 due to the heavy volume of reliable starters, as well as players selected that are now widely regarded as future Hall of Famers, such as Patrick Willis, Darrelle Revis, Marshawn Lynch, and Marshal Yanda; first round selections Calvin Johnson, Joe Thomas, and Adrian Peterson are widely regarded as being among the greatest to ever play at their respective positions.


title: 2007 NFL Draft

text: For each player selected in the supplemental draft, the selecting team forfeits its pick in that round in the draft of the following season.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The People's Party ( ; known mostly by its acronym, PP ) is a conservative and Christian-democratic political party in Spain.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The People's Party was a 1989 re-foundation of People's Alliance (AP), a party led by former minister of the dictatorship Manuel Fraga and founded back in 1976 as alliance of post-Francoist proto-parties. The new party combined the conservative AP with several small Christian democratic and liberal parties (the party call this fusion of views "the Reformist Centre"). In 2002, Manuel Fraga received the honorary title of "Founding Chairman". The party's youth organization is New Generations of the People's Party of Spain (NNGG).


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The PP is a member of the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), and in the European Parliament its 16 MEPs sit in the EPP Group. The PP is also a member of the Centrist Democrat International and the International Democrat Union. The PP was also one of the founding organizations of the Budapest-based Robert Schuman Institute for Developing Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: On 24 May 2018, the National Court found that the PP profited from the illegal kickbacks-for-contracts scheme of the Gürtel case, confirming the existence of an illegal accounting and financing structure that ran in parallel with the party's official one since the party's foundation in 1989 and ruling that the PP helped establish "a genuine and effective system of institutional corruption through the manipulation of central, autonomous and local public procurement". This prompted a no confidence vote on Mariano Rajoy's government, which was brought down on 1 June 2018 in the first successful motion since the Spanish transition to democracy. On 5 June 2018, Rajoy announced his resignation as PP leader. On 21 July 2018 Pablo Casado was elected as the new leader of the PP. Under his leadership, the party was claimed to take a right-wing turn, including forging local alliances with the far-right Vox party. However, Casado later bet on breaking ties with Vox, and caused an unprecedented leadership crisis inside PP. After this there were rumors that Casado had ordered to spy on the popular president of the community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, for alleged irregularities, which collapsed popular support for PP according to opinion polls for future national elections, being resolved with the resignation of Casado and the appointment of the veteran Alberto Núñez Feijóo as the new leader, which improved the electoral expectations of the party.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The party has its roots in the People's Alliance founded on 9 October 1976 by former Francoist minister Manuel Fraga. Although Fraga was a member of the reformist faction of the Franco regime, he supported an extremely gradual transition to democracy. However, he badly underestimated the public's distaste for Francoism. Additionally, while he attempted to convey a reformist image, the large number of former Francoists in the party led the public to perceive it as both reactionary and authoritarian. In the June 1977 general election, the AP garnered only 8.3 percent of the vote, putting it in fourth place.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: In the months following the 1977 elections, dissent erupted within the AP over constitutional issues that arose as the draft document was being formulated. Fraga had wanted from the beginning to brand the party as a traditional European conservative party, and wanted to move the AP toward the political centre in order to form a larger centre-right party. Fraga's wing won the struggle, prompting most of the disenchanted reactionaries to leave the party. The AP then joined with other moderate conservatives to form the Democratic Coalition ("Coalición Democrática," CD).


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: It was hoped that this new coalition would capture the support of those who had voted for the Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD) in 1977, but who had become disenchanted with the Adolfo Suárez government. In the March 1979 general election, however, the CD received 6.1 percent of the vote, again finishing a distant fourth.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: At the AP's Second Party Congress in December 1979, party leaders re-assessed their involvement in the CD. Many felt that the creation of the coalition had merely confused the voters, and they sought to emphasise the AP's independent identity. Fraga resumed control of the party, and the political resolutions adopted by the party congress reaffirmed the conservative orientation of the AP.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: In the early 1980s, Fraga succeeded in rallying the various components of the right around his leadership. He was aided in his efforts to revive the AP by the increasing disintegration of the UCD. In the general elections held in October 1982, the AP gained votes both from previous UCD supporters and from the far right. It became the major opposition party to the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, securing 25.4 percent of the popular vote. Whereas the AP's parliamentary representation had dropped to 9 seats in 1979, the party allied itself with the small Christian democratic People's Democratic Party (PDP) and won 106 seats in 1982.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The increased strength of the AP was further evidenced in the municipal and regional elections held in May 1983, when the party drew 26 percent of the vote. A significant portion of the electorate appeared to support the AP's emphasis on law and order as well as its pro-business policies.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: Subsequent political developments belied the party's aspirations to continue increasing its base of support. Prior to the June 1986 elections, the AP joined forces with the PDP and the Liberal Party (PL) to form the People's Coalition (CP), in another attempt to expand its constituency to include the centre of the political spectrum. The coalition called for stronger measures against terrorism, for more privatisation, and for a reduction in public spending and in taxes. The CP failed to increase its share of the vote in the 1986 elections, however, and it soon began to disintegrate.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: When regional elections in late 1986 resulted in further losses for the coalition, Fraga resigned as AP chairman, although he retained his parliamentary seat. At the party congress in February 1987, Antonio Hernández Mancha was chosen to head the AP, declaring that under his leadership the AP would become a "modern right-wing European party". But Hernández Mancha lacked political experience at the national level, and the party continued to decline. When support for the AP plummeted in the municipal and regional elections held in June 1987, it was clear that it would be overtaken as major opposition party by Suárez's Democratic and Social Centre (CDS).


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: After the resignation of Manuel Fraga and the successive victories of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in the general election of 1982 and 1986 general election, the Popular Alliance entered a period of deep crisis. Fraga then took the reins and, at the Congress of January 1989, the constituent parties of the CP were folded into a new party, the People's Party. While the AP was the nucleus of the merged party, the PP tried to bill itself as a more moderate party than the AP. Fraga was the first chairman of the party, with Francisco Álvarez Cascos as the secretary general.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: On 4 September 1989, and at the suggestion of Fraga himself, José María Aznar (then premier of the Autonomous Region of Castile and León) was named the party's candidate for Prime Minister of Spain at the general elections. In April 1990, Aznar became chairman of the party. Fraga would later be named Founding Chairman of the People's Party.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The PP became the largest party for the first time in 1996, and Aznar became Prime Minister with the support of the Basque Nationalist Party, the Catalan Convergence and Union and the Canarian Coalition. In the 2000 elections, the PP gained an absolute majority.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: In August 2003, Mariano Rajoy was appointed Secretary General by Aznar. Thus, Rajoy became the party's candidate for Prime Minister in the 2004 general election, held three days after the 11 March 2004 Madrid train bombings, and which Rajoy lost by a big margin to Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) leader José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The PP under Mariano Rajoy opposed the PSOE government after the PP lost the general election in 2004, arguing that this victory was influenced by the Madrid bombings of 11 March 2004. At a national level, its political strategy has followed two main axes, both linked to Spain's delicate regional politics: Firstly, opposing further administrative devolution to Catalonia by means of the newly approved "Estatut" or Statute of Catalonia that lays out the powers of the Catalan regional government. Secondly, opposition to political negotiations with the Basque separatist organization ETA.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The People's Party has supported the Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT) with respect to the Government's actions concerning ETA's ceasefire, and was able to mobilise hundreds of thousands of people in demonstrations against Government policies that, in its opinion, would result in political concessions to ETA. Nevertheless, the end of the ceasefire in December 2006 ended prospects for government negotiations with ETA.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The prospect of increased demands for autonomy in the programs of Catalan and Basque parties, and Zapatero's alleged favouring of them, became a focus for the party's campaign for the March 2008 general election. Basque President Juan José Ibarretxe's proposal for a unilateral referendum for the solution of the Basque Conflict was another important issue.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The People's Party under Rajoy has an increasingly patriotic, or nationalist, element to it, appealing to the sense of "Spanishness" and making strong use of national symbols such as the Spanish flag. Prior to the national celebrations of Spanish Heritage Day, Rajoy made a speech asking Spaniards to "privately or publicly" display their pride in their nation and to honor their flag, an action which received some criticism from many political groups of the Congress.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: On 9 March 2008, Spain held a general election, with both main parties led by the same candidates who competed in 2004: 154 People's Party MPs were elected, up six on the previous election. However, the failure to close the gap with the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (which increased its number of MPs by five) provoked a party crisis, in which some internal groups and supportive media questioned the leadership of Rajoy, who was said to be close to resigning.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: After an impasse of three days, he decided to stay, and summoned a Party Convention to be held in June 2008 in Valencia. Speculation about alternative candidates erupted in the media, with discussion of the possible candidacies of Madrid Mayor Alberto Ruíz Gallardón and Madrid autonomous community Premier Esperanza Aguirre creating a national debate, calls for support and opposition from the media, etc.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: In the end neither one stood, with Gallardón explicitly backing Rajoy and Aguirre refusing to comment on the issue. The only politician who explicitly expressed his intention to stand was Juan Costa, who had been a minister under Aznar, but he was unable to garner the 20% support required to stand in the election because of the support Rajoy had received prior to his nomination. At the convention, Mariano Rajoy was re-elected chairman with 79% of the vote, and in order to "refresh the negative public image of the party", which had been a major factor in the electoral defeat, its leadership was controversially renewed with young people, replacing a significant number of politicians from the Aznar era.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: Among the latter, most resigned of their own accord to make room for the next generation, like the PP Spokesman in the Congress of Deputies Eduardo Zaplana, replaced by Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría; and the party Secretary-General Ángel Acebes, whose office was taken by María Dolores de Cospedal.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The convention also saw significant reforms to the Party Statutes, including the reform of election to the office of Party Chairperson, which was to be open to more competition; and linking that office to the party candidacy in the general elections, etc. María San Gil, Chairwoman of the Basque PP, left the party (even resigning from her Basque Parliament seat) over disagreements on the party policies towards regional nationalisms in Spain, and particularly over the deletion of a direct reference to the Basque Nationalist Party accusing them of being too passive and "contemptuous" regarding the armed Basque group ETA. Most PP members rallied behind San Gil at first, but when it became clear that her decision was final the national leadership called a regional party election, in which Antonio Basagoiti was chosen as the new Basque PP leader.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The PP won a clear victory in the 2011 general elections, ousting the PSOE from government. With 44.62% of the votes, the conservatives won 186 seats in the "Congreso de los Diputados", the biggest victory they have ever had. On the other hand, the centre-left PSOE suffered a huge defeat, losing 59 MPs. The PP, under Mariano Rajoy's leadership, returned to power after 7 years of opposition.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: In May 2018 the Audiencia Nacional declared the PP as guilty part "on a lucrative basis" in the Gürtel corruption scheme, understanding the organization profited from the corruption scheme "to the detriment of the State's interests". This led to a motion of no confidence to the prime minister Mariano Rajoy, led by socialist leader Pedro Sánchez, which eventually succeeded, thus forcing Rajoy to quit his position, and ultimately resign as the party's leader. His substitute would be determined in July 2018.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: Pablo Casado's victory in the July 2018 PP leadership election was considered a party swing towards the right.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: Polls indicated a continual decline in support for the PP in the lead-up to the April 2019 general election. Ultimately, the party achieved the worst result in its history, winning just 16.7% of the national vote – a decline of almost 16% from the 2016 election – and losing over half its seats. Though becoming only the second largest party in the Congress of Deputies, it held almost half as many seats as first placed PSOE, and was less than a single percentage point and just nine seats ahead of third placed Ciudadanos.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The party enjoyed a partial revival in 2019 European elections, winning 20.15% of votes. The party increased its support in the November 2019 election, scoring 20.82% of votes and electing 89 deputies and 83 senators.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: After a few months of confrontation between the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and the leadership of the national branch of the party, on 16 February 2022, information appeared about an alleged payment (in the form of a commission) of Díaz Ayuso's brother for health material and also about alleged spying on the president's family by the party leadership through the City Council of Madrid. The president herself accused in an appearance the following day the national leadership of the PP of wanting to destroy her politically. That afternoon, the secretary general, Teodoro García Egea, appeared to deny all the information related to the attempt to spy on the president's entourage; in this appearance, Egea informed of the opening of an informative file on the actions of the president of Madrid, which was closed the following day, considering the documentation provided valid. A few hours later, that same day, Ángel Carromero, a trusted person of the Mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, resigned after the release of some audios in which one of the detectives claimed to have been contacted from the Empresa Municipal de la Vivienda y Suelo (Municipal Housing and Land Company).


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The following day, President Pablo Casado stated on the Cadena COPE radio channel that Díaz Ayuso should provide all the necessary documentation to clear doubts about his honorability, questioning at the same time his honesty by stating whether "it is logical to award a commission to your brother in April 2020, when 700 people were dying in Spain due to the pandemic".


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: This led to a schism in the leadership of the PP, in which regional leaders and popular leaders demanded political responsibilities and a change of leadership and responsibilities in the apparatus. On 22 February there was a cascade of resignations of senior party officials and the demand by the majority of territorial barons and the Popular Parliamentary Group for the holding of an Extraordinary Congress, in addition to the request for the resignation of the Secretary General, which took place that same day. Casado finally agreed to convene the National Board of Directors on 1 March to set in motion an Extraordinary Congress of the PP. Casado was subsequently replaced as leader by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the president of Galicia.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: Described as the main liberal-conservative party of Spain, political scientists Vít Hlousek and Lubomír Kopeček have observed that under the leadership of José María Aznar the party evolved into a conservative party with elements of Christian democracy and economic liberalism. It has also been described as Christian humanist and conservative liberal. On the other hand, sociologist Vicenç Navarro considered the PP a conservative-neoliberal coalition with a neoliberal economic policy.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The party supports the regional structure in autonomous communities enshrined in the Constitution of 1978, as well as the constitutional monarchy.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: When Spain first legalised same-sex marriage in 2005, the party was opposed to the same-sex marriage law. It did, however, support marriage-like civil unions for same-sex couples. The party organized demonstrations against the same-sex marriage law. After the law was deemed constitutional in 2012, the PP government announced that it would no longer seek the repeal of same-sex marriage. While the party has a strong socially conservative faction, some politicians from the People's Party now support same-sex marriage. Some PP regional governments have introduced legislation against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: In early 2009 a scandal involving several senior members of the party came to the public's attention. The Gürtel case resulted in the resignation of the party's treasurer Luis Bárcenas in 2009. The case against him was dropped in July 2011 but reopened the following year.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: The leader of the party in the Valencia region, Francisco Camps, stepped down in July 2011 because of a pending trial. He was accused of having received gifts in exchange for public contracts, but was found to be not guilty.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: In January 2013, the judges' investigation discovered an account in Switzerland controlled by Luis Bárcenas with 22 million euros and another 4.5 million in the United States. Allegations appeared in the media regarding the existence of supposed illegal funds of the PP, used for the undercover monthly payments to VIPs in the party from 1989 to 2009, including the former government presidents, Mariano Rajoy and José María Aznar. The existence of such illicit funding has been denied by the PP.


title: People's Party (Spain)

text: Judge Eloy Velasco instructing the Lezo Case in the Spanish National Court is investigating former President of the Community of Madrid, Ignacio González, former Work Minister, Eduardo Zaplana, Vice-councilor of the presidency of the Community of Madrid and implicated in Gürtel Case Alberto López Viejo, businessmen Juan Miguel Villa Mir (OHL) and PricewaterhouseCoopers among others for embezzlement of public funds to presumably finance People's Party (PP) campaigns in the Community of Madrid.


title: Family tree of the Greek gods

text: The following is a family tree of gods, goddesses, and other divine and semi-divine figures from Ancient Greek mythology and Ancient Greek religion.


title: Family tree of the Greek gods

text: Key: The names of the generally accepted Olympians are given in bold font.Key: The names of the twelve first-generation Titans have a green background.


title: Zadie Smith

text: Zadie Smith FRSL (born Sadie; 25 October 1975) is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, "White Teeth" (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She has been a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University since September 2010.


title: Zadie Smith

text: Sadie Smith was born on 25 October 1975 in Willesden to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and an English father, Harvey Smith, who was 30 years his wife's senior. At the age of 14, she changed her name from Sadie to Zadie.


title: Zadie Smith

text: Smith's mother grew up in Jamaica and emigrated to England in 1969. Smith's parents divorced when she was a teenager. She has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers (one is the rapper and stand-up comedian Doc Brown, and the other is the rapper Luc Skyz). As a child, Smith was fond of tap dancing, and in her teenage years, she considered a career in musical theatre. While at university, Smith earned money as a jazz singer, and wanted to become a journalist. Despite earlier ambitions, literature emerged as her principal interest.


title: Zadie Smith

text: Smith attended the local state schools, Malorees Junior School and Hampstead Comprehensive School, then King's College, Cambridge, where she studied English literature. In an interview with "The Guardian" in 2000, Smith corrected a newspaper assertion that she left Cambridge with a double First. "Actually, I got a Third in my Part Ones", she said. She graduated with upper second-class honours. While at university Smith auditioned unsuccessfully for the Cambridge Footlights.


title: Zadie Smith

text: At Cambridge, Smith published a number of short stories in a collection of new student writing called "The Mays Anthology". They attracted the attention of a publisher, who offered her a contract for her first novel. Smith decided to contact a literary agent and was taken on by A. P. Watt. Smith returned to guest-edit the anthology in 2001.


title: Zadie Smith

text: Smith's début novel "White Teeth" was introduced to the publishing world in 1997 before it was completed. On the basis of a partial manuscript, an auction for the rights was begun, which was won by Hamish Hamilton. Smith completed "White Teeth" during her final year at the University of Cambridge. Published in 2000, the novel immediately became a best-seller and received much acclaim. It was praised internationally and won a number of awards, among them the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Betty Trask Award. The novel was adapted for television in 2002. In July 2000, Smith's debut was also the subject for discussion in a controversial essay of literary criticism by James Wood entitled "Human, All Too Inhuman", where Wood critiques the novel as part of a contemporary genre of hysterical realism where "‘[i]nformation has become the new character" and human feeling is absent from contemporary fiction. In an article for "The Guardian" in October 2001, Smith responded to the criticism by agreeing with the accuracy of the term and that she agreed with Wood's underlying argument that "any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped". However, she rejected her debut being categorised alongside major authors such as David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie, and Don DeLillo and the dismissal of their own innovations on the basis of being hysterical realism. Responding earnestly to Wood's concerns about contemporary literature and culture, Smith describes her own anxieties as a writer and argued that fiction should be "not a division of head and heart, but the useful employment of both".


title: Zadie Smith

text: Smith served as writer-in-residence at the ICA in London and subsequently published, as editor, an anthology of sex writing, "Piece of Flesh", as the culmination of this role.


title: Zadie Smith

text: Smith's second novel, "The Autograph Man", was published in 2002 and was a commercial success, although it was not as well received by critics as "White Teeth".


title: Zadie Smith

text: After the publication of "The Autograph Man", Smith visited the United States as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She started work on a still-unreleased book of essays, "The Morality of the Novel" (a.k.a. "Fail Better"), in which she considers a selection of 20th-century writers through the lens of moral philosophy. Some portions of this book presumably appear in the essay collection "Changing My Mind", published in November 2009.


title: Zadie Smith

text: Smith's third novel, "On Beauty", was published in September 2005. It is set largely in and around Greater Boston. It attracted more acclaim than "The Autograph Man": it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.


title: Zadie Smith

text: Later in the same year, Smith published "Martha and Hanwell", a book that pairs two short stories about two troubled characters, originally published in "Granta" and "The New Yorker" respectively. Penguin published "Martha and Hanwell" with a new introduction by the author as part of their pocket series to celebrate their 70th birthday. The first story, "Martha, Martha", deals with Smith's familiar themes of race and postcolonial identity, while "Hanwell in Hell" is about a man struggling to cope with the death of his wife. In December 2008 she guest-edited the BBC Radio 4 "Today" programme.


title: Zadie Smith

text: After teaching fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts, Smith joined New York University as a tenured professor of fiction in 2010.


title: Zadie Smith

text: Between March and October 2011, Smith was the monthly New Books reviewer for "Harper's Magazine". She is also a frequent contributor to "The New York Review of Books". In 2010, "The Guardian" newspaper asked Smith for her "10 rules for writing fiction". Among them she declared: "Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied."


title: Zadie Smith

text: Smith's novel "NW" was published in 2012. It is set in the Kilburn area of north-west London, the title being a reference to the local postcode, NW6. "NW" was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction. "NW" was made into a BBC television film directed by Saul Dibb and adapted by Rachel Bennette. Starring Nikki Amuka-Bird and Phoebe Fox, it was broadcast on BBC Two on 14 November 2016.


title: Zadie Smith

text: In 2015 it was announced that Smith, along with her husband Nick Laird, was writing the screenplay for a science fiction movie to be directed by French filmmaker Claire Denis. Smith later said that her involvement had been overstated and that she had simply helped to polish the English dialogue for the film.


title: Zadie Smith

text: Smith's fifth novel, "Swing Time", was published in November 2016. It drew inspiration from Smith's childhood love of tap dancing. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017.


title: Zadie Smith

text: Smith is a contributor to Margaret Busby's 2019 anthology "New Daughters of Africa" (as is her mother Yvonne Bailey-Smith).


title: Zadie Smith

text: Smith's first collection of short stories, "Grand Union", was published on 8 October 2019. In 2020 she published six essays in a collection entitled "Intimations", the royalties from which she said she would be donating to the Equal Justice Initiative and New York’s COVID-19 emergency relief fund.


title: Zadie Smith

text: In 2021, Smith debuted her first play, "The Wife of Willesden", which she wrote after learning that her borough in London, Brent, had been selected in 2018 as the 2020 London's Borough of Culture. As the most famous current writer from Brent, Zadie was the natural choice to author the piece. She chose to adapt the Wife of Bath's Tale in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, recalling how she had translated Chaucer into contemporary English at Oxford. The retelling replaces the pilgrimage with a pub crawl set in contemporary London, with the Wife of Bath becoming Alvita, a Jamaican-born British woman in her mid-50's who challenges her Auntie P's traditional Christian views on sex and marriage. Like the original tale, Alvita is a woman who has had five husbands, with her experiences with them ranging from pleasant to traumatic. The majority of the piece is spent on her talking to the people in the pub, much like how the Wife of Bath's prologue is longer than the tale itself. To her, Alvita's voice is a common one she heard growing up in Brent, and thus writing this play was a natural choice for the festival. The tale itself is set in 17th century Jamaica, where a man guilty of rape is brought before the Queen, who decrees that his punishment is to go and find what women truly desire.


title: Zadie Smith

text: Smith met Nick Laird at Cambridge University. They married in 2004 in King's College Chapel, Cambridge. Smith dedicated "On Beauty" to "my dear Laird". She also uses his name in passing in "White Teeth": "An' all the good-lookin' men, all the "rides" like your man Nicky Laird, they're all dead."


title: Zadie Smith

text: The couple lived in Rome, Italy, from November 2006 to 2007, and lived in New York City and Queen's Park, London for about 10 years before relocating to Kilburn, London in 2020. They have two children.


title: Zadie Smith

text: Smith describes herself as "unreligious", and was not raised in a religion, although retains a "curiosity" about the role religion plays in others' lives. In an essay exploring humanist and existentialist views of death and dying, Smith characterises her worldview as that of a "sentimental humanist".


title: Zadie Smith

text: She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002. In a 2004 BBC poll of cultural researchers, Smith was named among the top twenty most influential people in British culture.


title: Zadie Smith

text: In 2003, she was included on "Granta's" list of 20 best young authors, and was also included in the 2013 list. She joined New York University's Creative Writing Program as a tenured professor on 1 September 2010. Smith has won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2006 and her novel "White Teeth" was included in "Time" magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty is a comic opera in two acts, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. Its official premiere was at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York City on 31 December 1879, where it was well received by both audiences and critics. Its London debut was on 3 April 1880, at the Opera Comique, where it ran for 363 performances.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: The story concerns Frederic, who, having completed his 21st year, is released from his apprenticeship to a band of tender-hearted pirates. He meets the daughters of Major-General Stanley, including Mabel, and the two young people fall instantly in love. Frederic soon learns, however, that he was born on the 29th of February, and so, technically, he has a birthday only once each leap year. His indenture specifies that he remain apprenticed to the pirates until his "twenty-first birthday", meaning that he must serve for another 63 years. Bound by his own sense of duty, Frederic's only solace is that Mabel agrees to wait for him faithfully.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: "Pirates" was the fifth Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration and introduced the much-parodied "Major-General's Song". The opera was performed for over a century by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in Britain and by many other opera companies and repertory companies worldwide. Modernized productions include Joseph Papp's 1981 Broadway production, which ran for 787 performances, winning the Tony Award for Best Revival and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical, and spawning many imitations and a 1983 film adaptation. "Pirates" remains popular today, taking its place along with "The Mikado" and "H.M.S. Pinafore" as one of the most frequently played Gilbert and Sullivan operas.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: "The Pirates of Penzance" was the only Gilbert and Sullivan opera to have its official premiere in the United States. At the time, American law offered no copyright protection to foreigners. After the pair's previous opera, "H.M.S. Pinafore", achieved success in London in 1878, approximately 150 American companies quickly mounted unauthorised productions that often took considerable liberties with the text and paid no royalties to the creators. Gilbert and Sullivan hoped to forestall further "copyright piracy" by mounting the first production of their next opera in America, before others could copy it, and by delaying publication of the score and libretto. They succeeded in keeping for themselves the direct profits of the first American production of "The Pirates of Penzance" by opening the production themselves on Broadway, prior to the London production, and they also operated profitable US touring companies of "Pirates" and "Pinafore". However, Gilbert, Sullivan, and their producer, Richard D'Oyly Carte, failed in their efforts, over the next decade, to control the American performance copyrights to "Pirates" and their other operas.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: Fiction and plays about pirates were ubiquitous in the 19th century. Walter Scott's "The Pirate" (1822) and James Fenimore Cooper's "The Red Rover" were key sources for the romanticised, dashing pirate image and the idea of repentant pirates. Both Gilbert and Sullivan had parodied these ideas early in their careers. Sullivan had written a comic opera called "The Contrabandista", in 1867, about a hapless British tourist who is captured by bandits and forced to become their chief. Gilbert had written several comic works that involved pirates or bandits. In Gilbert's 1876 opera "Princess Toto", the title character is eager to be captured by a brigand chief. Gilbert had translated Jacques Offenbach's operetta "Les brigands", in 1871. As in "Les brigands", "The Pirates of Penzance" absurdly treats stealing as a professional career path, with apprentices and tools of the trade such as the crowbar and life preserver.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: While "Pinafore" was running strongly at the Opera Comique in London, Gilbert was eager to get started on his and Sullivan's next opera, and he began working on the libretto in December 1878. He re-used several elements of his 1870 one-act piece, "Our Island Home", which had introduced a pirate "chief", Captain Bang. Bang was mistakenly apprenticed to a pirate band as a child by his deaf nursemaid. Also, Bang, like Frederic in "The Pirates of Penzance", had never seen a woman before and felt a keen sense of duty, as an apprenticed pirate, until the passage of his twenty-first birthday freed him from his articles of indenture. Bernard Shaw believed that Gilbert drew on ideas in "Les brigands" for his new libretto, including the businesslike bandits and the bumbling police. Gilbert and Sullivan also inserted into Act II an idea they first considered for a one-act opera parody in 1876 about burglars meeting police, while their conflict escapes the notice of the oblivious father of a large family of girls. As in "Pinafore", "there was a wordful self-descriptive set-piece for Stanley ["The Major-General's Song"], introducing himself much as Sir Joseph Porter had done ... a lugubrious comic number for the Sergeant of Police ... a song of confession for Ruth, the successor [to] Little Buttercup", romantic material for Frederic and Mabel, and "ensemble and chorus music in turn pretty, parodic and atmospheric."


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte met by 24 April 1879 to make plans for a production of "Pinafore" and the new opera in America. Carte travelled to New York in the summer of 1879 and made arrangements with theatre manager John T. Ford to present, at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, the authorised productions. He then returned to London. Meanwhile, once "Pinafore" became a hit in London, the author, composer and producer had the financial resources to produce future shows themselves, and they executed a plan to free themselves from their financial backers in the "Comedy Opera Company". Carte formed a new partnership with Gilbert and Sullivan to divide profits equally among themselves after the expenses of each of their shows.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: In November 1879, Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte sailed to America with a company of singing actors, to play both "Pinafore" and the new opera, including J. H. Ryley as Sir Joseph, Blanche Roosevelt as Josephine, Alice Barnett as Little Buttercup, Furneaux Cook as Dick Deadeye, Hugh Talbot as Ralph Rackstraw and Jessie Bond as Cousin Hebe, some of whom had been in the "Pinafore" cast in London. To these, he added some American singers, including Signor Brocolini as Captain Corcoran. Alfred Cellier came to assist Sullivan, while his brother François Cellier remained in London to conduct "Pinafore" there. Gilbert and Sullivan cast talented actors who were not well-known stars and did not command high fees. They then tailored their operas to the particular abilities of these performers. The skill with which Gilbert and Sullivan used their performers had an effect on the audience: as critic Herman Klein wrote, "we secretly marvelled at the naturalness and ease with which [the Gilbertian quips and absurdities] were said and done. For until then no living soul had seen upon the stage such weird, eccentric, yet intensely human beings ... [They] conjured into existence a hitherto unknown comic world of sheer delight." Gilbert acted as stage director for his own plays and operas. He sought naturalism in acting, which was unusual at the time, just as he strove for realistic visual elements. He deprecated self-conscious interaction with the audience and insisted on a style of portrayal in which the characters were never aware of their own absurdity but were coherent internal wholes. Sullivan conducted the music rehearsals.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: Sullivan had sketched out the music for "Pirates" in England. When he arrived in New York, however, he found that he had left the sketches for Act I behind, and he had to reconstruct the first act from memory, or compose new numbers. Gilbert told a correspondent many years later that Sullivan was unable to recall his setting of the entrance of the women's chorus, so they substituted the chorus "Climbing over rocky mountain" from their earlier opera, "Thespis". Sullivan's manuscript for "Pirates" contains pages removed from a "Thespis" score, with the vocal parts of this chorus altered from their original arrangement as a four-part chorus. Some scholars (e.g. Tillett and Spencer, 2000) have suggested that Gilbert and Sullivan had planned all along to re-use "Climbing over rocky mountain," and perhaps other parts of "Thespis". They argue that Sullivan's having brought the unpublished "Thespis" score to New York, when there were no plans to revive "Thespis", might not have been accidental. In any case, on 10 December 1879, Sullivan wrote a letter to his mother about the new opera, upon which he was hard at work in New York. "I think it will be a great success, for it is exquisitely funny, and the music is strikingly tuneful and catching." As was his usual practice in his operas, Sullivan left the overture for the last moment, often sketching it out and entrusting completion of "the details" to an assistant, in this case the company's music director, Alfred Cellier.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: "Pinafore" opened in New York on 1 December 1879 and ran for the rest of December. After a reasonably strong first week, audiences quickly fell off, since most New Yorkers had already seen local productions of "Pinafore". In the meantime, Gilbert and Sullivan raced to complete and rehearse "The Pirates of Penzance". The work's title is a multi-layered joke. On the one hand, Penzance was a docile seaside resort in 1879, and not the place where one would expect to encounter pirates. On the other hand, the title was also a jab at the theatrical "pirates" who had staged unlicensed productions of "H.M.S. Pinafore" in America. To secure the British copyright, a D'Oyly Carte touring company gave a perfunctory copyright performance of "Pirates" the afternoon before the New York premiere, at the Royal Bijou Theatre in Paignton, Devon, organised by Helen Lenoir, who would later marry Richard D'Oyly Carte. The cast, which was performing "Pinafore" in the evenings in Torquay, received some of the music for "Pirates" only two days beforehand. Having had only one rehearsal, they travelled to nearby Paignton for the matinee, where they read their parts from scripts carried onto the stage, making do with whatever costumes they had on hand.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: "Pirates" premiered on 31 December 1879 in New York and was an immediate hit. On 2 January 1880, Sullivan wrote, in another letter to his mother from New York, "The libretto is ingenious, clever, wonderfully funny in parts, and sometimes brilliant in dialogue – beautifully written for music, as is all Gilbert does. ... The music is infinitely superior in every way to the "Pinafore" – 'tunier' and more developed, of a higher class altogether. I think that in time it will be very popular." Shortly thereafter, Carte sent three touring companies around the United States East Coast and Midwest, playing "Pirates" and "Pinafore". Sullivan's prediction was correct. After a strong run in New York and several American tours, "Pirates" opened in London on 3 April 1880, running for 363 performances there. It remains one of the most popular G&S works. The London sets were designed by John O'Connor.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: The critics' notices were generally excellent in both New York and London. The character of Major-General Stanley was widely taken to be a caricature of the popular general Sir Garnet Wolseley. The biographer Michael Ainger, however, doubts that Gilbert intended a caricature of Wolseley, identifying instead General Henry Turner, uncle of Gilbert's wife, as the pattern for the "modern Major-General". Gilbert disliked Turner, who, unlike the progressive Wolseley, was of the old school of officers. Nevertheless, in the original London production, George Grossmith imitated Wolseley's mannerisms and appearance, particularly his large moustache, and the audience recognised the allusion. Wolseley himself, according to his biographer, took no offence at the caricature and sometimes sang "I am the very model of a modern Major-General" for the private amusement of his family and friends.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: On the coast of Cornwall, during Queen Victoria's reign, Frederic celebrates the completion of his twenty-first year and the end of his apprenticeship to a gentlemanly band of pirates ("Pour, oh pour the pirate sherry"). The pirates' maid of all work, Ruth, appears and reveals that, as Frederic's nursemaid long ago, she made a mistake "through being hard of hearing": Mishearing Frederic's father's instructions, she apprenticed him to a pirate, instead of to a ship's "pilot" ("When Frederic was a little lad").


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: The Major-General sits in a ruined chapel on his estate, surrounded by his daughters. His conscience is tortured by the lie that he told the pirates, and the girls attempt to console him ("Oh dry the glist'ning tear"). The Sergeant of Police and his corps arrive to announce their readiness to arrest the pirates ("When the foeman bares his steel"). The girls loudly express their admiration of the police for facing likely slaughter by fierce and merciless foes. The police are unnerved by this and leave reluctantly.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: The notices from critics were generally excellent in both New York and London in 1880. In New York, the "Herald" and the "Tribune" both dedicated considerable space to their reviews. The "Herald" took the view that "the new work is in every respect superior to the "Pinafore", the text more humorous, the music more elegant and more elaborate." The "Tribune" called it "a brilliant and complete success", commenting, "The humor of the "Pirates" is richer, but more recondite. It demands a closer attention to the words [but] there are great stores of wit and drollery ... which will well repay exploration. ... The music is fresh, bright, elegant and merry, and much of it belongs to a higher order of art than the most popular of the tunes of "Pinafore"." "The New York Times" also praised the work, writing, "it would be impossible for a confirmed misanthrope to refrain from merriment over it", though the paper doubted if "Pirates" could repeat the prodigious success of "Pinafore".


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: After the London premiere, the critical consensus, led by the theatrical newspaper "The Era", was that the new work marked a distinct advance on Gilbert and Sullivan's earlier works. "The Pall Mall Gazette" said, "Of Mr. Sullivan's music we must speak in detail on some other occasion. Suffice it for the present to say that in the new style which he has marked out for himself it is the best he has written." "The Graphic" wrote:


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: There were a few dissenting comments: "The Manchester Guardian" thought both author and composer had drawn on the works of their predecessors: "Mr. Gilbert ... seems to have borrowed an idea from Sheridan's "The Critic"; Mr. Sullivan's music is sprightly, tuneful and full of 'go', although it is certainly lacking in originality." "The Sporting Times" noted, "It doesn't appear to have struck any of the critics yet that the central idea in "The Pirates of Penzance" is taken from "Our Island Home", which was played by the German Reeds some ten years ago." "The Times" thought Gilbert's wit outran his dramatic invention, and Sullivan's music for the new work was not quite as good as his score for "The Sorcerer", which the "Times" critic called a masterpiece.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: The overture to "The Pirates of Penzance" was composed by Sullivan and his musical assistant Alfred Cellier. It follows the pattern of most Savoy opera overtures: a lively opening (the melody of "With cat-like tread"), a slow middle section ("Ah, leave me not to pine alone"), and a concluding allegro in a compressed sonata form, in which the themes of "How beautifully blue the sky" and "A paradox, a paradox" are combined.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: The score parodies several composers, most conspicuously Verdi. "Come, friends, who plough the sea" and "You triumph now" are burlesques of "Il trovatore", and one of the best-known choral passages from the finale to Act I, "Hail Poetry", is, according to the Sullivan scholar, Arthur Jacobs, a burlesque of the prayer scene, "La Vergine degli Angeli", in Verdi's "La forza del destino". However, another musicologist, Nicholas Temperley, writes, "The choral outburst 'Hail, Poetry' in "The Pirates of Penzance" would need very little alteration to turn it into a Mozart string quartet." Another well-known parody number from the work is the song for coloratura, "Poor wand'ring one", which is generally thought to burlesque Gounod's waltz-songs, though the music critic of "The Times" called it "mock-Donizetti". In a scene in Act II, Mabel addresses the police, who chant their response in the manner of an Anglican church service.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: Sullivan even managed to parody two composers at once. The critic Rodney Milnes describes the Major-General's Act II song, "Sighing softly to the river", "as plainly inspired by – and indeed worthy of – Sullivan's hero Schubert", and Amanda Holden speaks of the song's "Schubertian water-rippling accompaniment", but adds that it simultaneously spoofs Verdi's "Il trovatore", with the soloist unaware of a concealed male chorus singing behind him.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: Writing about patter songs, Shaw, in his capacity as a music critic, praised "the time-honored lilt which Sir Arthur Sullivan, following the example of Mozart and Rossini, chose for the lists of accomplishments of the Major-General in "The Pirates" or the Colonel in "Patience"."


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: This opera contains two well-known examples of Sullivan's characteristic combination of two seemingly disparate melodies. Jacobs suggests that Berlioz's "La damnation de Faust", a great favourite in Sullivan's formative years, may have been the model for Sullivan's trademark contrapuntal mingling of the rapid prattle of the women's chorus in Act I ("How beautifully blue the sky") in 2/4 time with the lovers' duet in waltz time. Jacobs writes that "the whole number [shifts] with Schubertian ease from B to G and back again." In Act II, a double chorus combines the policemen's dogged tune, "When the foeman bares his steel" and the soaring line for the women, "Go, ye heroes, go to glory". In adapting the four-part chorus "Climbing over rocky mountain" from "Thespis" for re-use in "Pirates", Sullivan took less trouble: he wrote only a single vocal line, suitable for soprano voices. Despite this, the number ends with another example of Sullivan's counterpoint, with the chorus singing the second melody of the piece ("Let us gaily tread the measure") while the orchestra plays the first ("Climbing over rocky mountain").


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: Sullivan set a particular vocal challenge for the soprano who portrays Mabel. The Sullivan scholar Gervase Hughes wrote, "Mabel ... "must" be a coloratura because of 'Poor wand'ring one!', yet 'Dear father, why leave your bed' demands steady beauty of tone throughout the octave F to F, and 'Ah, leave me not to pine' goes a third lower still." In "The Music of Arthur Sullivan" (1959), Hughes quoted four extracts from "Pirates", saying that if hearing each out of context one might attribute it to Schubert, Mendelssohn, Gounod or Bizet respectively, "yet on learning the truth one would kick oneself for not having recognised Sullivan's touch in all four." Hughes concluded by quoting the introductory bars of "When a felon's not engaged in his employment", adding, "There could never be any doubt as to who wrote "that", and it is as English as our wonderful police themselves."


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: Because the work was premiered in three different places (the Paignton performance and the full productions in New York and London), there are more variations in the early libretto and score of "The Pirates of Penzance" than in other Gilbert and Sullivan works. Songs sent from New York to the D'Oyly Carte touring company in England for the Paignton premiere were then altered or omitted during Broadway rehearsals. Gilbert and Sullivan trimmed the work for the London premiere, and Gilbert made further alterations up to and including the 1908 Savoy revival. For example, early versions depicted the Pirate King as the servant of the pirate band, and the words of the opening chorus were, "Pour, O King, the pirate sherry". In the original New York production the revelation by Ruth that the pirates are "all noblemen who have gone wrong" prompted the following exchange (recalling a famous passage in "H.M.S. Pinafore"):


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: Gilbert deleted the exchange in the 1900 revival, and the Chappell vocal score was revised accordingly. For the 1908 revival Gilbert had the pirates yielding "in good King Edward's name". Despite Helen Carte's repeated urging, Gilbert did not prepare an authorised version of the libretti of the Savoy operas.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: In its 1989 production, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company restored one of the original versions of the finale, which finishes with a variation of "I am the very model of a modern major-general", rather than with the customary reprise of "Poor wand'ring one", but in later revivals, it reverted to the more familiar text.


title: The Pirates of Penzance

text: "The Pirates of Penzance" has been one of Gilbert and Sullivan's most popular comic operas. After its unique triple opening in 1879–80, it was revived in London at the Savoy Theatre in 1888 and in 1900, and for the Savoy's repertory season of 1908–09. In the British provinces, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company toured it almost continuously from 1880 to 1884, and again in 1888. It re-entered the D'Oyly Carte touring repertory in 1893 and was never again absent until the company's closure in 1982. New costumes were designed by Percy Anderson in 1919 and George Sheringham in 1929 (who also executed a new Act I set). Peter Goffin created a new touring set in 1957.