Body swap appearances in media
Short stories and operas
Table:
Title	Author	Year	Method / Notes

Avatar	Théophile Gautier	1856	magic

New Bodies for Old	Jack Vance	1950	collected 1982 as Chateau d'If

The Great Keinplatz Experiment	Arthur Conan Doyle	1885	mesmerism

Icchapuran , Ichchhapuran ( Fulfilling the wish )	Rabindranath Tagore	1895

Lejana ( The Distances )	Julio Cortázar	1949	hug

Mefisto in Onyx	Harlan Ellison	1993

The Shadow Out of Time	H. P. Lovecraft	1936 ( cut ) 1939 ( restored )	psychic temporal transfer

The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham	H. G. Wells	1896

The Thing on the Doorstep	H. P. Lovecraft	1937	magic

The Gentleman in Black ( opera )	Frederic Clay and W. S. Gilbert	1870	magic

Happy Arcadia ( opera )	Frederic Clay and W. S. Gilbert	1872	magic

Somerset , the Scientific Monkey	Donald Bern ( Alfred Bernstein )	1942	mind transfer machine

Transformation	Mary Shelley	1830	supernatural ritual

Using the accompanying table and the textual context listed.

Solve the question: How many performances were played for an opera that was written by an author who was famous for The Pirates of Penzance ? Return your answer as JSON: {"answer": "YOUR ANSWER"}. Avoid adding external knowledge.

Avatar , first published in 1856 , is a Fantastique 19th century short story by French writer Théophile Gautier .
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier ( French : [ pjɛʁ ʒyl teofil ɡotje ] ; 30 August 1811 - 23 October 1872 ) was a French poet , dramatist , novelist , journalist , and art and literary critic . While an ardent defender of Romanticism , Gautier 's work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism , Symbolism , Decadence and Modernism . He was widely esteemed by writers as disparate as Balzac , Baudelaire , the Goncourt brothers , Flaubert , Pound , Eliot , James , Proust and Wilde .
John Holbrook Jack Vance ( August 28 , 1916 - May 26 , 2013 ) was an American mystery , fantasy , and science fiction writer . Though most of his work has been published under the name Jack Vance , he also wrote nine mystery novels . Vance won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1984 and he was a Guest of Honor at the 1992 World Science Fiction Convention in Orlando , Florida . The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made him its 15th Grand Master in 1997 and the Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted him in 2001 , its sixth class of two deceased and two living writers . Among his awards for particular works were : Hugo Awards , in 1963 for The Dragon Masters , in 1967 for The Last Castle , and in 2010 for his memoir This is Me , Jack Vance ! ; a Nebula Award in 1966 , also for The Last Castle ; the Jupiter Award in 1975 ; the World Fantasy Award in 1990 for Lyonesse : Madouc . He also won an Edgar Award for the best first mystery novel in 1961 for The Man in the Cage . A 2009 profile in The New York Times Magazine described Vance as one of American literature 's most distinctive and undervalued voices . He died at his home in Oakland , California on May 26 , 2013 , aged 96 .
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ DL ( 22 May 1859 - 7 July 1930 ) was a British writer . He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 when he published A Study in Scarlet , the first of four novels and more than fifty short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson . The Sherlock Holmes stories are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction . Doyle was a prolific writer ; other than Holmes stories , his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard , as well as plays , romances , poetry , non-fiction and historical novels . One of Doyle 's early short stories , J. Habakuk Jephson 's Statement ( 1884 ) , helped to popularise the mystery of the Mary Celeste .
Rabindranath Tagore FRAS ( /rəˈbɪndrənɑːt tæˈɡɔːr/ ( listen ) ; born Robindronath Thakur , 7 May 1861 - 7 August 1941 ) , [ a ] also known by his pen name Bhanu Singha Thakur ( Bhonita ) , and also known by his sobriquets Gurudev , [ b ] Kabiguru , and Biswakabi , was a polymath , poet , musician , and artist from the Indian subcontinent . He reshaped Bengali literature and music , as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries . Author of the profoundly sensitive , fresh and beautiful verse of Gitanjali , he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature . Tagore 's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial ; however , his elegant prose and magical poetry remain largely unknown outside Bengal . He is sometimes referred to as the Bard of Bengal . A Brahmo Hindu from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Burdwan District and Jessore , Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old . At the age of sixteen , he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ( Sun Lion ) , which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics . By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas , published under his real name . As a humanist , universalist , internationalist , and ardent anti-nationalist , he denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from Britain . As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance , he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings , sketches and doodles , hundreds of texts , and some two thousand songs ; his legacy also endures in the institution he founded , Visva-Bharati University . Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures . His novels , stories , songs , dance-dramas , and essays spoke to topics political and personal .
Julio Cortázar , born Julio Florencio Cortázar American Spanish : [ ˈxuljo koɾˈtasaɾ ] ( listen ) ; ( 26 August 1914 - 12 February 1984 ) was an Argentine novelist , short story writer , and essayist . Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom , Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in America and Europe . He is considered one of the most innovative and original authors of his time , a master of history , poetic prose and short story in general and a creator of important novels that inaugurated a new way of making literature in the Hispanic world by breaking the classical moulds through narratives that escaped temporal linearity . As the content of his work travels on the border between the real and the fantastic , it is often placed within the genres of magical realism and surrealism . He lived his childhood and adolescence and incipient maturity in Argentina and , after the 1950s , in Europe . He lived in Italy , Spain , Switzerland and France , where he settled in 1951 and composed some of his works .
Harlan Jay Ellison ( May 27 , 1934 - June 28 , 2018 ) was an American writer , known for his prolific and influential work in New Wave speculative fiction , and for his outspoken , combative personality . Robert Bloch , the author of Psycho , described Ellison as the only living organism I know whose natural habitat is hot water . His published works include more than 1,700 short stories , novellas , screenplays , comic book scripts , teleplays , essays , and a wide range of criticism covering literature , film , television , and print media . Some of his best-known work includes the Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever , his A Boy and His Dog cycle , and his short stories I Have No Mouth , and I Must Scream and 'Repent , Harlequin ! ' Said the Ticktockman . He was also editor and anthologist for Dangerous Visions ( 1967 ) and Again , Dangerous Visions ( 1972 ) . Ellison won numerous awards , including multiple Hugos , Nebulas , and Edgars .
The Shadow Out of Time is a novella by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft . Written between November 1934 and February 1935 , it was first published in the June 1936 issue of Astounding Stories . The story describes time and space travel by mind transfer . The premise is that a person in a given place and time can switch bodies with someone who is elsewhere or elsewhen . Other writers have re-used this concept in later works , such as drinking tea from Red Forest leaves in the 12 Monkeys ( TV series ) and long-range communication stones in the Stargate SG-1 television series . As with other Lovecraftian works , this story features blatantly alien beings that are n't simply variations on humans or other familiar terrestrial animals .
Herbert George Wells ( 21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946 ) was an English writer . He was prolific in many genres , writing dozens of novels , short stories , and works of social commentary , history , satire , biography , and autobiography , and even including two books on recreational war games . He is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called the father of science fiction , along with Jules Verne and the publisher Hugo Gernsback . [ a ] During his own lifetime , however , he was most prominent as a forward-looking , even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale . A futurist , he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft , tanks , space travel , nuclear weapons , satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web . His science fiction imagined time travel , alien invasion , invisibility , and biological engineering . Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the Shakespeare of science fiction . Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption - dubbed Wellss law - leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as O Realist of the Fantastic ! . His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine ( 1895 ) , The Island of Doctor Moreau ( 1896 ) , The Invisible Man ( 1897 ) , The War of the Worlds ( 1898 ) and the military science fiction The War in the Air ( 1907 ) . Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times . Wells 's earliest specialised training was in biology , and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context . He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist , often ( but not always , as at the beginning of the First World War ) sympathising with pacifist views .
The Thing on the Doorstep is a horror short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft , part of the Cthulhu Mythos universe . It was written in August 1933 , and first published in the January 1937 issue of Weird Tales .
Howard Phillips Lovecraft ( US : /ˈlʌvkræft/ ; August 20 , 1890 - March 15 , 1937 ) was an American writer of weird fiction and horror fiction , who is known for his creation of what became the Cthulhu Mythos . [ n 1 ] Born in Providence , Rhode Island , Lovecraft spent most of his life within New England . He was born into affluence , which ended with the death of his grandfather . In 1913 , he wrote a critical letter to a pulp magazine that ultimately led to his involvement in pulp fiction . During the interwar period , he wrote and published stories that focused on his interpretation of humanity 's place in the universe . In his view , humanity was an unimportant part of an uncaring cosmos that could be swept away at any moment . These stories also included fantastic elements that represented the perceived fragility of anthropocentrism . Lovecraft was at the center of a wider body of authors known as The Lovecraft Circle . This group wrote stories that frequently shared details between them . He was also a prolific writer of letters . He maintained a correspondence with several different authors and literary proteges . According to some estimates , he wrote approximately 100,000 letters over the course of his lifetime .
The Gentleman in Black is a two-act comic opera written in 1870 with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert and music by Frederic Clay . The musical comedietta opened at the Charing Cross Theatre on 26 May 1870 . It played for 26 performances , until the theatre closed at the end of the season . The plot involves body-switching , facilitated by the magical title character . It also involves two devices that Gilbert would re-use : baby-switching and a calendar oddity . Produced soon after Gilbert first met Arthur Sullivan , but before the two had collaborated , Gilbert 's first full-length comic opera , The Gentleman in Black , was based on the theatrically popular theory of metempsychosis . Gilbert and Frederic Clay had collaborated previously on a one-act opera , Ages Ago . The music was not published and is now lost . The piece was never revived in Gilbert 's lifetime , although modern performances have been given , some adapting Sullivan music . [ citation needed ] The libretto is included in Original Plays by W. S. Gilbert in Four Series , in the fourth volume in the series ( 1911 ) published by Chatto and Windus of London .
Frederic Emes Clay ( 3 August 1838 - 24 November 1889 ) was an English composer known principally for his music written for the stage . Clay , a great friend of Arthur Sullivan 's , wrote four comic operas with W. S. Gilbert and introduced the two men . While working as a civil servant in the Treasury department , Clay began composing seriously in the early 1860s . His first big success was Ages Ago ( 1869 ) , a short comic opera with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert , for the small Gallery of Illustration . Other pieces with Gilbert and others followed , and Clay turned to composing full-time after his father died in 1873 . That year , he composed a successful opera-bouffe version of The Black Crook for the Alhambra Theatre . Clay 's last piece with Gilbert was Princess Toto ( 1875 ) . He also composed two cantatas . His last two works were both successful operas composed in 1883 , The Merry Duchess and The Golden Ring . He then suffered a stroke that paralysed him at age 44 .
Sir William Schwenck Gilbert [ n 1 ] ( 18 November 1836 - 29 May 1911 ) was an English dramatist , librettist , poet and illustrator best known for his collaboration with composer Arthur Sullivan , which produced fourteen comic operas . The most famous of these include H.M.S . Pinafore , The Pirates of Penzance and one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre , The Mikado . The popularity of these works was supported for over a century by year-round performances of them , in Britain and abroad , by the repertory company that Gilbert , Sullivan and their producer Richard D'Oyly Carte founded , the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company . These Savoy operas are still frequently performed in the English-speaking world and beyond . Gilbert 's creative output included over 75 plays and libretti , and numerous short stories , poems and lyrics , both comic and serious . After brief careers as a government clerk and a lawyer , Gilbert began to focus , in the 1860s , on writing light verse , including his Bab Ballads , short stories , theatre reviews and illustrations , often for Fun magazine . He also began to write burlesques and his first comic plays , developing a unique absurdist , inverted style that would later be known as his topsy-turvy style . He also developed a realistic method of stage direction and a reputation as a strict theatre director . In the 1870s , Gilbert wrote 40 plays and libretti , including his German Reed Entertainments , several blank-verse fairy comedies , some serious plays , and his first five collaborations with Sullivan : Thespis , Trial by Jury , The Sorcerer , H.M.S . Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance . In the 1880s , Gilbert focused on the Savoy operas , including Patience , Iolanthe , The Mikado , The Yeomen of the Guard and The Gondoliers .
Happy Arcadia is a musical entertainment with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert and music originally by Frederic Clay that premiered on 28 October 1872 at the Royal Gallery of Illustration . It was one of four collaborations between Gilbert and Clay between 1869 and 1876 . The music is lost . The piece is a satire on the genre of pastoral plays in which the characters , who each wish that they could be someone else , have their wish granted , with unhappy results . Gilbert and Sullivan later produced a popular comic opera , Iolanthe in which two of the characters , Strephon and Phyllis , are Arcadian shepherds . Phyllis , like Chloe , is torn between two suitors . The character of Lycidas also anticipates the character of Archibald Grosvenor in Patience , who is cursed with perfect beauty .
Transformation is a short story written by Mary Shelley and first published in 1831 for The Keepsake . Guido , the narrator , tells the story of his encounter with a strange , misshapen creature when he was a young man living in Genoa , Italy , around the turn of the fifteenth century . He makes a deal with the creature to exchange bodies , but the creature does not reappear at the appointed time to take his own body back . Guido discovers that the creature is pretending to be him , kills it and therefore 'himself ' , and eventually awakens in his own body .
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley ( UK : /ˈwʊlstənkrɑːft/ , US : /-kræft/ ; née Godwin ; 30 August 1797 - 1 February 1851 ) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein ; or , The Modern Prometheus ( 1818 ) . She also edited and promoted the works of her husband , the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley . Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft . Shelley 's mother died less than a month after giving birth to her . She was raised by her father who was able to provide her with a rich if informal education , encouraging her to adhere to his own anarchist political theories . When she was four , her father married a neighbour with whom Shelley came to have a troubled relationship . In 1814 , Shelley began a romance with one of her father 's political followers , Percy Bysshe Shelley , who was already married . Together with her stepsister , Claire Clairmont , she and Percy left for France and travelled through Europe . Upon their return to England , Shelley was pregnant with Percy 's child . Over the next two years , she and Percy faced ostracism , constant debt and the death of their prematurely born daughter . They married in late 1816 , after the suicide of Percy Shelley 's first wife , Harriet . In 1816 , the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron , John William Polidori and Claire Clairmont near Geneva , Switzerland , where Shelley conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein .