Stuff and Moonshine

I don’t know if anyone still reads Robertson Davies, but there’s a great bit in Lyre of Orpheus where the characters, who have decided to reconstruct and mount a lost 19th-century opera, suffer a setback when they discover that a partial libretto exists, but that while the composer was trying to do a Romantic work about King Arthur, the librettist wanted a jolly panto and stuck Oberon, Titania, and Puck into the plot purely so that Puck could be played by an attractive young woman in tights. Oh, and Puck keeps irreverently referring to the fairy monarchs as “Tit and Nob.” It’s like Gilbert and Wagner in reverse:
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/rec.music.opera/QDIlXXHBsZQ/Ag7WTAPeoicJ