DISINTERESTED CRITICISM.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2402, 16 December 1881, Page 3

DISINTERESTED CRITICISM.

Two farmers from Green country, Michigan, who were in Milwaukee with hogs, and who were stopping at the Stock Yards Hotel, went to see “ Hamlet ”at the Opera House. They sat, says an American paper, on a front seat, and the audience noticed all through the play that they were not pleased, and when they got into a horse car after the performance, those in the oar got a pretty good idea of what the trouble was. “ Well, Lige, how did it strike yon ?” said the sandy.whiskered one, as he bit oil a piece of navy plug and handed the plug back to his friend. “ Oh, it didn’t strike me. All I want is to live to get back to the tavern and find that red-headed hotel-keeper that told mo Hamlet was a burlesque opera, with can can girls. Call that a place of amusement ? I suppose a place of amusement is where a man goes to laugh. I don’t want nobody to charge mo a dollar to see a funeral procession and listen to a fellow dig a grave and sing comic songs. I tell you, Ezra, it don’t look right to see skulls thrown round on the stage. And as for diggin’ graves, there is a man in Monroe that can dig two graves to that fellow’s one. I tell you it just made me sick to see that poor crazy girl, Ofeely, taking on about her father that Gimlet killed with a scythe, and when them boys up in the loft begun to cheer I felt like going and kicking them all down stairs, and then saying my prayers. Any man that will make fun of a crazy girl ain’t fit to live. I tell you I felt so bad for that girl I was cussed glad when the hired girl came in, and said she was drowned.”

“ Hamlet was a bully, I thought,” said Ezra. “He could talk ’em all blind, and knew more than the whole lot. Lige, do you think he was crazy?” “Crazy, no. He was a fool. Say, Ezra, have a little sense now. Suppose your father was dead and your mother was married again to that fellow that looked like a saloon keeper, and some ghost should come howling around you, with pants made of tinfail, a mosquito bar blanket on, and a tin wash-basin on his head, and point at you with a tin dinner-horn, and tell you the saloon keeper caught your father asleep out in the sugar bush and poured pepper sauce in his ear and killed him, and told you go around gnashing your teeth for revenge, and snatching your mother bald-headed, wouldn’t you think it was a put-up job, and they wore playing you for a sardine ? Of course you would, and you would belt him one in the jaw, and tell the ghost to go and soak his head. Now wouldn’t you ? ’ “ Well, may be, Lige. But Hamlet played his part well, didn’t he ? ” “ Certainly. The young man did splendidly, considering the play he had, but I know school teachers in Green county that can write a better play than that during recess. Hamlet was no gentleman to treat that girl the way he did. He loved her, and she loved him, and then he went back on her, and jabbed her father, and set her crazy, and when ho happened to stumble on her funeral in the graveyard he wanted to get up a crying match with the girl’s brother, and jumped into the grave on coflln, and act up and put on style, and break up the funeral. Oh, got out. I don’t like that way of doing business. A man that haint got no more sand than that couldn’t get a job driving hogs for jme. What he ought to have done was to marry the girl, and any court in Wisconsin would have made him marry her or pay a fine. For funeral obsequies, ‘ Hamlet ’ is a good play, but give me Buffalo Bill. We get off here, Ez. Watch me kill that landlord when we get to the house. Egad, I can’t help thinking how confounded mean that Hamlet treated his mother. Why she had a right to get married again,”