AN AMUSING END TO A TRAGEDY.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XVI, Issue 73, 26 March 1881, Page 4

AN AMUSING END TO A TRAGEDY.

An amusing end to a tragedy took place at the Music Hall, Lancaster, on the 29th October. Mr E, Fletcher was playing Hamlet at tbe above Hall, before a large audience. The play went off in good style till the laßt scene, when Hamlet, who had to kill the King, stabbbed the unfortunate monarch, and threw him back in his chair. But to the horror and surprise of the melancholy Dane, he saw the throne-chair on which lay the corpse of his guilty uncle slowly wheel to the edge of the platform on which it had been placed, and in an instant toppled over, down went the King ot Denmark on bis head, up went the feet of the now struggling, Hying King, and vainly did the cnurtiers try to help him — he was wedged too fast in the chair. The audience roared with laughter, the actors chuckled, the musicians screamed. " Drop the curtain," said Hamlet. But the scene-shifter was too much taken up by the joke to obey the summons, (ill at last the audience, breathless with laughter, saw the drop-scene fall on one of thejmost; amußiog episodes ever seen on the stage. After a short interval the curtain again rose, and Hamlet triad to regain tbe sympathy of the audience, but the Qhosfr of the wicked King still cast his halo over the scene, and it was with a hard struggle Hamlet regained his composure, dying in the usual orthodox manner.