How cruel Fortune, and how fickle, too, To crop the Method made for making you! Changes tho’ common, yet when great they prove, Make men distrust the care of Mighty Jove; Half made in thought (though not in fact) we find You bought and sold, but left poor H. behind. P. S.--Since so it is ne’er mind the silly trick, The pair will please, when Pierrot makes you sick. Who sold and who bought is a mystery, but the transaction did not change the theater to other uses, for the “Gazette” announces: “A ball at the play-house in Queen street on February 3 next. To begin at 6 o’clock.” In the paper for January 8-15, 1737, and in May of the same year: “At the request of the Ancient and Honorable Society of Free and Accepted Masons, at the theatre in Queen Street, on Thursday next, the 26th instant, will be performed a comedy, called ‘The Recruiting Officer,’ with a prologue, epilogue and song suitable to the occasion, to which will be added a new dance called ‘Harlequin,’ and the clown and the song, ‘Mad Tom’ in proper habiliments, by a person that has never yet appeared upon the stage.” This performance seems to have been a great success, for the next “Gazette” accords it this most extended notice: CHARLESTOWN, May 28. On Thursday night last “The Recruiting Officer” was acted for the entertainment of the ancient and honorable society of Free and Accepted Masons, who came to the Play House about 7 o’clock, in the usual manner, and made a very decent and solemn appearance; there was a fuller house on this occasion than ever had been known in this place, and the entered apprentice and masters songs, sung upon the stage, which were joined in chorus by the Masons in the pitt to the satisfaction and entertainment of the whole audience. After the play the Masons returned to the lodge at Mr. Shepheard’s, in the same order observed in coming to the Play House. Mad Tom’s song must have been taken from “King Lear,” and, if so, is the first recorded instance of the production of any of Shakespeare’s works on this continent. The most careful search has failed to find any mention of plays for some years, but a map of Charlestown dated 1738 marks the site of the theater on the south side of Queen, a little west of Church street, on the lot of land now occupied by the rear portion of the old Planters’ Hotel, within less than a hundred yards of the Huguenot and St. Philip’s Churches, and in October, 1743, a ball is advertised to take place at the theater in Queen street. A similar notice appears in the paper for November 19, 1774, and the next link is an advertisement in the “Gazette,” October 3, 1748, of a school “over against the Play House,” and the following extract from “an exhortation to the inhabitants of South Carolina,” written by a Quakeress, Sophia Hume, in 1748, and published in London in 1752.