Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, CompleteVarious
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
We must confess we approach a description of the third act with
diffidence. Such intense pathos, we feel, demands words of more sombre
soundink of a darker hue, than we can command. The third scene is, in
particular, too extravagantly touching for ordinary nerves to witness.
Mary Clifford is in bedFrench bedstead (especially selected, perhaps,
because such things were not thought of in the days of Mother Brownrigg)
stands exactly in the middle of the stagea chest of drawers is placed
behind, and a table on each side, to balance the picture. The lover
leans over the head, the mother sits at the foot, the father stands at
the side: Mary Clifford is insane, with lucid intervals, and is,
moreover, dying. The consequence is, she has all the talk to herself,
which consists of a discourse concerning the great governors, her
cruel mistress, and her naughty young master, interlarded with insane
ejaculations, always considered stage property, such as, Ah, she
comes! Nay, strike me notI am guiltless! Again, Villain! what do
you take me for?unhand me! and all that. Then the dying part comes,
and she sees an angel in the flies, and informs it that she is coming
soon (here it is usual for a lady to be removed from the gallery in
strong hysterics), and keeps her word by letting her arm fall upon the
bed-clothes and shutting her eyes, whereupon somebody says that she is
dead, and the prompter whistles for the scene to be changed.
In the last scene, criminal justice takes its course. Mrs. Brownrigg,
having been sentenced to the gallows, is seen in the condemned cell; her
son by her side, and the fatal cart in the back-ground. Having been
brought up genteelly, she declines the mode of conveyance provided for
her journey to Tyburn with the utmost volubility. Being about to be
hanged merely does not seem to affect her so poignantly as the
disgraceful drag she is doomed to take her last journey in. She swoons
at the idea; and the curtain falls to end her wicked career, and the
sufferings of an innocent audience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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