WHEN THE LAST CURTAIN FELL.

Some Striking Instances of How Death Has Stepped Behind the Footlights and Claimed His Victims in Full View of Audiences Who Have Mistaken Real Tragedy for Play.

"Into Thy hands, O Lord! Into Thy hands!"

These words, inscribed on a card that was fastened to the cross of lilies sent by Queen Alexandra of England to be laid on the casket containing the body of Sir Henry Irving, were the last uttered on the stage by that famous actor. They are the last words of Becket, in Tennyson's drama of that name.

Though Irving did not die on the stage, the hand of death was upon him at the close of that last performance. He was scarcely more than outside the theater in Bradford, England, when he was stricken with syncope, and he died a few minutes after reaching his hotel.

There are a score of other cases on record in which death has appeared on the stage of a theater for the purpose of marking its victims.

It was a fateful irony that Signor Castelmary should be fatally stricken on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in the midst of the bright and romantic scenes of "Martha." A tragi-comedy if ever there were one!

Yet this overpowering mingling of the real and the unreal is by no means an unusual element of stage life. History records many instances of deaths on the stage; some of them the result of accidental violence, but by far the greater number caused by the sudden effect of overwrought emotions.

Sometimes death comes instantaneously; sometimes the blow is received from which recovery is impossible, and the actor lingers on with nothing but suffering and death before him. Both tragedy and comedy have been the scenes of actual death on the stage.

Peg Woffington, it will be remembered, was stricken with paralysis while playing Rosalind. She had gone through the entire play with a life and spirit which gave no sign of the weakening powers plainly evident to her companions on the stage, and had nearly concluded the epilogue:

"If I were among you, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me——"

Her last words on the stage had been spoken. Staggering off the scene, she fell apparently lifeless, and recovered only to live three long years of loneliness and retirement away from the work she loved.

But most wonderful of all was Edmund Kean's last night on the stage. He was playing Othello to his son's Iago at Covent Garden, and, worn out with physical and mental excess, barely managed to conceal his incapacity and weakness from the audience.

Reaching the great scenes of the third act, they proved too much for his waning powers, and uttering the words, "Othello's occupation's gone," he began the next line, but was unable to complete it, and fell into his son's arms, with the faint cry:

"God, I am dying! Speak to them, Charles."

He was carried to his home, where he died seven weeks later.

The story of the death of John Palmer, while acting in "The Stranger" at Liverpool, in 1798, offers an instance almost analogous to the death of Castelmary. He had gone on with his part into the fourth act, when, faltering in his lines, he fell prostrate before his companion actor and died while being carried off the stage. The story that he died while uttering the lines in an earlier act, "There is another and a better world," is a fiction which requires denial almost as often as the story of his death is repeated.

Others have met with accidental death in melodramatic scenes at the hands of their overzealous brother actors. Sometimes the actor does himself actual violence, and there are a few instances on record of the murder of actor by actor during the performance of a play.

Crozier, for example, was accidentally stabbed by a brother actor in "Sins of the Night," at the Novelty, in London, on August 10, 1896. In 1820 Mme. Linsky was fatally shot in a melodrama by a soldier super; and in 1891, at a school representation of "Romeo and Juliet," in Manchester, England, the youngster playing Tybalt killed Romeo in the quarrel scene.

In 1898 Miss Ethel Marlowe died from heart disease at the Knickerbocker, New York, during a performance of "The Christian." Her sister, Virginia Marlowe, in 1896, and her father, Owen Marlowe, in 1876, also died on the stage in view of the audience.