SHAKSPERE AT THE TUILERTES.
THE Drury Lane and Covent Garden versions of Shakspere are rather in bad odour at present. But the worst of these " adapta- tions" of his dramas to Cockney comprehensions scarcely comes up to the " adaptation" of Hamlet to the taste of the Tuileries, which Macready has condescended to become a party to. Ham- let was presented to the Royal Family and Court of France ; the speech to the players, and Ophelia's funeral, being " by particular desire" omitted. The object of the former curtailment was, to leave Mademoiselle Plessy, " the most beautiful woman of the day," time to appear in the afterpiece and sing " When love at- tends the wedded pair "; and for the funeral was substituted " a plentiful distribution of ices and syrups." This was a new and original reading of the Queen's " sweets to the sweet." These mutilations were executed in an appropriate locale : we learn from the Times that " the theatre of the chateau is precisely the hall of the Natio-aal Convention," of guillotining memory.
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