af·ter·piece

(ăf′tər-pēs′)

A short comic piece performed after a play, especially during the 1700s and 1800s.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

afterpiece

(ˈɑːftəˌpiːs)

(Theatre) a brief usually comic dramatic piece presented after a play

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

af•ter•piece

(ˈæf tərˌpis, ˈɑf-)

n.

a short comic piece performed after a featured play.

[1770–80]

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

afterpiece - a brief dramatic piece (usually comic) presented after a play

piece - an artistic or literary composition; "he wrote an interesting piece on Iran"; "the children acted out a comic piece to amuse the guests"

exode - a farcical afterpiece in the ancient Roman theater

Mentioned in

References in classic literature

If we are to act, let it be in a theatre completely fitted up with pit, boxes, and gallery, and let us have a play entire from beginning to end; so as it be a German play, no matter what, with a good tricking, shifting afterpiece, and a figure-dance, and a hornpipe, and a song between the acts.

View in context

As in Garrick's afterpiece A Peep Behind the Curtain, or, Vie New Rehearsal (1767), a courtship plot moves the action of this meta-theatrical play forward.

THEATRE, CELEBRITY, AND CONTAGION: DAVID GARRICK'S 1742 DUBLIN VISIT AND JAMES R. PLANCHE'S GARRICK FEVER

While the young preacher assembles only a small audience in the local schoolhouse, addressing them soberly "on the welfare of their immortal souls," the Story-Teller, in the village theater, in the space between an ill-acted version of "the tragedy of Douglas" and some unnamed afterpiece, to a largely drunken audience led to expect some world-renowned performer, recites the hastily assembled tale called "Mr.

Supernal Loveliness and Fantastic Foolery: The Esthetic Dimension in Poe and Hawthorne

I didn't really understand what an "afterpiece" was in the theatrical life of England in Restoration or Georgian/Augustan times.

IAML Congress 2016 General Assembly: Tuesday 5 July and Friday 8 July Rome, Italy Auditorium Parco della Musica

(Alfred was Frangois's brother, and was his predecessor as Sullivan's assistant; moreover, he was later to compose the 1886 smash hit show Dorothy--a significant work that deserves an edition in its own right, if sufficient source material is extant.) After All first appeared as an afterpiece in the original run of H.M.S.

Music from the Savoy Theatre

In large part due to the skills of a variety of clowns and players, by the turn of the century the jig developed into "a short sung-drama that featured as an afterpiece to the main play in the open playhouses, and at times, it seems, as an interlude at bear-baitings" (1).

Roger Clegg and Lucie Skeaping. Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs: Musical Comedy on the Shakespearean Stage; Scripts, Music and Context

Aye, and to long for the afterpiece. Since the tragedy dragged, might she not divert herself with that well-bred man beside her?" (43).

Henry James's civil war stories: the homefront experience and war romance

In The Manager's Daughter, a metatheatrical afterpiece written especially for Jean Davenport by E.

An "unmanly and insidious attack": child actress Jean Davenport and the performance of masculinity in 1840s Jamaica and Newfoundland

The "Afterpiece" by Teresa Casal entitled "Painting with Words and Becoming Other People: Theatre and the Visual Arts in Molly Fox's Birthday and Authenticity--An Interview with Novelist Deirdre Madden" closes this ambitious and comprehensive volume on the relations between the different modes of representations and the arts contemplated from a socio-cultural and historiographical perspective.

Literature and the study of intermediality: a book review article on new work by Grishakova and Ryan and Carvalho Homem

This opened at Wallack's Lyceum on 24 December 1855, ran until 9 January, and then became a regular afterpiece. It was the main attraction at Wallack's once again in May 1856, then

Foreign constellations in a national drama: becoming American in Boucicault's Belle Lamar

In the playhouses of Elizabethan London dramatic jigs were established as the standard ending or afterpiece to more serious theatrical fare.

All singing, 'all dancing: sexually explicit jigs were a major part of the attraction of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and restoration stage, as Lucie Skeaping explains