’Cent enjoyment,
Is just as great as any honest man’s,
Honest man’s.”
This sums up pretty fairly an affair at Sherborn a few days ago. Sung by the ordinary policeman chorus of any ordinary Gilbert and Sullivan revival, the sentiment would seem trite enough. Sung by the felonious themselves, by forgers, by the “enterprising burglars,” it takes on a keener significance. It comes home.
It was an amazed audience that sat in the chapel of the Women’s Prison at Sherborn, Mass., and listened to “The Pirates of Penzance,” presented by fifty-five of the two hundred women who are “doing time.” It was an audience which did not always get its cue as promptly as an audience should, for in several places where the Gilbert and Sullivan Company intended it should laugh it openly dabbed its eyes with handkerchief or blew nose violently.
In the first place, it had gasped over the grim humor of “The Pirates of Penzance” as presented by a set of offenders against property and public order anyway. It gasped again when a lusty opening chorus of attractive “pirates” demanded that somebody pour, oh, pour, the pirate sherry—for it was “sherry” that landed on a lot of them in Sherborn. And it could not for the life of it smile when the jolly pirates explained to it that,
Although our dark career
Sometimes involves the crime of stealing,
We rather think that we’re
Not altogether void of feeling.