Definition of "afterpiece" []

• A short comic piece performed after a play. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "First used to supplement or preface a short three-act play so as to eke out a full evening's entertainment, the little play was known as either an "afterpiece" or a"
• "This was the strategic afterpiece of a country that had, in the 210 years from its founding in 1783 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, plotted and achieved a vertical and vertiginous rise from obscurity to global preeminence without the least precedent or parallel in the history of the world."
• "That this is so lends particular irony to the observations and predictions made by the reviewer for the Mirror of the Stage; or, New Dramatic Censor, who wrote in August 1823 that this drama would perhaps have done very well as an afterpiece; but there is not sufficient interest for"