What you’re seeing here are photographs from an early 1900s theatrical production about the mortal peril of tippling and consorting with card players. Look at Death in those pictures below. He loves getting hammered! Just check out his party face in the second-to-last snapshot! As the Historical Ziegfeld Group explains of these scenes:
In 1906 The Journal of the English Folk Song Society published a piece on the old English ballad “Death and the Lady.” Some enterprising female entertainer encountered the article and realized the story might be used as a great vaudeville piece about the evils of card play and alcohol […] Here Joseph Hall, the Brooklyn born photographer who had made a career on baseball pictures and theatrical production stills, captured the sequence of the action, providing a peculiarly detailed & rare view of the progress of a single vaudeville performance.
[Via Morbid Anatomy]
