complete dress of the ancient prologue-speaker, is still retained in the play exhibited in Hamlet, before the king and court of Denmark.

An epilogue does not appear to have been a regular appendage to a play in Shakspeare's time; for many of his dramas had none; at least, they have not been preserved. In All's well that ends well, A MidsummerNight's Dream, As you like it, Troilus and Cressida, and The Tempest, the epilogue is spoken by one of the persons of the drama, and adapted to the character of the speaker; a circumstance that I have not observed in the epilogues of any other author of that age. The epilogue was not always spoken by one of the performers in the piece; for that subjoined to The Second Part of King Henry IV. appears to have been delivered by a dancer.

The performers of male characters frequently wore periwigs which in the age of Shakspeare were not in common use. It appears from a passage in Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, 1589, that vizards were on some occasions used by the actors of those days; and it may be inferred from a scene in one of our author's comedies, that they were sometimes worn in his time, by those who performed female characters. But this, I imagine, was very rare. Some of the female part of the audience. likewise appeared in masks.

Both the prompter, or book-holder, as he was sometimes called, and the property-man, appear to have been regular appendages of our ancient theatres.

The stage-dresses, it is reasonable to suppose, were much more costly in some playhouses than others. Yet the wardrobe of even the king's servants at The Globe and Blackfriars was, we find, but scantily furnished; and our author's dramas derived very little aid from the splendour of exhibition.

It is well known, that in the time of Shakspeare, and for many years afterwards, female characters were represented solely by boys or young men. Nashe, in a pamphlet published in 1592, speaking in defence of the English stage, boasts that the players of his time were "not as the players beyond sea, a sort of squirting bawdie come

dians, that have whores and common curtizans to play women's parts." What Nashe considered as an high eulogy on his country, Prynne has made one of his principal charges against the English stage; having employed several pages in his bulky volume, and quoted many hundred authorities, to prove that "those playes wherein any men act women's parts in woman's apparell must needs be sinful, yea, abominable unto christians." The grand basis of his argument is a text in scripture; Deuteronomy, xxii. 5; "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment:" a precept, which Sir Richard Baker has justly remarked, is no part of the moral law, and ought not to be understood literally. "Where," says Sir Richard, "finds he this precept? Even in the same place where he finds also that we must not weare cloaths of linsey-woolsey; and seeing we lawfully now wear cloathes of linsey-woolsey, why may it not be as lawful for men to put on women's garments?"

It may perhaps be supposed, that Prynne, having thus vehemently inveighed against men's representing female characters on the stage, would not have been averse to the introduction of women in the scene; but sinful as this zealot thought it in men to assume the garments of the other sex, he considered it as not less abominable in women to tread the stage in their own proper dress: for he informs us, "that some Frenchwomen, or monsters rather, in Michaelmas term, 1629, attempted to act a French play at the playhouse in Blackfriers," which he represents as "an impudent, shameful, unwomanish, graceless, if not more than whorish attempt."

Soon after the period he speaks of, a regular French theatre was established in London, where without doubt women acted. They had long before appeared on the Italian as well as the French stage. When Coryate was at Venice, [July, 1608,] he tells us, he was at one of their playhouses, and saw a comedy acted. "The house (he adds) is very beggarly and base, in comparison of our stately playhouses in England; neither can their actors compare with us for apparell, shewes, and musicke. Here I observed certaine things that I never saw be

fore; for I saw women act, a thing that I never saw before, though I have heard that it hath been some times used in London; and they performed it with as good a grace, action, gesture, and whatsoever convenient for a player, as ever I saw any masculine actor."

The practice of men's performing the parts of women in the scene is of the highest antiquity. On the Grecian stage no woman certainly ever acted. From Plutarch's Life of Phocian, we learn, that in his time (about three hundred and eighteen years before the Christian era) the performance of a tragedy at Athens was interrupted for some time by one of the actors, who was to personate a queen, refusing to come on the stage, because he had not a suitable mask and dress, and a train of attendants richly habited; and Demosthenes in one of his orations, mentions Theodorus and Aristodemus as having often represented the Antigone of Sophocles. This fact is also ascertained by an anecdote preserved by Aulus Gellius. A very celebrated actor, whose name was Polus, was appointed to perform the part of Electra in Sophocles's play; who in the progress of the drama appears with an urn in her hands, containing, as she supposes, the ashes of Orestes. The actor having some time before been deprived by death of a beloved son, to indulge his grief, as it should seem, procured the urn which contained the ashes of his child, to be brought from his tomb; which affected him so much, that when he appeared with it on the scene, he embraced it with unfeigned sorrow, and burst into tears.

That on the Roman stage also female parts were represented by men in tragedy, is ascertained by one of Cicero's letters to Atticus, in which he speaks of Antipho, who performed the part of Andromache; and by a passage in Horace, who informs us, that Fusius Phocæus being to perform the part of Ilione, the wife of Polymnestor, in a tragedy written either by Accius or Pacuvius, and being in the course of the play to be awakened out of sleep by the cries of the shade of Polydorus, got so drunk, that he fell into a real and profound sleep, from which no noise could rouse him.

Horace indeed mentions a female performer, called [H]

VOL. I.

Arbuscula; but as we find from his own authority that men personated women on the Roman stage, she probably was only an emboliaria, who performed in the interludes and dances exhibited between the acts and at the end of the play. Servius calls her mima, but that may mean nothing more than one who acted in the mimes, or danced in the pantomime dances; and this seems the more probable from the manner in which she is mentioned by Cicero, from whom we learn that the part of Andromache was performed by a male actor on that very day when Arbuscula exhibited with the highest applause.

The same practice prevailed in the time of the emperors; for in the list of parts which Nero, with a preposterous ambition, acted in the publick theatre, we find that of Canace, who was represented in labour on the stage.

In the interludes exhibited between the acts undoubtedly women appeared. The elder Pliny informs us, that a female named Lucceïa acted in these interludes for an hundred years; and Galeria Copiola for above ninety years; having been first introduced on the scene in the fourteenth year of her age, in the year of Rome 672, when Caius Marius the younger, and Cneius Carbo were consuls, and having performed in the 104th year of her age, six years before the death of Augustus, in the consulate of C. Poppæus and Quintus Sulpicius, A. U. C. 762.

Eunuchs also sometimes represented women on the Roman stage, as they do at this day in Italy; for we find that Sporus, who made so conspicuous a figure in the time of Nero, being appointed in the year 70, [A. U. C. 823] to personate a nymph, who, in an interlude exhibited before Vitellius, was to be carried off by a ravisher, rather than endure the indignity of wearing a female dress on the stage, put himself to death: a singular end for one, who about ten years before had been publickly espoused to Nero, in the hymeneal veil, and had been carried through one of the streets of Rome by the side of that monster, in the imperial robes of the empresses, ornamented with a profusion of jewels.

Thus ancient was the usage, which, though not adopted in the neighbouring countries of France and Italy, prevailed in England from the infancy of the stage. The prejudice against women appearing on the scene continued so strong, that till near the time of the Restoration, boys constantly performed female characters and, strange as it may now appear, the old practice was not deserted without many apologies for the indecorum of the novel usage. In 1659, or 1660, in imitation of the foreign theatres, women were first introduced on the scene. In 1656, indeed, Mrs. Coleman, the wife of Mr. Edward Coleman, represented Ianthe in the First Part of D'Avenant's Siege of Rhodes; but the little she had to say was spoken in recitative. The first woman that appeared in any regular drama on a publick stage, performed the part of Desdemona; but who the lady was, I am unable to ascertain. The play of Othello is enumerated by Downes as one of the stock-plays of the king's company on their opening their theatre in Drury Lane in April, 1663; and it appears from a paper found with Sir Henry Herbert's Office-book, and indorsed by him, that it was one of the stock-plays of the same company from the time they began to play without a patent at the Red Bull in St. John Street. Mrs. Hughs performed the part of Desdemona in 1663, when the company removed to Drury Lane, and obtained the title of the king's servants; but whether she performed with them while they played at the Red Bull, or in Vere Street, near Clare Market, has not been ascertained. Perhaps Mrs. Saunderson made her first essay there, though she afterwards was enlisted in D'Avenant's company. received tradition is, that she was the first English actress. The verses which were spoken by way of introducing a female to the audience, were written by Thomas Jordan, and being only found in a very scarce miscellany, I shall here transcribe them:

The

*

*" A Royal Harbour of Loyal Poesie," by Thomas Jordan, no date, but printed, as Mr. Malone believes, in 1662. Jordan was an actor as well as a poet.