The female parts were taken usually by boys, but
frequently by grown men, and when Juliet or Desdemona was announced, a
giant would stride upon the stage. There is a story that Kynaston, a
handsome fellow, famous in female characters, and petted by ladies of
rank, once kept Charles I. waiting while he was being shaved before
appearing as Evadne in "The Maid's Tragedy." The innovation of women on
the stage was first introduced by a French company in 1629, but the
audiences would not tolerate it, and hissed and pelted the actresses off
the stage. But thirty years later women took the place they have ever
since held; when the populace had once experienced the charm of a female
Juliet and Ophelia, they would have no other, and the rage for actresses
ran to such excess at one time that it was a fashion for women to take
the male parts as well. But that was in the abandoned days of Charles II.
Pepys could not control his delight at the appearance of Nell Gwynne,
especially "when she comes like a young gallant, and hath the motions and
carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have. It makes me, I
confess, admire her." The acting of Shakespeare himself is only a faint
tradition. He played the ghost in "Hamlet," and Adam in "As You Like It."
William Oldys says (Oldys was an antiquarian who was pottering about in
the first part of the eighteenth century, picking up gossip in
coffee-houses, and making memoranda on scraps of paper in book-shops)
Shakespeare's brother Charles, who lived past the middle of the
seventeenth century, was much inquired of by actors about the
circumstances of Shakespeare's playing.
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