This knight, too, was the first who introduced scenery on the stage. I will add (par parenthèse) that it was a priest who first suggested the levelling of the pit with the stage, for the purpose of masquerades and balls.
Prynne was not among those who fancied that morality would profit by the introduction of actresses. He had his misgivings as to the effects likely to be produced on the susceptible young gallants of his day. Touching the appearance of the French actresses at the Blackfriars Theatre, noticed above, he calls it “an impudent, shameful, un-womanish, graceless, if not more than w——ish attempt.” The fashion was, undoubtedly, first set by the court, and by no less a person than a queen. Anne of Denmark, wife of James I., acted a part in a pastoral. They who remember some of the incidents of the training she gave her son, the princely knight young Henry, will hardly think that Anne gave dignity to the occupation she temporarily assumed.
Mrs. Saunderson is said to have been the first regularly-engaged actress who opened her lips on the English stage. Had she and her compeers only half the charms which report ascribed to them, they must have afforded far more pleasure to audience and spectators than the “beautiful woman-actor,” Stephen Hamerton Hart, with his womanly dignity; Burt, with his odious female sprightliness; or Goffe, who was as hearty and bustling as old Mrs. Davenport. King Charles himself and his cavaliers, too, must have been especially delighted when they were no longer kept waiting for the commencement of a play, on the ground that the Queen was not yet shaved.
It is curious that there were some people not near so strait-laced as Prynne, who considered that public virtue would suffer shipwreck if actresses were permitted to establish themselves in the general favor. The opposite party, of course, went to an opposite extreme; and in 1672, not only were “Philaster,” and Killigrew’s “Parson’s Wedding,” played entirely by women, but one of the “Miss” Marshalls, gay daughter of a Presbyterian minister, on both occasions spoke the prologue and epilogue in male attire. “Philaster” is simply an absurd piece, which was rendered popular by Hart and Nell Gwyn; but with respect to Killigrew’s piece, it is so disgusting, from the commencement to the finale, that I can hardly fancy how any individuals, barely alive to their humanity, could be brought to utter and enact the turpitudes which Killigrew set down for them, or that an audience could be kept from fleeing from the house before the first act was over.
But the gallants could endure anything rather than a return to such effects as are alluded to by a contemporary writer, who, by way of introducing a female Desdemona, said in his prologue—
“Our women are defective and so sized
You’d think they were some of the guard disguised;
For, to speak truth, men act that are between
Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen;
With brow so large, and nerve so uncompliant,