[218] Following the American production, Miss George played Divorçons in London.
[219] Laura Hope Crews was born at San Francisco.
[220] Besides Miss Russell, Miss O’Neil, Miss Stahl and Miss Crosman, these are some of the American actresses of the closing years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, who merit more notice than can be given them here, but whose achievements are recorded in the books named in the bibliography: Viola Allen, Julia Arthur, Blanche Bates, Amelia Bingham, Clara Bloodgood, Mrs. Leslie Carter, Rose Coghlan, Ida Conquest, Maxine Elliott, Virginia Harned, Isabel Irving, May Irwin, Mary Mannering, Clara Morris, Eleanor Robson, Effie Shannon, Mary Shaw and Blanche Walsh. Some in this list, like Miss Irwin, Miss Coghlan and Miss Shannon, are, happily, still active. And Miss Arthur announces her return to the stage.
[221] Rutland to Nethersole.
[222] 1629.
[223] Women acted in Italy as early as 1560, and actresses appeared in France probably not much later. The earliest French actress of whom there is definite record is Marie Vernier, who acted in Paris, in her husband’s company, in 1599. In Spain the practice of substituting boys and men in women’s parts seems never to have obtained. Going back to antiquity, it is to be noted that while the Greeks never tolerated actresses on their stage, in Rome occasional women players were by no means unknown.
[224] In the interim D’Avenant had ingeniously circumvented the restrictions placed by Cromwell’s government on the theatres, by devising a species of opera. They were really plays, in the grand style, modeled after Italian pieces, and with a musical accompaniment to take the curse off. In one of these, The Siege of Rhodes, performed in 1656, two women, Mrs. Edward Coleman and another, played Ianthe and Roxalana.
[225] Thomas Jordan’s prologue shows that the “boys” were now sometimes dangerously near middle age:
“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 bone so large, and nerve so incompliant,
When you call DESDEMONA, enter GIANT.”
“Old Chetwood tells a story which amply illustrates the absurdity of the ‘men-actresses.’ King Charles II, he says, coming to the theatre to see Hamlet and being kept waiting for some time, sent the Earl of Rochester behind to see what was causing the delay. He returned with the information that ‘the Queen was not quite shaved.’ ‘Odsfish!’ said the King. ‘I beg her Majesty’s pardon. We’ll wait till her barber has done with her.’”—Lowe’s Betterton.