[1209] "He entertaines us" (says Overbury in his Character of an Actor) "in the best leasure of our life, that is, betweene meales; the most unfit time either for study or bodily exercise." Even so late as in the reign of Charles II. plays generally began at three in the afternoon.
[1210] See Biogr. Brit. i. 117, n. D.
[1211] I say "no English actress ... on the public stage," because Prynne speaks of it as an unusual enormity, that "they had Frenchwomen actors in a play not long since personated in Blackfriars playhouse." This was in 1629, vid. p. 215. And tho' female parts were performed by men or boys on the public stage, yet in masques at Court, the Queen and her ladies made no scruple to perform the principal parts, especially in the reigns of James I. and Charles I.
Sir William Davenant, after the restoration, introduced women, scenery, and higher prices. See Cibber's Apology for his own Life.
[1212] See A Short Discourse on the English Stage, subjoined to Flecknoe's Love's Kingdom, 1674, 12mo.
[1213] It appears from an epigram of Taylor the Water-poet, that one of the principal theatres in his time, viz. the Globe on the Bankside, Southwark (which Ben Jonson calls the "Glory of the Bank, and Fort of the whole Parish"), had been covered with thatch till it was burnt down in 1613. (See Taylor's Sculler, Epig. 22, p. 31. Jonson's Execration on Vulcan.)
Puttenham tells us they used vizards in his time, "partly to supply the want of players, when there were more parts than there were persons, or that it was not thought meet to trouble ... princes chambers with too many folkes." [Art of Eng. Poes. 1589, p. 26.] From the last clause, it should seem that they were chiefly used in the masques at Court.
[1214] Coryate's Crudities, 4to. 1611, p. 247.
