s
"Defence of Poesy." The same puritanic spirit soon reached our
universities; for when a Dr. Gager had a play performed at Christchurch,
Dr. Reynolds, of Queen's College, terrified at the Satanic novelty,
published "The Ouerthrow of Stage-plays," 1593; a tedious invective,
foaming at the mouth of its text with quotations and authorities; for
that was the age when authority was stronger than opinion, and the
slightest could awe the readers. Reynolds takes great pains to prove
that a stage-play is infamous, by the opinions of antiquity; that a
theatre corrupts morals, by those of the Fathers; but the most
reasonable point of attack is "the sin of boys wearing the dress and
affecting the airs of women."[150] This was too long a flagrant evil in
the theatrical economy. To us there appears something so repulsive in
the exhibition of boys, or men, personating female characters, that one
cannot conceive how they could ever have been tolerated as a substitute
for the spontaneous grace, the melting voice, and the soothing looks of
a female. It was quite impossible to give the tenderness of a woman to
any perfection of feeling, in a personating male; and to this cause may
we not attribute that the female characters have never been made chief
personages among our elder poets, as they would assuredly have been, had
they not been conscious that the male actor could not have sufficiently
affected the audience? A poet who lived in Charles the Second's day, and
who has written a prologue to Othello, to introduce the _first actress_
on our stage, has humorously touched on this gross absurdity.

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 brows so large, and nerve so uncompliant,
When you call _Desdemona_--enter _Giant_.

Yet at the time the absurd custom prevailed, Tom Nash, in his _Pierce
Pennilesse_, commends our stage for not having, as they had abroad,
women-actors, or "courtezans," as he calls them: and even so late as in
1650, when women were first introduced on our stage, endless are the
apologies for the _indecorum_ of this novel usage! Such are the
difficulties which occur even in forcing bad customs to return to
nature; and so long does it take to infuse into the multitude a little
common sense! It is even probable that this happy revolution originated
from mere neces