s Desdemona really the
first English actress? Had there not been earlier change in the old
custom prescribing that the heroines of the British drama should be
personated by boys? It is certain that French actresses had appeared
here so far back as 1629. Prynne, in his "Histriomastix," published in
1633, writes: "They have now their female players in Italy and other
foreign parts, and Michaelmas, 1629, they had French women-actors in
a play personated at Blackfriars, to which there was great resort."
These ladies, however, it may be noted, met with a very unfavourable
reception. Prynne's denunciation of them was a matter of course. He
had undertaken to show that stage-plays of whatever kind were most
"pernicious corruptions," and that the profession of "play-poets" and
stage-players, together with the penning, acting, and frequenting of
stage-plays, was unlawful, infamous, and misbecoming Christians. He
speaks of the "women-actors" as "monsters," and applies most severe
epithets to their histrionic efforts: "impudent," "shameful,"
"unwomanish," and such like. Another critic, one Thomas Brande, in a
private letter discovered by Mr. Payne Collier in the library of
Lambeth Palace, and probably addressed to Laud while Bishop of London,
writes of the just offence to all virtuous and well-disposed persons
in this town "given by the vagrant French players who had been
expelled from their own country," and adds: "Glad am I to say they
were hissed, hooted, and pippin-pelted" (pippin-pelted is a good
phrase) "from the stage, so as I do not think they will soon be ready
to try the same again." Mr. Brande was further of opinion that the
Master of the Revels should have been called to account for permitting
such performances. Failing at Blackfriars, the French company
subsequently appeared at the Fortune and Red Bull Theatres, but with a
similar result, insomuch that the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry
Herbert, who had duly sanctioned their performance, records in his
accounts that, "in respect of their ill luck," he had returned some
portion of the fees they had paid him for permission to play.

Whether these French "women-actors" failed because of their sex or
because of their nationality, cannot now be shown. They were the first
actresses that had ever been seen in this country. But then they were
not of English origin, and they appeared, of course, in a foreign
drama. Still, of English actresses antecedent to the Desdemona of the