I

Shakspere's Amazons

Behold, it is my younger brother dressed,
A man, or woman, that hath gulled the world.
FIELD, Amends for Ladies, III. 2.

HAT in Shakspere's time, on the public stage, the
parts of women were played by boys is a fact too

T

well known to require more than the very briefest reference. "Every schoolboy knows" that actresses were not seen in England, except in private performances, till after the Restoration1; and most people could tell us that on January 3, 1660 (old style), Samuel Pepys saw women on the stage for the first time. The dullest reader of Shakspere's plays never fails to catch the point when he lights on Rosalind's epilogue: "If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me"; and everybody understands the Egyptian Queen when she says she will not go to Rome to see "some squeaking Cleopatra boy her greatness." Nevertheless it is less easy than one would think to keep constantly in mind the fact that the female parts were not written for a Sarah Bernhardt or an Ellen Terry, but for a Kynaston or a "child of the chapel "2. Many touches in Elizabethan

1 The case of Davenant's Siege of Rhodes, acted in August 1650, is no exception. Though it is scarcely an opera in the real sense of the term, Davenant called it so to avoid the Commonwealth prohibition of stage-plays; and the women sang in it. They were, as Mr Schelling says, chosen for their voices rather than for their acting; and one of them, Mrs Coleman, had already appeared in a previous "entertainment" of Davenant's.

• The Puritan objection to stage-plays turned largely on the assumption of women's dress by men. Thus, for example, Rainolds, in his Overthrow of Stage-Playes, calls such an assumption "unscriptural"; and the same view is expressed by Gosson. No one would accuse Gilbert and Sullivan of Puritanism; but it will be remembered that one of their rules of action was never to give a man's part to a woman or vice versa.

plays are often misunderstood or passed over through a neglect, even momentary, of this point. There are some passages, for example, in speeches of Lady Macbeth or of Perdita which Shakspere would probably have written differently if he had meant them for the mouth of Mrs Siddons or Mary Anderson.

The chief complication due to this historical accident (for such it really is) of the English stage arises when a Julia or a Portia is represented as donning a man's clothes and mimicking a man's bearing and behaviour. We are thus confronted with the curious situation of a boy pretending to be a girl who pretends to be a boy. From the frequency with which this situation appears in Elizabethan plays, it would seem that the audiences were delighted with its piquancy, and had no objection to being thus twice beguiled-or rather to being, first cheated and then cheated of the cheat. At any rate the device is found half a dozen times in "Beaumont and Fletcher"; in Philaster for example, in the Pilgrim, in the Maid's Tragedy, in Love's Cure1, and, very gratuitously, in Cupid's Revenge; while Ben Jonson's Silent

1 Love's Cure is usually ascribed, wholly or in part, to Massinger. It is noteworthy that the device with which we are dealing is here much better prepared and motived than is generally the case in the genuine plays of "Beaumont and Fletcher"; and this fact is quite consistent with Massinger's authorship; for "the most striking feature of Massinger's art," as Köppel says (Cambridge Hist. of Eng. Lit. VI. p. 153), "is to be found in his great constructive power"; whereas the merits of Fletcher, unquestionably, lie anywhere rather than in his plot-construction. (Beaumont was dead before the earliest date to which the play can be assigned.)

Love's Cure supplies a specially elaborate development of the device. Here we have Lucio in woman's apparel, and his sister Clara, a sort of Bradamante or Britomart, in man's. The plot turns on Clara's sudden access of love for her father's enemy Vitelli, and its "humour" on a series of equivocal jests arising out of the confusion of dress. It may be observed that it abounds in obvious imitations of Shakspere: perhaps therefore it may be allowable to trace to Shakspere's influence the measure of skill with which the device is prepared.

The relation of Love's Cure, as well as of the Pilgrim, of which we shall speak later, to its Spanish original is well worth working out in detail.