So far the story is clear enough.  But was this 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 Vere Street Theatre, certain traces have been discovered.  In Brome’s comedy of “The Court Beggar,” acted at the Cockpit Theatre, in 1632, one of the characters observed:  “If you have a short speech or two, the boy’s a pretty actor, and his mother can play her part; women-actors now grow in request.”  Was this an allusion merely to the French actresses that had been seen in London some few years before, or were English actresses referred to?  Had these really appeared, if not at the