in 1600, only two were allowed, the Globe and the Fortune, which was on the north side, on Golden Lane.  The Fortune was fifty feet square within, and three stories high, with galleries, built of wood on a brick foundation, and with a roof of tiles.  The stage was forty-three feet wide, and projected into the middle of the yard (as the pit was called), where the groundlings stood.  To one of the galleries admission was only twopence.  The young gallants used to go into the yards and spy about the galleries and boxes for their acquaintances.  In these theatres there was a drop-curtain, but little or no scenery.  Spectators had boxes looking on the stage behind the curtain, and they often sat upon the stage with the actors; sometimes the actors all remained upon the stage during the whole play.  There seems to have been great familiarity between the audience and the actors.  Fruits in season, apples, pears, and nuts, with wine and beer, were carried about to be sold, and pipes were smoked.  There was neither any prudery in the plays or the players, and the audiences in behavior were no better than the plays.

The actors were all men.  The female parts were taken usually by boys, but frequently by grown men, and when Juliet or Desdemona was announced, a giant would stride upon the stage.  There is a story that Kynaston, a handsome fellow, famous in female characters, and petted by ladies of rank, once kept Charles I. waiting while he was being shaved before appearing as Evadne in “The Maid’s Tragedy.”  The innovation of women on the stage was first introduced by a French company in 1629, but the audiences would not tolerate it, and hissed and pelted the actresses off the stage.  But thirty years later women took the place they have ever since held; when the populace had once experienced the charm of a female Juliet and Ophelia, they would have no other, and the rage for actresses ran to such excess at one time that it was a fashion for women to take the male parts as well.  But that was in the abandoned days of Charles ii.  Pepys could not control his delight at the appearance of Nell Gwynne, especially “when she comes like a young gallant, and hath the motions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have.  It makes me, I confess, admire her.”  The acting of Shakespeare himself is only a faint tradition.  He played the ghost in “Hamlet,” and Adam in “As You Like It.”  William Oldys says (Oldys was an antiquarian who was pottering about in the first part of the eighteenth century, picking up gossip in coffee-houses, and making memoranda on scraps of paper in book-shops) Shakespeare’s brother Charles, who lived past the middle of the seventeenth century, was much inquired of by actors about the circumstances of Shakespeare’s playing.  But Charles was so old and weak in mind that he could recall nothing except the faint impression that he had once seen “Will” act a part in one of his own comedies, wherein, being to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping and unable to walk that he was forced to be supported and carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among some company who were eating, and one of them sang a song.  And that was Shakespeare!