I recently began subscribing to Garrison Keillor’s online daily website called ”The Writer’s Almanac.” He offers poems, celebrates the birthdays of famous writers, and includes things that interest him. Like this:
On this date in 1660, a professional female actress appeared on the English stage in a production of Othello. It’s one of the earliest known instances of a female role actually being played by a woman in an English production. Up until this time, women were considered too fine and sensitive for the rough life of the theater, and boys or men dressed in drag to play female characters. An earlier attempt to form co-ed theater troupes was met with jeers and hisses and thrown produce.
But by the second half of the 17th century, the King’s Company felt that London society could handle it. Before the production, a lengthy disclaimer in iambic pentameter was delivered to the audience, warning them that they were about to see an actual woman in the part. This was, the actor explained, because they felt that men were just too big and burly to play the more delicate roles, “With bone so large and nerve so incompliant / When you call Desdemona, enter giant.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane As an aside, the movie “Shakespeare in Love” dramatizes (with many liberties) that moment when a woman was “found” playing a woman on the stage by the queen. The movie is a hoot with many well-knowns, but it also wonderfully brings forward the delights of poetry, and particularly of Shakespeare’s works, as it is centered around “Romeo and Juliet.” CBK
I wonder how long it will take the US to realize that a woman can serve as President.
retired teacher Well, they’re making TV and movies about it . . . soooooooo. . . . . CBK
Retired teacher: this can’t happen to soon!!!!
Glad to hear Keillor is still going.
So am I! Thanks for letting us know, Diane. I just checked out his website and there is a lot of content there.
Yes, they could have boys in drag onstage, but not women. LOL.
When I think of all that was denied women, for so long, of all that potential lost, I am overwhelmed by the enormity of it. It’s literally beyond one’s ability to hold it in the imagination. I’m not that old, but I remember a time when there were very few jobs open to women–teacher, nurse, maid, nanny, switchboard operator, waitress. How long it took the Western World to figure out how crazy that was even after people had before them the examples of women as able–as brilliant and skillful–as, say, Queen Elizabeth I of England!
The fascinating thing was the number of women who influenced thought and society. The first thing that came to my mind was that 1660 was such a watershed year in Europe that Modern European History started there. The resorption of the monarchy in England with Parliament bringing back the Stuarts with Charles II, Louis XIV takes active control of the French throne that same year. And now I hear that was the year of the first woman recognized to play Desmondia?
A century later, Voltaire’s girlfriend, Emily Du Chatalet, was to translate Newton’s work into French, thereby giving it to the continent and their thinkers. Still, despite authors and thinkers along the way, we had to wait until John Stuart Mill suggested that women were people too before things started to change. I feel mighty glad to have lived in an era when we have begun to see some change.
I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.
Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably — his mother was an heiress — to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin — Ovid, Virgil and Horace — and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighborhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practicing his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter — indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighboring woolstapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager — a fat, loose-lipped man — guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting — no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted — you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last — for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same gray eyes and rounded brows — at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so — who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body? — killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.
–Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own