This chapter, or rather this list,--it could be little more with so many ladies clamoring for their deserved attention,--has at least made one thing clear. On the feminine side of the art of acting, the only art in which women compete with men on more than even terms, the American stage is in a healthy condition. It has been said, often with cynical emphasis, that in America the audiences of women condition the whole art of the drama. But it is not only at the box-office that women outweigh the men in their share in our theatre. APPENDIX THE FIRST ENGLISH ACTRESSES, AND THE CHANGE IN THE ACTOR’S SOCIAL STATUS The actress, as an established element in the theatre, is comparatively modern. The English stage had been a flourishing public institution for something more than a century when, in the first years of the Restoration, veritable women began regularly to replace those lads and beardless men who in Shakespeare’s day enacted stage heroines. There are, to be sure, fleeting glimpses of women acting in England much earlier in the seventeenth century, while boys were regularly playing women’s parts. King James spent immense sums on his court revels, and his Queen, Anne, was both actress and manager--no doubt with much professional coaching. In 1625--the first year of the reign of Charles I--there was a merry round of plays acted at Hampton Court at Christmas time. “The demoiselles,”--who, as Doran surmises, were probably the maids of honor--“mean to present a French pastoral wherein the Queen is a principal actress.”[221] Thus the first actresses in England were amateurs, and among them were two Queens of the Realm! Henrietta Maria was, of course, French, and it was due to this fact, and to her liking for the stage, that actresses from France came to London[222]--doubtless the first professional actresses to appear there. The fashion--or rather the obvious advantages--of the acting of women’s parts by women appears to have commended itself much earlier on the continent than in England. “They have now,” contemptuously says Prynne,--the author of _Histrio-Mastix_ (1633) and the theatre’s best hater,--“their female players in Italy and other foreign parts.”[223] The French actresses who came to act at Blackfriars may have pleased their countrywoman, the Queen. But they seem to have had, on the whole, a rather hard time. “Glad am I to say,” wrote Thomas Brand, another stout Puritan, “they were hissed, hooted, and pippin-pelted from the stage, so that I do not think they will soon be ready to try the same again.” Prynne was furiously abusive. He calls the actresses by a variety of names, of which “monsters” is one of the mildest.