Again in 1630 a company of mixed players attempted to give a performance, the actors appearing as women and the actresses as men, but an order was immediately issued excluding all females from the stage. In 1640 a company of male and female players announced they would play together, but their performance was stopped, and in 1645 the proprietor of a theatre was severely punished for employing female players. This was done as an example, for violations were frequent. In the history of the Doll-theatre, also, there had been companies of women who handled the marionettes while female minstrels sang and recited the ballad-dramas to which the dolls moved, and women accomplished in the samisen accompanied the minstrels. These Doll-theatre companies of women were not long to endure, and soon came to grief. Somewhere about the time that O-Kuni was beginning to dance on her temporary stage by the riverside in Kyoto, Ono-no-Otsu, a lady-in-waiting in the household of the great general, Oda Nobunaga, had composed a long ballad called _Joruri Hime Monogatari_, or the Story of Princess Joruri. It had been sung by a minstrel to the accompaniment of the samisen. This was an improvement on the balladry of the blind musicians, who had recited their stories of love and battle to the mournful minor strings of the biwa. The first tayu, or minstrel, to sing the improved balladry inaugurated by Ono-no-Otsu, was a woman called Rokuji Namuyemon. After her there were both male and female minstrels, but the prohibition of the Onna Kabuki also included the female minstrel. The talent of woman had repeatedly tried to express itself in the realm of the theatre, but now the heavy hand of the puritanic shogunate fell upon her activities, and the result was the suppression of all stage aspiration on the part of females for three hundred years. Ihara Seiseiin, commenting on this in his _History of the Japanese Stage_, says that although the Shogun’s Government was under the necessity of maintaining the morals of the people, the prohibition had an ill effect upon the theatre, and the injury has not been completely healed. He thinks that if the Onna Kabuki had been left to develop naturally, it is most probable that there would now exist a different state of affairs, and actresses would have adorned the Japanese theatre as they do in the Occident. But, he continues, it was impossible for the Tokugawa Shogunate to have such foresight with regard to art, and the fact that there are no names of actresses adorning the history of the Japanese stage must be attributed to this initial, stern, prohibitive measure of the shogunate. These strict laws regarding the appearance of females on the stage were enforced until the last days of the shogunate, when its grip loosened on many of the measures that had been made to regulate the morals of the people and to control their democratic tendencies.