The most striking defect in the practice of the Elizabethan playhouse, according to accepted notions, lies in the allotment of the female roles. It was thought unseemly for women to act at all. Female parts were played by boys or men--a substitution lacking, from the modern point of view, in grace and seemliness. But the standard of propriety in such matters varies from age to age. Shakespeare alludes quite complacently to the appearance of boys and men in women's parts. He makes Rosalind say, laughingly and saucily, to the men of the audience in the epilogue to _As You Like It_: "If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me." "_If I were_ a woman," she says. The jest lies in the fact that the speaker was not a woman but a boy. Similarly, Cleopatra on her downfall in _Antony and Cleopatra_, (V. ii. 220), laments the quick comedians Extemporally will stage us ... and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra _boy_ my greatness. The experiment of entrusting a boy with the part of Ophelia was lately tried in London not unsuccessfully; but it is difficult to realise how a boy or young man could adequately interpret most of Shakespeare's female characters. It seems almost sacrilegious to conceive the part of Cleopatra, the most highly sensitised in its minutest details of all dramatic portrayals of female character,--it seems almost sacrilegious to submit Cleopatra's sublimity of passion to interpretation by an unfledged representative of the other sex. Yet such solecisms were imperative under the theatrical system of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Men taking women's parts seem to have worn masks, but that can hardly have improved matters. Flute, when he complains that it would hardly befit him to play a woman's part because he had a beard coming, is bidden by his resourceful manager, Quince, play Thisbe in a "mask." At times actors who had long lost the roses of youth masqueraded in women's roles. Thereby the ungainliness, which marked the distribution of the cast in Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses, was often forced into stronger light. It was not till the seventeenth century was well advanced that women were permitted to act in public theatres. Then the gracelessness of the masculine method was acknowledged and deplored. It was the character of Desdemona which was first undertaken by a woman, and the absurdity of the old practice was noticed in the prologue written for this revival of _Othello_, which was made memorable by the innovation. Some lines in the prologue describe the earlier system thus:-- For to speak truth, men act, that are between Forty or fifty, wenches of fifteen, With bone so large and nerve so uncompliant, When you call Desdemona, enter Giant.