It has often been remarked that as a result of the fact that boy actors played the women’s parts in the Elizabethan theater we find Shakespeare’s heroines very frequently masquerading as pages. Julia, Portia, Nerissa, Jessica, Viola, Rosalind, and Imogen all appear as handsome youths. An analogous result in the Chinese theater of to-day is that the heroines appear in an endless number of cases as warriors. The Chinese have not only their Mu Lan (who goes to war in her father’s place because the latter is old and feeble), but very many other heroines who invariably defeat men in battle. Chinese history or legend does not account for this, but it is due to the fact that the actors who portray women seek opportunities to display their skill in fighting. This fighting is a highly conventionalized art, a combination of dancing and acrobatics performed to a deafening and exciting music, which, in regard to its place on the program, can best be compared to our ballet. Most foreigners in Peking are kept away from the theater by the fearful noise made in these “fighting plays”, as they are called, but if these same people could attend an Elizabethan theater they would possibly find that the great delight of the audiences was the “noise” (music), the clatter and scuffle of the battles, the drums, the squibs, and the cannon.[40] There are in Peking three companies of boy actors, the largest of which has about three hundred in its theater. These are training schools for actors in which the boys of eight to sixteen or eighteen years are given very arduous courses in singing, acrobatics, stage fighting, and all the other arts that an actor requires. The competition of these “little eyases” in Peking might well arouse the ire of some of the regular actors, as it did Shakespeare’s (“Hamlet”, II, 2, 362), for in China the life of the common actor is a hard one, most of them eking out a meager living at about twenty cents a day. The position of the actor in society is very low in Peking, just as it was in London. A Chinese moralist might well apply to them the words written in 1759:[41] “Players are masters of vice, teachers of wantonnesse, spurres to impuritie, the Sonnes of idlenesse, so longe as they live in this order, loathe them.” Under the former dynasty the actors and their sons, together with the sons of prostitutes, jailers, and lictors, were not eligible for taking the examinations. Even now they usually intermarry only among their own number, and they suffer also from various other discriminations. Most of them were catamites, until the Republic abolished this formerly legalized institution. Mei Lan-fang, an actor who has risen to high perfection in his art, as well as to great wealth, an artist who may tour America in the near future, would have ample reason in the present organization of Chinese society to reproach Fortune in Shakespeare’s words: