The actors were all men. The female parts were taken usually by boys, but frequently by grown men, and when Juliet or Desdemona was announced, a giant would stride upon the stage. There is a story that Kynaston, a handsome fellow, famous in female characters, and petted by ladies of rank, once kept Charles I. waiting while he was being shaved before appearing as Evadne in "The Maid's Tragedy." The innovation of women on the stage was first introduced by a French company in 1629, but the audiences would not tolerate it, and hissed and pelted the actresses off the stage. But thirty years later women took the place they have ever since held; when the populace had once experienced the charm of a female Juliet and Ophelia, they would have no other, and the rage for actresses ran to such excess at one time that it was a fashion for women to take the male parts as well. But that was in the abandoned days of Charles II. Pepys could not control his delight at the appearance of Nell Gwynne, especially "when she comes like a young gallant, and hath the motions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have. It makes me, I confess, admire her." The acting of Shakespeare himself is only a faint tradition. He played the ghost in "Hamlet," and Adam in "As You Like It." William Oldys says (Oldys was an antiquarian who was pottering about in the first part of the eighteenth century, picking up gossip in coffee-houses, and making memoranda on scraps of paper in book-shops) Shakespeare's brother Charles, who lived past the middle of the seventeenth century, was much inquired of by actors about the circumstances of Shakespeare's playing. But Charles was so old and weak in mind that he could recall nothing except the faint impression that he had once seen "Will" act a part in one of his own comedies, wherein, being to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping and unable to walk that he was forced to be supported and carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among some company who were eating, and one of them sang a song. And that was Shakespeare! The whole Bankside, with its taverns, play-houses, and worse, its bear pits and gardens, was the scene of roystering and coarse amusement. And it is surprising that plays of such sustained moral greatness as Shakespeare's should have been welcome.