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.
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