Note 1036 — XI THE ACTOR'S ECONOMICS

Women only began to act regularly at the Restoration; cf. Ward, iii. 253. There had been occasional earlier examples; even in 1611 Coryat, Crudities, i. 386, says that at Venice 'I saw women acte, a thing that I never saw before, though I have heard that it hathe beene sometimes used in London'. The exceptions are, I think, such as prove the rule; private plays such as Hymen's Triumph, Venner's gulling show of England's Joy, the Italian tumblers of 1574, the virago Moll Frith at the Fortune (cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Dekker, Roaring Girl). On 22 Feb. 1583 Richard Madox 'went to the theater to see a scurvie play set out al by one virgin, which there proved a fyemarten without voice, so that we stayed not the matter' (Cotton MSS. App. xlvii, f. 6ᵛ; cf. S. P. Colonial, E. Indies, 221). As to the skill of the boys, cf. Ben Jonson on Richard Robinson in The Devil is an Ass, II. viii. 64.