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5]
at first it would not tolerate women upon its boards, soon addressed to both sexes its prologues and its epilogues.
In the epilogue to the old play of “
Juliana, or tie
Princess of
Poland,” this being spoken in dialogue, as often happened, by an actor of each sex, the woman rebukes the man for addressing the audience as “You, gentlemen!”
She says:
You, gentlemen!
and why, I pray, to them?
What!
do the ladies merit no esteem?
She then takes his place, and addresses the whole audience as if it were a parliament, or, in the phrase then familiar, a diet:
Fair English Diet, then,
Senate of ladies, lower house of men,
I humbly pray, decree before you go.
This was in 1671, the author being “little starch
Johnny Crowne;” as Lord Rochester called him, from his starched neck-cloth.
Crowne was born in
Nova Scotia; and it is curious that even at that early day this continent should have begun to supply
England with the seeds of social heresy on “the woman question.”
In these days the joint phrase “Men and women” has thoroughly established itself, and needs no further vindication; and if I reverse it, putting women first, it is with no revolutionary design, although
