No, okay, it wasn't King Charles II who wrote about Desdemona, that was Shakespeare, but on this day in 1660, after The Return of the King (no, not Tolkien's Aragorn, do keep up at the back, there) either Margaret Hughes or Anne Marshall became the first woman to play a role on a public stage in England, and her role was Desdemona in Shakespeare's play Othello.
We no longer have actresses, of course, only actors of various and infinitely varied sexes.
But it was fun while it lasted, wasn't it?
Word To Use Today If You're Brave Enough: actress. This word stretches back further than you'd think, right back to the 1580s when, however, it meant a woman who did something. The stage sense appeared around 1700, so Margaret Hughes or Anne Marshall were actually actors.
The word actor started off with the idea of being someone who manages some activity (particularly, oddly, driving sheep). An actor was also the accuser in a court case. It started to be applied to stage actors about the time the word actress first appeared, in the 1580s. The Latin word agere means to set in motion.
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