Irene Rooke first appeared on stage in 1895; after she joined Ben Greet’s company she had the opportunity to play a number of roles in Shakespeare: Viola, Ophelia, Perdita, Miranda, Desdemona, Hero, and Rosalind. She played in London for the first time in 1897 as Ophelia opposite Edward Gordon Craig’s Hamlet at the Olympic Theatre. Rooke did not return to Shakespeare until 1910 when she played Viola for Miss Horniman at Manchester’s Gaiety Theatre; she played Viola again in 1914. In 1915, again in Manchester at the New Theatre, she played Portia and Desdemona. There is no record of her acting in Shakespeare again after 1915.

Despite a quite busy career on the stage, she played in twenty films between 1916 and 1932. One of which was The Loves of Mary, Queen of Scots (1923) as Catherine de’ Medici alongside Fay Compton who played the lead, Mary Stuart.

Delia Crehan was born in Ireland, immigrated to the United States, and became one of the more popular actresses in Augustin Daly’s company. She later joined John Drew’s Philadelphia troupe and it was a printer’s error there that gave her the stage-name “Ada Rehan.” She was totally devoted to the theater and her profession and never found time to marry. When she moved to London in 1884, she proved equally popular there, adding a number of Shakespearean roles to her repertoire. She was probably best known as Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew or Rosalind in As You Like It. Here, she is pictured as Portia in The Merchant of Venice. She was, in some ways, a victim of the changes going on in the theater at the time. New directors and performance values made her seem increasingly old-fashioned and “Victorian” in style. She retired in 1905 and died eleven years later in 1916.

Evelyn Millard, a popular stage “beauty,” made her first appearance in 1891 as a walk-on at the Haymarket Theatre. Her first major parts came when she joined Sarah Thorne at the Theatre Royal in Margate; she played, among other roles, Juliet and then Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. When she joined the company of Sir Beerbohm Tree in 1897 she was given the role of Portia in Julius Caesar.

Between 1903 and 1916, she played in several more Shakespeare productions: Jessica in The Merchant of Venice (1903), Juliet in 1905, and Desdemona in Lewis Waller‘s production of Othello in 1906. After forming her own company in 1908 she played Ophelia in Hamlet (1910) and Olivia in Twelfth Night in 1912 with Harley Granville Barker at the Savoy Theatre. Her last recorded Shakespeare role was as Calpurnia in Julius Caesar during the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration in 1916.

Notably, Millard is known for creating the role of Cecily Cardew in the 1895 premiere of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. A year later, she performed in a Royal Command Performance for Queen Victoria. After retiring from the stage, she died in Kensington, at her home, in 1941 at the age of seventy.

Dorothy Green was only fifteen when she made her first professional appearance in 1901 in Henry V, and from that point on she was never far between parts in Shakespeare’s plays. This is partly due to the fact that she had joined Herbert Beerbohm Tree‘s company when she was quite young, and then later played with Frank Benson and became one of the loyal “Bensonians.” Two notable parts during this period were as Beatrice in 1913 and as Hermia in 1915.

In 1921, Green joined the New Shakespeare Company and with them at Stratford she played Viola, Desdemona, Imogen, Ophelia, and Portia in Julius Caesar. Throughout her career she played many different parts in popular, modern plays, but she always found time to return to Shakespeare; between 1922 and 1951 she took roles in at least eighteen Shakespeare plays.

Ms. Carlisle’s first professional appearance in 1903 was in a Shakespeare comedy when she played Audrey in As You Like It; that same year she also played Maria in Twelfth Night. When Herbert Beerbohm Tree revived Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice in 1908, she played Olivia and Portia. In 1935, the year before she died, she turned from the comedies to the tragedies, playing Emilia in Othello and Lady MacDuff in Macbeth.

Ivah Wills was co-founder in 1905 of the Coburn Shakespearean Players with Charles Coburn, whom she married the following year in 1905. They performed together, primarily in the plays of Shakespeare, for many years until her death in 1937 due to heart disease.