When Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet in about 1595, his first Juliet was a teenage boy, Robert Gough. Gough would have worn white face make-up, a wig and a corset. His son also became a
'boy player' in women's roles!

After the 1660 Restoration, playwright Thomas Otway reset the play in 80 BC as a Roman political drama: Elizabeth Barry, tragic superstar in her late 20s, played Lavinia.

Nearly 300 years ago, the first Black performer to play Juliet was Rachael Baptiste, an Irishwoman also hugely successful as a singer.
She performed in Lancashire in the mid-1700s.

Another great singer to play Juliet was Susannah Cibber, who chose Juliet for her comeback vehicle in after a scandalous divorce from her abusive husband Theophilus. Theophilus's rival production - playing Romeo to his daughter Jenny's Juliet - tanked.

In the 1880s, Ellen Terry's Juliet explored the character's passion and anguish opposite her real-life lover, Henry Irving. Terry was 35 and the mother of two children. Theatregoing Britain coped.

Welsh actress Gwen Frangcon-Davies was lauded opposite John Gielgud in the 1920s for being 'the child Juliet', youthful and
passionately romantic. Unknown to the public, Ffrangcon-Davies was 33, and gay.

The first Black Juliet on the London stages was Elizabeth Adare in 1981 National Theatre; the first South Asian Juliet was Janet Steel in 1985 at Deptford. Women of colour have been playing Juliet in London since long before Amewudah-Rivers was born!

I wish I'd seen Gugu Mbatha-Raw opposite Andrew Garfield Royal Exchange Theatre in 2005; a production Lyn Gardner described as 'rac[ing] along like a hammering heart'.

Anneika Rose was a luminous Juliet in Neil Bartlett's Fellini/Mafioso-inspired 2008 production The RSC - and I should know, working in FOH, I watched it about 20 times!

Tomorrow, Felixe Forde gives her final, acclaimed performance as Juliet Shakespeare’s Globe: a dazzling, explicitly contemporary production with Forde as its thrilling heartbeat.

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers is London's next new Juliet: the latest in a long tradition of making Juliet not for an age, but for all time.
Juliet is, like her love, 'as boundless as the sea'.