Anne Marshall likely played Desdemona in a King's Company staging of Othello, one of the earliest documented appearances of a woman on the English public stage.
On 8 December 1660, a performance of Shakespeare's Othello was staged by Thomas Killigrew's King's Company, and Anne Marshall is often cited by theatre historians as the likely actress who portrayed Desdemona that night. This performance is frequently referenced as one of the earliest — and possibly the very first — instances of a woman appearing in a professional role on the English public stage, following the reopening of theatres after the Restoration and the lifting of the Puritan ban on female performers.
Before this era, female roles in English drama had been played exclusively by boy actors, a convention dating back centuries. The introduction of actresses represented a profound cultural shift, aligning English theatre with continental European practice and opening a new profession to women for the first time in the nation's history.
However, historians caution that the precise identity of the first woman to appear on the English stage remains genuinely contested; Margaret Hughes is also frequently proposed as a candidate for this distinction, and contemporary records from the period are sparse and sometimes contradictory. Anne Marshall's association with this performance nonetheless cements her as one of the pioneering women of Restoration theatre, part of a small cohort who overcame significant social stigma to establish acting as a viable, if still controversial, occupation for women in England.