At the beginning of the twentieth century, the American theatre was for the most part a medium of mass entertainment. In the cities, the theatre meant popular melodrama in enormous theatres like the Bowery in New York as well as the likes of Sarah Bernhardt from France touring in plays by Rostand and Racine and Ellen Terry and Henry Irving from England playing in Shakespeare and Shaw. American stars E. H. Sothern, Julia Marlowe, and Richard Mansfield acted in Shakespeare, and Ethel, Lionel, and John Barrymore starred in contemporary plays by American and English writers. The theatre also meant numerous American companies touring in old American standards like the ubiquitous Uncle Tom's Cabin and James O'Neill's thirty-year vehicle, Monte Cristo. Increasingly risqué revues like the Ziegfeld Follies played alongside minstrel shows and the wholesome family entertainment of vaudeville. To the early twentieth-century public, the theatre included burlesque, circus, and “extravaganza,” as well as the Yiddish theatre, the settlement house theatre, and the puppet theatre.