This disdain for female actors was a Northern European tradition.

From Shakespeare The World as Stage by Bill Bryson.  Chapter 4 page 76.  

A particular challenge for audience and performers alike must surely have been the practice of putting male players in female parts. When we consider how many powerful and expressive female roles Shakespeare created—Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona—the actors must have been gifted dissemblers indeed. Rosalind in As You Like It has about a quarter of all the lines in the play; Shakespeare clearly had enormous confidence in some young actor. Yet, while we often know a good deal about performers in male roles from Shakespeare’s day, we know almost nothing about the conduct of the female parts. Judith Cook, in Women in Shakespeare, says she could not find a single record of any role of a woman played by a specific boy actor. We don’t even know much about boy actors in general terms, including how old they were. For many of a conservative nature, stage transvestism was a source of real anxiety. The fear was that spectators would be attracted to both the female character and the boy beneath, thus becoming doubly corrupted.

This disdain for female actors was a Northern European tradition. In Spain, France, and Italy, women were played by women—a fact that astonished British travelers, who seem often to have been genuinely surprised to find that women could play women as competently onstage as in life. Shakespeare got maximum effect from the gender confusion by constantly having his female characters—Rosalind in As You Like It, Viola in Twelfth Night— disguise themselves as boys, creating the satisfyingly dizzying situation of a boy playing a woman playing a boy.