Roaring Boys (24 page)

In the classical world both Helen of Troy and Lucrece are excused for what they did on account of the fact that it was their beauty that drove men wild. They should have controlled themselves better. Therefore it was not Helen’s fault that Paris abducted her and started the Trojan War or that Lucrece was raped by Tarquin. As for Cleopatra, history has treated her as unfairly as it has Fair Rosamund. Emilia has a soft spot for Cleopatra and in an essay by Rowse,
The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady
, he quotes a letter from Agatha Christie saying that she felt that Emilia would dearly have loved to play the part of Cleopatra on stage herself. Then there are her ‘heroines’, Sisera who hammered a nail through the head of Jael, and Judith who decapitated Holofernes, alongside other strong-minded Biblical women such as Deborah and Susannah.

All this is carefully framed in a Christian context, however, since Emilia obviously did not wish to upset her various patrons. Never having achieved the title of Lady Lanier, she remained keenly aware of her own status, yet in a poem dedicated to Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, she points out delicately that one cannot choose the rank into which one is born:

For how doth Gentry come to rise and fall?
Or who is he that very rightly can
Distinguish of his birth, or tell at all
In what mean state his ancestors have been,
Before some one of worth did honour win?

Most striking of all is her preface to ‘The Virtuous Reader’, surely an early example of feminist writing whether or not Emilia would have considered herself as such:

As also in respect it pleased our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, without the assistance of man, being free from original and other sins from the time of his conception, till the hour of his death, to be begotten of a woman, born of a woman, nourished by a woman, obedient to a woman; and that he healed women, pardoned women, comforted women; yea, even when he was in his greatest agony and bloody sweat, going to be crucified, and also in the last hour of his death, took care to dispose of a woman: after his resurrection, appeared first to a woman, then sent a woman to declare his most glorious resurrection to the rest of the Disciples.

A remarkable lady, Emilia. We know little of her subsequent career except that she fell out with her landlord, an army officer, refusing to leave her house when he returned from Europe and wanted it back. There followed three years of court cases before she finally left in the August of 1619 without paying her last quarter’s rent and deliberately leaving the house ‘in great decay and a nasty, filthy state’. She lived to become a grandmother and great-grandmother and died in 1645 at the age of seventy-six.

Sometime in 1608 or early 1609 playgoers attending a performance at the Fortune Theatre were treated to a new comedy by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton:
The Roaring Girl
. The title itself was amusing since the adjective was one normally applied to noisy, swaggering, roistering men. But this particular play was most unusual in that its protagonist was not only a real person but one very well known to those living on the Bankside and even beyond, for by the time the play was put on she had achieved a considerable reputation.
²

Mary or ‘Moll’ Frith, the daughter of a London shoemaker, ‘a fair and square-conditioned man’, was born in 1584. A brief biography is given in a pamphlet written not long after her death,
The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith, commonly called Mal Cutpurse exactly collected and now published for the delights and recreations of all merry disposed persons
. Although born into a very similar background to the playwrights and players among whom she socialised there was, of course, no question of the grammar school education that had been so vital to them, but the pamphlet notes that:

particular care was expended on her education, for her boisterous and masculine spirit caused her parents much solicitude. A very Tomrigg and Rumpscuttle she was and delighted and sported in boys’ play and pastimes, not minding the company of girls; many a blow and bang this hoyting procured her, but she was not so to be tamed or taken off from her rude inclinations.

She could not endure the sedentary life of sewing and stitching, her needle, bodkin and thimble, she could not think on quietly, wishing them changed to a sword or a dagger and cudgels; working a sampler was as grievous as stitching a winding sheet. She would fight the boys and courageously beat them, run, jump, leap and hop with any of them or any other play whatsoever.

Came the time, when Moll reached the age of fifteen or sixteen, that she was expected to repay her parents’ care and teaching and make a suitable match, and a number of likely husbands were suggested to her. The prospect did not appeal, for ‘household work of any kind was distasteful to her and above all she had an abhorrence to the tending of children, to whom she ever had an aversion in her mind equal to the sterility of her womb, never being made a mother to the best of our information’.

The latter may or may not have been true but certainly at the age of sixteen she ran away from home and embarked on what was considered a wildly exotic and eccentric lifestyle, dressing in men’s clothes when she felt like it, smoking a pipe and practising her skill with the rapier until she became an expert swordswoman. She was also an excellent shot. She set up home on the Bankside and mixed freely with the Bankside underclass and low life as well as theatre people and was roundly condemned by the authorities as ‘a bully, whore, bawd, pickpurse, fortune-teller, receiver and forger’, much of which was untrue. She was never a whore. There have been suggestions that she was gay or bisexual but her two long-term relationships were with men, ‘the notorious Captain Hind, highwayman’ and ‘one, Richard Hannam, a worthy who constantly wore a watchmaker and jeweller’s shop in his pocket and could at any time command £1000’.

As to the rest she was anything but a bawd but had some reputation for theft, for in the play she becomes almost a female Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. In real life Moll readily admitted to this and also to some forging, but was always adamant that not only had she never been a whore herself but that she would never procure any other woman to become one.

Moll was obviously delighted with her dramatic portrayal and from time to time would sit on a stool on stage to watch the performance. The action of the play concerns the womanising Laxton who seduces women and then blackmails them, a young man who is forbidden to marry the girl of his choice, and ‘Jack Dapper’ who is trying to avoid being sent to a debtors’ prison. During the course of the play characters make various assignations which take place at the Three Pigeons in Brentford. The inn is featured in a number of plays of the period as a refuge for eloping couples or adulterous husbands and wives (and even much later in
She Stoops to Conquer
), the in-joke being that it was owned by a popular actor, Jack Lowin.

All three plots are eventually sorted out by Moll, in the course of which she challenges Laxton, who has taken a fancy to her when dressed as a woman, to a duel. When he agrees he discovers that not only is he hopelessly outclassed but that Moll insists on telling him on behalf of all women exactly what she thinks of him; which suggests that Dekker and Middleton were well aware of her personal views on the subject:

thou art one of those,
That thinks each woman thy fond flexible whore:
If she but casts a liberal eye upon thee,
Turns back her head, she’s thine; or amongst company
By chance drink first to thee, then she’s quite gone.
There is no means to help her; nay, for a need
Will swear unto thy credulous fellow lechers
That thou are more in favour with the lady
At first sight, than her monkey all her lifetime.
How many of our sex, by such as thou,
Have had their good thoughts paid with a blasted name,
That never deserved so lowly? Or did trip
In path of whoredom beyond cup and lip,
But for the stain of conscience and of soul?
³

The play ends by suggesting the possibility that Moll herself might soon be seen sitting on the stage and might even join the actors to acknowledge applause at the end if the audience wished it:

The Roaring Girl herself, some few days hence,
Shall on this stage give larger recompense,
Which mirth that you may share in, herself doth woo you,
And craves this sign, your hand to beckon her to you.

But there it looks as if she did a great deal more than sit and watch and later actually played herself, for a court indictment dated 12 February 1611–12 states categorically that she had appeared on the stage of the Fortune Theatre some nine months earlier. No explanation is given as to why the case took so long to come to court. What happened next is described in a letter from a John Chamberlain to a friend:

This Sunday Moll Cutpurse a notorious baggage that was used to go in men’s apparel was brought to St. Paul’s Cross, where she wept bitterly and seemed very penitent, but it is since doubted this was so but that she was drunk, being discovered to have tippled some three quarts of sack before she came to her penance. She had the daintiest preacher, or ghostly father, that ever I saw in a pulpit, one Ratcliffe of Brazen Nose of Oxford, a likelier man to have led the revels in some Masque at Court than to be where he was, but the best is he did so extremely badly and so wearied his audience that the best part went away and rest tarried to hear Moll Cutpurse rather than himself.

Moll spent the next six months in the notorious Bridewell Prison, beating hemp while being urged to ponder on her sins.

On her release she immediately returned again to the poets and players, almost all of whom she was to outlive. When she was in her fifties, she acted as a spy and courier for the Royalist cause during the Civil War and is authentically reported to have actually robbed General Fairfax on Hounslow Heath, shooting him in the arm and killing the two horses on which his servants were riding. Hotly pursued by soldiers, she was apprehended at Turnham Green and sent to Newgate. But she was to escape the scaffold. Her sheer nerve and spirit so appealed to Fairfax that he allowed her to be ransomed for the enormous sum of £2,000. She died in her small house in Fleet Street on 26 July 1659 at the age of seventy-four and was buried in the churchyard of St Bride’s, now the journalists’ church, which seems appropriate. In her will she left £20 ‘so that the conduits might run with wine on the restoration of the King’.

But this rough magic
I do here abjure; and when I have requir’d
Some heavenly music – which even now I do –

To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.

Shakespeare,
The Tempest
, V, i

T
he King’s Men were fortunate for even before they acquired their second theatre the fact that they had a royal patron meant that from the start they were able to achieve a certain amount of security in an increasingly cold financial climate. For the plague epidemic of the year of the Queen’s death and the accession of James was, if anything, even worse than that of ten years earlier. As the rhyme said:

Whole households and whole streets are stricken,
The sick do die, the sound do sicken.
And Lord have mercy on us crying,
Ere mercy come, that they are dying.

But although the epidemic abated somewhat towards the end of 1604, the disease did not go away and for the next ten years the playhouses were regularly closed for anything from a few weeks to several months, leaving all too many of those involved in the theatre unemployed and struggling to make ends meet. The King’s Men had the additional bonus of regularly being commanded to play at Court and in 1606 they had the opportunity not only to earn some money but also to flatter their illustrious patron.

King James had invited the Queen’s brother, King Christian IV of Denmark, to England on a state visit. It was to be a grand affair, the entertainment lavish, so it was therefore to be expected that the King’s own company of players should perform before the royal guest. The actor Richard Huggett in his book,
The Curse of Macbeth
, suggests that Shakespeare might well have been summoned in person to the office of the comptroller in Whitehall Palace, have had the situation explained to him and be then asked, as a member of the King’s own company, to provide a new and suitable play for the occasion. As ever, scholars disagree, but the consensus of the majority of academics is that Shakespeare did indeed write
Macbeth
especially for the event and that it was performed before the Court during the summer of 1606, probably on 7 August, although the first recorded public performance was that seen by Simon Forman at the Globe five years later.

There is much to suggest this is true, since what better subject to please the King than a play featuring two Scottish kings, the spirits of five others and his ancestor, Banquo, while also drawing attention to his expertise in witchcraft? Possibly Shakespeare read the King’s own book on the subject,
Daemonologie
, to acquire the mood for it, and he certainly read Holinshed’s
Chronicles of Scotland
. He might also have known that when the King visited Oxford the previous year Dr Matthew Gwinn, a Fellow of St John’s College, had laid on an entertainment entitled
The Three Sybils
derived from ‘three women in strange and wild apparel . . . either the Weird Sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destiny or else some nymphs or fairies who accost Macbeth and Banquo’. If that is so then it could well have been why Forman described the three witches in
Macbeth
as looking like nymphs or fairies rather than the wizened old women of popular mythology. Another suggestion is that the play is as short as it is because it was designed to suit the King’s attention span; it was not unusual for him to go to sleep during theatrical performances.

Although
Macbeth
remains to this day one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays and still packs in audiences, it has carried an enormous amount of baggage with it over the last four hundred years. Popular legend has it that it almost inevitably brings bad luck with it, that a production can lead to death, doom and disaster for all those involved. In his book Huggett writes that the famous ‘curse of Macbeth’ struck at the very first performance when Hal Berridge, the boy playing Lady Macbeth, was taken ill and that Shakespeare himself was forced to take over the role.
¹
He claims John Aubrey as the source but this writer has so far been unable to track down the reference. But even if it could be found it should perhaps be greeted with caution in view of other theatrical information peddled by Aubrey for according to him Ben Jonson ‘killed Mr. Marlowe, the Poet, on Bunhill, comeing [sic] from the Greencurtain playhouse’.
²
Some claim that the ‘curse’ is in the text of the play itself because the famous chant given to the witches which begins ‘Fillet of a fenny’s snake, Eye of newt and toe of frog . . .’ is an authentic black magic spell. It is also suggested that so far from pleasing the King the emphasis on witchcraft and the way it was dealt with upset him, which is why no other performance was recorded for five years, but if this was the case, then there is no record of it.