Dr Kat and The Roaring Girl

hello and welcome back to the channel if you're new here hi you're very welcome this is reading the past and I'm dr. Kat and today I'd like to talk about biographies or really perhaps the way in which fiction and biography Khmers it seems to me that you almost can't turn a corner at the moment without being confronted by biographies whether you're walking past your local cinema or flicking through the brochure of a theatre or turning on your TV or scrolling through your streaming service you on the one hand might flick on Netflix and see the crown on the other will posh your cinema and see adverts for my friend Dharma these biographies are about our kings and queens our politicians and also some of our most prolific and depraved criminals I think it's all too easy to think this is something that's peculiar to us that because of our 24-hour news cycle on our desperate need to consume content that people are essentially scraping every barrel they can to find stories to bring to us but it's not peculiar to our time in fact if we look back a few hundred years we can learn that this is absolutely nothing new the obvious example is of course William Shakespeare's history plays where the lives of kings and princes are played out on the early modern stage however the person I'd like to talk about today isn't a king or a queen or a prince she's allegedly a criminal and what I'd like to talk about today an attempt to do is to unpick the tangled web of fact and fiction that shape our understanding of a woman called Mary Fritz let's go [Music] [Music] so much of the truth or fact of Mary or mul Fritz life remains elusive to us even her date of birth is lost and this isn't uncommon for many people in the past who weren't destined to sit on a throne or weren't born in a position that surrounded a throne their birth date simply isn't recorded we may if we're lucky have a baptismal record but fire flood human error all means that sometimes these records are lost or not properly made so Mary isn't really an anomaly in this but we do know is that it's claimed that she was in her 74th year at the time of her death in July 16 59 we know that she asked to be buried in some Brides and she was on the 10th of August 16 59 however she allegedly wrote an autobiography known as the life and death of mrs. Mary Fred and in this alleged autobiography it gives a birthdate of 1589 which would make her 70 at the time of her death and not 74 now we can of course question whether she is the real author of this autobiography and if she is why she would have got her birth date wrong well of course it's possible that Mary is responsible for that error and exaggeration it is to me however most likely that Mary or more if had absolutely nothing to do with the penning of this so-called autobiography published as it was three years after her death I think it's an attempt for somebody an anonymous author to cash in on the scandalous life led by this woman when I call her life scandalous this is not my personal value judgment of course it is I think the judgment of many of her contemporaries because when Mol or Mary didn't find her selves in the pages of ballads or pamphlets or plays she did unfortunately find herself in front of the Courts of Justice and here is a list of some of the crimes that we know she was accused of that made it to court on the 26th of August 1600 Mary or mole finds herself before the Middlesex justices with two female accomplices one Jane Hill and one Jane Stiles the women were alleged to have stole a clock and more man's purse that contained two shillings 11 pence on the 8th of September 1609 she is accused of burbling a house in the parish of st. Olaf Southwark stealing over 10 pounds worth of coins and jewellery she is apparently found not guilty of this offense in March 1610 on Christmas Day 1611 she is arrested and sent to bright world prison for being in decently dressed just what this means we will be discussing in a moment on the 27th of January 1612 Bishop King accused her of prostitution she denies the charge but he returns her to Bridewell on the 12th of February 1612 so within a month of this charge of prostitution it's reported that mol does public penance at Paul's cross presumably she's doing penance for this charge of prostitution it then seems that she is released on the 23rd of March 1614 Mary is in the records again this time though she's got married to Luke Anna Markham now we're not sure how long this marriage lasts but it seems that it was fairly short and when it ended fairly acrimonious what's interesting to me is that Mary never uses her married name she remains with her maiden name which i think is thoroughly modern of her however this marriage clearly does bring her a degree of respectability and it's a good few years before she finds herself back before the Middlesex justices but she is back in 1617 by which time it seems that the happy couple is no longer happy and they are living separately in 1621 she is called before Star Chamber this is a court that sit and the Palace of Westminster and is comprised of privy counsellors and she is accused of being a fence a receiver of stolen property more specifically it seems that when something would go missing either from being pickpocketed or from being burgled a person could approach Mary and for a fee she would get these goods back to them she claimed that this is because of her contacts with the underworld she was able to get goods back to their very receptive and happy owners people said she was the one orchestrating these thefts in the first place and was then earning money by ransoming these Goods back to their rightful owners it's up to you to decide what you think is most likely in 1624 she finds herself before the court of requests because of an unpaid bill for a shipment of beaver hats in what seems to be her last recorded brush with the authorities or the law we find Mary on the 21st of June 1644 being discharged from Bethlem Hospital also known as bedlam having apparently recovered from alleged insanity the indecent dress that gets Mary arrested and placed in Bridewell on Christmas Day 1611 is not perhaps what we would think of as being indecent dressed today now yes she is accused or an occasion of being a prostitute and also a pimp and a panda and so it could be quite easy to see this indecent dress as being her wearing too little on the contrary I think that she is placed in Bridewell and perhaps the Bethlehem Hospital later because of her propensity to dress as a man in doing so she breaks with the established social order much like her purchase that she doesn't pay for of beaver hats she is breaking down the gender and class boundaries that are clearly codified at this time women cannot go about dressed as men men cannot go about dressed as women a yeoman farmer can't dress the prints a fishwife can dresses abductors every strata of society is separated up by what they are permitted to wear and the same goes across the separation of genders what Mary is doing flexes and threatens to break this clearly codified social order you deviate so profoundly from the established social order may begin as being seen as a criminal offense and may later when it's repeated time and again be seen as evidence of insanity in the patchwork of fact and fiction of the life of Mary or Mole Freeth or to use her alternative name that you may know her better as mol cup purse she comes down to us as a charming roguish figure she gets about London in her men's clothing smoking a pipe and presumably swearing like a sailor she's a thief and a pickpocket and maybe a pimp or a panda absolutely but there's something inherently likeable about her and I don't think that's just a modern audience saying that I think the contemporaries that represented her on their pages and their stages also felt this peculiar affection for this criminal woman she's a rogue but she's a lovable rogue as I mentioned earlier Mary is the subject of her very own alleged auto biography that's published three years after her death the life and death of mrs. Mary Fred however she was also in print during her lifetime and so would have been able to read and enjoy the representation of her the first of these enters the stage shows register on the 7th of August 1610 so this is just under a year after that an alleged burglary that she said to have committed in southern and it is John days the mad pranks of Mary Mull of the bank side in day's text we see Mary going about the streets dressed in men's clothing she is also accused by day of playing the lute in the taverns and Street without a license clearly de is attempt to cash in on the roguish charms of this lady criminal and he certainly wouldn't be the last perhaps the most famous representation of Mary Freeth appears in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Decker's the roaring go published in 1611 the Mary Freeth character of mole cup purse in Decorah Middletons play the roarin girl is a matchmaker of sorts she comes across a young man who has fallen in love with an impoverished girl his father will not allow him to marry a girl with such a poor dowry so mol hatches a plan she will pretend to be this gentleman's lover she will make his father think that rather than this impoverished girl with a small dowry he is instead running off with a prostitute and a thief Molk up purse of course they attempt to catch her out and catch him out and all resolves with him eloping his father thinks he's eloped with mole coppers and is of course relieved to find that instead his son has married sweet Mary with her little dowry also tellingly within the play the accusations about mole as a cup purse and a pimp are shown to be false they are the rumors of scandalized Londoners they are attempting to take a woman who has essentially turned her back on the traditional feminine role of wife and mother and they have made her into this criminal figure it's essentially a different form of a witch-hunt she doesn't conform and so she's accused of this through middle and ecers play interestingly Mary Freeth through her counterpart mol cutpurse is absolved of the accusations yes she might stray from traditional female roles she may dress as a man and she may mix with criminals but it doesn't make her one and essentially all of the allegations against her are simply down to the fact that people cannot understand this woman who has deviated so profoundly she isn't a criminal she's a rebel but she's a rebel with a heart of gold who wants to see two young lovers happily placed together to see a love match take place regardless of Gary she is the hero of the piece in April 1611 there is a report that Mary Freeth appeared on the stage of the fortune Theatre she was dressed as a man wearing a sword and she had come to close out a play by dancing a jig the assumption is that the play that she was closing was of course the roaring go now we don't know for sure but I do like to think that this was the play that she was closing because it means that she enjoyed this representation of herself that she liked herself being fictionalized and mythologized in this way what do you think let me know in the comment section down below in choosing to title their play the roarin girl or mole cup purse Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker are using a term that is most commonly at this time attached two young men roaring boys were carousing street fighting petty criminals what this points to for me is that at this time there simply isn't a phrase that fully explained or encompasses what mary or mole was they have to borrow from the male world just I think as Mary herself does in her costume and it's higher she doesn't fit female definition and so she borrows seemingly from men it's important I think to briefly state that figures like the real mary fris and her fictional counterpart mole coppers also feature in other texts in the period slightly after the first production and printing of the roaring go in 1622 polemical pamphlets appear the first one hit Mulia or the mannish woman seems to be a direct response to james the first complaints against women going about dressed as men the fact that the king is complaining about these mannish women would perhaps point to the fact that mary Freeth is not the only cross dress woman in london or perhaps she has simply become so famous that she has inspired others to dress and behave as she does however in that same year a second pamphlet a response comes out hiked via is the womanish man and in this pamphlet these mannish women are essentially absolved of their sin and the blame is placed firmly on the effeminate men that surround them the women who dress and act as men says this second pamphlet are forced to do so because they have no appropriate male in London to support them the men have turned woman so the women must act as men let me know what you think of these pamphlets if you find them interesting perhaps I can make a dedicated video on them or if there's another pamphlet or libel or polemic that you'd like me to look at for a video do let me know in the comment section down below I hope you enjoyed this video and found it useful if you liked me talking about the fact and fictions of historical biography and you can think of another figure you'd like me to have a look at please let me know in the comment section down below I'm also going to leave my social media links in the description box I'd love it if you come over there and follow me but also you can come there and tell me if there's another topic or person you'd like me to cover if you did like this video please do click the like button so I know please also subscribe to my channel and click the bell icon so that YouTube tells you when I've next uploaded I hope you're gonna have a great day whatever you're doing and that you're going to take care of yourself I look forward to seeing you all in the next video bye bye for now [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Reading the Past

Views: 29,804

Rating: 4.9645281 out of 5

Keywords: The Roaring Girl, Gender, Middleton, Education, Mary Frith, Early Modern, Drama, History, Culture, Theatre, Literature, Moll Cutpurse, Dekker, Biography, Renaissance

Id: jWq44OXD6rk

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 08 2019