ABSTRACT
Before the Puritan mindset and the English Civil War prevailed to officially close London theatres in 1642, women were prohibited from acting in public in Britain. Male, female and cross-dressed roles were all played by the men and boys of all-male casts, and professional female performers were marginalized as mountebanks’ assistants, gypsy fortune-tellers or vagrants.2 Only exceptionally are their identities and activities individually recorded. Ann Mossock, ‘player’, was rewarded with payment of three shillings and fourpence in July 1638, when she and Robert Tayler were in Coventry ‘by warrant to shew the worldes Creation’.3 Mrs Bradley, Jane Smith, Ioane Wyatt and Mrs de Roson were members of four husband-and-wife teams licensed to show unusual animals or humans around the English provinces in the 1610s and 1620s.4 For the ‘Vaulter good, and Dauncing lass on Roap: and man that cries hey toss, and tumbler young’ of Bartholomew Fair and their type, business carried on more or less as usual through the closure.5 According to the provisions of Queen Elizabeth’s 1572 Acte for the punishement of Vacaboundes and for the Relief of the Poore & Impotent, all able-bodied, unmarried, non-land-owning adults were required to be in service, and performing itinerants shared the lowest social status:
for goe they neuer so braue, yet are they counted and taken but for beggers […] Are they not taken by the lawes of the Realm, for roagues and vacaboundes (I speak of such as trauaile the Cuntries, with playes & enterludes, making an occupation of it) and ought so to be punished? 6
Mary Frith, one of the most creative, challenged the restrictive limitations of both class and gender by cross-dressing in the attire of a well-born male, to construct the performative persona of her London street shows, mix with quacks and
1 Aspects of Part VI were previously touched on in Katritzky, ‘Unser sind drey’ and ‘Pickelhering and Hamlet’.
