Providence evidently made me to be useful, and I can’t help it. But, I must say, that I don’t altogether appreciate your friend’s kind wishes with respect to my complexion. If it had been as dark as any nigger’s, I should have been just as happy and as useful, and as much respected by those whose respect I value; and as to his offer of blessing me, I should, even if it were practicable, decline it without any thanks. As to the society which the process might gain me admission into, all I can say is, that, judging from the specimens I have met with here and elsewhere, I don’t think that I shall lose much by being excluded from it. So, gentlemen, I drink to you and the general reformation of American manners.
The Wonderful Adventures deserves its newfound status as a modern classic. It was written for money and can be monstrously self-promoting in places, but at its best—in the tender accounts of the young men who died in her arms, or by abruptly breaking off from describing battlefield carnage to give a recipe for a refreshing punch—it is as lively and original as the lady herself.
Despite all her troubles, Mary lived and died a happy woman. She may never have heard of Epicurus but she instinctively embodied his central proposition that true pleasure comes from conquering pain and fear. And in the other sense of the word, what could be more Epicurean than a bar and restaurant on a battlefield? She left no grand edifice, but she left an unforgettable voice.
Everything we know about Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse (about 1584–1659), suggests that her voice was equally unforgettable. For one thing, she had to make herself heard above the roar of the bear pit. Standing among the office blocks and art galleries of London’s Bankside today, it’s hard to imagine that four hundred years ago, in a small street still called Bear Gardens, ferocious battles were fought in a circular arena that held more than three thousand people. Here could be seen the most formidable fighting bears of the era—ursine celebrities like Ned Whiting, Sackerson, or Blind Harry Hunks—taking on a succession of dogs, swatting them from wherever their jaws had fastened hold, battling it out until either they or the dogs collapsed from exhaustion. As well as being a noisy, gruesome spectacle, bear baiting was big business. A lot of money could be made betting on the outcome.
It was a brutal, often dangerous pastime. The animals were tethered to a stake in the center of the arena, held by a 15-foot chain or rope. The breeders stood in a circle, just out of range, holding their dogs by the ears. Once they were let loose, the contest would rage for as long as an hour. It wasn’t unusual for wounded animals to break free and chase their owners around the pit. Injuries were common; health and safety rules rudimentary. This was a man’s sport: the bear pit was no place for a woman.
But Mary Frith wasn’t going to let that put her off. She dressed, drank, smoked, and swore like a man; and the bear pit was her passion. She bred mastiffs—the muscular, squat-faced, short-necked, strong-jawed ancestors of today’s bulldogs. In her own account of her life, published in 1662, three years after her death, we learn that her dogs were pampered like the children she never had (or wanted), each of them sleeping in their own bed, complete with sheets and blankets, and fed on a special food she boiled up herself.
Mary had grown up just over the river, the daughter of a cobbler in Aldersgate Street, but Southwark was her spiritual home. The south bank of the Thames in the early seventeenth century was London’s pleasure center, though very much not what Epicurus had in mind. Two pence got you into the bear garden; six pence, an evening at the theatre or an hour with a whore. Beer was a penny a pint; tobacco, three pence a pipe load; a decent tavern meal about the same. Given that the average wage was about seven shillings a week, it’s not surprising that theft and gambling were rife. The entertainments brought in huge numbers of gamblers: An estimated 10 percent of the entire population of London visited the theatre or the bear garden every day. In the narrow maze of streets, gangs of professional criminals worked their routines assiduously.
Mary Frith started out as a pickpocket. We first hear of her as a teenager in 1600, when she and two female accomplices were accused of stealing “2s and 11d in cash, from an unknown man at Clerkenwell.” Other arrests followed, and despite her protestations in her autobiography that she “never Actually or Instrumentally cut any Mans Purse,” she certainly worked as a part of a gang who did. But Mary had grander ambitions than a life of petty crime. By 1608 she was performing in the streets and taverns of Southwark. Dressed as a man, in a doublet and leather jerkin, a sword hanging by her side and a pipe clamped between her teeth, she would strum her lute, sing rude songs, dance jigs, and tell stories. Perhaps the cross-dressing began as part of her pickpocket routine—it would certainly have made it easier it to blend into a crowd—but it soon became her calling card.
A woman dressing as a man was far more shocking then than now. It was done in the theatre, of course—all the actors were men and boys in any case—but to do it openly on the streets was more than just an affront to the natural order of things. It was breaking the law. Moll Cutpurse, Mary’s alter ego, became an overnight sensation. She was more like a contemporary conceptual artist than the stage performers she hung around with—not only did she dress and perform as a man, she lived like one, too. From the tavern to the bear pit, her art was her life. By 1610, she had inspired one of the first female celebrity biographies, The Madde Prancks of Merry Moll of the Bankside with Her Walks in Man’s Apparel and to What Purpose, by the playwright John Day. In 1611 two of the most successful writers of the age, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, asked her to close a performance of the play they had written about her, The Roaring Girl. This was the big time—an audience of two thousand people watching Moll Cutpurse playing herself.
This stunt proved too much for the authorities. Mary was arrested for immoral behavior and thrown into the correction house at Bridewell, where she was subjected to the punishment usually reserved for prostitutes. She was soundly whipped and then forced to beat the stalks of hemp plants to make fibers for rope. But if this was intended to make her see the error of her ways, it failed abysmally. After three months, she reemerged and took up where she had left off. On Christmas Eve, 1611, she was arrested again for exactly the same offense, “to the disgrace of all womanhood.”
This time she was hauled up in front of the bishop of London, charged with prostitution as well as cross-dressing. The bishop pressed her to confess that she was “sexually incontinent,” but Mary would have none of it. She cheerfully admitted to being a foul-mouthed, drunken thief and a gambler and a bear baiter, but she strongly objected to the accusation that she had sold her body. Though she looked like a man, she told the assembled clerics, a visit to her lodgings would show she was every bit a woman. This saucy response outraged the judge. She was sentenced to public penance (dressed in a very unmanly white shift) at the cross outside old St. Paul’s. Mary turned it into a command performance, drinking herself insensible on six pints of sherry first and then weeping so piteously that the authorities released her to preserve the peace.
Mary had a very modern instinct for making money from fame. By the time she was thirty, she was a major player in the London underworld. Her days as a thief and her hours spent in the bear gardens and taverns had built up an unrivaled network of contacts on both sides of the law. As far as her manor was concerned, she always knew who was doing what, and where. This made her the perfect broker for stolen goods. If a purse or a watch went missing, a visit to Moll Cutpurse would usually see it restored on the same day, provided a decent cash reward was produced. It was a protection racket tolerated by the authorities because it kept the mean streets of Southwark under control, and welcomed by the theatres and sporting rings because it allowed them to turn a profit unmolested.
In 1614 Mary married Lewknor Markham, scion of a well-off, upper-class family from Nottinghamshire. Mary’s new father-in-law, Gervase Markham (1568–1637), was an astonishingly industrious author, churning out poems and treatises on everything from forestry, agriculture, and militar
y training to veterinary medicine, archery, and wildfowling. The booksellers were swamped with his works. In 1617 he had five different books on horses all in print at the same time. This exasperated the Stationers’ Company, which forced him to sign an unprecedented agreement in which he promised “never to write any more book or books to be printed of the deseases or Cures of any Cattle, as Horse, Oxe, Cowe, Sheepe, Swine, Goates etc.” His best-known work is The English Hus-wife (1615), a kind of early Mrs. Beeton, full of recipes and handy hints on running a successful household. Quite what drove his son to marry a cross-dressing, bear-baiting gangster is a mystery.
In any event, it seems to have been a marriage of convenience rather than passion, as there is no evidence of their ever having lived together. From Mary’s point of view, having a husband brought respectability, which was good for business. She invariably referred to herself as Mrs. Mary Markham from then on, although she failed to mention her husband at all in her autobiography. In fact, other than the marriage, there is no mention of Lewknor Markham in any historical records. The couple married at St. Mary Overbury, now Southwark Cathedral, at that time the actors’ church, so it’s possible he was involved with the theatre. Why did he marry Mary? Perhaps he was gay? That wouldn’t have been unusual in the Southwark of the day. Or given that the subtitle to The English Hus-wife was “Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman,” it might have just been two fingers up to his annoyingly successful father. But the most likely reason is money, Lewknor taking a cut from Mary’s business in return for use of the Markham name. That would have been worth hard cash to her.
Mary’s sex life is another mystery. There’s no record of her having had sexual relationships with anyone, male or female. However scary Moll Cutpurse may have been in public, the private Mary Frith sounds rather nice, and her house in Fleet Street, full of dogs and parrots, surprisingly feminine. It was always immaculate—kept spotless by no fewer than three maids—and the walls were covered with looking glasses, “so that I could see my sweet self all over in any part of my rooms.” Self-esteem was clearly not the problem. On rare occasions she did admit to finding a man attractive—one such was Ralph Briscoe, the clerk at Newgate Prison, who was “right for her tooth” and whose life she saved by pulling him out of the ring when a bull had him by the breeches. But sex just seems to have been too much bother, except as a source for humor. Coming across a worse-for-wear neighbor late one night, she called out to him cheekily: “Mr. Drake, when shall you and I make Ducklings?”
To which he responded “that I looked as if some Toad had ridden me and poisoned me into that shape,” that he was altogether for “a dainty Duck, that I was not like that Feather, and that my Eggs were addle. I contented my self with the repulse and walked quietly homeward.”
Good humor, self-deprecation, vulnerability are all there. Perhaps she was happier alone with her dogs and parrots, who loved her unconditionally.
The lusts of others were a different matter. Hovering between the criminal underworld and polite society, Mary was perfectly placed to offer more intimate services than the sale of stolen property. And she had spotted a gap in the market: wealthy women looking for male companions. With the single-mindedness she brought to all her business ventures, she “chose the sprucest Fellows the Town afforded” and turned her house into an escort agency. One of her most audacious coups was to get the male lovers of a woman who had been (with Mary’s help) serially unfaithful to her husband to contribute to the maintenance of her children after she’d died of the clap.
Busy as she was with fencing and pimping, Mary still found time to play Moll for the occasional public performance. The vintner and showman William Banks bet her £20 that she wouldn’t ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch dressed as a man. Of course, she did so in style, flaunting a banner, blowing a trumpet, and causing a riot in the process. Part of the excitement was due to the fact that the horse she was riding was Banks’s Morocco, the most famous performing animal in London. Shod in silver, it could dance, play dice, count money, and generally astonish an audience with its intelligence and dexterity. Its most famous trick was climbing the hundreds of narrow steps to the top of the old St. Paul’s and dancing on the roof, watched by thousands below. In the annals of popular entertainment, Moll Cutpurse riding Banks’s horse would have been the Jacobean equivalent of the Beatles reforming and playing on the same stage as the Rolling Stones.
Even at four centuries’ distance, it is this irrepressible side to Mary’s character that seems as fresh as ever. If the idea of bawdy has fallen victim to endless over-the-top costume dramas, full of ale-swigging wenches in low-cut dresses, it’s worth remembering the word originally meant “joyous.” The joy that Mary brought to others with her unconventional life was borne out by the people who knew her. “She has the spirit of four great parishes,” wrote Middleton and Dekker, “and a voice that will drown all the city.” She was a show-off—even sometimes a bully—but the dens and alleyways of south London were a brighter place for her presence. One can imagine her getting on well with Mary Seacole. Both rose from poverty and lived their lives as independent women, on their own terms, in a man’s world.
After the Civil War, the Puritans banned bear baiting. Though Mary outlived Cromwell, she didn’t live quite long enough to see the monarchy restored and her beloved bear garden reopened, but in any case, the Southwark of old was never quite the same again. Mary Markham died wealthy enough to be buried inside St. Bridget’s Church in Fleet Street. Her final request was to be laid face down in her coffin because “as I have in my Life been preposterous, so I may be in my Death”—but whether it was carried out, we’ll never know.
One person who would have appreciated Mary’s last wish was the great twentieth-century physicist Richard Feynman (1918–88). Tall, handsome, and funny, he was also an eccentric prankster with a huge appetite for the preposterous. His own last words were in the same spirit: “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.” For Feynman, to be bored in life, work, or death was the ultimate sin.
He was born into a tight-knit Jewish family in New York and didn’t talk until he was well past three years old. Not long afterward, his father, somewhat optimistically, bought him the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. But the young Feynman devoured it: It was his constant companion throughout his childhood, and by his early teens he had read it cover to cover. His father, Melville, a Belarusian car-polish salesman, stretched him in other ways, too. He taught him to predict mathematical patterns using building blocks and took him on long walks where he showed him how to pay close attention to nature. It was his father, Feynman always said, who taught him the difference between “knowing the name of something and knowing something.” Years later he would write:
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.
Melville also had a wonderful knack of turning abstract scientific ideas into stories, something his son would inherit and make his trademark:
For example, when I was playing with my electric trains, he told me that there is a great wheel being turned by water which is connected by filaments of copper, which spread out and spread out and spread out in all directions; and then there are little wheels, and all those little wheels turn when the big wheel turns. The relation between them is only that there is copper and iron, nothing else—no moving parts. You turn one wheel here, and all the little wheels all over the place turn, and your train is one of them. It was a wonderful world my father told me about.
As a result, science and fun were indistinguishable for the young Feynman. He accumulated tubes, springs, batteries, anything mechanical he could get his hands on, and performed experiments. He paid his younger sister Joan (who also became a physicist) four cents a week to act as his lab assistant. Part of her role was to agree to be electrocuted (mildly) in fro
nt of Dick’s friends. He also created a rudimentary burglar alarm for the house and an electric motor that would rock his sister’s cot. He was known in the neighborhood as “the boy who could fix radios by thinking.”
He hated school, of course—except for the Math Team, where he reigned supreme. In the school yearbook, he was given the soubriquet Mad Genius, which he did his best to live up to. Studying for his bachelor’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his math and physics results were off the scale, and later, in the entrance exam for Princeton, he achieved a perfect score in both subjects—a feat never achieved before or since. Feynman’s happiest times at the university were spent playing in his room, trying to figure out how ants communicated or the physics required to explain how jelly set. Nevertheless, his doctoral thesis caused a sensation. In it, he created an entirely fresh approach to quantum mechanics—unlike anything anyone had done before—and applied it with spectacular success to describe the interactions of electrons and photons. Rather as Oliver Heaviside had done with Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism, the twenty-three-year-old Feynman had come up with a simpler, more elegant solution than anyone had thought possible. He later claimed that he had a synesthetic gift: He could see the underlying patterns in a sequence of equations marked out in different colors.
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