Sandra Clark

Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England

The book explores how real-life womens crimes were handled in the news media of an age before the invention of the newspaper, in ballads, pamphlets, and plays. It discusses those features of contemporary society that particularly influenced early modern crime reporting, such as attitudes to news, the law and womens rights, and ideas about the responsibility of the community for keeping order. It considers the problems of writing about transgressive women for audiences whose ideal woman was chaste, silent, and obedient.

The broadside ballad and the woman's voice

Despite a common view that the appeal of early modern street literature was to a predominantly male audience,1 there is ample evidence that the broadside ballad had a particular appeal for women. Any account of its reception history would notice the many references in the period to the popularity of ballad singing with young women. It is claimed that, in the eighteenth century, most professional ballad singers were women,2 but in the seventeenth century, though a woman pedlar sometimes helped a male partner to sell ballads, there were only a few women actually known to have sung publicly before the Restoration.3 The traditional, or folk ballad, was commonly transmitted through women’s singing;4 there are many references in the seventeenth century to women in domestic situations singing ballads of all kinds, and there is a strong tradition of female transmission from early times up to the nineteenth century.5 The histories of the traditional and the broadside ballad are closely interconnected,6 and it would be misleading to regard them as completely separate genres, even if their origins might appear to be antithetical. Singing, like story telling, was very much a woman’s act in the early modern period, and the ballad, though produced as a printed object available to be read, was sold to an audience by a singer and circulated as much by singing as by reading.

Macbeth and the Language of the Passions

This article argues that the emotional journey that Macbeth undergoes, culminating in extreme weariness, both physical and spiritual, can be illuminated with reference to early modern theories of mind–body relations as derived from Aristotle via Galen. Shakespeares use of the language of humoral theory contributes significantly to his development of Macbeth as a character with an abnormal susceptibility to feeling. However, a materialistic account of his cognitive disorder coexists with a metaphysical one. The combination helps to create a figure whose passionate suffering, and constant analysis of his feelings, command audience sympathy.

Shrews, Marriage and Murder

There was a common form of humour in early modern England known as the dead wife joke, which appears in various guises. John Taylor the water-poet, a fund of misogynistic wisdom, has a version which he calls ‘Taylor’s motto’: A married man (some say) ha’s two dayes gladnesse And all his life else, is a ling’ring sadesse: The one dayes mirth is when he is first married. Th’other’s when his wife’s to burying carried.1

Women’s Crimes: Their Social Context and Their Representation

The aim of this chapter is to address two questions: the first is, what crimes did women commit in early modern England, and which of these were represented in popular literature? This question can be answered directly, with recourse to fact and evidence. The second is more complex: how did contemporary constructions of gender as expressed in social institutions such as law and the family condition that representation? My method here is to work within a certain broad focus on the issues and the texts that illustrate them; in consequence, detailed discussion of some issues which arise, will be deferred to subsequent chapters. I am not concerned to sift fact from fiction, to assess the accuracy of popular accounts of women’s crimes, but to use cultural evidence of one kind (legislation, some documented evidence, prescriptive handbooks) to interpret another (sensational accounts of women’s crimes). In this context, discussion of gender issues in early modern law broadens out in two directions: first, into consideration of a particular aspect of it which relates especially to women and is reflected in various kinds of social practice: its peculiarly communal nature. The second issue that arises from consideration of legal theory and practice is that of agency: the extent to which women can be regarded in law as responsible for their actions, how the woman who commits crimes can be explained. I examine, with some examples, the question of how crime writing can function to shape a subjectivity for women and the extent to which it is differentiated from men’s.

The Broadside Ballad

I open this chapter with a statement of limitation: of all the broadside ballads extant from the years 1575–1700 only about 30 actually deal with the subject of crimes committed by women. A larger number are concerned with crimes committed by men, which necessarily form part, perhaps the most immediate part, of the context for my main subject. Of course, a high proportion of those ballads we know, mainly through entries in the registers of the Stationers’ Company, to have been written in the period have perished, and some of these were certainly about women’s crimes. It is particularly regrettable, for my purposes, that the four ballads registered on the subject of Anne Brewen’s murder of her husband, recorded in the pamphlet, The trueth of the most wicked & secret murthering of Iohn Brewen, Goldsmith of London (1592), have all disappeared;1 so too other ballads linked with extant pamphlets about women’s crimes, such as the ballad of ‘the woman that was Lately burnt in Saint Georges feildes’,2 probably about Margaret Fernseede; ‘Two unnaturall Mothers’,3 probably about the infanticidal women described by Henry Goodcole as Natures Cruell Step-Dames (1637); the ‘sorrowful ballad made by Mistris Browne … consentinge to the killinge of her husband’;4 and five ballads including the ‘pitiful lamentacon of Rachell Merrye’,5 related to one of the cases dramatised in Robert Yarrington’s play, Two Lamentable Tragedies (1601).6

Early Modern News and Crime Writing: Its Literary and Ideological Context

An interest in news is probably a feature of all societies since it constitutes a basic element in communication between individuals and groups and a footing for social intercourse. But news is not a neutral or objective concept, through whatever medium transmitted; it is a construction which exists in oblique relation to actual events. A modern sociologist refers to news as ‘the end-product of a complex process which begins with a systematic sorting and selecting of events and topics according to a socially constructed set of categories’,1 and this is a process which operates even in the most primitive form of news, that of orally transmitted gossip. In contemporary societies, the news media play an important, and often highly contested, ideological role in the existing structures of power. Raymond Williams calls newspapers ‘a signifying system through which necessarily (though among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored’.2 The accounts of reality which newspapers put forward are shaped and constrained by the interests they represent. In the early modern period, before the systematic and professional production of news in the form of newsbooks, corantos and official newsletters, news writing, both scribal and printed, circulated in a variety of forms, many of them no longer in existence, in which the interaction of oral and written cultures was highly significant.

Crime News and the Pamphlet

Although the term pamphlet has no completely stable definition, in the early modern period it is commonly used with the force of a diminutive and hence, by association, to refer to a printed publication that is ephemeral, occasional and frivolous in nature; ‘pedlarie pamphlets’, ‘scald, trivial, lying pamphlets’, ‘carelesse scareless Pamphlets’, are some of the ways contemporaries described them.1 Marie-Helene Davies says that it derives from Old French ‘palme-feuillet’, meaning literally ‘what could be held in a hand’,2 which conforms with the etymologies given in the OED and also with the bibliographers’ view of it as a publication sold stitched or stabbed (sewn sideways) but unbound and therefore cheaper than a book.3 The term denotes a format, a category of printed production, but not a genre of writing like the broadside ballad or the domestic play with its own formal and rhetorical conventions. The pamphlets which are my chief concern here, those that give accounts of crimes committed by women, generally originate as a subset of the literature of ‘strange news’, stories of monstrous, prodigious or disastrous occurrences, and are structured through conventions of style and content developed in accordance with the perceived nature of this content and its cultural functions. But as accounts of criminal activity acquire meanings and significance outside this particular discourse during the seventeenth century, so too do the pamphlets shift generically.