Then, as now, a marginal, area of London, where many writers lived or lodged.
In Holywell Street, in the late summer of 1588, the great comic actor Dick Tarleton was dying, cared for by “one Em Ball”, a local woman “of verye bad reputacion”.
Robert Greene was living that year with a woman of the surname Ball, the sister of a thief who had died at Tyburn. She would bear his son, called Fortunatus, who died in 1593 and was buried at St Leonard’s Shoreditch, when his mother was living on the same street. The two Ball women might have been related, or they might have been the same woman. (p. 40)
Other women in the pamphlets of Thomas Nashe include old Megge Curtis of Shoreditch for whom the pages of a pamphlet served “to stop mustard pots with”; and Mother Livers of Newington, a fortune-teller”.
(From A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe, Charles Nicholl, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984)
Anyone come across “Em” elsewhere?
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