Why the past matters: Emma Whipday & Freyja Cox Jensen at TEDxGoodenoughCollege
[Music] [Music] good evening we are here tonight to tell you about a murder that took place over 400 years ago it was the murder of a London shopkeeper named Master Beach and his young servant Thomas Winchester by one of their neighbors Master Beach was a prosperous man his shop was popular and he sold enough to make himself very comfortable but in London in 1594 not everyone's lives were so comfortable the city was overcrowded and ever growing flooded with immigrants from the provinces and refugees from abroad Master Beach's neighbor Thomas Mary was a young man who owned a Tavern that he struggled to make ends meet and to feed his family in a fit of jealous rage Thomas Mary killed Master beach by hitting him repeatedly over the head with a hammer to get rid of the only witness to his horrific crime he then did the same to master Beach's young servant he forced his sister Rachel to help him clean up the blood and get rid of the body in the days that followed his neighbors horrified that such a horrific crime could take place place in their close-nit southern Community without being detected banded together to find out the criminals they discovered Mary and Mary and his sister Rachel were hanged for murder the crime sent shock waves across Elizabeth and London it was reported in news pamphlets and sung about on the streets but sadly none of those pamphlets and none of those ballads survive today the only reason that we know that the crime took place at all is because it survived in another form in 1600 the Admirals men the theater company that staged many of Shakespeare's early plays staged a play called The Tragedy of Thomas Mary based on the crime at the Rose Theater the remains of which can still be found on Bank side in the following year the play was published or a version of this play was published in a compilation of two plays in one called two lamentable tragedies a few week ago Freya and I staged the first performance of this play in over 400 years Freya took the Gory and unpleasant role of Thomas Mary the murderer and Emma took the part of the onstage prompt she was there all dressed up in costume sitting in the middle of the stage while the action took place around her just as it would have done in Shakespeare's London now this is quite peculiar we don't do that today when you go to the globe or the RSC you don't see the person sitting there with the book The Script on stage ready to pick up the pieces When Things Fall Apart so why do we do this surely actors should be able to learn their lines well it was because we were attempting to bring to life the ways that plays were staged in Elizabeth and London so the actors because they performed so often never received a whole script to learn they only had their own lines and their cues and they only had one full rehearsal on the day of the performance so that's what we attempted to do now as you can imagine for a cast of Modern 2st Century actors trained in weeks and weeks of rehearsals knowing everybody else's lines as well as their own this was quite unsettling we were pretty worried about what was going to happen I was on stage as the murderer I knew that I I killed somebody and I knew what I did with the body I didn't know what anybody else was going to do in reaction against me so this is why we had Emma there and we were trying to do it to make some connections between actors in the time of Shakespeare and how we do modern-day acting we were trying to experience what it was like what it felt like to be those people in 16th Century Theaters but those weren't the only connections we were trying to make we were also trying to link what happened in London in the 1590s and then around about 1600 in the text of our play with our society today and we were exploring some of the problems that we face conceptions of society David Cameron suggested that we have a big Society we were looking at social inequality and Injustice gender relations poverty Y and how people deal with criminals when they're in living in their family or in their neighborhood so the play starts with Thomas Mary pretty disgruntle sitting at home considering his life and he says I cannot buy my beer my bread my meat my coals my [ __ ] and such like necessaries at the best hands because I lack the coin which many misers Coffer up in bags having enough to serve their turn besides he's essentially saying that he can't buy the food and drink he needs for his family he can't afford to heat his house he can't do it all at the same time and he certainly can't buy the quality that he wants and feels his family deserve because he just can't afford it he also takes a look around at the people living in the nearby streets and he sees men who are very rich men like Master Beach who've got more than enough money they've got plenty in savings and he thinks that this isn't fair now today in England we have more people than ever accessing food banks we also have food banks increasingly providing food that doesn't have to be cooked people just can't afford to turn on their ovens and you don't need to look very far in the papers to see evidence of fuel poverty particularly among the elderly and of course if you can't afford to heat your home in a cold winter then you're going to be subject to all kinds of diseases and this is bad and it puts the strain on the NHS so we wanted to explore these kinds of connections we wanted to see what happens when you've got a situation where the Society is in crisis the 1590s were a terrible time England was at War prices were very high the currency was debased inflation was terrible um a series of really bad harvests and plagues meant that everyone was really really struggling to make ends meet so we took a little look at this and we thought that actually what we see is Mary turning to Crime out of desperation and this is pretty much what we saw in 2011 when London's youth took to the streets in the riot it's what happens when a city's young people become poor and disenfranchised so as Freya says Mary turns to Crime out of desperation and sad economic circumstances but in so doing he doesn't just embroil himself in a criminal lifestyle he also forces his sister Rachel to be involved by making her help him hide the body and clean up the blood Rachel is determined to protect her brother and she says let others open what I do conceal he is my brother I will cover it and rather die than have it spoken rif look where she goes betrayed her brother's life so Rachel is saying that Mary might be found out but it won't be through her she would rather die than have the whole Community know her as someone who would turn her brother in to the authorities and in studies of British crime of British gang culture today we see a similar pattern sisters who were loyal to their criminal Brothers partly out of family pride and loyalty and also because they're financially dependent of upon them in one recent study by London Metropolitan University one sister of a gang member said my brother brought me an iPad recently I thought to myself he doesn't work so where does he get this money I chose not to ask I can't be bothered with an argument just take it and be quiet I don't want no argument Rachel finds herself in a similar position forced to keep quiet about the money her brother has stolen as an unmarried Elizabethan woman Rachel is unable to support herself she's entirely reliant on her brother for financial support for the sister's gang for the sister of the gang member she has a job of her own but she becomes dependent on her brother for luxuries that she cannot afford the shadow of domestic violence hangs over both accounts both Thomas Mary and the gang member are men who live violent lives and their sisters are afraid to provoke them but there is also the issue of family pride and loyalty Rachel is determined to protect her brother and her reputation and many of the sisters in the study were the same they were determined to conceal their brother's secrets and protest their innocence although not criminals themselves the family members of criminals can become complicit in Crimes by being forced to keep quiet about them and so become embroiled in their devastating consequences for Rachel the consequences of keeping her brothers sisters secrets were fatal she was hanged as an accessory to murder now it's quite a gory tale and the way that Mary disposes of the body is no different he kills Master Beach and he's got to do something with the corpse but he can't carry the body all by himself and Rachel's not going to help him she's just going to wipe up the blood so what Mary does is he chops the body up into its you know component parts as one I suppose might do in such a situation he chops The Head and the legs off and then the arms and the Torso are separate and he puts these pieces in bags which he carries around London and deposits in certain Secret locations he goes home convinced that this means he's out of trouble no one can possibly put two and two together or head legs arms and torso together no one is going to find him out he hasn't banked on the local neighborhood watch or the equivalent in Elizabeth and London the neighbors all get together they don't know where Master beach has gone something bad must have happened Thomas Winchester is lying there with a hammer in his head this is how he's been murdered so what they do is they look in all the drains to see who's been washing blood away they try and find out who owns the hammer that is sticking still in Thomas Winchester's head and they try and find out find out who bought the sacks in which the body parts are concealed we have the character of a gentleman he's out walking his dog uh and the dog happens to find something lying in a ditch it's a bit of the body the gentleman has heard a rumor that someone is missing in a certain location in sooc so he takes the body part s to the locality where the man is missing we also have two watermen here in their orange life jackets these were the men who fed passengers across the river temps there was only one bridge in this time so they were really important and they were the equivalent of today's London cabbies they're the people who get the gossip from their passengers so they know something is wrong and master Beach is missing too they come across the other body parts lying in a different ditch what do they do they feel a sense of social responsibility they could ignore them but they take them belg to the street where Master Beach lives and the neighbors band together they lay out the body they see that it makes a hole they see it's Master Beach and they use the body parts to come to a conclusion about who murdered him now this idea of neighbors all getting together to help step in when something is wrong to fix it is very like David Cameron's big Society David Cameron in 2011 first spoke about this in terms of our society and Community being broken something needs to be fixed and what he was talking about is the way that people living together in neighborhoods manage to police themselves things work because people care about each other and you don't always need the state to step in and do it for you this is precisely what happens in Elizabeth and London in the 1590s there is no standing army and there is no police force there is no way the law is going to be upheld if the ordinary people don't get together to do it themselves they only need State Justice right at the end when the execution is performed and so in the connections between what we see happening in Elizabeth and London this idea that you represent it on the stage to show people how they should be acting when something goes wrong Mary has stepped outside the social norms the neighbors have put it right we can see traces of what David Cameron sees as the ideal for our society today a sort of fantasy as you like where we see the world of the 1590s still being played out in today's political rhetoric so as prya says the play deals with fantasies and nightmares of a society how a society can go wrong when Neighbors start killing each other but how that same neighborhood can fix it and it is similar idea ideals that we find in newspapers and political speeches today but of course in many ways Elizabeth and London was very different to the London we know today the water was unsafe to drink so everyone drank weak beer from morning till night plague was Rife and there was extremely serious um consequences for breaking the law the law often punished descent with death but many things have not changed all that much there was destructive prejudice against immigrants women who walk the streets alone particularly at night were at risk of sexual violence and there was dramatic social injustice stemming from inequality of wealth many things have improved since then sanitation gender relations the NHS the welfare state but many things have not and we think it's important to recognize this and it's in analyzing these similarities and differences that we find find in literature and we find in history similarities and differences between the past and the present we might track them with our left hemisphere um that we can start to see how you can use the past to help to make the world a better place today we might think that we're all very modern that we've got problems to do with investment bankers the world is a a progressive place and we tend to look forwards rather than back we're using science and new technology to see where we're going to go but unless we stop and look back over our shoulders we're not going to learn lessons from the past lessons that will help us to improve we're not going to work out what we did wrong we're not going to work out how we got where we are today and sometimes those things really matter we also think that the reluctance sometimes to invest in the humanities might come from its previous focus on slightly more traditional subjects history has often been about Great Men literature has been about great works of art the plays of William Shakespeare but those people aren't really like most of us they don't reflect the hopes and the anxieties of the ordinary people and we think that it's by looking at these Ordinary People and exploring how their lives were lived and how they dealt with their problems that we might be able to think about who we are today and how far we've improved on what went on in the past so we like to look through things like the tragedy of Mary at the lives of the people out there on the Streets of London these are the poor people the uneducated people the disenfranchised people and in the 1590s this pretty much includes all women in society we're not suggesting that the study of the Arts and Humanities only matters when it's relevant to issues our society faces today I believe that the study of literature and history are important in their own right and I don't think I'm alone in this the recent birthday celebrations of Shakespeare's 450th birthday and the Spate of programs events and various articles inspired by the anniversary of the first world war suggest that big history and great literature will always be seen as important but the tragedy of Mary is certainly not great literature in fact a lot of it is quite bad and the crime on which it is based is certainly not big history it's tiny history micro history it mattered to a small community of people in 16th century London and then it was soon forgotten but for those few people in 16th century London it was really important it said something to them about their society their community and how they lived together and we think that if we focus on Tiny histories we're going to get more of a sense of who you and I are and how we all work together in today's England today's Britain today's Global joined up world and so if you take one thing away from our talk today we'd like it to be this that we want to spend a bit more time thinking about the past in terms of Ordinary People You me everybody not just I don't know David Cameron or the queen not just William Shakespeare or Queen Elizabeth the first so we'd like to think about the past and we'd like to think that the past matters because it tells us something about who we are it tells us something about how we got where we are today and quite a lot of the time it tells us how far we still have to go thank you thank you