Cutting Ball

"Cutting" Ball was a notorious criminal during the Elizabethan Age. (His name came from a "cutpurse", a thief.)

Thomas Nashe mentions a ballad written about him, which does not survive. His sister Em was the mistress of writer Robert Greene. Greene, who wrote much about the London underworld, once hired Ball as a bodyguard. Ball was hanged at Tyburn.

The San Francisco experimental Cutting Ball Theatre was named after him.