Roaring Girls

To a country that had long employed sartorial sumptuary laws to scrupulously to preserve the distinctions of rank in its citizens, this trend for female transvestism indicated their alarming lack of control over the distinctions of gender. The Bible had decried cross-dressing as an ‘abomination unto the Lord’,[13] a subversion of the ‘proper’ hierarchy between woman, man and God, as the pamphleteer Phillip Stubbes was keen to remind everybody in his 1583 Anatomy of Abuses. All cross-dressers, he wrote, were ‘accursed’. Men who did it were ‘weak, tender and infirm’, degrading themselves to the status of feeble, powerless females.[14] Women who did it were hermaphroditic ‘monsters’ and presumptuous whores, attempting to steal a man’s power and usurp his sovereignty.

It was this perceived power exchange that was key to transvestism’s ability to unsettle and enrage society. In women, not only did it smack of insubordination, but with its elements of disguise, evasion and masculine aggression, it carried an intrinsic connection to both criminality and sexual incontinency. In 1615, a fencing master named Joseph Swetnam was so incensed by this fad that Mary Frith was spearheading that he published The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women – a misogynist’s rant in which he bloviated against the ‘heinous evils’ of women. The book was so popular it went through ten editions by 1637, and the concerns it spoke of went right to the very top. King James I, another notorious misogynist, voiced his own anxieties in January 1620, when he commanded that the clergy ‘inveigh vehemently and bitterly in their sermons, against the insolence of our women’ for ‘their wearing of broad brimmed hats’ and ‘pointed doublets’, for having ‘their hair cut short or shorne’ and for carrying ‘stilettoes or poinards [daggers]’.[15] His decree then sparked a pamphlet war the following month between the anonymous authors of Hic Mulier, or, The Man-Woman and Haec Vir; or, The Womanish Man, who publicly fought out the big question: where these ‘masculine-feminines’ a monstrous ‘deformity never before dreamed of’, or emancipated slaves fighting for freedom of choice and self-expression?[16] It could not have been clearer that, even after decades of furiously debating the controversy, this new breed of woman that Mary represented encapsulated men’s fears that ‘the world is very far out of order’.[17]

Consequently, and perhaps inevitably, the panicked authorities frantically cracked down on this destabilising wave of transvestism in an attempt to stamp it out. Several women are known to have been arrested and punished for it long before Mary took it up: in 1569, one Joanna Goodman was whipped and sent to the Bridewell house of correction for dressing as a male servant to accompany her husband to war; in July 1575, the Aldermen’s Court sentenced Dorothy Clayton to stand on the pillory for two hours before sending her to Bridewell Prison and Hospital because ‘contrary to all honesty and womanhood [she] commonly goes about the City apparelled in man’s attire’; in 1599, Katherine Cuffe was sent to Bridewell for disguising herself in boy’s clothes to meet her lover in secret, as was Margaret Wakeley in 1601, because she ‘had a bastard child and went in men’s apparel’.[18]

Most of these women had been accused of sexual misconduct in connection with their transvestism and were using it as a form of disguise. Mary’s motives, however, appear to have been quite different, with her cross-dressing driven partly by a need to advance her career as a crooked street entertainer, and partly by sheer enjoyment.[19] If she was aware of the hazards before she began, she was not put off; indeed, she seems to have been intent on exploiting every one of its discomforting associations. Her outfit of choice was usually a doublet and petticoat, mixing male and female dress, which, rather than disguising her femaleness, deliberately drew attention to her man-womanness. This was not a woman attempting to blend in and disappear; it was a woman who wanted to be noticed – a natural extrovert, who couldn’t resist the overriding urge to step outside the conventional bounds of female experience and thumb her nose in a small but symbolic way at society’s assumption that she was not fit to participate in the world as fully as men. Her method would have its advantages and disadvantages, but certainly Mary Frith had achieved her end: ‘Moll Cutpurse’ had gone up in the underworld – soon there was hardly a soul in London who didn’t know her name.

THE ROARING GIRL

It was around 1610, when Mary was in her mid-twenties and had spent a good couple of years building her dubious reputation as a curious local personality, that London’s playwrights began to take notice of her. And like her biographers, they, too, would mould her image to suit their own ends.

The theatre had come of age during Elizabeth’s reign and, despite occasional closures due to the plague (in 1603–4 and again in 1606–9), it was maturing under James I. Nestled between the inns, bear-pits and brothels of Southwark, playhouses were grubby, raucous places, where ‘all around were card-sharps, dicers, con men and money lenders, roaring boys and roaring girls’,[20] and all of life, from nobodies to nobles, pooled together for their penny’s worth of entertainment. They were also places where women, though welcome in the pits and the galleries, were still categorically banned from the stage.

Mary might not have been allowed to perform herself, but now, at the height of her fame, her alias Moll Cutpurse began to make cameo appearances in several comedic works of the day, taking the lead role in at least two. The Mad Pranks of Merry Moll of the Bankside, with her Walks in Man’s Apparel, and to What Purpose was entered in the Stationer’s Register by playwright John Day in 1610, and though it hasn’t survived, the title gives a flavour of the jolly, affectionate take on her street performances that it likely contained. What has survived are two plays that both date from 1611 and feature very different treatments of Moll. One, Nathaniel Field’s Amends for Ladies, gives her the short shrift you might expect, allowing her only a brief walk-on part and branding her a ‘rogue’, a ‘whore’ and a ‘bawd’; the other would put Moll centre stage and overturn every assumption society held about her.

In the spring of 1611, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist had lately been performed at the original Bankside Globe Theatre by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men; Shakespeare himself, now approaching semi-retirement, was preparing The Winter’s Tale for performance there in May. Across the river, between Whitecross Street and Golden Lane to the west of Shoreditch, on what is now Fortune Street, sat the Fortune Theatre, the rectangular (rather than polygonal) playhouse owned by theatre manager, brothel keeper, property dealer and pawnbroker Philip Henslowe and his son-in-law, the retired lead actor Edward Alleyn. There, the prolific dramatists Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker were presenting The Roaring Girl, a ‘city comedy’ to be performed by Prince Henry’s Men (formerly the Admiral’s Men), the second most important acting troupe after Shakespeare’s.

The play’s prologue makes it clear that Jacobean audiences were in for something new. No doubt they had turned up to watch this long-awaited piece with their own ideas of what to expect from a roaring girl, muses the speaker: she ‘roars at midnight in deep tavern bowls’; she ‘beats the watch’ and controls the constables; she ‘swears, stabs’ and ‘gives braves’, causing mayhem wherever she goes. As the female equivalent of a noisy, riotous roaring boy, who had been a stock character of English literature since the previous century, she could mean nothing but mischief. But this would be the tale of a roaring girl who ‘flies / With wings more lofty’ – a new kind of woman, never before seen, ‘whose notes till now never were’. Who could this woman be? The audience knew her name already. It was ‘Mad Moll’, of course, the actor cried, whose ‘life our acts proclaim!’[21]

The play makes full strategic use of its audience’s preconceptions, however, for its plot relies on the assumption that a woman like Moll Cutpurse – famed for wearing men’s clothes, carrying a sword, smoking a pipe and thieving – would be every father’s nightmare daughter-in-law. So when young lovers Sebastian Wengrave and Mary Fitzallard find themselves thwarted by Sebastian’s father, Sir Alexander, who prohibits the match because of Mary’s puny dowry, Sebastian’s cunning plan is to pretend that he’s in love with Moll Cutpurse instead, ‘a creature / So strange in quality, a whole city takes / Note of her name and person’.[22] She is assumed to be a woman so repugnant that his father will overcome his financial misgivings about Mary Fitzallard and see her, by comparison, as a dream alternative.

It all goes according to plan. When Sir Alexander hears that Sebastian is to marry Moll he voices his outright disgust at his son’s choice, describing her as nothing short of an aberration. She is a ‘scurvy woman’, ‘a creature … nature hath brought forth / To mock the sex of woman’. She ‘strays so from her kind, / Nature repents she made her’. His judgement is unequivocal: Moll is a ‘monster’.[23]

Panicked at the prospect of the censure and embarrassment that will surely follow if his son ends up shackled to such a creature (‘Why, wouldst thou fain marry to be pointed at?’ he asks Sebastian in disbelief),[24] Sir Alexander resolves to stop the marriage and employs a spy and trickster – the aptly named Trapdoor – to wheedle his way into Moll’s service to ‘ensnare her very life’ and remove her from the picture. The traps are duly laid: because she is a woman and therefore surely vain and stupid, the villains try to flatter, trick and con her; because she is a cross-dresser and therefore surely a whore, they then try to seduce her, and because she is a thief and therefore surely greedy, they plant a trail of jewels in her path to make her fingers twitch.

When Moll swaggers on stage, however, first in mannish riding habit and later in full doublet and breeches, sword at her side and pipe in her mouth (played, confusingly, by a man pretending to be a woman dressed as a man), all the villains’ plans – and their assumptions – are dramatically upended. Far from being the victim of this play, Moll Cutpurse is its undoubted heroine, outwitting her enemies at every turn. This is no monstrous whore; Moll is a model of chastity, wit and integrity, the moral heart of the action and (no doubt thanks to her real-life template) the most vibrant, fully formed character in the play. In her, the audience was confronted with an all-new image of female virtue: a woman who challenges her would-be seducer Laxton to a duel for impugning her honour (and wins); who protects her enemies from a gang of marauding cutpurses rather than robbing them, and who is clever enough to see through Trapdoor’s subterfuge in an instant. To defy the feminine ideal entirely, she is also staunchly anti-marriage, preferring ‘to lie o’both sides o’th’bed’ and retain her independence than to take orders from a man. If Sir Alexander knew her at all, she says, he would understand that she and Sebastian could never possibly marry – not because he could never want such a monster, but because she ‘would ne’er agree!’[25]

Sebastian, at least, has the sense to realise that Moll is in fact the only person who ‘has the art to help them’, and that if his plan is to work, he must confide in her rather than dupe her. And his trust in her pays dividends, for by the close of the play, she has bested her foes, brought the lovers together and restored order and justice. Sir Alexander is left begging her pardon for slandering and prejudging her, begrudgingly admitting that ‘Thou art a mad girl, and yet I cannot now / Condemn thee.’[26]

If we were to judge Mary Frith solely by The Roaring Girl, she would be a much easier figure to grasp, for Middleton and Dekker’s version of her is remarkably close to our idea of a modern-day feminist heroine. To give this flagrantly unconventional female character such moral goodness, to have her triumph and be the agent of peace and harmony, when to the pamphleteers, the authorities and even the King she was a harbinger of social chaos, was a radical move. She is like no other heroine in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.[27] Even Shakespeare’s most famous cross-dressing women – Viola, Portia and Rosalind – do so for the purposes of disguise, to win or save their lover, and once their task is complete, order is restored and the threat that their cross-dressing posed is removed. They all end their respective plays back where they ‘belong’: married and in their ‘proper’ clothes. Moll is very different. Like her real-life counterpart, she cross-dresses because she wants to, and at the end of The Roaring Girl she is celebrated for refusing to bow to conformity and remains entirely herself – unmarried, in breeches and in full control of the action.[28]

This was a revolutionary female character to see in the theatre. In a play littered with low comedy (smutty jokes on her hermaphroditic qualities are everywhere – she is ‘a codpiece daughter’, a ‘cutpurse drab’, ‘a monster with two trinkets’, a ‘gaskin-bride’[29]), Moll is never degraded; she is untouched by the slander and is the most powerful character on stage at all times. She also has all the best lines. The longest and most rhetorically slick speech in the play is hers, and as an impassioned diatribe against men’s objectification and predation of women and the sexual hypocrisy that so easily branded them harlots, it forms the moral nub of the play. Her words are directed at her would-be seducer Laxton, but to all men by extension:

… Thou’rt one of those

That thinks each woman thy fond flexible whore,

If she but cast a liberal eye upon thee,

Turn back her head, she’s thine …

Why, she asks, is a woman like her presumed immoral and considered fair game, and then cursed with a ‘blasted name’, just because she’s ‘given to sport’ and ‘often merry’? Is a woman not allowed to enjoy herself without inviting sexual advances? Apparently not. Nor was she always in a position to protect herself. Society preferred to ignore the unseemly truth behind its sexual politics, but here was Moll stating it plainly: that most women who ended up falling from grace did so not because they were morally corrupt, but because their circumstances were desperate. Forever at the mercy of poverty, chance and exploitative men who preyed on the vulnerable, it was all too easy for ‘distressed needlewomen’ and ‘trade-fallen wives’ to be used for pleasure and discarded as whores. Women who found themselves in dire straits would of course take all that was offered: ‘Such hungry things as these may soon be took / With a worm fastened on a golden hook.’

Fallen women rarely found a public defender, but here, in the character of Moll Cutpurse, they had a fearless one who was stepping up and placing the blame firmly where it belonged: not with women, but with the sexual assumptions that served women so ill. The notorious thief had become the woman’s champion,[30] who, despite the censure levelled at her, would always answer back and turn the gender tables: ‘I scorn to prostitute myself to a man,’ she roars in conclusion, ‘I that can prostitute a man to me!’[31] It’s an extraordinary speech for two male writers to put into a woman’s mouth in 1611 – one that spoke such enduring truths that it still resonates today.

Mary Frith’s madcap life may have been ripe for adaptation, but Middleton and Dekker took some bold liberties in their interpretation of it. Their portrayal of Mary as Moll Cutpurse is unquestionably rose-tinted, transforming her from the monster that society saw into an idealised blend of the ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’. In their version, she is not even a thief – a twist taken up and perpetuated by Mary’s ‘diary’, in which she insists that ‘I never actually or instrumentally cut any man’s purse, though I have often restored it.’ There is little doubt that the real Mary Frith was a thief, but for the play’s message to carry, and to please the Master of the Revels, Moll’s moral character had to be blameless – even if that meant playing down her crimes and restyling the woman herself into a more appealing package for the theatre-going public.

Not one to let truth get in the way of a good story, Thomas Middleton was blasé about his play’s inaccuracies – in an epistle to accompany the play, he simply pleads artistic licence:

Worse things, I must needs confess, the world has taxed her for than has been written of her [here]; but ’tis the excellency of a writer to leave things better than he finds ’em …

The legend of Moll Cutpurse – however romanticised – had now been enshrined in literature, but despite the airbrushing, the play still has something to say about the character of the real woman. In Mary Frith the playwrights seem to have recognised a free spirit, a merry, eccentric rogue, who they believed was not only harmless, but in a strange way heroic. This unusual woman, who was so openly disputing the status quo, didn’t give a damn what people thought of her, and when Moll proudly owns this fact – ‘Perhaps for my mad going, some reprove me – / I please myself, and care not else who loves me’[32] – it sounds remarkably like genuine admiration on the part of the playwrights.

In fact, it makes perfect sense that the theatre world should have embraced a figure like Mary. No doubt Middleton and Dekker spotted the lucrative commercial potential of such a larger-than-life celebrity, but the playhouse also occupied a liminal space on the fringes of society where, within the limits of censorship, misfits were welcomed, boundaries were pushed and the established order challenged. And with young boys in dresses playing the roles denied to women, theatre was an artform that relied on transvestism. This simple act of transformation – deemed wholly immoral off-stage – was so integral to the workings of pre-Restoration theatre that it was self-consciously worked into many of its plots, becoming a legitimate stage convention by which female characters could wrest some power and agency for themselves. These gender games could be exposed and toyed with at will by the playwright to remind audiences just how easily the divisions between masculine and feminine could be questioned and the hierarchies that relied on them overturned.[33] In the safe space of the theatre, the normal rules didn’t apply.

It was in the dramatists’ interests, then, to present cross-dressing as something exciting and titillating, but essentially innocuous, though in the real world it remained a different story. At a time when women were being whipped or sent to prison for cross-dressed misdemeanours, publicly flaunting one’s transvestism on stage was downright dangerous. Yet that’s precisely what Mary Frith now proceeded to do. As Moll recites the Epilogue to The Roaring Girl, she tells the audience that if the play didn’t pass muster:

The Roaring Girl herself, some few days hence,

Shall on this stage, give larger recompense. [34]

And so she did. One day in April 1611, at the close of the play’s performance, Mary Frith herself appeared on the stage, in full male dress before perhaps two or three thousand people, to perform an afterpiece (usually a short musical extra or jig performed after the main show). She was, it turns out, entirely complicit in this production that had so publicly appropriated her persona, and now she was taking full advantage of it for a little self-promotion.[35]

Did this appearance make Mary Frith the first woman ever to perform in a public London theatre? Very likely, yes.[36] But she was pushing the boundaries to their limits with this coup de théâtre. Women were not allowed on the stage, let alone in men’s clothes, and in striding onto that proscenium, she was usurping a man’s place, making a show of herself and blurring the distinction between make-believe and reality. It was a daring, transgressive, illegal act that would land her in big trouble.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

The London authorities didn’t look on Mary Frith’s antics with as kind an eye as the theatre world did. To them, she represented everything their king hated: she was a cross-dresser, a smoker (James I wrote a treatise against this ‘filthy custom’ in 1604)[37] and an upstart, uncouth, unbiddable woman. It’s not known whether Mary managed repeat performances at the Fortune Theatre, or whether it was a one-off, but soon after her scandalous appearance on stage in April 1611, she was arrested and charged with multiple offences to prevent it ever happening again. Unlicensed, she had ‘sat there upon the stage in the public view of all the people there present in man’s apparel& played upon her lute & sang a song’. Not only that, she had engaged in ‘immodest & lascivious speeches’ with her audience, throwing out a bawdy challenge to those in the audience who thought she was a man: that ‘if any of them would come to her lodging they should find that she is a woman’.[38]

This was unacceptable, not least because such a display would draw an undesirable crowd. Wherever Mary Frith appeared, a gang of roaring boys and girls was sure to follow. When Middlesex magistrates decided the following year, in October 1612, to ban all ‘jigs, rhymes and dances after their plays’ across England, they seemed to have Mary’s performance in mind. The reason cited was that when similar ‘lewd’ entertainments had appeared at the Fortune Theatre, they had attracted hordes of cutpurses and other ‘ill-disposed persons’ at the end of every play, who shattered the peace and caused ‘tumults and outrages’.[39] It was this, as much as her transgression on stage, that had goaded them into arresting her – Mary’s very presence on the stage was seen as a threat to public order.

Her punishment was to be committed to Bridewell Prison and Hospital – a house of correction on the banks of the Fleet River in the City where petty crooks, vagrants, persistent drunks and fallen women were briefly incarcerated and subject to hard labour (usually beating hemp) and floggings. Mary appears to have been one of those who resisted correction, however, because within a year, she had reoffended: on Christmas Day 1611, she was caught at St Paul’s ‘with her petticoat tucked up about her in the fashion of a man with a man’s cloak on her to the great scandal of diverse persons … & to the disgrace of all womanhood’.[40] She spent the festive season back in Bridewell before being hauled before the Bishop of London in the New Year, answering fresh charges for what Mary calls in the diary her ‘unseasonable and suspicious walking’.[41] She made her excuses, she says, claiming that she had been out late to attend a woman in labour, and was discharged with a small fine. Her revenge on the constable who arrested her, she tells us proudly, was sweet: having employed one of her ‘imps’ to trick him into believing he had inherited a great fortune, she enjoyed his disappointment immensely when he then learned that he hadn’t.

In reality, Mary confessed to the Bishop a litany of other ‘unwomanly’ acts: that she had ‘long frequented all or most of the disorderly & licentious places in this city’, usually dressed as a man, including alehouses, taverns, tobacco shops and playhouses. That she had ‘this long time past usually blasphemed & dishonoured the name of God’ and ‘associated herself with ruffianly swaggering & lewd company’ – namely cutpurses, drunks and dissolutes, ‘with whom she hath to the great shame of her sex often times (as she said) drunk hard & distempered her head with drink’.[42] This transcript of Mary’s confession brings us closer to her true character than anything else can: by her own account, she was a hard-drinking, pipe-smoking, foul-mouthed cross-dresser who could usually be found bantering with the ragged company of the city’s most disreputable alehouses – and occasionally picking a pocket or two. This was who she was, and this was the realm in which she ruled. But she was also a wily actress, and so before her godly accusers she launched into a dramatic apology, protesting that she was ‘heartily sorry for her foresaid licentious & dissolute life’ and giving a solemn promise that from then on she would behave ‘honestly, soberly & womanly’.[43] Perhaps in that moment, when her liberty was at stake, she even half meant it.