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THE ROARING GIRL

It is Sunday, 9 February 1612, and a crowd has gathered in the churchyard of old St Paul’s Cathedral to see a woman punished. Her crime is against nature; she has disgraced all womankind with her monstrous acts, and now, before the public and before God, she must admit her shame and be cleansed of guilt.

Barefoot and bare-headed, the woman walks out into the wan morning light, swathed in a white sheet and clutching a long taper. For those who can read it, a placard proclaiming her sin hangs around her neck. As she makes her way unsteadily across the cold flagstones of the yard towards the pulpit and carefully climbs the steps to the platform, the jeers from the crowd rise up and follow her.

From the pulpit stage, she looks out over her audience and sees a swarm of eager faces. They are waiting for the show to start, so when the priest begins his sermon, the woman takes her cue. She drops her eyes, suppresses a smile and does her best to cry.

The woman was Mary Frith, and six weeks before, on Christmas Day 1611, she had been arrested (not for the first time) at St Paul’s

Cathedral for walking the streets of London at night dressed in men’s clothes. The result was a charge of public immorality, and a punishment designed to humiliate, disgrace and correct her: she would do public penance in a white sheet, at the open-air pulpit of St Paul’s Cross within the cathedral grounds,[1] where all could bear witness to her forced repentance and the purification of her soul.

This symbolic ritual was a tried and tested disciplinary measure, already centuries old by 1612, but in this instance, it was a waste of time. The ecclesiastical court, which dealt with all lapses in personal morality, was attempting to shame and reform a woman who would not be shamed or reformed, and in the end, the event was more farcical pantomime than solemn ceremony. The penitent herself, it was observed, regarded her punishment with such merry disdain that she was drunk throughout the proceedings; for her, it seems, this was just another opportunity to play to the crowds. Her priest’s sermon, meanwhile – a lengthy lecture denouncing her sin and calling on her to repent – was so mind-numbingly tedious that most of the audience lost interest and wandered off partway through. Those who stayed, however, were rewarded for their patience with precisely what they had come for: a free performance by ‘Moll Cutpurse’ – one of the most famous, and infamous, women in London.

THE THREE FACES OF MARY

When Mary Frith completed her act of penance at St Paul’s Cross in 1612, her name – or at least that of her alter ego, ‘Moll Cutpurse’ – had been on the lips of most Jacobean Londoners for several years, especially those who frequented the playhouses, taverns, brothels and bear pits of Bankside, the lawless entertainment district of Southwark that lay conveniently outside the City’s jurisdiction. Whether they loved or loathed her, feared or admired her, Mary’s notorious career as a cross-dressing thief (or ‘cutpurse’[2]) and street entertainer had fascinated the public, and by the time she’d reached her mid-twenties, she had achieved cult celebrity status – so much so that several playwrights had already appropriated, refashioned and immortalised her persona as a wholly unconventional folk heroine.

Fifty years later, Mary’s legend as one of the most enjoyably outrageous and controversial women of the age was still going strong, confirmed by the arrival in 1662 of a sensationalised ‘autobiography’, The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith, which, if it were what it pretends to be – the candid deathbed diary of a repentant sinner – would constitute an invaluable primary source for Mary’s life and an important early example of life writing by an Englishwoman. As it is, the diary is almost certainly a fake. There is no credible evidence that Mary wrote it herself; after all, she’d been dead for three years before it appeared, and although up to 50 per cent of women in London were literate by the late seventeenth century (a much higher proportion than in most parts of the country), it’s unlikely that a woman of low birth such as Mary would have been one of them.[3]

The book’s numerous factual errors and omissions point instead to another hand, and given its erratic style, maybe even several. Falling into three distinct and sometimes contradictory sections – an opening address, an introduction summarising Mary’s upbringing and a ‘diary’ of her life as a cutpurse – it comprises a string of unapologetic, entertaining, though often disjointed, anecdotes of her misdeeds, and seems to have more in common with the fictionalised criminal biographies that were popular at the time than it does with a genuine diary,[4] veering in tone from comic to defiant to political and even preachy.

This ‘diary’, then, is an unreliable account of Mary’s life, though that’s not to say it’s worthless. Plenty of the details within its pages chime with what we know to be true. It’s plausible that the authors had their anecdotes either directly from Mary when she was alive – an old woman entertaining anyone in the alehouse who would listen with tales of her outrageous youth – or from those who knew her, or, more likely, that they adapted them from the tales of her exploits that had been passed from gossip to gossip for decades. Mary had already written herself into London’s folklore with her riotous escapades, leaving the diary’s anonymous authors the task of matching, if not surpassing, these outlandish oral tales.

But herein lies the problem with Mary Frith. With the historical records frustratingly reticent on her real life (her appearances in them are few, though always revealing), much of what we know – or think we know – of her comes from the various fictionalised versions that appeared over the years, making her as slippery a character in death as she was in life. The legend who features in the ‘diary’, the character who walked the stage and the flesh-and-blood woman who left an imprint on the records don’t always agree, splitting her image into hazy triplicate. The diarists were aware of the issue. Their excuse for the ‘abruptness and discontinuance’ of their story is that ‘it was impossible to make one piece of so various a subject’.[5] This isn’t just an unwitting admission of their own fudged documentation of her life; evidently Mary’s baffling complexity made her as intangible to her contemporaries as she is to us.

Lower-class, lawless, unconventional and disobedient, Mary Frith was disturbing – but also strangely alluring; she represented an unusual kind of woman in the seventeenth century, one to whom society had no answer. By definition, such women lived a precarious life and needed cunning strategies to survive, and in Mary’s case that meant barricading herself in behind a protective wall of myth and mystique, cultivating multiple personalities and perfecting her performance of each one until the real woman became as elusive as wisps of smoke. With so many Marys before us, it’s as if she’s laid down a challenge: to find the real Mary Frith, and catch her if we can.

A VERY TOMRIG OR RUMPSCUTTLE

The mystery authors of The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith do their best to get to the bottom of this unfathomable woman, but she is ‘so difficult a mixture’ of male and female, of ‘dishonesty and fair and civil deportment’, that they seem torn from the start between admiration and alarm. Faced with a cross-dressing thief who on the one hand must surely be morally reprehensible, but on the other was famed for her good humour and entertaining shenanigans, they delight in her one minute, sneer at her the next – sometimes all at once. Their introduction showers Mary with mock-heroic epithets: she is ‘a prodigy’, an ‘epicoene wonder’, ‘the oracle of felony’, the gold-standard bearer of thievery – a profession that is now in ‘sad decays’ without her; but she is also a ‘virago’, a ‘bono roba’ (prostitute), a monstrous hybrid of masculine and feminine, so unattractive that she was ‘not made for the pleasure or delight of man’. Such a woman made little sense to her peers; she was as much a side-show freak as she was a folkloric heroine, and needed to be explained to the uncomprehending but fascinated public.

In their attempt to do just that, the authors begin at the beginning, with Mary’s childhood, which, if the bare bones of their introduction are to be believed, served as a dress rehearsal for the role she would play in later life. With an air of surprise, they report that this natural rebel was born to perfectly ordinary, law-abiding parents – an ‘honest shoemaker’ and his wife, who lived in the Barbican area of London – in the latter years of Elizabeth I’s reign (the exact year is unclear). Tender, affectionate and indulgent, Mr and Mrs Frith offered their daughter a humble upbringing, though a happy and stable one.[6] By rights, she ought to have been just another honest, hard-working young woman who soon married and settled into her predetermined roles of wife and mother. But no.

Mary’s ‘boisterous and masculine spirit’ manifested itself early and would not be tamed. To curb her unruly ways, we’re told that her parents took particular care over her education (which by the standards of the day meant teaching her to read but not to write, as well as a few domestic accomplishments), but their efforts had little effect. Young Mary was a child of action, not academia. She was an archetypal tomboy – ‘a very tomrig or rumpscuttle’ – fizzing with energy, and resistant to every norm of female behaviour: she would ‘fight with boys, and courageously beat them’; ‘run, jump, leap or hop with any of them’, and ravage her pretty girls’ clothes in the scuffles. She didn’t care – her dresses hung awkwardly on her ungainly frame and only annoyed her.

Drawn to the places where the rabble congregated, this scrappy urchin spent most of her time at the Bear Garden, the rowdy entertainment arena wedged in among the playhouses of Bankside, where bear-baiting, bull-baiting and dog fighting kept the blood-lusty crowds amused. Here, in the fug of the bustling, stinking, noisy Southwark streets, all the vices were out on display: drunks and tavern brawlers, punters and prostitutes, cutpurses and cheats jostled along together, while down the road, above the gateway of old London Bridge, the heads of traitors sat on spikes, like gruesome lollipops in a sweet-shop window. Young Mary saw it all, and she wasn’t fazed in the least; in fact, she fitted right in.

However unladylike, this was the world where Mary Frith felt at home, for she was ‘too great a libertine … to be enclosed in the limits of a private domestic life’. As womanhood approached, she showed no interest in the feminine pursuits she was expected to learn: ‘she could not endure that sedentary life of sewing or stitching’, preferring a sword and a dagger to a needle and thimble. The bakehouse and the laundry were alien to her, and the ‘magpie chat of the wenches’ an irritation. Mary preferred a more direct form of expression. Even when she was young she was ‘not for mincing obscenity’; by adulthood, the habit had developed into ‘downright swearing’. Such profane language from a woman was unfeminine and unacceptable and, along with the rest of her behaviour, it had to be policed (as Mary would later discover – her reputed potty mouth would be listed in the court records as one of her many arrestable offences). To complete this picture of the ultimate anti-woman, we’re told that ‘above all she had a natural abhorrence to the tending of children’, and steered well clear of becoming a mother (another claim that is borne out by the records).

If this character portrait is accurate, Mary was a woman destined to offend and perplex seventeenth-century society in every way. Indeed, so far was she from the meek, mild, modest woman that custom demanded that it was doubted she was a woman at all. She had unsexed herself, become a ‘hermaphrodite in manners as well as in habit’; she was ‘the living description of a schism and separation’, combining the ‘female subtlety’ of one sex and the ‘manly resolution’ of the other – and to a society that only dealt in strict gender binaries, such a combination was profoundly unnerving.

A lower-class girl with no money, little education and scant opportunities had very few options in life even if she conformed, but if, like Mary, she either would not or could not conform, the choice was almost made for her. Such girls often found themselves tripping over into the wrong side of the law in order to survive, usually through thievery or prostitution, but even in that world there was a hierarchy to climb. If Mary wanted to live differently to most women, she would have to behave differently to most women. And if she wanted a modicum of the power and freedom that men had, then she would have to settle for power and freedom in the criminal underworld.

MOLL CUTPURSE

Too proud to beg, too wild for domestic drudgery and quite possibly too repulsed by men to contemplate prostitution, Mary Frith decided to make her living as a cutpurse. It was the most dangerous choice of all these unappealing options, for to embark upon a career of thievery automatically meant risking her liberty and her life. England in the early seventeenth century was a visibly savage place: legal punishments were reliably disproportionate to the crime and barbaric public executions were a favoured form of entertainment. With property deemed as valuable as human life – and frequently even more so – theft and burglary were among the country’s capital offences; if Mary’s fingers weren’t quite nimble enough, she could be facing a stint in Newgate Gaol, or worse, the drop at Tyburn.[7] But in a city where ostentatious wealth rubbed shoulders with grinding poverty, the temptation to pick the glittering pockets of affluent bankers, merchants, lawyers and lords was just too great. Undeterred, or perhaps just desperate, Mary joined the hordes of cutpurses who plagued Elizabethan London early – probably when she was still a child – and quickly demonstrated a knack for getting away with it.

Undoubtedly it played to her advantage that law and order was then a haphazard thing – the professional police force had yet to be established and certain areas, including Mary’s stomping ground of Southwark, fell outside the City’s jurisdiction, making them attractive dens for every kind of vice. These areas were more or less governed by underground criminal networks. Magistrates relied on local volunteer constables to keep the peace and apprehend criminals, who in turn relied on members of the public to raise a ‘hue and cry’ whenever they spotted a misdemeanour. Mary was presumably so adept at sleight of hand that she mostly managed to pilfer unnoticed, though she wasn’t always so lucky.

The records show that on 26 August 1600, when she was still a teenager, she was first charged by the Justices of Middlesex with stealing an unknown man’s purse, while working in cahoots with two other women. She wriggled out of it on this occasion but was indicted again on 18 March 1602 for stealing a purse from a man named Richard Ingles, and again on 8 September 1609, for burglary.[8] Every time, she managed to secure a verdict of not guilty and escape a trip to Newgate – or the noose – so that by her early twenties she had made quite a career for herself. And with it came a well-earned new nickname: ‘Moll Cutpurse’.[9]

The details of Mary’s subsequent life as a cutpurse are filled in by The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith with unashamed glee. After a short preamble, Mary’s so-called ‘diary’ embarks on a chain of anecdotes about her many misadventures, tricks and petty revenges, even providing a kind of instruction manual in places on how she and her colleagues successfully plied their trade. Helpful details such as dates are absent, and psychological self-analysis doesn’t trouble her – ‘It is no matter to know how I grew up to this,’ she states dismissively, ‘since I have laid it as a maxim that it was my fate.’ She is, however, allowed the odd moment of reflection when it’s to marvel at what an extraordinary creature she is. ‘I do more wonder at myself than others can do,’ she declares in awe, with the same air of amusement with which she relates all of her history. For the purpose here, more than anything, is to entertain with her oddity. Accordingly, her crimes are softened to ‘pranks’ and, like her literary descendant Moll Flanders, she is portrayed as an honest thief and magnetic heroine, her maxim for life: ‘To be excellent and happy in villainy’, because that has always been ‘reputed equal with a good fame’.

Judging by these anecdotes, Mary’s good fame was justified. She tells of being tricked into boarding a ship for the plantations of Virginia and her subsequent escape by paying off the captain, and of how, being poor and friendless, she then joined a gang of pickpockets, who judged her to be ‘very well qualified for a receiver and entertainer of their fortunate achievements’ – or rather a receiver of stolen goods. This was a life she rather took to, for although the danger was evident, she was ‘loath to relinquish the profit’, and seems to have quickly established a unique and powerful position for herself as protectress and confidante of this coterie of thieves. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Being ‘well known to all the gang, and by my good dealing with them not a little in their favour’, Mary was offered protection and anonymity in return – a real case of honour among thieves. She would share out the profits fairly, act as ‘umpire in their quarrels’ and lend money to the most desperate, thereby preventing them from committing dangerous robberies and effectively saving them from ‘the hangman’s clutches’. By fashioning herself as the fair, magnanimous champion of lowlifes in this way, Mary earned the respect and devoted loyalty of her fellow cutpurses, ‘so that among all the thieveries they did, my name was never heard of; for they made it the chiefest of their religion to conceal me and to conceal nothing of their designs from me’. In effect, she had negotiated her way to the top of her own organised crime ring – and secured her own immunity in the process.

It was a wily strategy, though not foolproof – as we know, Mary occasionally found herself in hot water, but when she did, the pickpocket community was allegedly swift to come to her rescue. In one instance, cited in the diary, when Mary is taken up for stealing a watch, she employs one of her gang to commit the ultimate theft in front of a packed courtroom, purely to get her off the hook. Once she had pleaded not guilty, she says, ‘it came to this issue, whether that watch for which I was indicted was the gentleman’s watch or no’. The constable who had apprehended her was called forward to deliver the watch for the gentleman to identify, but just as the constable was making his way into court, Mary deployed her secret weapon: ‘one of my small officers dived into his pocket and sought out the evidence against me, and departed invisible’.

This neat trick naturally incensed the Lord Mayor, who immediately suspected her chicanery, but with no evidence to hand, there was nothing he could do. Once again, the jury were forced to acquit Mary, leaving her free to continue with her shady dealings, undiscouraged and irredeemable as ever. Before long, she tells us, she had the confidence of famous highwaymen, too, and begins to cut a figure rather like a seventeenth-century Fagin, sending off her gang of pickpockets and robbers to do their light-fingered work and bring back the spoils to their mistress.

It’s not known exactly when Mary Frith began to combine her pickpocketing with transvestism, but it seems likely to have coincided with the advent of her entertainment career – a male-dominated industry like all the others – when she was in her early twenties.

Counterintuitive though this decision seems for a thief whose life depended on anonymity, in around 1608 Mary began to see the advantage in developing her persona as ‘Moll Cutpurse’ into a public attraction; by simply donning a doublet, hat and cloak, she could become a ‘character’, who simultaneously drew the crowds to her and distanced her from them. It soon become her signature. Dressed in men’s clothes, she would walk the streets of Southwark, challenging ‘diverse gallants’ to sartorial competitions and entertaining the crowds with her ‘mad pranks’, while her gang of footpads weaved through the distracted audience, cutting purses as they went. Now a decoy as well as a fence and low-level criminal mastermind, Mary Frith had pulled off a protean magic trick: she had become Moll Cutpurse, the charming, eccentric rogue who could never be caught in the act.

Mary’s transvestism was unusual, but it didn’t occur in isolation. It was part of a Europe-wide underground trend for female cross-dressing that first sprang up in the 1570s, reached a peak in the 1620s, thrived throughout the eighteenth century and continued on into the early nineteenth, when it rapidly fizzled out. The UK was particularly prone to this phenomenon, having one of the highest incidence rates in Europe – there are at least 50 recorded cases during this period of women living as men, either to work, marry or serve their country as soldiers and sailors – and it’s easy to see the appeal.[10] A woman’s clothes were ornamental rather than practical, designed to hinder, not help her. Her rigid stays and voluminous skirts accentuated her primary functions of mother and sex object, and were as cumbersome and restrictive as the social rules that bound her. To throw them off in favour of a doublet and hose offered a long list of symbolic attractions. For some women, sidestepping the arbitrary trappings of gender was a survival strategy or simple expedient, a handy disguise when in trouble, in love or going off to war. For others, it was an expression of their complex sexuality, which, in an era before sexual categorisation, had only a one-size-fits-all model. For many more, it meant safety – from harassment, seduction, rape and prostitution, from forced marriages and unwanted pregnancy. And for the ambitious or adventurous, who, as Mary Beard puts it, had ‘no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man’,[11] it meant a sudden open door to agency and opportunity. For those who dabbled, it was pleasingly provocative. For those who went the whole hog, it was a liberation. For all of them, it was a direct challenge to the intractable social codes that governed everyone’s lives – an early feminist act of defiance.[12]

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.

Before her grilling in the Bishop’s court was over, Mary’s accusers succumbed to the age-old assumption that her cross-dressing must go hand in hand with whoredom, and so there came the inevitable charge that she had also been ‘dishonest of her body’ as a prostitute and ‘drawn other women to lewdness’ as a bawd (or madam). If the diary is to be believed, Mary did indeed have a sideline as a bawd, though even then, she managed to defy convention – as well as procuring women for men, she apparently also found ‘the sprucest fellows the town afforded’ for the pleasure of ‘great women’, and in one anecdote even convinces these fellows to pay maintenance for their illegitimate children.[44] The real Mary Frith, however, ‘absolutely denied that she was chargeable with either of these imputations’, and aside from the diary anecdote, there’s no evidence to suggest she was lying. Nonetheless, the Bishop of London ‘thought fit to remand her to Bridewell … until he might further examine the truth of the misdemeanours enforced against her without laying as yet any further censure upon her’.[45] The authorities didn’t know what to do with Mary Frith, so for want of any other ideas, they bundled her off to prison for the third time.

In time, the Bishop’s court hit upon what it thought would be the perfect punishment for Mary: she must do public penance in a white sheet at St Paul’s Cross – a purification ritual that would act as a second baptism and openly humiliate her, too.[46] Public shaming was an integral part of retributive law enforcement before and beyond the seventeenth century – the stocks, the pillory, the drunkard’s cloak, skimmingtons and carting were among the standard punishments for errant citizens[47] – and though such draconian tactics may have worked on some, they seem to have yet again abjectly failed to ‘correct’ Mary. The prolific letter-writer John Chamberlain witnessed the scene at St Paul’s Cross that day in February 1612 when Mary performed her penance, and he wasn’t fooled by her act of contrition. With little sympathy for this ‘notorious baggage’, he wrote to a friend the following week that ‘she wept bitterly and seemed very penitent, but it is since doubted she was maudlin drunk, being discovered to have tippled three quarts of sack [wine] before she came to her penance.’ Her bleary-eyed speech of mock-repentance went unrecorded, but Chamberlain noted with some amusement that ‘she had the daintiest preacher or ghostly father that ever I saw’, who delivered his sermon so ‘extreme badly’ that most of the audience didn’t bother to hear the end of it. Those who did, he said, ‘tarried rather to hear Mall Cut-purse than him’.[48]

The event was nothing short of comical. And in the diary’s account of the episode, Mary’s defiance in the face of it is everything you would hope for: ‘They might as soon have shamed a black dog as me with any kind of such punishment,’ she says bullishly. For half a penny, she crows, she would have travelled to all the market towns in England in her white sheet, wearing it as a badge of honour rather than a cloak of shame.

Unrepentant, undeterred, unchanged, the Mary of the diary relishes every ripple of disruption she causes, and ensures she has the last laugh on the crowd who come to watch her: ‘without any regard to the sacredness of the place’ and ‘in revenge of this disgrace intended me’, her gaggle of trusty fingersmiths ‘spoiled a good many clothes by cutting off part of their cloaks and gowns and sending them home as naked behind as an ape’s tail’. We can only hope it’s true: that all those who came to gloat over Mary that day left St Paul’s with their bare arses exposed, even more humiliated than her.