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