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