Cant, Costume, and Cutpurses: Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl

Let's head into the Fortune Theatre for a performance of one of the most innovative and deceptively complex comedies of the English Renaissance.  The Roaring Girl, or Moll Cutpurse explores the fluidity of social identity by the protagonist's use of clothing and language.

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• 13:13 (Cont.) Cant, Costume, and Cutpurses: Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl

Transcript

This day & place the sayd Mary Mariam Frith appeared personally & then & there

voluntarily confessed that she had long frequented all or most of the disorderly

& licentious places in this Cittie as namely she hath usually in the habit of a

man resorted to alehouses, Taverns  and Tobacco shops & also to play houses there

to see plays & prizes & namely being at a play about 3 quarters of a year since

at the fortune in men's apparel & in her boots & with a sword by her side, she

told the company there present that she thought many of them were of opinion that

she was a man, but if any of them would come to her lodging they should find

that she is a woman & some other immodest and lascivious speeches she also used

at that time And also sat there upon the stage in the public view of all the

people there presente in man’s apparel & played upon her lute & sang a

song. And she further confessed that she hath for this long time past usually

blasphemed & dishonored the name of God by swearing & cursing & by tearing

God out of his kingdom if it were possible, & hath also usually associated her

self with Ruffianly swaggering & lewd company as namely with cut purses, blasphemous

drunkards & others of bad note & of most dissolute behavior with

whom she hath to the great shame of her sex often times (as she said) drunk

hard & distempered her head with drink, fallen into the detestable & hateful

sinne of drunkenness And further confesseth that since she was punished for the

misdemeanors afore mentioned in Bridewell she was since upon Christmas day

at night taken in Powles Church wth her petticoat tucked up about her in the

fashion of a man with a man’s cloak on her to the great scandal of divers

persons who understood the same & to the disgrace of all womanhood. And she

confesseth that she is commonly named Moll Cutpurse of her cutting of purses.

Hello and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast!  I’m glad you’ve joined us.  That was an excerpt from the court transcripts of the 1611 trial of one Mary Frith, also called Moll Cutpurse, a notorious figure in the London underworld.  This consummate danger to society became the fictionalized subject of one of the most interesting comedies of the English stage: The Roaring Girl, by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton. 

Sorry about that.  Not sure what happened there.  Must speak to my sound engineer.

Dekker was a prolific playwright and pamphleteer, well known for his vivid depictions of London life. He began writing plays in the late 1590s, often portraying the lives of the urban poor. Dekker's writing style was rich in social commentary, and he had a knack for blending humor with serious social critique. Middleton enjoyed a reputation as one of the most versatile and skilled writers of his time. He worked across genres, including comedy and tragedy, often examining issues of morality and social corruption. Middleton’s was a sharp, satirical style with intricately crafted plots, dark humor and an often bleak view of human nature.

In the best collaboration since peanut butter and jelly, Dekker and Middleton joined forces to write The Roaring Girl, a city comedy based on the real-life exploits of the notorious cross-dressing thief and troublemaker, Mary Frith, shortly after her trial, noted earlier, in 1611. The play blends Dekker’s compassionate, down-to-earth portrayal of ordinary characters with Middleton’s sharp, satirical edge. This play remains one of the best-known city comedies of the early 17th century, standing out for its bold female protagonist and its nuanced exploration of gender and societal expectations.

That protagonist – both the historical one and her literary projection – Mary, or Moll, or Meg – attained an almost legendary status in her own time.  In addition to Dekker and Middleton’s play, there was at least one other play – 1594’s Long Meg which is now long lost – as well as a comic biography titled Long Meg of Westminster.  In both cases, the length of what remains a mystery.  As we see in the court transcript I just quoted, Ms. Frith has been guilty of, at various and sundry times: drinking, swearing, going to plays, hanging out with the wrong sort, pickpocketing, and, most scandalous of all: dressing as a man!  (Gasp! effect)  Do take a moment to collect yourself.  Are you ready?  Then I shall carry on.

Despite the fact that I organized Moll’s rap sheet in such a way as to mark with bathos her ultimate crime, I do, in fact, want to take that charge – cross-dressing – as perhaps the most serious, at least insofar as the play The Roaring Girl is concerned.  Dekker and Middleton’s play fictionalizes Mary Frith into a quite complex and innovative character, not only for the comic stage, but also for cultural criticism.  In the playwrights’ hands, Mary Frith becomes Moll Cutpurse, a woman whom I will describe as liminal in that she refuses to be categorized by social conventions and so exists on the thresholds of competing or contrasting categories.  She lives on culturally-prescribed boundaries between distinctions in sex, gender, class, and morality.

Let’s take a look at the character’s very name as an easy example of what I’m driving at.  “Moll” has been, from maybe the year dot, been a familiar form for “Mary,” a nickname, a pet name.  Certainly, we needn’t dally too long with all the associations of purity, innocence, subservience, and sacrifice that a Christian-conscious culture has with this name.  But, from around the beginning of the 17th century – so the time of this play – Moll also becomes street language for “prostitute” and, later, underworld slang for a woman in general.  So her name becomes a signifier of each traditional moral pole on the virgin/whore continuum.  The pseudo-surname “Cutpurse” not only identifies her profession, but may carry with it intimations of emasculation, the severing of the scrotum and testes.

But before we start thinking about how that connotation works in the play, let’s get a sense of the story.  It’s time for the quick and dirty:

Young lover Sebastian Wengrave loves Mary Fitzallard, but his father, Sir Alexander Wengrave, refuses his consent to their marriage because Mary has so little money. Cleverly, Sebastian devises a plan, pretending he is in love with the roaring-girl Moll Cutpurse, known for her transgressive behavior and cross-dressing. By so shocking his father, Sebastian hopes he will eventually relent and accept Ms. Fitzallard as a preferable alternative.  I can’t see how it could fail.  But Sir Alexander has already heard of his son’s supposed infatuation with Moll and, horrified by the news, he swears to prevent the marriage by any means necessary. Trying to learn more about Moll, he hires Trapdoor, a petty criminal, to gather information on her and Sebastian’s relationship.

Moll Cutpurse makes her first appearance at a shop. We get some witty banter – with more double-entendres per mile than Dirk Diggler running a marathon.  We get witty banter between Moll and some rather thick gallants, including Laxton, a bro who has a reputation for seducing women (though his name is a pun meaning, essentially, “no testicles”; he “lacks stones”). Laxton tries to seduce Moll, ‘cause she’d be easy, right? But Moll cuts him off – as it were – mocking his clumsy advances and excoriating male presumption. 

Sebastian approaches Moll and explains his plan to use her to fool his father. Moll agrees to play along, which kind of surprises me, but she makes it clear that she has no romantic interest in Sebastian or anyone else, for that matter. 

Moll meets with Laxton again, who attempts to manipulate her into an affair. However, Moll sees through his lies and challenges him to a duel. The two fight, and Moll triumphs, humiliating him.

In a tavern, several characters gather. Moll engages in further Wildean repartee, condemning the double standards of society. Sir Alexander observes Moll’s behavior from afar, convinced that she is leading his son astray. He confronts Sebastian about Moll, warning him of the disgrace that will follow if he marries her. Sebastian continues his ruse, insisting that he is determined to marry Moll. Sir Alexander gathers his allies, ready to catch Moll and Sebastian in flagrante delicto. But then Sebastian reveals the truth: his relationship with Moll was fabricated to gain his father’s approval for marrying Mary Fitzallard. Moll, far from being a villain, helped Sebastian out of friendship, not romantic or pecuniary interest.  In a moment of sit-com-like epiphany, Sir Alexander agrees to Sebastian and Mary’s marriage. Moll, meanwhile, declares that she will never marry, preferring her life of freedom.

In creating this comedy, Dekker and Middleton drew on a number of pretty familiar comedic formulas.  One of these was called the New Comedy and its stock plot was the son trying to overcome a father’s opposition to a marriage.  Supporting this were elements from what is called prodigal literature (from the Gospel parable) in which a spendthrift and libertine youth squanders his wealth on a scandalous woman.  This strain, though, in The Roaring Girl, gets complicated by the ruse and by the fact that Moll is scandalous only in reputation, not in character.  Finally, we have the citizen comedy, which obtains mostly in the play’s subplot, in which the wives of local shopkeepers have their fidelity questioned, only to have it affirmed at the conclusion.  Here again, too, Dekker and Middleton innovate on the trope by having the women actually get pissed that men have such a low opinion of their honor.  In addition, we have some of the city comedy devices – the rube who gets gulled by the city slicker – and perhaps the greatest feature of the play as text: the use of canting language, that secret language of the London criminal underworld.  I’ll have more to say on that momentarily.

That the play draws on so many rather conventional schemes and devices might lead one to believe that The Roaring Girl revels in mocking women who get above their station, women who want to be – socially speaking – men.  Cross-dressing, as we saw in the Shakespeare episodes, was already a comic staple by the time Big Bill put Rosalind, and Portia, and Imogen, and Viola in a pair of breeches and a floppy hat.  But these women adopted male attire for reasons of self-preservation or self-advancement.  Implicit here, then, is an understanding and an acceptance of a gendered social hierarchy, and that to survive and thrive, a woman must appropriate maleness.  And, of course, as we’ve noted before, theater companies cast young males, boys, in the women’s roles.  So we’ve also the comic and cultural complications that come with watching a male pretend to be a female pretending to be male.  Now, there are a couple of instances, too, in Shakespeare of male characters presenting as females for whatever purpose.  In Taming of the Shrew, Bartholomeo disguises himself as Madam, and in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff purports to be the Fat Woman of Brentford.  In these examples, we get a different impetus to laughter.  Here, the men step down – it is a humor of humiliation.  Our suspension of disbelief, as the audience, also has a different dynamic.  We are meant to see through the artifice when a burly man like Falstaff presents feminine, and we are less cognizant of the “man playing a man playing a woman” unreality.  The man playing a man does not read dramatically.  I mean, we don’t think of it as a feature of the play – that’s just casting and acting.  But we do read the “man playing a woman playing a man” as more narratively complicated because we’ve had to suspend disbelief twice.

At any rate, though, I said all that only in order to say that that’s not at all what the character of Moll Cutpurse is about.  This is not a drag show, nor is it an example of, like, early music hall comedy.  Moll does not pretend to be a man – she’s not trying to deceive anyone (well, except for maybe Sir Alexander, but that’s about sex, not gender).  Indeed, nobody really takes Moll to be a man.  Her first appearance, described in the stage directions as “in a frieze jerkin and a black saveguard” – that is, in a man’s short coat and trousers – generates no more consternation in the young men than: “Life, yonder’s Moll!”  From a distance one can tell.  There is one scene in which Laxton is momentarily taken in by Moll’s appearance, addressing her as “sir,” but this is his stupidity – he previously noted that, while waiting for her: “I see none yet dressed like her, I must look for a shag ruff, a frieze jerkin, a short sword, and a safeguard.”  Moll does not intend  to deceive. Unlike in Shakespeare’s comedies, nobody here is really ontologically baffled by a broad hat, a tunic, and a sword.  These people would not be confused if Clark Kent ever removed his glasses in public, y’know?  The young men in the play don’t care that Moll wears pants, they just want to get into them with her.

The old guys, though, ah! that’s a different story.  At their age, the hey-day in the blood is tame, it’s  humble.  So what gets their dander up?  Instability – a suspicion that the careful sorting which makes social life understandable and manageable is precarious.  In a moment of metatheater, Sir Alexander gestures to his home as his guests arrive, describing the decor in terms analogous to a description of the Fortune Theater (where the play was first performed).  Pointing to the galleries (of the theater) he speaks of the portraits hanging in his home, the “stories of men and women, mixed together, / Fair ones with foul, like sunshine in wet weather.”  There is something unsettling in this balance of opposites, and as the analogy continues, Alexander warns that “a cut-purse thrusts and leers with a hawk’s eyes for his prey” – anticipating the intrusion of Moll and her disruption of balance into chaotic mingling.

So the controversy over Moll’s masculine attire (and Mary Frith’s) is not an early version of the culture wars around gender identity we see today.  Though we like to think so, given our own cultural milieu.  When Mistress Gallipot says of her: “Some will not stick to say she’s a man And some both man and woman,” we should not take this as confining Moll in contemporary trans or queer categories.   Laxton does reply: “she might first cuckold the husband and then make him do as much for the wife,” but this line is susceptible to overly presentist readings. Nor should we think of Moll as nonbinary in our modern sense.  Like Mary Frith in the court transcript, Moll Cutpurse identifies unambiguously as a woman: “she thought many of them were of opinion that she was a man, but if any of them would come to her lodging they should find that she is a woman.”   The problem is one of presentation.  She is simply a woman who wears a man’s attire and, in a world where sumptuary laws dictated what clothes were appropriate for what social status, in a world in which social conventions were believed to derive from natural dictates, Moll’s refusal threatens a disruption of a jenga-like social order.  Male attire may signify the independence of mind and the personal autonomy generally ascribed to men in a patriarchal structure, but perhaps only ironically as the male characters don’t genuinely seem to be liberated from their own hidebound conventions.  I just think Moll has constructed herself on the threshold between categories of gender, sexual orientation, performativity, which makes her indefinable in any social hierarchy.  She stands then as an avatar for the constructed quality of social distinctions, pointing out their very unnaturalness.

So, Moll’s appearance, her presentation, puts her in this complex liminal space.  But there is another way by which Moll defies categories and classes, another way she is able to cross thresholds between social realms, and that is with her language.  

Moll’s speeches, for most of the play, dazzle with their wit and dexterity.  Expressing her frustration with bumbling f-boys trying to get her into bed, Moll smirks: “Women are courted but ne’er soundly tried, / As many walk in spurs that never ride.”  It’s a great line – perfectly balanced.  She exploits both meanings of “court”: that is, to woo and to try, as in a legal case.  Then, she puns on the word “tried,” linking to the courtroom but also introducing the sense of the word as meaning “tested.”  So she mocks the young men who court her, but who are too green, or too inept, to actually succeed.  These are the men who go around in spurs like  cavaliers, but are no real equestrians.  Moll gives this kind of speech all the time, punning on words, exploiting ambiguities, constructing double entendres.  She’s very like Hamlet in this way, revealing truths through equivocal language, but she’s probably a lot more fun to be around.

But toward the end of the play, especially in Act 5, Dekker introduces language that had been the subject of his 1608 pamphlet entitled “Lantern and Candlelight.”  Let me digress a bit to say that “Lantern and Candlelight” was the most popular of what were variously known at the time as rogue books, cony-catching books, or beggars’ books: stories and essays about the criminal underworld – a bit like Jacobean true crime – and offered the cozy bourgeois public some entre into the tricks, practices, and language of the criminal classes.  Dekker’s discourse here opens with an interesting mutation of the Tower of Babel story, leading neatly into an introduction of the peculiar argot of the London petty villain.  Here is Dekker’s explanation of the origin of “canting”  – that is, the slang of the underworld:

And as these people are strange both in names and in their conditions, so do they speak a Language (proper only to themselves) called canting, which is more strange. . . .  The first Inventor of it, was hanged, yet left he apt scholars behind him, who have reduced that into Methode, which he on his death-bed (which was a pair of gallows) could not so absolutely perfect as he desired.

It was necessary, that a people (so fast increasing, & so daily practicing new & strange Villanies, should borrow to themselves a spéech, (so near as they could (none but themselves should understand: & for that cause was this Language, (which some call Peddlers’ French,) Invented, to the intent that (albeit any Spies should secretly steal into their companies to discover them) they might freely utter their minds one to another, yet avoid the danger. The Language therefore of canting, they study even from their Infancy, that is to say, from the very first hour, that they take upon them the names of Kinchin Coes, till they are grown Rufflers, or Upright-men, which are the highest in degrée amongst them.

Dekker thoughtfully provides his reader a glossary of canting terms, such as “dup the jigger” meaning “open the door” and “ken” is a house, and “stampers” are shoes.  Additionally, he offers exercises for the autodidact to practice translating English into cant or composing one’s own canting poetry.  DuoLingo should take note – segment of the market that little owl is missing.

At any rate, as Dekker points out in the previous excerpt, the point of cant was to provide a means for criminals to communicate with each other while keeping the meaning dark to outsiders, especially law enforcement.  So, it’s a language of exclusion, or at least of demarcation.  It’s speech that circumscribes a particular social milieu and subculture – it marks a boundary with the straight world.

Moll, while not a criminal in the traditional sense, is aligned with this world by her familiarity with cant and her association with roguish, marginal figures. She can move between worlds, both upper-class society and the street-level criminal world, in part due to her mastery of multiple "languages" — we might call it today “code-switching – both the respectable speech of the upper classes and the cant of the lower ones. Act 5, scene 1 portrays a prime example of this, in which Moll tests the authenticity of rogues Tearcat and Trapdoor: “I hope then you can cant, for by your cudgels, you, sirrah, are an upright man!”    From here on, she simultaneously converses with the scoundrels and translates for the booshies, who are quite intrigued.  Jack Dapper says he’ll “give a schoolmaster half-a-crown a week, and teach me this peddler’s French!” This fluidity suggests that language is a tool for navigating different social spaces and identities.

Yet, while cant is the language of thieves, vagabonds, and other marginal figures, the play reveals that the upper-class characters engage in equally deceitful behavior, just in more socially sanctioned ways. Sir Alexander, for example, schemes to manipulate and deceive his son, yet sees himself as morally superior to Moll, who is aligned with the criminal underworld. By presenting both groups as deceptive in different ways, the play questions the idea that one form of language (cant) is inherently corrupt while another (courtly speech) is virtuous.  Moll’s speech to Lord Noland challenges such hypocrisy:

. . . must you have 

A black ill name, because ill things you know?

Good troth, my lord, I’m made Moll Cutpurse so!

How many are whores in small ruffs and still looks?

How many chaste whose names fill Slander’s books?

Were all men cuckolds whom gallants in their scorns 

Call so, we should not walk for goring horns!

Notable in her charge is the idea that it is language that made Moll Cutpurse out of Mary Frith.  In some sense, she is what people think she is, or has become it.  It’s a very interesting ironic tension with the rest of Moll’s vociferous declarations of self-fashioning.  Here, she seems to hint that respectable society, by defining her as a rogue, has permitted her to actually be one.  But, then again, Moll hardly behaves in any truly roguish ways; in fact, in the main, we can read her as pretty traditional, morally speaking.

So, I guess my main upshot about all this has to do with the theme of performance.  Much of the play is concerned with characters pretending to be something they’re not—Sebastian pretending to be in love with Moll, Moll pretending to go along with Sebastian’s scheme, and Sir Alexander pretending to uphold moral virtue while scheming in the background. Language, especially cant, becomes another form of performance that allows characters to navigate these social deceptions.

Moll’s use of language is part of her larger performance as the "roaring girl," a role she adopts to challenge societal norms, suggesting that language itself is performative, with its meanings and associations shifting depending on who is speaking and in what context.

The use of cant in The Roaring Girl underscores the play’s exploration of language as a dynamic, flexible tool that reflects and shapes social identity. Dekker and Middleton use it to show how language can both empower and marginalize, depending on who wields it and how. Through Moll’s fluid use of both cant and formal speech, the authors critique the rigid social hierarchies of their time, exposing the hypocrisy of those who judge others based on superficial markers like language. Ultimately, they suggest that speech, like social identity, is something that can be manipulated and performed, challenging fixed notions of morality, class, and gender.  As I’ve argued throughout today’s show, Moll lives on the borders of those fixed notions, is able to move between those categories through her dress and costume and her speech.  Such movement implies that notions can’t be that fixed then.  They are not transcendent or eternal or natural.  Rather, they are constructions, and The Roaring Girl argues that what has been made can be unmade and remade.

Thank you very much for listening to the Classic English Literature Podcast.  I sincerely hope you enjoyed today’s show.  If you did, could you please – right now – text just one person and tell them how much you liked it?  Just say, “I just listened to this show and I think you’d like it.  Check it out!”  That’d do so much to build our audience, and I’d really appreciate it.  If you’ve any questions or comments, you can hit me up on the antisocial medias, email, and text.  All those links are on the episode page.  Till next time, be well!