Rare for a living person to be the subject of a play, but so Moll Frith was in The Roaring Girl, or Moll Cut-purse, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s play of 1607-1611. By then she was legendary in London, sitting onstage at a performance of The Roaring Girl, and having a rollicking good time wherever she went. She was likely also the inspiration of a pamphlet decrying women dressing in male clothing, Hic Mulier, the Man-Woman, and one in reply, Haec Vir, the Womanish Man, both published in 1620.
Even though Middleton and Dekker’s play and those pamphlets came out in the seventeenth century, well after Bedtrick ends, cross-dressing had been an issue for some time. By the mid-sixteenth century, male styles were creeping into women’s fashion, to the horror of preachers and commentators. The epilogue of George Gascoigne’s The Steele Glas of 1572 touches on the topic: “What be they? women? masking in mens weedes?/ With dutchkin doublets . . . and with jerkins jaggde?”
In 1583 Philip Stubbes published The Anatomy of Abuses (reprinted in 1585 and 1595), which, along with abuses such as adultery and drunkenness, condemns these fashions. He describes women’s doublets and jerkins made ‘as man’s apparel in all respects,’ adding that ‘as [women] can wear apparel assigned only to a man, I think they would as verily become men indeed . . . . ’
Like those who inveigh against stage acting, particularly boys playing women, Stubbes refers to Deuteronomy 22:8, “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.” The sexes are meant to be distinguishable, Stubbes reminds us; ‘Hermaphroditi’ are ‘monsters of both kids, half women, half men.’
Female portraits of the late sixteenth century show few masculine influences in clothing, as the subjects are, for the most part, noble women. However, I did come across a sketch of the outfit described in this exchange in The Secret Player between Sander Cooke and Frances Field, then apprentice seamstress, about the styles among ladies of the night:
“I can conceal men’s breeches in a gown. It’s the fashion—among a certain sort of woman.” Frances laughed, and the crone sitting next to the fire joined in. “Not the sort as you will find at Court, but sometimes called for in our shop. One of Winchester’s Geese, as these working women are called, asked for a codpiece and a skirt with a false seam down the front to display her hose. And the codpiece!”
Moll Frith was likely not a prostitute, though she was accused of being a bawd. Drunkenness, thievery, an outrageous personality, and striking male dress provided sufficient notoriety.
Protests against women wearing male clothing rose to such a pitch in the seventeenth century that King James joined in with what amounted to a declaration of war. On January 15, 1620, he instructed the bishop of London to call together the ‘clergy about this towne . . . and will them to inveigh heavily against the insolence of our women . . . wearing of brode-brimmed hats, pointed doublets, theyre hair cut short or shorne . . . . If pulpit admonitions will not reform them he would proceed by another course; the truth is, the world is very much out of order.’ He attempted to follow through with severe punishments.
Soon after the king’s directive, the pamphlet Hic Mulier was published, condemning women’s dressing in male apparel as a sexual and social disaster. Women who wear ‘the loose lascivious civill embracements of a French doublet . . . most ruffianly short locks’ and substitute swords for needles invite ‘a shameless libertie to every loose passion’. Besides their sexual looseness, such women destabilize the social hierarchy: one can’t tell a merchant’s wife from a noblewoman when she’s dressed as a man. It goes without saying that merchant’s wives and noblewomen could not dress the same; there were sumptuary laws.
Haec Vir, also published anonymously, appeared a week later in the form of a debate between the man-woman and the womanly man. The man-woman argues that women are more than ‘static icons’ . . . unjustly confined to [men’s] perpetual fantasy . . . [which] denies them full participation in the adult world.
The Roaring Girl, King James’s threats against the female fashion for male attire, and these two pamphlets appeared some time after Bedtrick ends. Although the publicly-aired controversy she helped create is still in the future, Moll Frith was a notorious personage by the late sixteenth century. Middleton and Dekker’s plot is fictional, but the real Moll clearly influenced the creation of the stage version. In life and in the play, Moll maintains her independence from social norms and her refusal to be subservient to men, sexually or otherwise. No one knows the situation of her recorded marriage, but she kept her own name and may have married for a more respectable status when summoned to the law courts.
Additionally, some men find cross-dressed women seductive, as the outraged rhetoric of Hic Mulier attests. The Roaring Girl entertainingly explores this theme.
When the ‘city gallant’ Laxton makes an assignation with the man-woman Moll, he understands it to be sexual. Instead, she shows up prepared for a duel. The rapiers associated with cross-dressed women are, as Simon Shepherd points out, a kind of penis symbol. If a man makes the wrong assumption about her, Moll is quick on the attack, rapier drawn. In the play she addresses Laxton: ‘thou art one of those That thinks each woman thy fond flexible whore.’
Moll Frith was so far ahead of her times that the Royal Shakespeare Company celebrated her in a Roaring Girl season in 2014, with contemporary plays as well as a production of Middleton and Dekker’s original, starring Lisa Dillon as Moll.
Cross-dressed women added to the destabilizing forces in conventional society, which in Elizabethan times was straining at its seams and in Jacobean, tearing. Women were breaking out of their traditional subordinate position, at least symbolically, and asserting themselves in the realms of male privilege and power. After all, until Moll Frith, there was no such thing as a Roaring Girl, only Roaring Boys.
Sander Cooke too assumes powerful male roles: stage player and husband.
[Quotations come from the Norton Critical Edition of Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl. Page numbers are cited in the post of February 23, 2018.]