Sander Cooke has three close women friends in Bedtrick, each rebellious in her own way. On a scale of scandal, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke is the least, Amelia Bassano Lanyer more so, and Moll Cutpurse, as Moll Frith was sometimes known, the most. Sander herself is either the least scandalous, because she’s generally taken for male, or the most, for the same reason. Of course each of her friends knows her secret, which contributes to their friendship. Each is carving a new path.
An ever-willing drinking buddy, Moll Frith can be unpredictable. What’s reliable is that her clothing will be flamboyant, her hat tall and decorated with a paste jewel, she’ll often have a clay pipe in her mouth, and she’ll please herself. Legal records substantiate Moll’s arrests for being a bawd and thief, but she became a figure of legend and lore during her lifetime. Witty sayings are attributed to her, some appearing in Bedtrick, and stories abound. She is said to have come drunk to a court-ordered punishment outside St. Paul’s and entertained more than she suffered.
According to the East End Women’s Museum in London:
‘Moll’s life and times have been well-documented, not least in her own words in a 1662 autobiography, and in the Newgate Calendar, which describes the “boisterous and masculine spirit” which appeared in her childhood:
She was above all breeding and instruction. She was a very tomrig or hoyden, and delighted only in boys’ play and pastime, not minding or companying with the girls. Many a bang and blow this hoyting procured her, but she was not so to be tamed, or taken off from her rude inclinations. She could not endure that sedentary life of sewing or stitching; a sampler was as grievous to her as a winding sheet; and on her needle, bodkin and thimble she could not think quietly, wishing them changed into sword and dagger for a bout at cudgels’.
This ‘autobiography’ was written three years after Moll’s death. Scholars believe an enterprising writer produced it to capitalize on Moll’s legendary status, but the Newgate Calendar quotation rings true: she was a born hoyden.
Moll became a flashy figure around London. Off stage Sander wouldn’t dare live as wildly or publicly as Moll, but her friend’s freedom and wide range of acquaintances, especially in the depths of Bankside, turn out to be helpful. Moll in her vivid male garb serves as a foil to modestly dressed Sander, whose female birth must stay hidden.
Mary Frith’s birth date is uncertain; some sources give it as ‘c. 1584,’ assuming that she was about 15 when first arrested for stealing in 1600. A charge later leveled at Moll, ‘indecency,’ referred not to scanty clothing but to wearing male apparel. During the timeframe of my novels, however, she gets away with it, but she’s more a character around town than a career player who, by theatrical practice in England until after the restoration of 1660, must be male. Sander’s vigilant; Moll enjoys disregarding social protocols—and the law, for that matter.
Given the doubt about her date of birth and the liberties allowed an historical novelist, I’ve set her birthday somewhat earlier, making her a near contemporary of Sander Cooke’s.
For such an outrageous character, Moll has a surprising familiarity with the Book of Common Prayer. In Chapter Two, Sander tells Moll that her brother has impregnated Frances Field and refuses to marry her. Moll is angry: he has no choice. Then she recommends that Sander read the marriage service.
“You’re the last person I’d expect to tell me to read the Book of Common Prayer, Moll Frith. Even if we do stand on a church porch.”
“I know all about religion. A sour uncle of mine was a priest. You can imagine what he thought of me. Wanted to ship me off to the New World with the other misfits.”
Only part of this is imagined: Moll was indeed shipped off to the New World, but jumped ship and returned to London.
Bedtrick ends in 1603, shortly after King James VI of Scotland was crowned King James I of England. Many of Moll’s antics and their public effect occurred later in the seventeenth century, noted in my post ‘Moll Frith, the Roaring Girl’ of February 23, 2018. Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton wrote a play entitled The Roaring Girl, and at the first performance, Moll is said to have sat on the stage and danced a jig afterward.
Later, in 1620, two pamphlets, Hic Mulier and Haek Vir, debated cross-dressing, to some extent reflecting the controversy Moll Frith provoked. An edited version of my earlier ‘Roaring Girl’ post with more details will follow: ‘Moll Frith and Cross-dressing.’
The last chapter of Bedtrick wouldn’t be complete without Moll’s presence at the foot of the king at the grand celebration that closes the novel.
Ironically, King James becomes one of the loudest voices against cross-dressing. Protests against women wearing male clothing rose to such a pitch that 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.’
Cross-dressed women were indeed a destabilizing force in conventional society, which in Elizabethan times was straining at its seams and by Jacobean beginning to tear. Such women broke out of their traditional subordinate position and asserted themselves at least symbolically in realms of male privilege and power. True of Moll, whom I characterize as never wearing a skirt. Her nature was masculine, but she also costumed herself so in large part for the shear fun of it.
Sander herself is not exactly a cross-dresser in Bedtrick, as she passes as a man in two realms of power: stage-player and husband.