"The Fashion of Playmaking": The Worn World of The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker

Abstract

When they collaborated on writing The Roaring Girl for Prince Henry’s Men at London’s Fortune Theatre in 1611, Thomas Middleton and fellow playwright and pamphleteer Thomas Dekker were undoubtedly aware of the “crowd trouble” that so often accompanied productions at public theaters. With an admission price as low as a mere penny to stand in front of the stage, as many as 3,000 playgoers—courtiers, merchants and tradesmen and their wives, apprentices, prostitutes, and pickpockets—would have been packed into the open air amphitheater (Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 34). Middleton and Dekker1 appealed to this diverse audience by placing Mary Frith (known in the play, as she was on the street, as Moll Cutpurse)2—a real-life cross-dressing woman living in the Fortune’s immediate vicinity—at the center of the play. Frith was a well-known and colorful local figure and probably a Fortune Theatre regular (Gurr 276). As the first woman to set foot on an English stage, Frith even performed a post-performance jig—a lewd song and dance. Women would not be permitted onstage again for another fifty years. The playwrights undoubtedly made a calculated decision in using a flesh-and-blood female as their inspiration, yet it was more than a shrewd publicity stunt. Like her larger-than-life counterpart Mary Frith, Moll Cutpurse takes center stage and uses clothing as a vehicle of self-transformation. In pushing aside the fragile boundaries of gender and class, The Roaring Girl’s heroine embodies a shocking possibility: individuals could extricate themselves from socially constructed norms and fashion their own singular identities.