Thomas Middleton's and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl

It would be a feeble argument to say that Renaissance England was anything more than a hierarchical, sex-negative, and oppressive environment for women. The shadings between the gender-constructions did not exist: The model, a divisive binary, was so one-dimensional that the concept of shade is laughable. Men were seen as the perfect specimen, while women remained unemployed in their role, only as subservient workers to the men who ruled over them. Attempts to counter the pre-existing the social and sexual order was seen as disastrously reinscriptive (Dollimore, 54): In their flights of subversion, the women represented in Renaissance texts only reaffirm the pre-existing gender constructions. Their status becomes one of deviance, not of well-thought determination; their location becomes dislocation; their stabbing criticisms at masculinity fatally wounds and tears at the voice-box of their plight. In this paper, I will attempt to uncover the layers of female gender-role resistance as represented in the Renaissance catalog, examining, among others, Thomas Middleton's and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl.

Jonathan Dollimore, whose dangerously delicious essay, "Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression" informs and prompts much of this paper, offers Renaissance presets: "In the Renaissance also the individual was seen as constituted by and in relation to - even the effect of - a pre-existing order." (Dollimore, 54). Among that pre-existing order was humanist, Sir Thomas Elyot's statement (modernized by Stephen Orgel):

A man in his natural perfection is fierce, hardy, strong in opinion, covetous of glory, desirous of knowledge, appetiting by generation to bring forth his semblable [i.e. eager for offspring]. The good nature of a woman is to be mild, timorous, tractable, benign, of sure remembrance, and shamefast. (Orgel, 13)

More disturbing and penetrating to the collective Renaissance psyche, the pre-existing order, was 16th Century anatomist Galen's sad, ill-informed definition of the female anatomy as a 'mirror image' to a man's (Porter and Hall, 75), which stated that the vagina, if turned inside-out, would be identical to a man's penis. Hard times.

Enter Mary Frith, notorious, infamous, Mary Frith. In 1612, one year after the production of The Roaring Girl, the original source for Middleton's and Dekker's inspiration was brought to ecclesiastical court to answer the charge against immorality. An extract from the Consistory of London Correction Book, which provides for this paper a background biography of the woman and also a sense of anxiety for the Jacobean courts states (again, modernized by Stephen Orgel):

…and then and there she voluntarily confessed that she had long frequented all or most of the disorderly and licentious places in this city… in the habit of a man resorted to alehouses, taverns, tobacco shops, and also to playhouses, there to see plays and prizes; and namely being a play about three-quarters of a year since at the Fortune [Theatre] in man's apparel, and in her boots, and 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, and 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 present, in man's apparel, and played upon her lute and sang a song… Being pressed to declare whether she had not been dishonest of her body and hath not also drawn other women to lewdness by her persuasions and by carrying herself like a bawd, she absolutely denied that she was chargeable with either of these imputations. (Orgel, 12)

In assessing the biographical information of Frith's infamous lifestyle, Middleton and Dekker take a revisionist approach (Orgel, 20), which is stated in the self-reflexive (in that it addresses the playwrights themselves and the audience to which they are writing the play) prologue of The Roaring Girl:

A play expected long makes the audience look

For wonders, that each scene should be a book,

Composed to all perfection. Each one comes

And brings a play in's head with him; up he sums

What he would of a roaring girl have writ;

If that he finds not here, he mews at it.

Only we entreat you think our scene

Cannot speak high, the subject being but mean.

A roaring girl (whose notes till now never were)

Shall fill with laughter our vast theater;

….

None of these roaring girls is ours: she flies

….Thus her character lies.

Yet what need characters, when to give a gues

Is better than the person to express?

But would you know who 'tis? Would you hear her name?

She is called Mad Moll; her life our acts proclaim. (Prologue, 1-30);

Like Galen's definition of the vagina, Middleton and Dekker attempt to turn sexual politics inside out. In the play Mary Frith is represented as "codpiece daughter" (II.ii.89) Moll Cutpurse.

Sir Alexander: It is a thing

One knows not how to name; her birth began

Ere she was all made. 'Tis woman more than man,

Man more than woman, and - which to none can hap -

The sun gives her two shadows to one shape….

Sir Davy: A monster. 'Tis some monster. (I.ii.129-136)

Though the cross-dressing, gender-bending characteristic of Frith is seemingly represented fully, the criminal element - robbery, prostitution, gang-leading - is not (Dollimore, 70-1). Remodeled and softened, Moll Cutpurse is only accused in the play for antisocial and corrupting behavior, and accused falsely at that (in the play, she's also portrayed as a virgin.) The dramatists recreate their version of Frith with touches romantic and comic. In assessing the play on its merits as entirely original and imaginative, it's difficult to ignore the real-life Frith. But, as Nabokov states in his lecture on Madame Bovary: "The girl Emma Bovary never existed: The book Madame Bovary shall exist forever and ever. A book lives longer than a girl." (Nabokov, 125). But the tension of sexuality, culled from Frith and her actions, and the reactions, makes it difficult for this writer's own formalist instincts to let sleeping transvestites lie. In a sense the real-life Frith is more important, more caustic, than the imagined Cutpurse - simply because it is her real-life actions that had inspired such material, her real-life actions of outré behaviorisms that caused such anxieties. The play itself only documents a small part of these anxieties, in lesser tones; substituting Frith's active attempts of defiance are the playwright's aesthetic devices of laughter and robust wit and word-play.

But, to view Moll as part of a social process, a process of defiance, a pre-written history informs her actions. In 16th Century France, two lesbians, who dressed as men were burned and hanged for using dildos in their sexual practices. By 1620, anxiety was so great in England that King James I attempted to outlaw transvestism altogether, as if the cross-dressing sought to undermine male authority altogether. Such attempts to undo the patriarchal script lose ground and credibility in its revolution: If in an attempt to remove themselves from the hole of subjectivity, why abandon female biology, why blend into the roles of a man? Dollimore states: "To suggest that gender difference can be maintained through cross-dressing and inversion is still to maintain or imply the crucial claim: it is difference working in terms of custom and culture rather than nature and divine law." (Dollimore, 70) In effect, the transvestites are counterproductive to any feminist cause - dressing as men, replacing buttons and bows with boots, swords and sheaths, and shortened coiffures, and using, albeit superficially, a phallus in their sexual practices. "To switch coats is to undo the work of heaven," Jean Howard writes of the attitudes (Howard, 422), yet the transgressive model only re-affirmed the greater commitment to male authority, patriarchal systems, and sexual power (Haynes, 116-7).

Cutpurse, however, seems to have no apparent sexual preference, no imposition or fatalistic desire to use a dildo. And her cross-dressing does not come in the form of a trick to marry into aristocracy.

I have no humor to marry. I love

To lie o'both sides o'th'bed myself; and again, o'th'other

Side, a wife, you know, ought to be obedient, but I fear me

I am too headstrong to obey; therefore, I'll ne'er go about it.

….

Marriage is but a chopping

And changing, where a maiden loses one head and has a

Worse i'th'place. (II.ii.37-46)

She knows and rejects the wifely subordination; she refuses to comply with a sexual system fraught with a power struggle that is simply no struggle whatsoever. And Moll, more than any other character in the play - possibly even outside of the playwrights' own slim, psychosexual grasp - understands that sexual desire, sexual intent, arousal, and so forth, is a learned behavior, not an innate one. In her article "Sex and social conflict: The erotics of The Roaring Girl, Jean Howard states:

Like gender, sexuality has increasingly been revealed as less an essential biological given than a socially constructed, historically variable set of practices and ideologies… In addition, [early modern England] sexuality was certainly not 'free' in some absolute sense, but was regulated by the state, by village custom, by changing ideological imperatives.

Her cross-dressing can then be seen as a first step in shaking the sexual code. She rejects establishment. The second step comes when she speaks, her proclamations and refusals; her terseness and, most radical, her "unladylike" overall persona, and her open attacks upon male weakness. Witness two "unquiet" attacks:

But for the stain of conscience and of soul,

Better had women fall into the hands

Of an act silent than a bragging nothing;

There's no mercy in't.

…

In thee [Laxton] I defy all men, their worst hates,

And their best flatteries, all their golden witchcrafts,

With which they entangle the poor spirits of fools,

Distressed needlewomen and trade-fallen wives.

….

I scorn to prostitute myself to a man,

I that can prostitute a man to me. (III.86-113)

He [Jack Dapper] looks for all the world with those spangled feathers like

A nobleman's bedpost. The purity of your wench would I

fain try; she seems like Kent unconquered, and I believe as

many wiles are in her.

….

Women are courted but ne'er soundly tried;

As many walk in spurs that never ride. (II.i.323-335)

She sets astir the order; she craves, not chaos, but honest re-thinking of the sexual system. The real-life Mary Frith may not have been so systematically-minded, but she did challenge simple customs, such as women on the stage, where she played, tucked under her breast, in her self-fashioned male costume, the lute. This was radically oppositional as "decent" women were meant only to play their instrument in the privacy of their home, with their children and husband as the only suitable, less contaminating audience. The imaginatively-drawn Cutpurse plays the viol, a far more socio-sexually transgressive and phallic device, a far more satiric substitute, aloud to Sebastian and Mary Fitzallard. Outrageously, she removes the viol from the wall:

Well, since you'll needs

put us together, sir, I'll play my part as well as I can. It shall

Ne'er be said I came into a gentleman's chamber and let his

Instrument hang by the walls. (IV.i.87-90)

She then proceeds to use the viol to conjure her dreams in a song. After the performance, she has no use for the viol and gives it back just as easily as she took it down:

Hang up the viol now,

Sir; all this while I was in a dream. One shall like rudely then;

But being awake, I keep my legs together. (IV.i.129-132)

….

He that can take me for a male musician,

I cannot choose but make him my instrument

And play upon him. (IV.i. 223-225)

Her outright attitude towards the phallus and its various representations draws upon the seriousness with which such an object contains. She uses it easily and gives it away just as easily. But is this effective?

Dollimore states: "What intrigues me about Renaissance drama, especially its drama, is a mode of transgression which finds expression through the inversion and perversion of pre-existing categories and structures which humanist transgression seeks to transcend, to be liberated from; a mode of transgression which seeks not to escape from existing structures, but rather a subversive reinscription within them - and in the process a dis-location of them."

On the outset her transvestitism seems to make up for a large part of the anxiety. As Orgel states: " That [cross-dressing] was considered not dangerously masculine, but dangerously feminine, is clear from the evidence against [Frith]… indeed, the feminine here in a particularly clear way, is constructed out of the masculine." If the stage acted as an arena of its world, a microcosm of the chaos of systems, then the male actor playing the cross-dressing woman is sluiced nicely with various role-reversals; between playwright and the all-male company, between all-male casts alone, between the all-male cast and the audience itself, the stage and the theatre walls with contains a pansexual atmosphere. Peter Stallybrass asks: "What did a Renaissance audience see when boy actors undressed on stage?... Did boy actors wear false breast?... Or did boys use tight lacing to gather up their flesh so as to create a cleavage, or were they simply flat-chested?... How far did the boy actor go in actually removing his clothes?Even the real life artistocratic history of Elizabeth Southwell eloping, in disguise as a boy page, to the young Robert Dudley, reverberates in the end of Shakespeare's As You Like It, where the character Rosalind, after deceiving her love-interest (and her own father) by dressing as a boy to meet her ends in love, addresses the audience in the play's epilogue:

"It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue… My way is to conjure you, and I'll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you; and I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as me, and breaths that I defied not; and I am sure, as many have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell." (Epilogue, 1-23)

The address, pansexual and pseudosexual, implicates the multivariable attractive strains of men onto women, and possibly their unspoken weakness to young boys. Although Middleton's play does not address the stage as explicitly as As You Like It, there does contain the scene in which Sebastian is aroused by Mary Fitzallard's and Moll's cross-dressing attires. Both appear as young boys and the attraction makes great claims on the pscho-sexual nature, the confused hostilities in the patriarchal script:

Mary: Never with more desire and harder venture!

Moll: How strange this shows, one man to kiss another!

Sebastian: I'd kiss such men to choose, Moll.

Methinks a woman's lip tastes well in a doublet. (IV.iii.56-60)

Sebastian: So methinks every kiss she gives me now

In this strange form is worth a pair of two.

Here we are safe, and furthest from the eye

Of all suspicion. (IV.i.58-61)

The problem of the Moll Cutpurse character is that she is only a character - a line that reverberates T.S. Eliot's own land of waste critique of the Middleton canon:

"[Middleton is] merely a name, a voice, the author of certain plays… He has no point of view, is neither sentimental, nor cynical; he is neither resigned, nor disillusioned nor romantic; he has no message. He is merely the name which associates six or seven great plays… (Eliot, 89)

She's only a character. Just in the way that Sebastian is a character of unguided passion and Laxton a character of spineless cunning, Moll is only a character of robustness, proclamations, deafening statements, boorish insults, toneless mocks, bombastic offensiveness, and unedited editorializing against the patriarchal script of Jacobean life. The Cutpurse invention, Middleton's and Dekker's revisionist model of the real lady, lacks texture, lacks shade. Not once in the play does the character express sigh and pause, reflection and ennui.

And this seems to be the Middleton genius (Dekker's input has been largely controversial, and in more cases than not, The Roaring Girl is attributed more to the wooly-bully Middleton canon than it is the sunny-bunny Dekker canon. [Cherry, 100]): To make flat, horizontal character - character types - into rounded, vertical characters, while still - maddeningly, infuriatingly - pigeonholing them as stock characters. In other words, Middleton's brilliance seems to be his justification of the existence of clichéd models. Stephen Orgel states: "She serves essentially as an interpreter of [the criminal underworld] to the middle-class world of drama; she is an honourable, comic, sentimental peacemaker, who does not take purses, but recovers them." (Orgel, 22)

The shame here in the case of The Roaring Girl and Moll Cutpurse (and in some cases the difficult positioning of such a character in his canon, "alongside the wives, widows, marriageable girls, and courtesans" [Cherry, 100]) is that Middleton is a capable writer of beauty and loss. He is able to capture the desperation of longing, the disgustingness of city life and profit, the failings and troubles of matrimony, and the conceptions of the city-life and its multi-faceted placements. For example, Sebastian woeing and sighing, longing and writhing:

If a man have a free will, where should the use

More perfect shine than in his will to love?

All creatures has their liberty in that;

Though else kept under servile yoke and fear,

The very bondslave has his freedom there. (II.ii.1-5)

The economy and grace of these lines stands equally tall and worth study as Johnson's poetic social realism and Webster's lyrical and discerning wordplay in his horrors. Yet that these lines of Sebastian's are delivered in service of the literary devices that Middleton has set-up and confined himself within, the device of cynical comedy, only undermine the lyrical and psychological density of this trim and muscular performance. Indeed, the entire play - subplots and transvestitism - seems more a calisthenics of cynicism and comedy than it is peering look into the richness of characters whose lives are confined into empty city-life; the language is a body-building exercise for Middleton's already, by 1611, muscular catalog. And this is why critics have a difficult time with him: Middleton's motivations seem to rely only on sneery cynicism. In her book Prostitution and Jacobean Comedy, Anne Haselkorn wrestles with Middleton:

…he reminds us that to see society from the pious view of virtue is to stitch together the Emperor's new clothes from the thread of unreality and naiveté… [It] is difficult to remain unsullied in a society that renders imperfect moral justice. Middleton exhorts us to live within our limitations. (Haselkorn, 76)

But Middleton represents a change in aesthetic values. He shifts from the Elizabethan agency of 'know thyself,' the interior domicile of the inner self against the outer self, the real voice sharing tenor with the imaginative voice, to the extremes of Jacobean drama, where humanist agency, male or female, clashes against psychological motivations and the urgent pacing of urban life. Middleton's drama reflects the 'is' and the 'does.' Self-agency is replaced with marketplace pacing. If every character in The Roaring Girl (though most importantly, the title character herself, seems to service the plot, to keep things going without intermission or pause for self-realization, then it is done as a kind of social commentary on the rigid fixedness of Jacobean social life.

The difficulty is such that almost everything contains some kind of comedic or satiric device where it becomes difficult to know when to stop laughing and when to settle down to seriousness. Even the names are part of acidic social commentary. As pointed out by critic Marjorie Garber the name of "coxcomb" gallant and failed sexual strategist, Laxton, translates into a double entendre, that he "lacks stones," that he lacks testicles (Garber, 224). Also, the original spelling of the Cutpurse herself was "Mal:" As in maladjusted, malady, malfunctioning (although not malnourished, as witnessed by her physically powerful thrashing of Laxton in a duel in order to "…Teach thy base thoughts manners! Thou'rt one of those/ That thinks each woman thy flexible whore." [III.1.72-3]).

Even the title acts as a entry-form into the pact of social commentary, the play on words, the trick of the common deviant "roaring boy," the urban miscreant, is given a female counterpart. The implications of the title contain both a transgressive agency for women and a quite damaging pseudo-sexual punning: An open mouth, a readied and hot mouth for oral sex, another orifice in which to stuff. In the aforementioned essay, Jean Howard states:

"To be a roaring girl is to have one's mouth open. Moll does, for a great deal of the play; and sometimes when it is open she is quarrelling and sometimes canting and sometimes just talking. And, of course, any woman whose mouth is opened in public spaces, in particular, is read as whorish, as incontinent with other bodily orifices as much as with the mouth." (Howard, 181).

Moll's open mouth also suggests bodily openness, display, lewdness, and, in particular filth; her body is even more open to the public stage as she performs her instrument in public. In Gail Kern Paster's wonderful scholarly book, The Body Embarrassed, which excites this writer's sense of scatological humor, she states:

"A body under interrogation whose warts and excrescences are 'tokens' is one already deeply inscribed with social expressiveness, already overcoded. Even before judgment is passed, such a body has already been made to count in a culture's ongoing, always contested classification of what is and is not natural." (Kaser, 248)

And yet, the play ends in marriage. Middleton's canon seems to rely heavily on the prescription of marriage, whether it be for the fall and submission of womankind or on the foundations of elevated status. Most depressing is a line in Middleton's The Changeling. If we use the text as an archaeological guide to the constructs and orders of Jacobean life, what do we do with this very quick line in the insane asylum, where Albius and Lollio compare women to the insane: "You need not fear, sir; so long as we are there with/ our commanding pizzles, they'll be as tame as the ladies/ themselves." (IV. Iii. 62-64)

However, by the play's end, Middleton uses coy role-reversal between the sexes, between the notions of husband and wife, as a re-inscription into the script of marriage, of husband and wife, of subordination.

Isabella: Your change is still behind,

But deserve best transformation.

You are a jealous coxcomb, keep your schools of folly,

Teach your scholars how to break your own head.

Albius: I see all apparent, wife, and will change now

Into a better husband. [Italics mine] (V.iii.220-225

Is this a glimpse of equality? A mutation? Subtle and small, though it may be, the roles of equality exercise a re-balancing in this last scene. Is this a healthy kind of defiance of the sexual code? A double-sided containment between husband and wife?

By the end of The Roaring Girl, we witness the ends of Cutpurses means, how her cross-dressing and bawdy behavior, was calculated to conjoin Sebastian and Mary in matrimony - though Cutpurse, herself claims to want none of her own prescription:

Lord Noldand: Thou hadst a suitor once. Jack, when

Wilt marry?

Moll: Who I, my lord? I'll tell you when, i'faith:

When you shall hear

Gallants void from sergeants's fear,

Honesty and truth unslandered,

Woman manned but never pandered,

Cheaters booted but not coached,

Vessels older ere they're broached.

If my mind be then not varied,

Next day following, I'll be married.

Lord Noland: This sounds like doomsday.

Moll: Then were marriage best,

For if I should repent, I were soon at rest. (V.ii.220-233)

Strength in the feminist argument for and against the effectiveness of the Moll Cutpurse character lies in the changes of today. When uneasiness comes, there is change, progress. When gender and sexuality anxiety becomes a part of the vocabulary, there is change, progress. When heavyweight writers of the time admit fault there is change, progress. The blurring of the notions of masculinity and femininity are apparent in the writings Martin Amis - a very, very modern writer who has been charged with both misogynistic devices and masculine limpness, who writes, as a footnote to his critique on Robert Bly's ultra-machismo Iron John:

This piece became part of a lecture I gave at two American universities in the mid-1990s. Robert Bly was [in attendance]. At the close of the talk I invited his rebuttal. Standing tall, Bly asked me why I was so frightened by the male grandeur. I wanted to say, 'Because it's so frightening'; instead I shrugged and mumbled, feeling I had already answered his question. (Amis, 9)

This kind of unknowing, static anxiety of sexual identity, of a crumbling of the sexual system, seems like the kind of inner-tension the real life Mary Frith (perhaps not Middleton's Cutpurse - in light of his cack-handed comic devices and plot propulsions, his Jacobean aesthetic values of quick urban life, the 'is' against the 'does,') would have celebrated.

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