Ben Jonson (1572–1637)

In 1611 two experienced London playwrights collaborated on a new play dramatizing a real-life contemporary wonder, Mary Frith, known as Moll Cutpurse, "a sometime thief and notorious cross-dresser" (ix). In Feb 2023 at the Blackfriars theater in Staunton VA a group of enthusiastic amateur players offered a staged reading of the rarely performed play, prompting me to revisit it. It's at once clear why it has become popular in recent years, after almost 4 centuries of neglect.

The real-life Frith was charged with theft and a host of notoriously male behaviors - drunkenness, swearing, dueling, swaggering, and cross-dressing. Middleton and Dekker's Moll affects some of those behaviors but is presented sympathetically as an outspoken free-thinker transcending the rigid constraints of her class and gender. Such froward behavior attracts some undesired admirers to this "maddest, fantastical'st girl" (2.1.192) for her "heroic spirit and masculine womanhood" (2.1.336-7), but much of the play rehearses the knee-jerk attacks on one who "strays so from her kind [that] Nature repents she made her" (1.2.214-5). Her non-binary gender presentation is at the heart of her offense: "It is a thing One knows not how to name; . . . 'Tis woman more than man, Man more than woman, and . . . The sun gives her two shadows to one shape" (1.2.129-33). The fact that such attacks come from the play's senex, Sir Alexander Wengrave, who blocks a heterosexual pair of true lovers from wedded bliss, makes clear where the plot's sympathies rest.

The play offers Moll several memorable bits of stage business. Twice in act 3 when in male garb she draws her weapon to engage with and defeat male opponents. Then act 4 finds her placing a viol da gamba between her trousered legs to perform two songs about transgressive wives, and in act 5 she engages in a bout of "canting," a slang duel that ends with yet another song.

Her verbal climax comes earlier, in an articulate attack on a would-be seducer, the poorly endowed Laxton (lacks stone): "Thou'rt one of those That thinks each woman thy fond flexible whore. . . . What durst move you, sir, To think me whorish? . . . "Cause, you'll say, I'm given to sport, I'm often merry, jest? Had mirth no kindred in the world but lust? . . . I scorn to prostitute myself to a man, I that can prostitute a man to me. . . she that has wit and spirit May scorn to live beholding to her body for meat Or for apparel . . . Base is the mind that kneels unto her body . . . My spirit shall be mistress of this house As long as I have time in't" (3.1.72-140).

Though Moll is the play's featured character, her part in the love-plot is relatively small. It is mostly limited to unmasking plotters and dodging entrapment while allying with the young lover Sebastian Wengrave to cozen his father and marry his true love Mary (about whom the roaring girl says "I pitied her for name's sake, that a Moll Should be so crossed in love" (4.1.68-9). Much of the play is taken up with the misadventures of two city gallants, whose attempts to "wap, niggle and fadoodle" (5.1.189-95) with two housewives and bamboozle their husbands are thwarted by the wives themselves (as in Shakespeare's Merry Wives).

In the end, though this city comedy flirts with transgression at every turn, it ends up affirming heterosexual marriage and wifely wiles. Sir Alexander the senex apologizes for his errors and praises Moll as "a good wench" and the foxy housewives as "kind gentlewomen, whose sparkling presence Are glories set in marriage" (5.2.268-9). Perhaps the chief roarer speaks for her sisters as well as herself when she proclaims, "I please myself, and care not else who loves me" (5.1.332).… (more)