ABOUT THE ORIGINAL PLAY
The Roaring Girl (1611) is in many ways a classic Jacobean city comedy. Its plot includes all the genre’s staple conventions: young lovers forbidden to marry by a mercenary father, citizen merchants plying their trades, and idle gallants playing at adultery with citizens’ wives. In the central marriage plot, Sebastian, like many clever young men in city comedies, concocts a scheme to marry the woman he loves, Mary Allard, without being disinherited: he will pretend to woo a woman whose conspicuous disregard for convention will make his preferred bride acceptable to his father. Meanwhile, another plotline traces flirtations and troublemaking among citizens and gallants, framed with bawdy puns on male sexual stamina (or lack thereof). So far, so familiar. Yet despite all these recognizable plot elements, this play sets itself apart from its contemporaries through the astonishing, iconoclastic figure of its title character: the so-called roaring girl, Moll Frith.

In the crowded landscape of early modern stage characters, Moll stands alone. Although her cross-dressing might seem to evoke figures such as Shakespeare’s earlier Portia, Rosalind, and Viola, in practice she has almost nothing in common with these romantic heroines. Moll has no interest in disguising herself as a man, or in winning a man’s attention. Rather, she dresses to suit herself, enjoying the comfort and freedom of breeches along with other related liberties. “Roaring boys,” known for smoking, drinking, and swearing, were stock characters in city comedies, but Moll is the only roaring girl in the dramatic record. Her unorthodox ways attract prurient curiosity. When a citizen’s wife gossips, “Some will not stick to say she’s a man / And some both man and woman,” one of the gallants responds, “That were excellent: she might first cuckold the husband and then make him do as much for the wife.” Yet these scandalmongers’ rumors say more about themselves than about Moll, who guards her integrity fiercely. She agrees to help the young lovers out of respect for the sincerity of their love, but she fervently rejects marriage for herself, insisting on her right to live as she pleases. “I have no humour to marry,” she explains; “I love to lie a’ both sides a’ th’ bed myself . . . 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.” Later, in a startlingly proto-feminist speech, she chides a would-be seducer, “th’art one of those / That thinks each woman thy fond, flexible whore / If she but cast a liberal eye upon thee.” Rebuking his expectations, she goes on to emphasize, “I scorn to prostitute myself to a man, / I that can prostitute a man to me.”

It’s tempting to imagine that Moll’s intoxicating freedom of speech and behavior might reflect a world in which women actually could and did enjoy these luxuries. Sadly, the historical record suggests that this was rarely, if ever, the case. Yet far from an outlandish fabrication, her character was based on an actual Mary Frith, who sang and played a lute at the Fortune Theater in 1611, “in the public eye”: possibly the first woman to perform on one of London’s public stages. And whether or not the real Frith enjoyed quite as much liberty as the fictional Moll, the play makes female freedoms thinkable and speakable, a project that this adaptation extends with new scenes and dialogues. In his Defense of Poesy (c.1580), Philip Sidney praised poetry for its ability to imagine new worlds and bring them into existence. “Only the poet,” he wrote, “disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature: in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or quite anew, forms such as never were in nature.” Sidney was almost certainly not thinking of a future roaring girl as one of these new marvels, but we might see Moll’s proud independence as conjuring the possibility – however remote and ephemeral – of female freedom.