Drama Criticism | Dekker, Thomas - Mary Beth Rose (essay date 1984)

Mary Beth Rose (essay date 1984)

SOURCE: “Women in Men's Clothing: Apparel and Social Stability in The Roaring Girl,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 14, No. 3, Autumn 1984, pp. 367-91.

[In the essay below, Rose argues that The Roaring Girl, with its depiction of the cross-dressing Moll Frith, presents “an image of Jacobean society as unable to absorb one of its most vital and complex creations into the existing social and sexual hierarchies.”]

The central figure in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's city comedy The Roaring Girl (c. 1608-1611) is a woman named Moll Frith, whose distinguishing feature is that she walks around Jacobean London dressed in male clothing.¹ It should be stressed that Moll is not in disguise: she is neither a disguised player, a man pretending to be a woman; nor is she a disguised character, whose role requires a woman pretending to be a man. Unlike the disguised heroines...

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