[In the following essay, Scragg argues that a passage from Act II, scene v of Twelfth Night—in which Malvolio reads the forged letter—can be read as both a bawdy joke and as a warning against pickpockets.]

Act II, scene v of Twelfth Night in which Malvolio falls victim to the letter device instigated by Maria is among the funniest in Shakespearian drama. Sir Toby, Fabian, and Sir Andrew, hiding in the box-tree, observe as Malvolio, day-dreaming about his relationship with his mistress, finds the letter ostensibly written to him by Olivia, and inspired by the ‘spirit of humours’ (Twelfth Night, II. v. 85)¹ proceeds to read passages from it aloud and apply them to himself. The scene rarely fails to bring the house down in the theatre, but on the printed page a number of its lines pose problems that are not immediately apparent to a spectator in the course of performance. The passage in question occurs as Malvolio first takes up the letter.

FABIAN.
Now is the woodcock near the gin.
SIR To.
O peace! and the spirit of humours intimate reading aloud to him!
MAL.
[Taking up the letter] By my life, this is my lady's hand: these be her very C's, her U's, and her T's, and thus makes she her great P's. It is in contempt of question her hand.
SIR And.
Her C's, her U's, and her T's: why that?
MAL.
[Reads] To the unknown beloved, this, and my good wishes.

(II. v. 84-93)

The most obvious difficulty to arise here is the absence, consistently remarked upon by the play's editors, of two of the letters that Malvolio specifies from the superscription, neither ‘c’ nor ‘p’ occurring in the words with which the letter is addressed. Two explanations suggest themselves for this omission. Either Shakespeare expected his audience to imagine the existence of some additional words that Malvolio neglects to read aloud, or he was aware that such discrepancies pass unnoticed in the playhouse and was indifferent to an exact correspondence between the letters and the lines. In either case, the primacy of the characters over the words from which they are supposedly drawn is clearly indicated, and their importance is signalled, as Lothian and Craik point out in their edition of the play (II. v. 88-9 n.), by Sir Andrew's repetition of them and his bewilderment over their significance.

The four letters are crucial in terms of plot development in that it is their execution that convinces Malvolio that the forged epistle is in fact in his mistress's hand. Any four (indeed, any number of) letters, however, would plainly have served this purpose equally effectively, the lengthy superscription offering the dramatist a considerable number from which to choose. In fact, the selection of ‘c’, ‘u’, ‘t’, and ‘p’ depends not upon their palaeographic value but upon the humour to which they give rise, in that the letters have sexual connotations, as Shakespeare's contemporaries, aided by Sir Andrew's emphasis, were no doubt immediately aware. As a succession of commentators have noted, ‘c’, ‘u’, and ‘t’ spell out ‘cut’, a slang term for the vagina, while ‘thus she makes her great P's’ is similarly bawdy, drawing on the common abbreviation for ‘piss’.² While fulfilling the immediate dramatic objective in allowing Malvolio to misidentify the source of the letter, the characters thus contribute to his deflation, in that his social pretensions are in sharp contrast to the vulgarity of the language he unwittingly employs. The collision between his fantasy of coming ‘from a day-bed’ (II. v. 48) where he has ‘left Olivia sleeping’ (II. v. 49) and his formation of the bawdy term ‘cut’ enforces the grotesque nature of the steward and the perversity of his aspirations, while the letters he singles out might be seen as an unconscious revelation of the darker aspect of his imaginings.

The self-exposure at work in Malvolio's perusal of the superscription is characteristic of the scene as a whole in which he consistently construes words, phrases, and single characters into an amorous epistle directed to himself. Nevertheless, a fundamental difference exists between Malvolio's response to the letter's direction and his interpretation of its contents, giving rise to a second problem that Sir Andrew's innocent question locates. Whereas in the main body of the letter Malvolio responds directly to the characters and words with which he is supplied, when he first takes up the paper the selection of letters on which he focuses is determined, not by the conspirators, but by the speaker himself. The contrast between the passage quoted at the outset of this paper and the lines relating to the spelling of Malvolio's own name illustrate the point.

MAL.
[Taking up the letter] By my life, this is my lady's hand: these be her very C's, her U's, and her T's, and thus makes she her great P's. It is in contempt of question her hand.
SIR And.
Her C's, her U's, and her T's: why that?

(II. v. 87-91)

Compare:

MAL.
[Reads] I may command where I adore;
                              But silence, like a Lucrece knife,
                              With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore;
                              M.O.A.I. doth sway my life.
FABIAN.
A fustian riddle!
SIR To.
Excellent wench, say I.

.....

MAL.
‘M.O.A.I.’ This simulation is not as the former: and yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my name.

(II. v. 106-41)

In the second instance, both the exposure of Malvolio's folly and his subsequent conduct towards Olivia are a direct consequence of the plan conceived by Maria—as Sir Toby's exclamation, ‘Excellent wench, say I’, confirms—whereas in the first the steward is rendered ridiculous, not by a deliberate ploy on the part of his enemies, but by his own lack of linguistic awareness. The joke enacted during the reading of the letter might thus be said to be Maria's, while the laughter arising from the superscription is more directly ascribable to the dramatist himself.

The divergent sources of laughter in the two phases of the scene may be equated with a shift in audience/actor relationships that occurs as the action evolves. At the outset of the episode, although Sir Toby, Fabian, and Sir Andrew, nursing their grievance against Malvolio, are told by Maria that her letter will ‘make a contemplative idiot of him’ (II. v. 19-20), they are not actively involved in the instigation of the device, and function as mere observers when the steward enters rapt in his fantasy of becoming Olivia's husband. At this stage, though the conspirators act as an internal audience to Malvolio's posturings, they do not control them, and their grasp of the situation is fuller than his only by virtue of his ignorance of their presence and the trap that has been laid for him. Malvolio, in short, at this stage of the scene is autonomous, and it is in his extravagant imaginings that the spectator is caught up. Once he opens the letter, however, the superior understanding of Sir Toby, Fabian, and to a lesser extent Sir Andrew alters this position. The audience perceives the steward through the eyes of the conspirators, who now function as part of the mechanism that controls his conduct. The movement between the reading of the superscription and the opening of the letter thus marks a division in the scene as a whole—as the action evolves from a play, to a species of play within a play.

Two dramatists, not one, might therefore be said to be at work in Act II, scene v. In the first half of the scene the characters exhibit themselves at the instigation of the dramatist, and the jokes may be regarded as his, while the second part of the scene is part-scripted by Maria, with her fellow conspirators functioning as an audience to her work. The jokes on the letters ‘c’, ‘u’, ‘t’, ‘p’ and ‘m’, ‘o’, ‘a’, ‘i’ are thus by different hands, and they depend, in part, for their effect upon a different kind of interaction between the speaker and the theatre audience. In the first instance Malvolio is very much down stage, and his random culling of the letters invites both levels of spectators to impose a meaning on the characters that he singles out. Sir Andrew's repetition of the letters involves the internal audience in the execution of the joke, his puzzled reiteration encouraging those outside the play world to form the word ‘cut’. In the second instance the comedy is of a different kind. The presence of the internal audience between the speaker and the spectator is much more strongly felt, while the attention of the audience is focused, not upon the letters themselves, which present no difficulty, but on Malvolio's application of them to himself. Maria's joke thus rests upon self-exposure, while Shakespeare's involves a much greater degree of audience participation, with a species of music-hall interaction taking place as the word ‘cut’ is spelled out.

The tradition of involving an audience in what proves to be a bawdy joke is an old one, reaching back into medieval drama—cf. the fifteenth-century Mankind in which the vices lead the spectators in what proves to be a lewd song. Such jokes frequently depend upon substitution or interruption, with a failure to complete a rhyme, or an unexpected pause, tricking the spectator into completing an indecent line for himself. A straightforward example occurs in IV. v of The Dutch Courtesan (a scene indebted to Twelfth Night) in which Cocledemoy sings a bawdy song, omitting a crucial rhyme word which the members of the audience then supply:

Maids in your night-rails,
Look well to your light—

(IV. v. 84-5)³

In the scene under discussion a similar invitation may well be extended. While on the one hand Sir Andrew's repetition of ‘c’, ‘u’, and ‘t’ ensures that the spectator formulates the word ‘cut’, Malvolio's seemingly random selection of letters implies the presence of others, to which those that he supplies provide the clue. While laughing at the incongruity of ‘cut’ and ‘pee’ in the mouth of the steward, the members of the audience are thus encouraged to visualize ‘cut-P——’ and in doing so a seventeenth-century spectator may well have been prompted to transfer an anxious hand to his side.

The activity of pick-pockets in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playhouses is well attested. An Act of Common Council passed by the City of London in 1574 included purse cutting among the ‘disorders and inconvenyences’ necessitating the strict regulation of the theatres,⁴ while the Middlesex justices in 1612 made an order for the suppression of the ‘jigs’ that commonly closed the plays of this period because of the cutpurses (among other socially undesirable personages) that they attracted.⁵ William Hawkins, a barber, was charged with taking a purse at the Curtain in 1600,⁶ while Alexander Fulsis was accused of a similar offence at the Red Bull in 1614.⁷ Even performances at court were not exempt from such depredations. According to a contemporary commentator, ‘chaynes, jewels, purces and such like loose ware’ were all lost to their owners in the course of Jonson's Mask of Blackness (1605),⁸ while another writer observed of a masque celebrating the marriage of Sir Philip Herbert and Lady Susan de Vere (1604), ‘There was no smal loss that night of chaines and jewells, and many great ladies were made shorter by the skirts, and were well enough served that they could keep cut no better’ (my italics).⁹ The last example is a particularly significant one in relation to Malvolio's selection of characters from Maria's letter in that the bawdy play on the words ‘serve’ and ‘cut’ in this context helps to confirm that a pun on ‘cut’ (= vagina) and ‘cut’ (of purses) was current during this period.

The attraction that the crowds thronging the playhouses exercised for the ‘nip’ and ‘foist’ is not indicated solely by records of specific incidents, however. It is also borne out by the ‘conny-catching’ literature of the period. Greene's The Second Part of Conny-Catching (1592) devotes an entire ‘discourse’ to the ‘nature of the Cutpurse and Pickpocket’, singling out the playhouse as a particularly lucrative field of operation, and describing the way in which its light-fingered patrons went to work:

At Plaies, the nip [cutpurse] standeth there leaning like some mannerly gentleman against the doore as men go in, and there finding talke with some of his companions, spieth what euery man hath in his purse, & wher in what place, and in which sleeue or pocket he puts the boung, and according to that so hee worketh, either where the thrust is great within, or els as they come out at the dores: but suppose that the foist [pickpocket] is smoakt, and the man misseth his purse, and apprehendeth him for it, then straight, he either conueith it to his stall, or els droppeth the boung, and with a great braue, hee defieth his accuser: and though the purse be found at his feet yet because hee hath it not about him, hee comes not within compasse of life.¹⁰

The justice meted out to those who failed to convince their accusers of their innocence was not always of a legal kind. Kempe's Nine Days Wonder records the custom of tying cutpurses to ‘a poast on our stage, for all people to wonder at, when at a play they are taken pilfring’,¹¹ and his account is authenticated by the anonymous Nobody and Somebody (c.1592, rev. 1603-6?) in which, during the mutual recriminations that take place towards the close of the play, Somebody's imputation that Nobody is responsible when ‘Pockets [are] pickt, and purses cut in throngs’ (l. 1878)¹² is answered with:

                                                            Somebody
Once pickt a pocket in this Play-house yard,
Was hoysted on the stage, and shamd about it.

(ll. 1893-5)

References to the operation of pickpockets among gatherings of all kinds are typical of the plays of the period and clearly served to alert the spectator to keep a wary eye, or hand, on his own purse. In the opening scene of Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c.1589-92), for example, the fool, Ralph, implies the ubiquity of the ‘nip’ when he advises his master to have himself transformed into his mistress's purse as the surest means of gaining access to her person:

If thou be'st a silken purse full of gold, then on Sundays she'll hang thee by her side, and you must not say a word. Now, sir, when she comes into a great prease of people, for fear of the cut-purse, on a sudden she'll swap thee into her plackerd; then, sirrah, being there, you may plead for yourself;

(I. i. 105-10)¹³

while in James IV (Greene, c.1590) the clown, Slipper, declares that he ‘cannot abide a full cup unkissed, a fat capon uncarved [or] a full purse unpicked’ (I. ii. 21-3),¹⁴ and that he can ‘pick a purse as soon as any thief in [the] country’ (III. i. 48-9), only to have his own pocket picked in the course of a dance in which he is encouraged to participate by three ‘Antics’ (IV. iii. 101ff.). Slender, in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, accuses the significantly named Corporal Nym of picking his purse of ‘seven groats in mill-sixpences and two Edward shovel-boards that cost [him] two shilling and two pence apiece of Yead Miller’ (I. i. 149, 140-2),¹⁵ while the pedlar, Autolycus, in The Winter's Tale, having relieved the Clown of his purse in IV. iii, explains his modus operandi to the audience in terms directly relevant to themselves, in that they have formed part of the eager crowd of listeners he describes:

Ha, ha! what a fool Honesty is! and Trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman! I have sold all my trumpery: not a counterfeit stone, not a ribbon, glass, pomander, brooch, table-book, ballad, knife, tape, glove, shoe-tie, bracelet, horn-ring, to keep my pack from fasting: they throng who should buy first, as if my trinkets had been hallowed and brought a benediction to the buyer: by which means I saw whose purse was best in picture; and what I saw, to my good use I remembered. My clown (who wants but something to be a reasonable man) grew so in love with the wenches' song, that he would not stir his pettitoes till he had both tune and words; which so drew the rest of the herd to me, that all their other senses stuck in ears: you might have pinched a placket, it was senseless; 'twas nothing to geld a codpiece of a purse; I would have filed keys off that hung in chains: no hearing, no feeling, but my sir's song, and admiring the nothing of it. So that in this time of lethargy I picked and cut most of their festival purses.

(IV. iv. 596-616)¹⁶

Such pointed illustrations of the pickpocket's art were not uncommon. Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, for example, written not long after the prohibition against jigs, and set in a location notorious for the ‘lifters’ it attracted,¹⁷ features a cutpurse and his ballad-singing accomplice among the principal characters, and demonstrates the way in which those who exploited the rich pickings that any tightly packed gathering of people represented went about their work. In II. iv, Edgworth (the cutpurse) tells Nightingale (the ballad singer) where to bring the purses that he passes him, and instructs him in both the choice of suitable places in which to sing, and the means by which to indicate where their victim's purse is to be found:

EDG.
All the purses and purchase I give you to-day by conveyance, bring hither to Urs'la's presently. Here we will meet at night in her lodge, and share. Look you choose good places for your standing i'the Fair, when you sing, Nightingale.
URS.
Aye, near the fullest passages; and shift 'em often.
EDG.
And i' your singing, you must use your hawk's eye nimbly, and fly the purse to a mark still—where 'tis worn and o'which side—that you may gi'me the sign with your beak, or hang your head that way i'the tune.

(II. iv. 35-44)¹⁸

In II. vi he picks the pocket of a young Squire, Bartholomew Cokes, while he is listening to an oration by Justice Overdo, initiating an altercation in which a whole series of characters is accused of picking pockets, while in III. v he tricks Cokes out of a second purse by tickling his ear with a straw in the course of a song sung by Nightingale, and thus obliging him to let go of his money in order to scratch. The last scene is an important one, not least in the levels of interaction that it sets up between play and spectator. Cokes initiates the action by challenging the unknown thief to gain possession of his second purse, before listening to the song sung by Nightingale, which itself issues a warning against pickpockets. The song thus functions as a species of dramatic performance, corresponding, in terms of content, to the play itself, with Cokes representing the members of Jonson's own audience, and Edgworth the cutpurses within its ranks. An elaborate game is thus instituted between the dramatist and those who seek to exploit the spectators he brings together, with Jonson effectively challenging the former to match Edgworth, while warning the latter against becoming a Cokes. The scene is too long to quote in full, but a selection of lines affords an indication of the nature of its development:

COK.
I would fain see that demon, your cutpurse, you talk of, that delicate-handed devil; they say he walks hereabout: I would see him walk, now. Look you, sister, here, here, let him come, sister, and welcome.
                                                                                He shows his purse boastingly
Ballad-man, does any cutpurses haunt hereabout? Pray thee raise me one or two: begin and show me one.
NIGH.
Sir, this is a spell against 'em, spick and span new; and 'tis made as 'twere in mine own person, and I sing it in mine own defence. But 'twill cost a penny alone, if you buy it.

.....

My masters and friends and good people draw near,
And look to your purses, for that I do say;
COK.
Ha, ha, this chimes! Good counsel at first dash.
NIGH.
And though little money, in them you do bear,
It cost more to get, than to lose in a day.
COK.
Good.
NIGH.
          You oft have been told,
          Both the young and the old;
And bidden beware of the cutpurse so bold;
COK.
Well said! He were to blame that would not, i'faith.

.....

NIGH.
At plays and at sermons, and at the sessions,
'Tis daily their practice such booty to make:
Yea, under the gallows, at executions,
They stick not the stare-abouts' purses to take—
          Nay, one without grace,
          At a far better place,
At court, and in Christmas, before the King's face.
COK.
That was a fine fellow! I would have him now.

.....

Look you, sister, here, here, where is't now? which pocket is't in, for a wager?
                                                                                          He shows his purse again.

.....

Edgworth gets up to him and tickles him in the ear with a straw twice to draw his hand out of his pocket.
QUAR[LOUS].
Good, i'faith! O, he has lighted on the wrong pocket.
WINW[IFE].
He has it, 'fore God, he is a brave fellow; pity he should be detected.
NIGH.
But O, you vile nation of cutpurses all,
Relent and repent, and amend and be sound,
And know that you ought not, by honest men's fall,
Advance your own fortunes, to die above ground.

.....

COK.
O God! my purse is gone, my purse, my purse, &c.

(III. v. 32-177)

While this scene might well be entitled ‘A Caveat against cutpurses’, like Nightingale's song (III. v. 31), the treatment of Edgworth himself is a far from hostile one. Though the play's wits, Quarlous and Winwife, observe the whole process by which Cokes is relieved of his purse, they have no sympathy for the victim, but use the power that their knowledge over Edgworth gives them to enlist him in their own cause (III. v. 236ff.). Edgworth himself is the aristocrat of the play's criminal society. Justice Overdo, echoing Mooncalf, describes him as a ‘civil young man’, a ‘proper penman’, with a ‘good clerk's look’ (II. iv. 29-33), while the people of the Fair regard him as generous and free-spending (cf. II. iv. 24-6, 65-70). This attitude to those who risked their lives to take purses is not exclusive, moreover, to Bartholomew Fair. Greene's The Second Part of Conny-Catching, for example (to which the play may well be indebted), paints a picture of the cutpurse that places considerable emphasis upon his skill and daring:

Therefore let all men take this caueat, that when they walke abroad amid any of the forenamed places, or like assemblies, that they take great care for their purse, how they place it, and not leaue it carelesse in their pockets or hose, for the Foist is so nimble-handed, that he exceeds the iugler for agilitie, and hath his legiar de maine as perfectly. Therefore an exquisite Foist must haue three properties that a good Surgeon should haue, and that is, an Eagles eie, a Ladies hand, and a Lions heart. An Eagles eie to spy out a purchase, to haue a quicke insight where the boung lies, and then a Lions heart, not to feare what the end will bee, and then a Ladies hande to be little and nimble, the better and the more easie to diue into any mans pocket.¹⁹

The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore, a play associated with the Shakespearian canon through the debate surrounding ‘hand D’, also portrays a ‘lifter’ in a not unfavourable light. In the course of the opening scenes, in which Moore's understanding of the common people is demonstrated, a cutpurse is brought before the Lord Mayor in order to be sentenced. Though the man's guilt is beyond question, Justice Suresbie argues that the blame for his offence, and thus responsibility for his death, lies in part with his accuser, who, by flaunting the contents of his purse, effectively lured him into crime:

SURE.
Heare me Smart, thou art a foolish fellowe,
If Lifter be conuicted by the lawe,
As, I see not howe the Iurie can acquit him:
Ile stand too't, thou art guiltie of his death.

.....

I tell thee plaine, it is a shame for thee,
with such a sum to tempte necessitie.
No lesse then ten poundes Sir, will serue your turne,
to [c]arie in your pursse about with ye,
to crake and brag in Tauernes of your monie.
I promise ye, a man that goes a broade,
with an intent of trueth, meeting such a bootie
may be prouokte to that he neuer meante.
what makes so many pilferers and fellons,
but such fond baites that foolish people lay:
to tempt the needie miserable wretche.

(ll. 125-41)²⁰

It is this argument that Moore turns, on Lifter's behalf, against Suresbie himself. Having asked the Lord Mayor to defer passing sentence, he persuades the accused man to steal Suresbie's own (bulging) purse, thus extending ultimate responsibility for the man's plight to the members of the bench who sit in judgment upon the poor while tempting them into crime. The play does not merely proffer an apologia for cutpurses, however. Like Bartholomew Fair it affords a demonstration of the way in which the light-fingered operate, and thus serves to alert the members of the audience to the tricks that they employ. Having convinced Lifter that he will come to his assistance if he agrees to steal Suresbie's purse, Moore acts as his ‘setter’ (l. 189), arranging a meeting in which the pickpocket gives the Justice a lesson on the way in which the members of his profession go to work.

LIFT.
There be Sir diuers very cunning fellowes,
that while you stand and looke them in the face:
will haue your pursse.
SURE.
Th'art an honest knaue.
tell me what are they? where they may be ca[ug]ht
I, those are they I looke for.
LIFT.
you talke of me Sir
Alas I am [a] punie: t[her]'s one indeed,
goes by my name he puts down all for pursses

.....

This fellowe Sir, perhaps will meete ye thus,
Or thus, or thus, and in kinde complement,
pretend acquaintaunce, somewhat doubtfully,
And these embraces serue.
SURE.
I marie Lifter, wherfore serue they?
LIFT.
Only to feele
whether you go vnder full saile or no,
Or that your lading be aboord your Barke.
SURE.
In playner English Lifter, if my pursse be storde or no?
LIFT.
ye haue it Sir.
SURE.
Excellent, excellent.
LIFT.
Then sir, you cannot but for manners sake,
walke on with him, for he will walke your way:
Alleadging either you haue much forgot him,
or he mistakes you.
SURE.
But in this time has he my pursse or no?
LIFT.
Not yet Sir, fye: / No nor I haue not yours.

(ll. 222-52)

Here, while the methods employed by the foist are clearly exhibited by the dramatist for the benefit of his audience, a species of admiration is simultaneously elicited for the skill that is displayed. This admiration is not confined, moreover, to those outside the play world. Suresbie himself is patently fascinated by the pickpocket's art, while Sir Thomas Moore, who functions in these scenes as the embodiment of wit and wisdom, has not only helped Lifter in the past (cf. ll. 159-61), but reveals an appreciation of his adroitness even while warning him not to attempt to profit from his victim's gullibility:

                                                  see that thou diminish not
one penie of the monie, but give it me,
It is the cunning act, that credits thee.

(ll. 194-6)

It is The Roaring Girl (Middleton and Dekker, 1611), however, that probably demonstrates most vividly both the ambivalent attitude that existed towards those whose living lay in other men's purses, and the interaction that took place between the players and that section of the audience seeking to exploit their clientele. The play celebrates a well-known figure of the day, Mary (or Moll) Frith, who customarily dressed as a man, smoked, and, according to the records of the Ecclesiastical court before which she was summoned in 1611/12, ‘vsually associated her selfe w^th Ruffinly swaggering & lewd company as namely w^th cut purses blasphemous drunkards & others of bad note & of most dissolute behaviour’.²¹ Moll appears in the play as Moll Cutpurse, and is treated favourably throughout, constantly frustrating the intentions of those who seek to exploit her, and asserting the positive value of her own conduct. The play was produced at the Fortune, a theatre patronized by the historical Moll herself, and in the course of one performance at least the gap between art and life was bridged when the real Moll made a personal appearance on stage.²² Nevertheless, in the course of the action the presence of pickpockets among the theatre audience is alluded to more than once, and in hostile terms, clearly designed to curtail their activities. In I. ii, for example, Sir Alexander Wengrave, commenting on the ‘room’ in which he and his companions find themselves, describes the playhouse in which the action takes place, concluding with the spectators themselves, and the pickpockets among their ranks:

Within one square a thousand heads are laid
So close, that all of heads, the roome seemes made,
As many faces there (fill'd with blith lookes)
Shew like the promising titles of new bookes,
(Writ merily) the Readers being their owne eyes,
Which seeme to moue and to giue plaudities,
And here and there (whilst with obsequious eares,
Throng'd heapes do listen) a cut purse thrusts and leeres
With haukes eyes for his prey: I need not shew him,
By a hanging villanous looke, your selues may know him,
The face is drawne so rarely,

(I. ii. 19-29)

while in V. i Moll herself exposes a cutpurse, whom her companions mistake for a gallant, and having revealed the way in which he and his accomplices operate, obliges him to make restitution for a purse taken on a previous occasion. Once again, the scene is too long to quote in full, but an extract from it affords an indication of the emphasis that is placed upon the activities of pickpockets in the playhouses:

Enter a Cutpurse very gallant, with foure or fiue men after him, one with a wand.
L[ORD] Nol[an].
What gallant comes yonder?
T[HOMAS] Long.
Masse, I thinke I know him, 'tis one of Cumberland.
1. Cut.
Shall we venture to shuffle in amongst yon heap of Gallants, and strike?
2. Cut.
'Tis a question whether there bee any siluer shels amongst them, for all their sattin outsides.
ALL Cut.
Let's try?
MOLL.
Pox on him, a gallant? shaddow mee, I know him: tis one that cumbers the land indeed; if hee swimme neere to the shore of any of your pockets, looke to your purses.
OMN.
Is't possible?
MOLL.
This braue fellow is no better then a foyst.
OMN.
Foyst, what's that?
MOLL.
A diuer with two fingers, a picke-pocket; all his traine study the figging law, that's to say, cutting of purses and foysting; one of them is a nip, I tooke him once i'the twopenny gallery at the Fortune

.....

Do'st not ken mee man?
1. Cut.
No trust mee sir.
MOLL.
Heart, there's a Knight to whom I'me bound for many fauours, lost his purse at the last new play i'the Swanne, seuen Angels in't, make it good you'r best; do you see? no more.

(V. i. 242-76)

The Roaring Girl was not the only play to exploit the notoriety of Mary Frith. She appears under the name of Moll Cutpurse in Field's Amends for Ladies (c. 1610-11), while some scholars have argued that she is referred to in Twelfth Night.²³ Taken in isolation, such allusions appear to be no more than one species of topical reference, but seen in conjunction with other evidence, they emerge as part of a cat and mouse game played throughout the period between the playwrights and one section of their audience. The most striking example of this kind of game occurs in a pre-Shakespearian play, Apius and Virginia (Richard Bower? 1559-67), in which the dramatist attempts not merely to frustrate the pickpocket but even to catch him in the act. At a number of points in the action, the Vice, Haphazard, who functions as a machiavellian counsellor to Apius, turns to address the spectators directly, abruptly reminding them to beware of the thieves among the crowd. At line 409, for example, he leaves the stage with:

Well, fare ye well now, for better or worse,
Put hands to your pockets, haue minde to your purse:

(ll. 409-10)²⁴

while at 531 he responds to Apius's decision to commit himself to him by raping Virginia with:

At hand (quoth picke purse) here redy am I
See well to the Cut Purse, be ruled by me.

(ll. 531-2)

At the close of the play, when on his way to execution, he pauses to claim the light-fingered among the audience as his kinsmen, and to invite them to follow him to the gallows:

Must I needes hange, by the gods it doth spight me,
To thinke how crabbedly this silke lace will bite me:
Then come cou[si]n cutpurs, come runne haste and folow me,
Haphazard, must hange, come folow the lyverie.

(ll. 1174-7)

Clearly, at each of these points the spectator was intended to clap his hand to his pocket, and possibly even encounter a hand on the way to relieving him of his ‘boung’.

The second of these examples is a particularly useful one, in that it admits a return to the Shakespearian corpus. The phrase ‘At hand quoth pickpurse’ was a proverbial one, and it occurs in Henry IV Part I prior to the robbery at Gadshill. II. i is set in the inn yard at Rochester in the early hours of the morning, as the carriers are preparing to set out, and the concept of theft runs throughout the scene. The carriers refuse to lend Gadshill their lanterns for fear that he might steal them, while the following exchange takes place when the Chamberlain is summoned:

GADS.
What ho! Chamberlain!
Enter Chamberlain.
CHAM.
‘At hand, quoth pick-purse.’
GADS.
That's even as fair as ‘At hand, quoth the chamberlain’: for thou variest no more from picking of purses than giving direction doth from labouring; thou layest the plot how.

(II. i. 46-51)²⁵

Given the universal awareness of the danger that the playhouses represented to the preservation of private property, it is highly unlikely that the members of Shakespeare's audience wouldn't have been prompted here to check the safety of their own valuables.

The laughter occasioned in Twelfth Night by Malvolio's selection of characters from the superscription of Maria's letter depends, as noted above, on incongruity on the one hand, and an interaction between player and spectator on the other. The puritan steward picks out a sequence of letters to which the members of the audience, in music-hall style, assign a bawdy significance, with laughter arising first from a recognition of the letters' meaning, and then from the dichotomy between the character of the speaker and the nature of the words he unwittingly forms. This species of humour, and the deflation of the steward that accompanies it, is clearly not dependent upon the use of any particular bawdy term, and a number of alternatives current during the period readily suggest themselves. Shakespeare himself frequently puns upon the word ‘prick’, and the letters ‘a’, ‘r’, ‘s’, and ‘e’, solemnly spelled out by the ‘affectioned’ (II. iii. 147) Malvolio would no doubt be equally effective in convulsing an audience with mirth. The choice of ‘c’, ‘u’, ‘t’, and ‘p’ is thus a self-conscious one, and in electing to use these particular letters Shakespeare may well have been engaging in a kind of interplay between play and spectator that functions on more than one level. While on the one hand the members of the audience are encouraged to spell out a bawdy term, and to laugh at the steward's deflation, on the other they are being led to form the word ‘cut-P——’, and thus being reminded of the repeated warnings against pickpockets they had heard in other plays, or of the cutpurse tied to the post supporting the stage. In short, aided by the added emphasis to the letters afforded by Sir Andrew's innocent enquiry, the members of Shakespeare's audience may have found their own answer to ‘why that?’, and have hurriedly taken fresh precautions against those mannerly young men pressing rather too close to their sides.

Notes

1. All references to Twelfth Night are to the Arden edn., ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London, 1975).

2. For a discussion of the bawdy innuendo here, see Lothian and Craik, Twelfth Night, II. v. 88-9 n.

3. The Selected Plays of John Marston, ed. Macdonald P. Jackson and Michael Neill (London, 1986). The suggestion that the audience was intended to supply the missing word was first made by J. A. B. Somerset, ‘The Comic Turn in English Drama, 1470-1616’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Birmingham, 1966), 471.

4. See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923, corrected 1951), i. 283.

5. Ibid. i. 304.

6. Ibid. ii. 403.

7. Ibid. ii. 447.

8. Quoted ibid. iii. 376.

9. Quoted ibid. iii. 377.

10. A Notable Discovery of Coosenage 1591: The Second Part of Conny-Catching 1592, ed. G. B. Harrison, Bodley Head Quartos (1922, repr. Edinburgh, 1966).

11. Quoted by Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, ii. 546.

12. References to Nobody and Somebody are to Richard Simpson's edn. in The School of Shakespeare (New York, 1878).

13. Five Elizabethan Comedies, ed. A. K. McIlwraith (London, 1934).

14. All references to James IV are to the Revels edn., ed. Norman Sanders (London, 1970).

15. The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. H. J. Oliver, Arden edn. (London, 1971).

16. The Winter's Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford, Arden edn. (London, 1963).

17. See Greene's The Second Part of Conny-Catching, p. 33.

18. All references to Bartholomew Fair are to the Revels edn., ed. E. A. Horsman (London, 1960, repr. Manchester, 1979).

19. The Second Part of Conny-Catching, p. 34.

20. All references are to The Book of Sir Thomas More, ed. W. W. Greg, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford, 1911), revised, with a supplement by Harold Jenkins (1961).

21. Quoted by Cyrus Hoy in his Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in ‘The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker’ (Cambridge, 1980), iii. 1. All quotations from The Roaring Girl are from The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, 1958).

22. See Hoy, Introductions, pp. 1-4.

23. See Twelfth Night, ed. Lothian and Craik, I. iii. 124 n. and Amends For Ladies, ed. A. Wilson Verity, Nero and Other Plays (London, 1888), 432 n.

24. All quotations from Apius and Virginia are from the Malone Society edn., ed. R. B. McKerrow and W. W. Greg (Oxford, 1911).

25. The First Part of King Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys, Arden edn. (London, 1960).