Mary Frith, also known as "Moll Cutpurse"
https://mjblackauthor.wordpress.com/2017/01/15/moll-cutpurse-seventeenth-century-celebrity-villain/
Since before Elizabethan times there was a tradition of pragmatic cross-dressing on the stage when only men could take their places as actors. Following the Restoration, women were finally permitted to take to the stage after which the implications of crossed dressing for the stage evolved. Where there was once a need for men en travesti to play the serious female role, women would now play these roles. The crossdressed actor male-to-female would play the comic relief while the newly-available 18th century option of actor crossdressing female-to-male might take on a more heroic bent.
However, off the stage there was a strong association with gender non-conforming individuals and criminality. Questions on an individual’s morality remained the greatest set of assumptions made about queer and gender non-conforming individuals during the Early and Late Modern Periods.
In the 17th century a popular genre of music was the broadside ballad. The songs might tell a humorous story, praise or criticize public figures or editorialize current events; each text set to a commonly known tune. In the broadside ballads, examples of cross-dressing and gender swapping are not uncommon. Most times they included a woodcut-printed image of a scene relating to the song.
For exampe, the woodcut from the ballad "The Couragious Cook-maid" published sometime between 1674 and 1679. The song tells of a cook maid, at the behest of her employer, robs five tailors each of whom have just performed work for her employer. She does this by cover of night, in men’s apparel, and with a black pudding (sausage) disguised as a pistol. This example illustrates how a crossdressed woman comitting a crime reinforces the association of gender nonconformity and criminality while the subtext warns of a woman usurping a mans power.
Outside of the fictionalized cross-dressing women immortalized in the broadsheet ballads, there were real individuals on whom some of these ballads might have been based.
One of the most enduring legacies of cross-dressers from early modern England was an individual named Mary Frith. There are many conflicting details in the lore surrounding Mary’s life, but Mary’s legal encounters are well-documented in an abundance of court records beginning in 1600, presumably around the age of sixteen, Mary first appears in court records for stealing a purse. That same year Mary had become so rebellious that their family had arranged for them to travel to the New World with their uncle, a minister. Rather, Mary had ideas of their own and when taken to the ship, bribed a sailor to help them get back off the ship. Mary returned to London and continued with their professional life of crime, entering court records again in 1602 and onward.
From their excellent skills as a pickpocket Mary became known as “Moll Cutpurse”. The term “moll” was normally used to describe a prostitute or the female accomplice of a gangster. Though Mary was not a gangster, they did boast about ties with London’s criminal underworld. In the literature surveyed, many sources reported that Mary Frith had experience as a pimp. The alias of “Cutpurse” is derived from slang and her criminal activities as a pickpocket.
Mary’s skill as a petty thief and their boisterous personality made them well-known in illicit circles. Along with their illegal activities, Mary was equally known for their comedic musical performances in taverns, tobacco shops and playhouses where they would sing, dance, and play the lute without a license (yet another legal issue), all while dressed in male clothing.
Mary became famous in their lifetime first by living their life in the manner that they saw fit; dressed in traditionally male-gendered clothing and performing acts that contemporary society deemed male-gendered such as drinking, singing in taverns while playing the lute, and freely using foul language. Mary is also attributed as the first female smoker in England. To be female and smoking, especially in public, was a direct affront to gender norms.
During the late Renaissance there was a trend in women donning elements of men’s apparel. However, in Mary’s case, with the combination of her chosen attire and the acts of smoking, swearing, and fencing stolen goods, this type of gender swapping, rather than simply adding men's apparel to her wardrobe, would have been highly unusual. Mary’s unusual life, infused with her charisma and unlikely charm, was the inspiration for their literary legacy that includes biographies and autobiographies, plays, pamphlets, and ballads about “Moll Cutpurse”, despite (and because of) their rebellious and illegal ways.
The many accounts of Mary’s life with both intersecting segments of information and wildly different anecdotes and lore. It is difficult to distinguish real events with those that have been sensationalized or fabricated by Mary or those who would try to profit from her story. For example In 1662, “bookseller William Gilbertson offered his patrons the anonymously written Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith. Commonly called Mal Cutpurse. Exactly Collected and now Published for the Delight and Recreation of all Merry Disposed Persons”, published three years after her death in 1659. Though there is no clear birthdate for Mary, based on burial records of their death date and stated age it is likely they were born in London sometime around 1584.
In Mary’s time a person’s dress was recognition of their place in society, one didn’t dress outside their social class much less the opposite side of the gender binary. Mary repeatedly professed to being a woman and if that notion was challenged she would invite any man to inspect more closely, though there are no reports of anyone accepting the invitation. Perhaps in Mary’s instances of professing her sex she was doing just that: professing her biological fact rather than her gender. At the time, the prevailing scientific notion on biological sex and gender was still the one-sex model. The nomenclature of sex/gender was male/man and female/woman, there was no other terminology save for those considered deviant. But by professing her biological sex, whilst wearing men’s clothes and performing male-gendered acts, Mary was, knowingly or unknowingly, making a statement about the roles and responsibilities that had been assigned to women.
In the essay Thieves, Bawds, and Counterrevolutionary Fantasies: The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith, by Melissa Mowry, the life and acts of Mary Frith are seen as a political technology. Mowry asserts that the many plays and literature written about Mary were also social commentary on the position and rights of common women in London society, as well as the cultural anxiety surrounding women with criminal backgrounds as “1) they spread disease; 2) they are deceptively innocent; 3) they threaten men’s earning potential in a capitalistic economy; and 4) they can become wayward, threatening the family structure.”
Mary was truly a character in the Bankside of Southwark and the subject of numerous jestbooks, jest biographies, and jest ballads common in the 17th century. Frith was well-known in her own right but attained legendary status when two plays about her life were written and produced while she was alive. The most famous of the two was Thomases Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl from around 1611.
In the Renaissance period, the adjective "roaring" referred to anyone living in an overly loud or extroverted way. Commonly used to describe a man or boy, the adjective is gendered. Its use with "girl" was obviously meant to signal an individual living outside the gender binary; a woman who behaves in what is traditionally considered to be a masculine way. The title of Middleton and Dekker’s play was the first documented use of roaring in reference to a biological female. The lead character's moniker alludes to the wild nature of the protagonist and her abhorrent behavior, considered exponentially worse for a woman. At first glance this seems to be a continuation of an assault on the reputation of then 27-year-old Mary Frith.
In 1610, one year before Middleton and Dekker’s play, John Day published The Madde Pranckes of Mery Mall writing of Mary’s illegal and carnal activities. While there are no surviving examples of the complete text or even the type of publication, be it pamphlet or ballad, it is clear that the work, with its coarse language, is not flattering to Mary in that it exploits rather than tries to understand Mary’s practices, habits, or intentions. The importance of Day’s partial fiction in the trajectory of Mary’s life was the response; Middleton and Dekker’s play in which the playwrights explained that their goal was to, in a sense, rehabilitate Mary, or at least the characterization heaped upon them by Day’s work. “Loved, loathed, and constantly talked about, Frith capitalized on her notoriety by making an appearance at the end of a 1611 performance of The Roaring Girl, at the Fortune Playhouse, dressed as a man, carrying a sword, and dancing a jig.”
Just as there are several accounts of Mary’s life, are there interpretations of Mary’s many, then- outrageous performative acts. In her 2021 peer-reviewed article Mary Frith, Moll Cutpurse and the Development of an Early Modern Criminal Celebrity, Lauren Liebe at Texas A&M University, describes Mary as a woman coming from the low social class in London who sees both criminality and entertainment as a means of social mobility. Further, Liebe interprets Frith’s crossdressing as an element in the development of the characterization of the fictional Moll Cutpurse suggesting that Mary’s acts of performativity, in this case crossdressing, were not a genuine expression of gender non-conformity or gender identity but merely as a calculated plan to achieve fame. Possibly, Liebe’s trans non inclusivity is to her article’s benefit as it falls more closely in line with her lens of the criminal celebrity. However, most likely borrowed from a monograph over two decades old and before the surge in queer studies and the liberation of alternative, gender-focused readings of historic materials, Liebe is not alone in her assertions.
In 2000 Gustav Ungerer published “Mary Frith, Alias Moll Cutpurse, in Life and Literature” in Shakespeare Studies, 28:42-84. In his article, Ungerer mutes Mary’s gender non-conformity writing “[She] turned out to be a self-fashioning individual who had taken to transvestism as an alternative strategy for economic survival. … [she] was a scheming and calculating [woman] with an ingrained instinct for upward social mobility and determined to exploit to the full the ambiguous legal position of women under common law.” However, if we are under the assumption that performativity manufactures gender, Mary Frith becomes ripe with possibility. Mary doesn’t use cross-dress as a disguise but “adopts male dress publicly and deliberately; and she uses it to signal her freedom from the traditional positions assigned to a woman in her culture”.
While Liebe’s reading and subsequent narrative, inspired by Ungerer’s, diminishes Mary’s experience as a queer individual, her point that Frith’s crossdressing was deliberate and premeditated supports Butler's theory that performative acts manufacture gender. Unger, however, fails to recognize Frith’s bravery as an openly gender nonconforming individual in late Renaissance London, and the political gravity of their performative acts simply framing them as ambition. Again, under the assumption that performativity manufactures gender, then Ungerer’s argument fits neatly into Butler's theory.
To disregard the frequency and commitment to what Liebe infers as a set of premeditated performative acts as a marketing ploy narrows the possibility of intent in regard to Mary’s crossdressing and all but erases their queerness. However, Liebe’s article raises important questions when considering the subject of Mary Frith’s gender identity: which of the surviving information is about Mary and which is about Moll or Mary creating Moll? Also, would separating the factual person from the fictional character give more or less explanation to the nature of Mary’s gender expression?
Next Chapter: Julie d'Aubigny