The Roaring Girl
The play was first published in quarto in 1611, printed by Nicholas Okes for the bookseller Thomas Archer.
The Epistle is noteworthy for its indication that Middleton, atypically for dramatists of his era, composed his plays for readers as well as theatre audiences.
[1] The Roaring Girl is a fictionalized dramatization of the life of Mary Frith, known as "Moll Cutpurse", a woman who had gained a reputation as a virago in the early 17th century.
She was also the subject of a lost chapbook written by John Day titled The Mad Pranks of Merry Moll of the Bankside, which was entered into the Stationers' Register on 7 August 1610.
[3] On the basis of documents from a surviving lawsuit, the actual Mary Frith seems to have been the type of person that Middleton and Dekker depicted.
[4] The real Mary Frith may have even stepped in once to play her own part as Moll in a performance of The Roaring Girl at the Fortune Theatre.
However, Sebastian has a plan to enable the match: he will pretend to be in love with Moll Cutpurse, a notorious cross-dressing thief, and his father will be so worried that he will see marriage to Mary as the preferable alternative.
Sir Alexander calls the spy and parasite Trapdoor, and sets him to follow Moll, get into her services, and find a way to destroy her.
Moll enters and Laxton takes a fancy to her, assuming that because she dresses as a man, she is morally loose.
She appears dressed as a man; he goes towards her but she challenges him to a fight: he has impugned her honor, assuming that all women are whores.
Moll teases and taunts him, but she finally accepts that his motives are good and agrees to take him on as her servant.
Feigning anger at the loss of his "betrothed," he takes it and exits, musing on the deceitfulness of women.
Sir Davy has decided to teach his son a lesson: he will arrange to have Jack arrested, trusting a few days in the counter (the debtor's prison) to bring him to his senses.
The citizens' wives discuss the gallants, agreeing that they don't really understand life, women, or relationships.
A young man enters pretending to have legal document calling the Gallipots to court for breach of contract.
This is Laxton's doing—after the thirty pounds, he demanded another fifteen, and now he is asking for a hundred in order to hold his peace.
Sir Alexander, vastly relieved, apologizes to both Mary and her father, and happily grants half his lands to the happy couple.
Critics and scholars who have attempted to differentiate the shares of the two collaborators in the play have not reached a full consensus, though the general tendency has been to attribute the romantic main plot of Mary Fitz-Allard largely to Dekker, and the Moll Cutpurse subplot mainly to Middleton.
Lake also favours the view of Fredson Bowers that the play was printed from a manuscript in Dekker's autograph.
Critics have discussed how she shapes gender relations, and how she represents a woman's situation in Early Modern England.
