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Mad Moll and Merry Meg: the Roaring Girl As Popular Heroine in Elizabethan and Jacobean Writings

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Mad Moll and Merry Meg: the Roaring Girl As Popular Heroine in Elizabethan and Jacobean Writings Mad Moll and Merry Meg: the roaring girl as popular heroine in Elizabethan and Jacobean writings Patricia Shaw UNIVERSITY OF OVIEDO The “Mad Moll” and “Merry Meg” of my title refer, respectively, to Mary Frith, likewise known as “Moll Cutpurse”, and a tall, strapping Lancashire lass, known since her arrival in London, as “Long Meg of Westminster”, who are the protagonists of a series of late sixteenth and seventeenth century writings, two of which I should like to analyse in some detail, in order to explore, and, if possible, to account for, the attraction which these “roaring” cross-dressing girls obviously exercised over the Renaissance imagination and over the male authors who, basing themselves perhaps on popular legends concerning these probably real-life characters, endowed them with such enduring and endearing vitality both in fiction and in drama. The works which we shall be principally concerned with here are: the anonymous jest-biography, The life of Long Meg of Westminster, first entered into the Stationers’ Register in 15901; and Middleton and Dekker’s play, The Roaring Girl, first performed in about 1605. It is interesting to note, however, that Moll likewise appears in fiction, protagonising her “autobiography”, The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith, published in 1662, and, conversely, that Meg is “the heroine of a play, noticed in Henslowe’s Diary, under the date February 14th, 1594” (Hindley, 1872: xxvi), but no longer extant. In the Renaissance period, the adjective “roaring” was applied to anyone “behaving or living in a noisy, riotous manner”2, and was used particularly in combination with boy: “a roaring boy”; the word is, therefore, gendered, and hence its use with girl was obviously meant to evoke a hoyden, or tom-boy, who behaves in what is traditionally considered to be a masculine way. Before commenting on the works mentioned, it would not, perhaps, be otiose to summarise briefly what is known about the real-life existence of these two interesting protagonists of, in Middleton’s words, “heroicke spirit and masculine womanhood” (The Roaring Girl, II.i.320-21). For chronological reasons, Long Meg should be considered first: her “actual existence as a real person has been both asserted and denied, but though in the nineteenth century the question was hotly debated by … antiquarians … in the pages of the early volumes of Notes and Queries, it remains unsolved”3 (Mish, 1963: 82). In the opinion, however, of Meg’s modern editor, Charles C. Mish: “… there must have been some living prototype for our heroine, and if she did not do everything … recorded of her, the stories which clustered around her name have nothing inherently improbable or inconsistent.” (Mish, 1963: 82). It is interesting to note in this context that the poet, John Skelton, and Henry VIII’s jester, Will Summers, who actually feature as characters in The Life of Long Meg …, and who certainly did exist, were the supposed begetters of, respectively, a jest-book: The Merry Tales of Skelton, registered in 1566-67, and a jest-biography: A Pleasant History of the Life and Death of Will 1 For the bibliographical history of Long Meg, see F. P. Wilson (1939: 155). The text used here is that to be found in Charles C. Mish (1963: 81-113). 2 The Oxford English Dictionary …, sub vocem. “roaring”. 3 “… notably by … Edwin F. Rimbault and Peter Cunningham”. Sederi VII (1996): 129—139 146 PATRICIA SHAW Summers, 1637. The “living prototype” of Meg, hypothesized by Mish is not, therefore, as he says, at all improbable, and the reference in the opening pages of the book to her being “a Lancashire lass” determined to go to London “to serve and to learn City fashions”, together with “three or four lasses more” rings true, and the rhyming couplet with which one of the last chapters (Ch. 15) closes: “If any man ask who brought this to pass, / Say it was done by a Lancashire lass.” suggests that her northern origins were not a purely introductory convention. Significant, too, is the affirmation made in the preface to the book that “A woman she was of late memory and well beloved, spoken on of all and known of many: therefore there is hope of better acceptance”, i.e. people who had actually known her would be more interested in reading about her! It should, however, be remembered that Meg, according to the OED1, is used dialectally “to indicate a hoyden, coarse woman, etc.”, and that in Edinburgh Castle there is a large 15th century cannon, known as Mons Meg (because it was cast in Mons), and also Roaring Meg, “so called from the loudness of her report”2. Of the real-life existence of Mary Frith there is no doubt: according to the Oxford Companion to English Literature, she was “a notorious thief, fortune-teller and forger, who lived about 1584- 1659. She did penance at St. Paul’s Cross in 1612”3, a fact borne out by John Chamberlain (McClure, 1939: 334), who writes in one of his contemporary letters that: … this last Sonday Mall Cut-purse a notorious bagage (that used to go in mans apparell and challenged the feild of divers gallants) was brought to … (Paul’s Cross), where she wept bitterly and seemed very penitent, but yt is since doubted she was maudelin druncke, being discovered to have tipled of three quarts of sacke before she came to her penaunce. According to Paul Salzman, “the redoubtable Mrs. Mary Frith … was a well-known figure in the early part of the (17th) century. She dressed in male attire and led a sternly independent life” (Salzman, 1985: 213).4 For Havelock Ellis, “Mary Frith … was a noted character of the period, and her reputation was none of the best” (Ellis, 1887: vii); however, according to her 17th century biographer, by “her heroick impudence (she) hath quite undone every Romance” (1662: 17). As will be seen, the most outstanding characteristic shared by these two young women (Meg is eighteen when she comes to London, and Moll about twenty-five when the events described in the play occur), is their afición for dressing up as men, above all, as swaggering, fighting men, in other words, as “roaring boys”, and that this tendency is not a purely literary invention, but, in fact, reflects a real-life vogue, is witnessed by a number of contemporary documents and references, dating from the 1580’s and continuing well into the 1620’s: thus we find such observations as the following by William Harrison in 1577: “I have met with some of these trulls in London so disguised, that it passed my skill to discern, whether they were men or women.” Philip Stubbes, in his Anatomy of Abuses, 1583, inveighs against women wearing doublets and jerkins, affirming that: … though this be a kind of attire appropriate only to man, yet they blush not to wear it; and if they could as well chaunge their sex, and put on the kinde of man, as they can weare apparel assigned only to man, I think they would as verely become men indeed, … For another commentator, such women are monstrous who are disguised as men, and are: “… like Androgini, who counterfayting the shape of either kind, are in deede neither, so while they are in condition women, and would seeme in apparell men, they are neither men nor women, but 1 The Oxford English Dictionary …, sub vocem, “Meg”. 2 Ibid. See also: The Oxford Companion to English Literature, under “Mons Meg”. 3 The Oxford Companion to English Literature, under “Moll Cutpurse”. 4 See also Singleton (1970: 77-78). MAD MOLL AND MERRY MEG 147 plaine Monsters.”1 Middleton is obviously reflecting such opinions when he has Old Wengrave say of Moll: A creature … nature hath brought forth To mocke the sex of women. - It is a thing One knowes not how to name, her birth began Ere she was all made. Tis woman more then man, Man more then woman, … Davy. A Monster, tis some Monster. (RG, I.ii.129-38) Middleton and Dekker themselves classify various types of “Roaring girls” in the Prologus to their play, for, they affirm, “of that Tribe are many”, in order to distinguish their girl from the others, and it is likewise worth noting that, although no longer extant, there was entered into the Stationers’ register a work by John Day, probably a play, entitled: The Mad Pranks of Merry Moll of the Bankside, with Her Walks in Man’s Apparel (August 7th., 1610), presumably referring to Mary Frith. By 1606, even Dekker “that tender-hearted poet” to whom, according to Havelock Ellis (1887: vii), “we probably owe much of the charity shed over the central figure” in The Roaring Girl, was accusing women of being “men’s Shee Apes” (Grosart, 1963: 59), and by 1620, we learn from that well-informed commentator of contemporary affairs, John Chamberlain (Shepherd, 1981: 68), that the king himself had taken up the cudgels against such unnatural behaviour on the part of women: Yesterday the bishop of London called together all his Clergie about this towne, and told them he had expresse commaundment from the king to will them to inveigh vehemently and bitterly in theyre sermons against the insolence of our women, and theyre wearing of brode brimd hats, pointed doublets, theyre hair cut short or shorne, and some of them stillettaes or poinards, and such other trinckets of like moment, adding withall that yf pulpit admonitions will not reforme them he wold proceed by another course. Such indignant criticism of women’s “insolent” cross-dressing and hair-cutting makes the sympathetic treatment meted out to the literary Meg and Moll by their authors particularly striking: in the case of Meg, it must be said, however, that in spite of all her derring-do, she still preserves her essential femininity (symbolised, perhaps, by the letting down of her hair after bouts of successful sword-play) in her willingness to be submissively married.
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