In contrast with the backstories of cross-dressing women in Shakespearean drama, legal records of women wearing male clothing (either individual garments or complete outfits) were viewed harshly by civic authorities. The chapter opens with an exception: the case of Arabella Stuart cross-dressing to try to evade confinement and escape to the continent in 1611.
The Roaring Girl (Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton)
17th century English play fictionalizing the life of a historic cross-dressing woman.
LHMP entry
Even scholarship that examines women’s participation in English theater has tended to overlook the role of ordinary women except as audience. One notable exception is studies of Mary (Moll) Frith who, in 1612, is recorded as having appeared on the stage in men’s clothing, playing the lute and singing. This may have been directly connected with performance of the play The Roaring Girl in which she appears as a character, and which advertised her forthcoming appearance on stage in its epilogue.
From the topic, one might think this chapter would focus primarily on the male homoerotic potential of boy actors dressing as female roles on the early modern stage, but the choice of plays that Orvis chooses to examine clearly bring in female themes as well.
I. Dramatic Constructions of Female Homoeroticism
The book opens with what has become a familiar lament that the scholarly consensus spent entirely too long proclaiming that female homoeroticism was not attested in early modern literature (largely because no one was actually looking for it, or considering it of importance when they found it), but that the last decade or so has been beginning to remedy that misapprehension.
This article looks at the Middleton and Dekker play (1608) The Roaring Girl based on the life of Moll Frith. One of Frith's several claims to fame was her habit of going about London openly wearing male clothing. That is, she made no effort to pass as a man or to use the clothing as disguise, but rather adopted it as a form of personal expression. The theatrical depiction of her similarly challenges gender expectations and anxieties, but obviously in a more self-conscious way.
Like many articles of this era, Bruster begins by explaining that (and why) there is a dearth of academic investigation into the topic of female homoeroticism in [insert topic here]. He asserts that prior work has focused on affirmative and subversive portrayals of female homoeroticism, resulting in an incomplete and idealized picture. So he’s going to be iconoclastic and look at less positive portrayals of female-female eroticism on the stage.
