COMEDY

74 GENDER AND SEXUALITYbeen redefined, may the women be reborn and returned to their placesas faithful wives and chaste servants of their husbands.The citizen comedies of the Jacobean era are particularly well stockedwith prostitutes and they generally conform to the image of the fallenwoman as a diseased monster. They also serve a moral function, beingused to tempt and chastise the prodigal, or being married off to a usurer,as is the case at the end of Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One(c. 1605), or David Lord Barry’s Ram Alley (1608), both examples ofcomic contrapasso where the villain is delivered a deliciously ironicpunishment befitting the nature of his crime. There are occasionalvariations on this theme where the prostitute turns out to have a heart ofgold, but, as Alexander Leggatt writes, ‘None of the attempts tocomplicate the conventional opposition of chaste maid and viciouswhore really amounts to much: they are all minor effects, frequentlyuncertain and apologetic’ (Leggatt, 1973:109).In Middleton and Dekker’s city comedy The Roaring Girl (c. 1611),we are presented with a radical exception to proscribed female roles inthe unusual character of Moll Cutpurse. Also known as Mary Frith,Moll defies all the conventions of acceptable female behaviour yetretains her unimpeachable chastity. Mary Frith was a real person whobegan to dress as a man and inhabit the London underworld in the earlyseventeenth century. Such a unique character occupies a singularposition in the play, which seems continually to struggle to know whatto do with her and can think of her only as a confusing thing. The firstdiscussion of her by Sir Alexander Wengrave makes this clear:It is a thingOne knows not how to name: her birth beganEre she was all made. ’Tis woman more than a man,Man more than a woman, and—which to none can hap—The sun gives her two shadows to one shape;(Middleton and Dekker, 1994:1.2.128–132)It is easier for the men having this conversation to believe that Moll isthe victim of a bizarre birth defect, than accept a woman wearing men’sclothing. While over forty plays used the convention of womencrossdressed for the purposes of disguise between 1603 and 1619,including The Roaring Girl in the character of Mary Fitzallard, it isimportant to remember that Moll is resolutely not in disguise (Stuart,1993:31). Her attire flaunts indeterminacy and taunts male opinion. Thisliminal relationship to categories of definition is further underlined by