The Case of Moll Frith: Women’s Work and the “All-Male Stage”
Korda, Natasha
Early Modern Culture, No. 4 (2004)
Abstract
Recent scholarship on women’s involvement in theatrical production in early modern England has begun to question the paradigm of the “all-male stage.” In focusing primarily on aristocratic women’s roles as patrons, playwrights and performers in court masques, however, such scholarship has left largely unexamined the roles of ordinary women in theatrical production, having considered such women mainly in their status as playgoers or consumers of theatrical commodities (Bergeron; Howard; Levin; Neill; Nelson; Westfall). A notable and oft-cited exception to this tendency is the historical figure of “Moll” or Mary Frith, who is recorded in the Consistory of London Correction Book in 1612 as having made an appearance “at the ffortune [theater],” where she appeared “vppon the stage in the publique viewe of all the people there presente in mans apparrell & playd vppon her lute & sange a songe” (Mulholland, 31). Moll, of course, had been the subject of Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, or Moll Cut-Purse, published in 1611, whose Epilogue famously promises the Fortune’s audience, “The Roaring Girl herself, some few days hence, / Shall on this stage give larger recompense” (l. 35-6). While Frith’s appearance at the Fortune provides a remarkable instance of an ordinary woman performing in a public theater, in retaining its exceptional status this instance leaves undisturbed the generalized conception of an all-male stage.
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