The Roaring Girl is much more than T.S. Eliot’s assessment of it as “a mass of cheap conventional intrigue” (89). Middleton and Dekker’s characters, while they may resemble certain conventional types from the period, interact and develop in ways that complement and augment the substantive themes at the heart of the play: the destructiveness of misjudgment, prejudice, and slander; the stability that ironically eludes domineering individuals; the importance of asserting one’s own worth in spite of popular opinion; the probable failure of ill-advised
exploitative schemes—each character’s role in the play emphasizes one or more of these issues. The playwrights’ deft characterizing creates non-archetypal, multifaceted individuals who elicit both sympathy and frustration, in turn. Taken in this light, Eliot’s disparagement of every aspect of the play that does not center on Moll Cutpurse is not only unfair but also obscures the play’s several merits.
To date, a thorough examination of all components of the play has yet to be achieved, but this thesis has attempted to indicate and begin to explicate key areas that still need critical
attention. The familial dynamics of the play, for instance, have often been dismissed as purely conventional and derivative, despite the fact that they underlie significant and distinctive plot threads throughout the play. In order to begin to analyze these dynamics, I have examined the father-son relationship between the Wengraves, but much more could be said about the relations between the Fitzallards and between Sir Davy Dapper and his son Jack Dapper. A similarly fruitful area of inquiry is the unassuming character of Mary Fitzallard: her ostensible conventionality provides an interesting foil to Moll’s flagrant transgressions. Comparisons between Mary and Moll should be revisited as critical understanding of gender and other social norms evolves. The play also offers some insights into the socioeconomic undercurrents of
Jacobean London, especially those involving the subculture of lower and middle class merchants and tradespeople. I have explored a few of these issues in regard to a central set of minor
characters—each is involved in his or her own particular scheme for personal gain, and they simultaneously indicate a great deal about the intersections between business and sexuality.
What ultimately ties these threads together is a concern with social norms and customs. As in many English plays of the Renaissance era, human interaction and its pitfalls play extensive roles, and—although much of the play has obvious connections to works by William Shakespeare and other contemporaries—Middleton and Dekker build a realistic and coherent world around Moll and her fellow characters. The plotting and scheming in which these
characters engage culminate in important insights regarding how easy it is to misjudge someone based on a misconception, which in turn has its roots in societal values. Literary invectives against custom’s hegemony are commonly found throughout English literature, and The Roaring
Girl could certainly be considered such a work, albeit in a figurative sense. Examples of such invectives during Middleton and Dekker’s time often took the form of pamphlets, and that medium offered a more explicit stance on the nature of custom. For instance, the anonymous author of the pamphlet titled Haec Vir, or The Womanish Man rails against the follies of
slavishly following socially-prescribed norms:
Are we then bound to be the Flatterers of Time or the dependents on Custom? Oh miserable servitude, chained only to Baseness and Folly, for than custom, nothing is more absurd, nothing more foolish…Custom is an Idiot, and whosoever
dependeth wholly upon him without the discourse of Reason will take from him his pied coat and become a slave indeed to contempt and censure. (140-1)
The Roaring Girl includes prominent examples of individuals who “dependeth wholly upon [custom],” and the resemblance between them and Haec Vir’s descriptions is uncanny. Sir
Alexander Wengrave, for one, certainly seems dependent on custom, at least in terms of his judgment of Moll Cutpurse. He fails to apply the “discourse of Reason” to his understanding of Moll and her involvement in his son’s love life, and this leads him to hatch an ultimately doomed plan to undermine and harm Moll and bring his son to heel. Along the way, he does become “a slave indeed to contempt and censure,” as the author of Haec Vir puts it. His hatred of Moll
blinds him to the truth of her character, and this ironically subjugates him to society’s influence, taking away his ability to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil. Laxton, too, pursues first Mrs. Openwork and then Moll in order to keep up with his society of young gallants, and he disregards the welfare of other people in the process. Time and again, Custom turns Middleton and Dekker’s characters against one another as well as themselves, and a large part of the play’s task is to censure such behavior.
The Roaring Girl dramatizes the dynamic interplay—and quite often conflict—between
individuals and the social norms promoted within their culture. Middleton and Dekker depict various characters’ attempts to reconcile their own interests with the demands of their society; some are able to balance these two concerns, while others choose, or are forced by circumstance, to conform to society’s standards rather than maintaining their autonomy. A central lesson of The
Roaring Girl, however, is that such conformity is not inherently binding: defying restrictive customs and establishing one’s independence is very often within reach.
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