Everyone knows that during the Jacobean period all actors were male and women never ever appeared on stage... except when they did.
No, I'm talking about Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton's comedy The Roaring Girl, which told the story of the real-life female criminal Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse. The play was acted at the Fortune Theatre and later published in 1611. Middleton wrote a brief preface in which he alluded to Frith's crossdressing, stating: "Venus being a woman passes through the play in doublet and breeches, a brave disguise and a safe one, if the statute untie not her codpiece point."
But was Middleton alluding to more than just the depiction of crossdressing on stage? In addition to the play being published in 1611, in that same year a confession of Frith's was recorded, in which she claimed to have appeared upon the public stage. Frith said not only had she gone to the Fortune Theatre dressed as a man, but she had "also sat there upon the stage in public view of all the people there present in man's apparel and played upon her lute and sang a song." (She flatly denied, however, being "dishonest of her body" or drawing "other women to lewdness.")
In what play did Frith appear? Chances are, her own. In the second act of The Roaring Girl, the character of Moll Cutpurse enters "in a frieze jerkin." Was this Frith? Possibly, but more likely she played the porter, who enters with Moll in a later scene "with a viol on his back." The porter asks, "Must I carry this great fiddle to your chamber, Mistress Mary?" This would allow Frith some time on stage with a musical instrument (as she claimed to have) but not require her to learn too many lines.
On the other hand, it is not the porter but the character of Moll herself who sings in Act IV. One verse of her song goes:
Here comes a wench will brave ye.
Her courage was so great,
She lay with one o' the navy,
Her husband lying i' the Fleet.
Yet oft with him she cavilled,
I wonder what she ails.
Her husband's ship lay gravelled,
When hers could hoise up sails,
Yet she began like all my foes
To call whore first: for so do those,
A pox of all false tails.
That certainly sounds like something a real-life criminal like Frith might have enjoyed roaring out on stage.
The Moll Cutpurse of the play, rather like the actual Mary Frith, who confessed to some crimes while denying others, defends herself in the final act. She compares herself to a traveler recently returning from Venice who heard about all of the tricks of panders and courtesans and now warns others against them. She asks others not to condemn her just because of her ill name. Could these line have been spoken by Frith herself?
While we can't be sure, the play's epilogue drops some juicy hints. It ends with the poets and actors saying,
Both crave your pardons: if what both have done
Cannot full pay your expectation,
The Roaring Girl herself, some few days hence,
Shall on this stage give larger recompense.
Which mirth that you may share in, herself does woo you,
And craves the sign, your hands to beckon her to you.
Perhaps Frith actually made good on that promise.