The Reckoning of Moll Cutpurse: Transversal Reimaginings of The Roaring Girl

Abstract

Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl has been among the most discussed of the non-Shakespearean early modern English plays since the mid 1980s. The reason for this may seem fairly obvious to those familiar with trends in both literary-cultural criticism and popular culture since 1980. As a play about a powerful woman cross-dressed as a man, it was especially ripe for second-wave feminist literary-cultural criticism and as subject matter for the emergent field of gender studies. After the publicized advent of the AIDS epidemic in the early ’80s, attention to gay culture increased dramatically, quickly becoming common discourse in media ranging from the nightly news to cinema to academic research. However, the focus of this attention in scholarship was often not AIDS, but identity formation and the sociocultural politics and subject positioning that informed it. Phenomenological and formalist approaches waned in popularity as poststructuralism, particularly the move to simultaneously historicize, de-essentialize, and relativize cultural products (from literary texts to human subjectivities), became increasingly predominant. All meaning, in such forms as categorizations, determinations, and interpretations, was seen as ideologically constrained and specific to its social, cultural, and historical situation; the catchwords “discursive,” “representation,” “construction,” “appropriation,” “blurring,” “crossing,” “passing,” “mutability,” and “indeterminacy” became common parlance in literary-cultural criticism.