The Roaring Girl

The Roaring Girl is a Jacobean stage play, a comedy written by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker.

The play was probably written c. 1610 and first published in 1611 in a quarto printed by Nicholas Okes for the bookseller Thomas Archer. The title page of the first edition states that the play was performed at the Fortune Theatre by the Prince's Players, the troupe known in the previous reign as the Admiral's Men. In the preface Middleton states that he composed his plays for readers as well as theatre audiences.

The Roaring Girl is a fictionalized dramatization of the life of Mary Frith, known as "Moll Cutpurse", a woman who had gained a reputation as a virago in the early 17th century. (The term "roaring girl" was adapted from the slang term "roaring boy", which was applied to a young man who caroused publicly, brawled, and committed petty crimes.) She was also the subject of a lost chapbook written by John Day titled The Mad Pranks of Merry Moll of the Bankside, which was entered into the Stationers' Register on 7 August 1610. Frith also appears in Nathaniel Field's Amends for Ladies, which dates from this same era of c. 1611. On the basis of documents from a surviving lawsuit, the actual Mary Frith seems to have been the type of person that Middleton and Dekker depicted. The real Mary Frith may have even stepped in once to play her own part as Moll in a performance of The Roaring Girl at the Fortune Theatre.

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