ABSTRACT
‘Case’ meant ‘clothing’, but it was also slang for ‘vagina’, the fantasised alteration to which is perhaps emblematised here by Moll’s strategically positioned phallic sword. Moll herself explains her cross-dressing in terms that are at once quite distinct from these mistaken ones, and yet help to make sense of them. The figure of Moll thus condenses many of the play’s thematic concerns. She is either trigger to, or comment on, play’s various interrogations of the circulation between appearance, gender, sexuality and power, just as she is a structural linchpin, common element in the various strands of the plot, holding or bringing together those concerning the gentry, the gallants, citizens and the underworld characters. The Roaring Girl typifies and extends a generic preoccupation with analysing fate of conventional meanings of gender and sexuality in the context of fast-changing social circumstances, thereby constituting a series of intriguingly open-ended questions regarding their origins in, and implications for, wider networks of social power relations.
