Abstract
“Queer Time and ‘Sideways Growth’ in The Roaring Girl” argues that The Roaring Girl’s Moll Cutpurse presents a queer critique of heteronormative temporality by, in the words of Kathryn Bond Stockton, “growing sideways” instead of “growing up.” Unlike Sebastian Wengrave and Mary Fitzallard, Moll, like Stockton’s “queer child,” delays temporal advancement and revels in the time before marriage as she refuses her own entrance into the institution. Furthermore, Moll’s physical size embodies this critique as her fat body symbolizes her refusal of containment and control. And while The Roaring Girl does not theorize a temporal framework outside linear futurity, it nonetheless suggests that premarital time can offer pleasure and vitality to those who cannot or will not “progress” through “straight” time.
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Notes
- 1.
All citations for The Roaring Girl are from the Norton Critical Edition (2011).
- 2.
Concerning the issue of “growing up ” in The Roaring Girl , Lloyd Edward Kermode once remarked that the play’s thematic development “grows up ” throughout the length of the play (1997, 421). While Kermode’s observation serves to underscore his challenge to critics who read act 3.1. as the central moment of the play, his language nonetheless underscores the ways in which the language of biological development has been evoked to discuss the progress of this play.
- 3.
See Stage (2009) for a concise overview of the (still valuable) scholarship that demonstrates this binary approach.
- 4.
Boellstorff points to the work of J. Jack Halberstam , Lee Edelman , and Elizabeth Freeman when citing instances of compelling queer scholarship that, despite its “much-needed” interventions, remains unable to think beyond the realm of reproductive futurity (2007, 229–230).
- 5.
Here I gesture to Judith Butler ’s claim that all feminist and queer theory shares the same investment: to aid in presenting all humans with the conditions for a “viable life” (2). See Butler (2004).
- 6.
See Ben-Amos (1994), Griffiths (1996), and Greteman (2013). Ben-Amos , for example, argues that the boundaries surrounding “adolescence and youth ” in early modern England “were not clear-cut”; more than biological age , adolescence was characterized by “a series of images and attributes” that defined one’s youthful status , including, most distinctively, defiance of established social order (11, 16). Likewise, Greteman acknowledges that while early modern “lawyers, poets, and preachers often speak with some precision, and in ascending order, of babies, boys , adolescents, youths, and young men … such specific categories collapse just as readily into the nebulous category of ‘childhood ,’ which legal , medical , and religious sources described as lasting until at least age twenty-one and often much longer” (9).
- 7.
Johnston argues that one can see, reflected in contemporary attitudes towards cases of sexual misconduct between adult women and adolescent males, early modern attitudes towards eroticized boys in Renaissance England (2017).
- 8.
According to Ben-Amos , youth (the life stage she places after adolescence ) in early modern England began around age 14 but could last anywhere from “18 up to 25, 28, or simply until marriage ” (1994, 11). Similarly, Keith Thomas observes that “marriage was the surest test of adult status and on it hinged crucial differences in wages, dress and economic independence” (1976, 24).
- 9.
See the section on “Holy Matrimony” in Cressy (1997).
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Mary Frith, the historical figure on which Middleton and Webster ’s “roaring girl ” was based, was born between 1584–1585, making her roughly 27 at the play’s writing. See Ungerer (2000).
- 12.
Moll’s presence in The Roaring Girl is slightly less surprising when one also considers the play’s indebtedness to Roman New Comedy , a genre that often featured trickster servant characters that supported their master ’s marital goals. Moll clearly fits into this tradition, although her gender and crossdressing continue to trouble any easy generic definitions. As Urvashi Chakravarty argues elsewhere in this collection, the affective bonds of service might themselves present a queer challenge to reproductive futurity , an argument worth exploring in relation to Moll’s generic role as “servant ” to Mary and Sebastian.
- 13.
To that end, one can also find studies examining Moll from the lens of single womanhood , such as Eastwood (2004).
- 14.
Many scholars of early modern gender relations note the implications of coverture for women’s lives in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. For but two of many examples, see Mendelson and Crawford (1998) and Gowing (2012). For scholarship that addresses the legacy of coverture, see Dolan (2008).
- 15.
It is worth noting that Moll’s freedom to do so safely and pleasurably throughout the play stands in stark contrast to many “real” women who were likely to face significant hardships if they remained unmarried . Even Mary Frith, on whom the fictitious Moll is based, did marry . On Frith’s eventual marriage , see Ungerer. On the plight of single women in early modern England and Europe, see Bennett and Froide (1999), and Amtower and Kehler (2003).
- 16.
I am thankful for Jennifer Higginbotham and Mark Johnston ’s observations regarding the form of Sebastian and Moll’s speeches, and the form’s possible reflection of each character’s relationship to marriage and time .
- 17.
See OED, “crooked.”
- 18.
This stage direction is present in the original 1611 play text.
- 19.
- 20.
For an excellent summary of Bakhtin’s work and its influence on later literary criticism, see the introduction to Stallybrass and White (1986).
- 21.
As Bakhtin observes, “The grotesque body, as we have often stressed, is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body” (1968, 317).
- 22.
For a nuanced exploration of obesity and its cultural implications in both early modernity and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, see Levy-Navarro (2008).
- 23.
Parker looks to Shakespeare ’s kitchen wench in The Comedy of Errors , the pregnant votaress of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well , Hamlet and Falstaff, as well as Jonson’s Ursula from Bartholomew Fair as examples of literary fat ladies (1987, 17–26).
- 24.
- 25.
Alexander Gavin’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Dickenson notes that Greene in Conceipt is most famous for its title page depiction of Robert Greene writing while in his winding sheet.
- 26.
A quick search through Early English Books Online reveals many appearances of the phrase “time slips” in early modern England.
- 27.
Much critical scholarship has attended to the implications of Moll’s crossdressing . See, for example, Garber (1992), Krantz (1995), Baston (1997), Hirschfeld (2003), Clary (2016), and Chess (2016). For an essay that considers the queer valences of clothes in both Moll and Jack Dapper, see Bromley (2015).
- 28.
For information regarding Mary Frith’s biography, see Ungerer (2000).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Syracuse University Humanities Center and the Shakespeare Association of America, both of which partially funded my travel to the 2016 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America where I participated in the seminar “Queering Childhood.” I would also like to thank the seminar leaders and participants, as well as Crystal Bartolovich, for their insightful feedback on various drafts of this chapter.
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Welshans, M. (2018). Queer Time and “Sideways Growth” in The Roaring Girl. In: Higginbotham, J., Johnston, M. (eds) Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72769-1_4
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