The Roaring Girl’s London Spaces

This paper reframes the critical debate surrounding Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl by examining her navigation of the play’s staged spaces. Critical attention has often fixated on Moll as either a subversive or a submissive figure. This article changes the focus of the debate by analyzing Moll’s interventions in social practices and social structures through three overlapping spatial analyses. Moll’s placelessness in her own world and her ability to manipulate the social show the play’s construction of urban space (London) as a network of disparate social structures.