"The Voice That Will Drown All the City": Un-Gendering Noise in The Roaring Girl

Critical Discussion of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's 1611 city comedy, The Roaring Girl, has by and large focused on the visual transgression of cross-dressing.¹ Yet, as the play's very title suggests, The Roaring Girl is centrally concerned with the transgressive potential of hearing and speaking, that is, not only cross-dressing but also "cross-talking."² This essay argues for the centrality of the o/aural in the play's construction of its title character. More so than visual stimuli, sound resists the spatial fixity that so often circumscribes representations of the female body on the early modern stage. The Roaring Girl, Moll Cutpurse, emerges as a figure of the volatile and mobile o/aural phenomenon of noise as it traverses a variety of embodied, theatrical, and geographic spaces. These spaces include the intricate anatomy of the ear and the vocal apparatus, both of which in the carnivalesque atmosphere of city comedy become linked with the anatomic spaces of the lower body stratum; the o/aural space of the early modern playhouse; and, finally, the acoustic space or "sound-scape" of the city of London that the play endeavors to represent.

Since the early 1980s, critics working from both feminist and queer studies perspectives have persistently situated either the theatricalized or the "real," historical Moll Cutpurse, also known as Mary Frith, along what one author dubs the "subversive/submissive" axis. ³ She is either a forward-looking breacher of cultural norms or an insufficiently transgressive character unable, in life, to transcend the official order that labeled her activities criminal, and whose performance ultimately ratifies the patriarchal system it would only seem to destabilize.⁴ Given the centrality, indeed, the undeniable visibility, of Moll's appearance on stage "in drag," the focus of the bulk of these studies has been Moll's transvestism, although a few critics have considered the subversive/submissive potential of act 5's notorious canting scene, in which Moll exhibits an ability to speak, and translate, the largely imaginary language of cant, or "pedlar's French."⁵

Recently, however, commentators have moved away from the subversion/ containment debates of the eighties and nineties to consider the play in relation to the emergence of a market-based commodity culture and other issues surrounding urbanization.⁶ In a recent article Kelly J. Stage makes a provocative case for considering Moll Cutpurse's alterity in spatial and geographic rather than embodied, specifically gendered terms.⁷ Yet the geography of the early modern play, as Bruce Smith has shown, is not only visual-spatial but also acoustic.⁸ A play's acoustic geography is, in turn, occupied by the medium of air which, as Gina Bloom persuasively argues, may constitute, as voice, a material extension of the actor/character's body, albeit a highly unstable, ephemeral one that, once it emerges from the speaker's mouth, becomes detached from his or her control and is subject to any variety of external forces.⁹ It is Moll's complex relationship to her ambiguously encoded o/aural environment, not just her ambiguously coded body, that makes her such a compelling and controversial character. Her strange alterity is fundamentally related to her status as a personification of noise, in both literal and figurative senses. A noise, more broadly conceived, ultimately registers the trangressive capabilities of all five senses, and even, paradoxically, the radical possibilities of silence.

The significance of noise in the early modern imaginary can be measured only by considering contemporary ideas about the ear and its sensory objects. Following the ancient Greeks, especially Plato, early modern thinkers generally recognized vision as the highest, most "divine" sense.¹⁰ But this was not exclusively the case. Unlike smell, taste, and touch, which were regarded as firmly grounded in corporeal materiality, hearing was in a position to vie with sight for its superior rank. For instance, the ear was widely regarded as the most important sensory organ for obtaining knowledge about both earthly and spiritual matters. Helkiah Crooke writes, "The vse of the Sense of Hearing...