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The Allure and Joy of Female Criminals in Early Modern English City Comedy

Paper · 2021 · Jessica Landis

Summary

This literary-historical article asks why female criminals in Jacobean city comedy come across as charming and pleasurable rather than menacing. Landis argues that these characters do more than unsettle gender norms. They give London audiences a thrilling, contained escape from the disorder of urban life. The study draws on period rogue pamphlets, records of real crime in early modern London, and earlier criticism of Moll Cutpurse and the historical Mary Frith. It then turns to Doll Common in Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, a figure critics have studied less. The method is close reading and comparison. Doll works within a gang, openly uses her femininity and sexual appeal, and commits her crimes in view of the audience. Moll, by contrast, acts alone, crossdresses, and her misdeeds are mostly reported rather than staged. The central claim is that comic, affectionate portrayal defuses the social threat of these women. Spectators can briefly imagine themselves as outsiders while staying within the dominant culture. This helps explain the commercial appeal of such figures in a fast-growing, diversifying city.

Key points

  • Primary texts: Jonson's The Alchemist (1610), Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl (c. 1607–1610), and Robert Greene's 1592 coney-catching dialogue between the thief Laurence and the prostitute Nan.
  • In Greene's dialogue, Nan argues that women criminals outdo men by wit rather than strength. She also mocks a "peevish scholar," most likely Greene himself, whose exposés failed to stop women's crime.
  • Key critical lenses:
    • Zachary Lesser's notion of "safe danger" (2004).
    • Miles Taylor's account of the pleasure of learning a subculture's cant (2005).
    • Jennifer Higgenbotham's reading of Moll as a liminal, category-blurring figure (2013).
    • Mark Hutchings on Frith as both marginalised and celebrated (2007).
  • Mary Frith appears in court records from 1611 and 1612, a 1612 letter by John Chamberlain, and a largely fictionalized 1662 "autobiography."
  • Contribution: shifting the discussion of female criminality from Moll to the less-studied Doll Common.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Fiction as "safe danger": readers take a transgressive position inside a bounded imaginary frame while their real-world standing stays untouched.
  • I2. Pamphlets came with cant glossaries, so the period itself treated decoding street slang as a learnable lexicon, and the quoted texts also use old spellings like "liue" and "vncertaine."
  • I3. The comparison separates crime the audience sees enacted from crime that is only mentioned, and this changes how the character is perceived.
  • I4. Interpreting the "peevish scholar" as the pamphlet's own author shows that a descriptive epithet can point outside the text to a real person.
  • I5. Moll is read as straddling categories at once: criminal and lawful, chaste and sexual, manly and womanly.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Keep a separate hypothetical or fictional sub-world, so that states a reader imagines inside a story never leak into the facts of the actual text-world.
  • I2 (tokens): Add an argot/archaic-orthography normalization layer (u/v, i/j swaps, cant-to-standard lemma map) so early modern or slangy input still gets correct lemmas.
  • I3 (world): Tag events as narrated-as-happening versus merely reported, giving each a different evidential status in the event timeline.
  • I4 (frames): Let coreference consider extra-textual referents such as the author or narrator for evaluative noun phrases, and record the link as a hedged, explainable guess.
  • I5 (world): Allow entities to carry several, even conflicting, ontology memberships with sources attached, instead of forcing a single class.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Franklin Pierce University.

📚 Shelves 5 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Social Sciences · 744 works Literature and Literary Theory · 340 works Political Science and International Relations · 72 works Classics · 67 works

🧭 Topics 1 English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Jessica Landis. 2021. The Allure and Joy of Female Criminals in Early Modern English City Comedy. Journal of Early Modern Studies 10.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.13128/jems-2279-7149-12548

@article{landis2021allure,
  title = {{The Allure and Joy of Female Criminals in Early Modern English City Comedy}},
  author = {Jessica Landis},
  journal = {Journal of Early Modern Studies 10},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.13128/jems-2279-7149-12548},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.13128/jems-2279-7149-12548}
}

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