I wrote earlier about how female cross-dressing in 16^th century England wasn’t seen as queer, it was seen as promiscuous. It’s strange how things change. Let’s look at some of the reasons that female cross-dressers were seen as the modern equivalent as streetwalkers:

Hic-Mulier. Hic-Mulier, or The Man-Woman, a pamphlet written in the 16^th century proclaimed the immorality of the female cross-dressers, uses the wood-cut on its cover also to capitalize and sensationalize female cross-dressing, but it also uses it to reinforce the text’s later condemnation of such masculinity. The wood-cut on the front cover of Hic- Mulier, shows two women at a barber shop. One has just gotten a fashionable man’s haircut and is looking at it in a mirror. She wears a fancy man’s hat. The other woman in the pamphlet is going to have her hair cut in the same style by the barber. This isn’t a particularly condemning scene unless taken in context with the rest of the pamphlet. The hat the woman is wearing in the wood-cut is later criticized as being too masculine. Also, right above the woodcut is the description of the pamphlet which says that man-women like these carry sexually transmitted diseases from prostituting themselves. So the wood-cut in the pamphlet is used to help sensationalize this cover page and to help illustrate a view these women have a “disease.”

Moll Cutpurse woodcut, cover of the Middleton and Dekker’s play The Roaring Girl. In the woodcut, Moll Cutpurse is very masculine. She smokes a pipe and has a sword placed as a phallic symbol. On the side of the woodcut, there is a quote which says, “My case is alter’d.” ‘Case’ meant clothing, but was also “slang for ‘vagina’, so the quote helps add to the reader’s knowledge Moll was a woman dressing as a man and also add to the sensationalism of the phallic sword. Unlike the text along with the woodcut in Hic-Mulier, the later text in The Roaring Girl doesn’t condemn the masculine dressing of Moll in the wood-cut. For example, in Act III, scene i, the stage directions simply say, “enter Moll like a man.” Instead of using costume pieces to either make Moll a caricature or to make her disgusting, she is simply represented both in the play and the woodcut as a woman who dresses like a man. The general public, probably especially the reading public, would have known about Moll’s arrests and trials. In part, this knowledge could have become public knowledge because of the publication of The Consistory of London Correction Book of 1611 which talks about Moll’s arrests and trials saying, “This day and place the sayd Mary appeared personally and then and there voluntarily confessed yt she had long frequented all or most of the disorderly and licentious places in this Cittie…and further confesseth yt since she was punished for the misdemeanors afore mentioned in Bridewell.”  One could argue this book wasn’t widely read, but other sources confirm Moll was a widely known notorious figure at this time.

Mary Frith. Mary Frith was probably viewed by readers of the print version of The Roaring Girl as an immoral person, a criminal, and a thief. At the same time, however, when this play was published, she reached the height of her cross-dressing notoriety because of her impending trial. Middleton and Dekker play up this fame, but also try and restate some of Mary Frith’s morality in their opening woodcut and letter to the reader. Although some may argue Middleton and Dekker exploit Mary Frith’s fame in their play and in these opening artifacts, it is unlikely this is the case because they could probably have made more money writing “slander” about her rather than trying to “leave things better than he finds ‘em.”