“Quilted with Mighty Words to Lean Purpose”: Clothing and Queer Style in The Roaring Girl

Abstract

unlike many non-Shakespearean early modern plays, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl (1611) has received significant and sustained critical attention. The play has shaped our understanding of how London’s denizens figured their changing relationships to each other and to material culture as the city’s population and economic activity rapidly increased in the early modern period. For many of the play’s feminist and queer readers, the title character’s cross-dressing connects early modern material culture to urban sexuality like a doublet to a pair of trunk hose. Central to this analysis has been the question of whether Dekker and Middleton’s representation of Moll challenges or retrenches dominant early modern understandings of gender and sexuality. Even as this critical attention to Moll has