The Revels Plays

An Elizabethan play by Anthony Munday and others that depicts the life of Thomas More. It survives only in a single manuscript, now owned by the British Library. Its main claim to fame is that three pages of it may have been written by William Shakespeare's hand, but the manuscript is also important for what it reveals about censorship of Elizabethan drama.

Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's comic triumph is as relevant today as it was when first performed in 1611. With its helpful annotations, historical documents on cross-dressing and on the colorful Mary Frith (the real-life model for Cutpurse); and wealth of scholarly interpretations, this Norton Critical Edition brings The Roaring Girl to life for today's readers. The text of The Roaring Girl is based on the text from English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology It is accompanied by generous explanatory annotations, five illustrations, and a detailed introduction. Thirteen critical essays chart the development of scholarly interest in The Roaring Girl, from the first half of the twentieth century, when the play received only passing reference, through the work on city comedy in the 1970's and 1980's, to the explosion of analyses through the late 1980's and 1990's when the play became a major focus for early modern gender studies. The more recent critical essays move beyond a strict focus on gender and cross-dressing to explore The Roaring Girl's depiction of other aspects of early modern London, including consumer culture and the contemporary fascination with the language of the criminal underworld. --Book Jacket.