Mary Firth: nice to meet you. So you were the first woman smoker in England. You go exploring the British Library looking for early Shakespeare manuscripts and you find these things.
If there was a time machine that would take me back to the late 16th century I could chat with you for a while. You were better known as Moll Cutpurse, weren't you? While your name, Moll, was a feminine appellation used in your time to refer to women of ill repute; your surname "Cutpurse" literally means "purse cutter". This term alludes to the technique that thieves used to seize their victims' purses: with a knife they cut the strap that held them in place and made their escape. You must have been an expert in this field to deserve such a nickname, right? With these few data what I know so far about you is that you were a woman who enjoyed stealing, scandal and smoking. Charming.
Your biography is blurred due to the immeasurable amount of myths and legends that have been told about you. At the age of twenty-five, your uncle forcibly put you on a ship bound for the Americas as punishment for your unladylike behavior. Apparently you did not agree with agreement with this decision because you jumped overboard, returned to land and decided never to go near your uncle again.
Another of the anecdotes that ran from mouth to mouth among your contemporaries is the one about that day (do you remember it?) when William Bankes bet twenty pounds that you wouldn't dare to walk from Charing Cross to Shoreditch dressed as a man. Well, not only did you dare, but you rode the three miles on the back of the famous Morocco horse while blowing your trumpet. (Fun fact: such was the horse's fame that Shakespeare mentions it in his play Love's Labors Lost). The number of people who gathered in the streets to applaud and boo you was so numerous, that the chaos and shouting of the crowd reached the Degree of a real revolution. How you loved to attract attention.
Your adventures were so loud that in 1611 Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker made public the play The Roaring Girl, a fictionalized adaptation of your life. You yourself played the role of Moll Cutpurse in one of the performances. Not content with the scandal of seeing a woman acting, you wanted to take your sass even further, so you appeared on stage dressed in men's clothes.
Mary, your life has given me food for thought. I have taken the trouble to write a little article about you. In the times I live in, women struggle to make their voices heard. We want to be recognized as unique and unrepeatable; especially in the professional arena.
However, I believe that women (in your time and mine) must find their worth in their own nature. We must love the way we are and this is not achieved by imitating everything men do. Just as men are proud of themselves without needing to borrow feminine traits, we need not look like men to feel fulfilled. You, I am sorry to say so frankly, sought to forge a lasting fame through your rebelliousness, but seeing the bad reputation that tarnishes your degree program, I wonder if all that effort was worth it. Are you proud that we remember you as the thieving Moll Cutpurse and not as Miss Mary Firth? I'm sure you were worth a lot more than you thought you were, and that all this pantomime wasn't necessary to let the world know how fabulous you are.
It is not for me to judge you. Your mastery in the art of theft and theater, your pipe, your sass and your pants oblige me to censure you, for I consider myself a discreet and feminine woman. But let's be honest: if you appeal to my facet as a writer, to that part of me that goes out of its way to create tragic, real and moving stories; then I will swallow each and every one of my words and you will have my most ardent admiration. Let this secret remain between us.
