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Updated: June 14, 2025
I have wondered often why the plundered countrymen should repair to him for succour, certainly it is under the same notion, as one whose pockets are picked goes to Moll Cutpurse, as the predominant in that faculty. He outdives a Dutchman, gets a noble of him that was never worth sixpence; for the poorest do not escape, but Dutch-like he will be draining even in the driest ground.
He tickles his ears with a straw, and while he is pleased with scratching it, picks his pocket, as the cutpurse served Bartl. Cokes. He embraces him and hugs him in his arms, and lifts him above ground, as wrestlers do, to throw him down again and fall upon him.
He endeavours to plant himself as near as he can to some puppet-play, monster, or mountebank, as the most convenient situation; and when trading grows scant they join all their forces together and make up one grand show, and admit the cutpurse and balladsinger to trade under them, as orange-women do at a playhouse.
If he had not feared the judges of the Queen's Courts more than he feared God, he said in bitter jest, he should often have turned cutpurse. He married, and loved his wife, but she was soon deserted; and the wretched profligate found himself again plunged into excesses which he loathed, though he could not live without them. But wild as was the life of Greene, his pen was pure.
She can at any time, when it suits her, show herself as expert a jockey as her husband, and he appears to advantage in no other character, and is only eloquent when descanting on the merits of some particular animal; but she can do much more; she is a prophetess, though she believes not in prophecy; she is a physician, though she will not taste her own philters; she is a procuress, though she is not to be procured; she is a singer of obscene songs, though she will suffer no obscene hands to touch her; and though no one is more tenacious of the little she possesses, she is a cutpurse and a shoplifter whenever opportunity shall offer. . . . Observe, for example, the Gitana, even her of Seville.
The worthy contemporary of Shakespeare, she had small difficulty in performing feats of prowess and resource which daunted the intrepid ruffians of the eighteenth century. Her period, in brief, gave her an eternal superiority; and it were as hopeless for Otway to surpass the master whom he disgraced, as for Wild to o'ershadow the brilliant example of Moll Cutpurse.
She is the chief character in Middleton's play of the "Roaring Girl"; and after a varied life as a thief, cutpurse, pickpocket, highwayman, trainer of animals, and keeper of a thieves' fence, she died in peace at the age of seventy.
Moll Cutpurse, whose intelligence and audacity were never bettered, was among the bravest of the Elizabethans. Her temperament was as large and as reckless as Ben Jonson's own. Neither her tongue nor her courage knew the curb of modesty, and she was the first to reduce her craft to a set of wise and imperious rules.
'Tis not pure a crown should content ye." "Well, it doesn't. Do you take me for a cutpurse? I'm not that sort." "How do I know? You use thieves' jargon. Where did you pick it up?" Lavinia gave one of her rippling laughs. "That's my business and not yours. I tell you it's honestly come by and I want a guinea for it. You know it's worth five and maybe more.
Six members of the criminal class: Alice Arden, Moll Cutpurse, Jenny Diver, Elizabeth Brownrigg, Elizabeth Canning, and Mary Bateman; and only two ladies of title, Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, and Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston.
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