Let us look, for example, at the two most significant masquerading women in Shakespeare’s plays. Viola in _Twelfth Night_ is an unconvincing man, afraid of the sight of her own sword, and her scenes with Olivia never even skirt the anomalous, their interest centering on her verbal agility. In _As You Like It_ Rosalind is much more boyish in appearance and temperament, and Celia’s devotion to her is marked. Following her cousin headlong into banishment, Celia reminds her harsh parent that: ... we still have slept together, Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, sat together, And wheresoe’er we went, like Juno’s swans, Still we went coupled and inseparable. Also LeBeau tells Orlando that Rosalind has been “detained by her usurping uncle To keep his daughter company; whose loves Are dearer than the natural bond of sisters.” These passages suggest an intensity in Celia’s attachment which the effeminate Frenchman is quick to notice, but no further word or action in the play reinforces them. Celia’s infatuation at sight for Oliver, though it does not, like Rosalind’s for Orlando, blossom before the spectator’s eyes, is no less whole-hearted, and if passion is implied at all between the girls it is that early adolescent sort readily supplanted by the first heterosexual attraction. The other women of Shakespeare frequently cited as unfeminine, Beatrice and Katherine, express antipathy to men, marriage, and male domination but exhibit no interest whatever in women. Two realistic plays of the early seventeenth century which have as their heroines real persons, one a known lesbian and the other suspected, are of special interest because no hint of variance appears in either drama. Middleton and Dekker’s _Roaring Girl_ (1611) was built around Mary Frith, a transvestist of the London underworld commonly called “Moll Cutpurse,” who was about twenty-five when the play was written. She is portrayed as hearty, fearless and clever, a walking lexicon of thieves’ cant and free tavern songs, but of blameless character—the sworn enemy of injustice, oppression and double-dealing in underworld and gentry alike. She befriends honest lovers of any class but makes short work of men who approach her; she would like to see all women “manned but never pandered,” and she burns to right women’s wrongs in general. Asked when she will marry, her impudent rhymed answer adds up to “Never!” In short, she is a kind of sexless and feministic Robin Hood. In their epilogue the authors say that some will: Wonder that a creature of her being Should be the subject of a poet, seeing In the world’s eye none weighs so light: others look For all those base tricks published in a book Foul as the brains they flowed from, of cutpurses, Of nips and foists, nasty obscene discourses As full of lies as empty of worth and wit, For any honest ear and eye unfit.