This excellent old comedy seems to have been deservedly popular on its performance by two different companies at the Black Friars Theatre before 1618, and it was twice printed. It is not easy to decide whether the comic or the serious scenes are the best; although the first are not without some of the coarseness which belonged to the manners of the age. The language is generally well-chosen. Some passages are of the higher order of poetry, and from them we may judge that Field was capable of writing other parts of "The Fatal Dowry" than those which Mr Gifford, in his just admiration of Massinger, was willing to assign to him. The characters are numerous, varied, and well-distinguished.

The object of the play was to vindicate the female sex, attacked in "Woman is a Weathercock;" and it is accomplished amply and happily in the persons of the Maid, Wife, and Widow. The plot is threefold, applying to each of them, but the incidents are interwoven with ingenuity, and concluded without confusion. In several of our old plays, husbands become, or endeavour to become, the instruments of the dishonour of their wives. Middleton was too fond of incidents of this odious kind, which are to be found in his "Chaste Maid in Cheapside," 1630, and in "Anything for a Quiet Life," 1662;[69] but in both cases the purpose of the husband was to profit by his own disgrace. In Field's "Amends for Ladies," the husband only resorts to this expedient to put his wife's fidelity to the test. This portion of the play was borrowed, in several of its preliminary circumstances, from the novel of the "Curioso Impertinente" in "Don Quixote;" but it would not have accorded with Field's design of making amends to the fair sex that Subtle should have met with the same success as Lothario. The attempt of Bold in disguise upon the Widow was taken from an incident apparently well known about the date when the play was written, and referred to in it. The original of that part of the comedy which relates to Ingen and the Lady Honour has not been found, and perhaps it was the invention of the poet.

The two editions of this play in 1618 and 1639 do not materially vary, although the difference between the title-pages might lead to the supposition that "the merry pranks of Moll Cutpurse" and the "humour of roaring" were new in the latter copy. It seldom happens that faith is to be put in attractive changes of title-pages. Middleton and Rowley's "Fair Quarrel" is, indeed, an instance to the contrary; for the edition of 1622 contains a good deal of curious matter connected with the manners of the times, promised in "the fore-front of the book," and not found in the copy of 1617. In "Amends for Ladies," Moll Cutpurse only appears in one scene. The variations between the impressions are errors of the press, some of which are important of their kind, and such as rendered a careful collation absolutely necessary.

It may here, perhaps, be worth while to place in one view the scanty and scattered information regarding Mary Frith (alias Moll Cutpurse), the Roaring Girl. She was a woman who commonly dressed like a man, and challenged several male opponents, bearing, during her life, the character of a bully, a thief, a bawd, a receiver of stolen goods, &c.[70] She appears to have been the daughter of a shoemaker, born in 1584, dead in 1659, and buried in what is now called St Bride's Church. In February 1611-12, she did penance at Paul's Cross, but the letter mentioning this fact, which is in the British Museum, does not state for what offence. Among other daring exploits, she robbed, or assisted in robbing, General Fairfax on Hounslow Heath, for which she was sent to Newgate, but afterwards liberated without trial. The immediate cause of her death was a dropsy, and she seems then to have been possessed of property. She lived in her own house in Fleet Street, next the Globe Tavern, and left £20 that the conduit might run wine on the expected return of Charles II. Besides the comedy by Middleton and Dekker [printed in the works of Middleton], John Day wrote "a book of the mad pranks of Merry Moll of the Bankside." It was entered at Stationers' Hall in 1610, and perhaps the play of which she is the heroine was founded upon it. Another account of her life was printed in 1662, shortly after her decease. She is supposed to be alluded to by Shakespeare in "Twelfth Night," act i. sc. 3, and obtained such "bad eminence," in point of notoriety, that it is not surprising (according to the evidence of the authors of "The Witch of Edmonton," act v. sc. 1), that some of the dogs at Paris Garden, used in baiting bulls and bears, were named after her.