In the early seventeenth century, Mary Frith, aka the Roaring Girl, enthralled the English public with her cross-dressing, tobacco-smoking, and sword-fighting. As her contemporaries noted, this “great ambodexter” used commodities to blur class and gender lines, thereby inviting them to comprehend identity as the product of autogenesis rather than fate as it was imposed by one’s place on the Golden Chain of Being. By enacting the idea that, as Don Lavoie puts it, “value and truth are not so much seen as imagined, not so much grasped as pursued,” the Roaring Girl presages Judith Butler’s argument that identity is not the function of a physical body that possesses an innate essence which determines its status. Rather, it is a performance that enables individuals to “rescript” themselves and their place in the world. Butler does not credit the market economy with providing individuals the logic as well as the literal means by which to construct new selves. Instead, she argues that performance is “constrained” by the “highly rigid regulatory frame” (56) of capitalism. The Roaring Girl undermines this contention. In the literatures by and about Frith, she is directly identified with the marketplace and, in one text, is even said to have been born under the merchant’s star. She thus reveals how capitalism does not constrain but enables the disruption of rigid frameworks that govern who or what one can be.