Material Cavendish: Paper, performance, "sociable virginity"

Modern Language Quarterly

Volumn 65, Issue PART 1, 2004, Pages 49-68

  Masten, Jeffrey ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949291697     PISSN: 00267929     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00267929-65-1-49     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. See esp. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929);
2. Cavendish is one of Woolf's earliest historical examples of women writing. Rosemary Kegl cites Cavendish's "longstanding prominence within feminist paradigms about seventeenth-century English women's intellectual activity," from Mary Astell through Woolf and beyond ("'The world I have made': Margaret Cavendish, Feminism, and the Blazing-World," in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 120).
3. In recent work that crucially considers the intersections and divergences of feminism and lesbianism, Valerie Traub discusses Cavendish's particular "seventeenth-century form of feminism" or "protofeminis[m] " (The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 294-95, 264).
4. Margaret Cavendish, Plays, Never before Printed. Written By the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princesse, the Duchess of Newcastle (London: by A. Maxwell, 1668).
5. Not only the Newberry copy (case Y 135.N43) but one of the Huntington copies (Bridgewater copy, no. 120140) includes six slips (the maximum I have seen in one copy), on the following pages: pp. 146 and 152 of Scenes from "The Presence"; p. 13 of The Bridals;
6. James Fitzmaurice, "Margaret Cavendish on Her Own Writing: Evidence from Revision and Handmade Correction," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 85 (1991): 305;
7. Sophie Tomlinson, "'My brain the Stage': Margaret Cavendish and the Fantasy of Female Performance," in Women, Texts, and Histories, 1575-1760, ed. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (London: Routledge, 1992), 163n46. The Huntington's Bridgewater copy is available for viewing by those with access to Early English Books Online (wwwlib.umi.com/eebo).
8. Anne Shaver helpfully prints the text of these slips where they appear in her edition of the selected plays (The Convent of Pleasure, and Other Plays [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999]).
9. Peter Stallybrass, "Books and Scrolls: Reading Discontinuously" (lecture given at the Seminar in the History of the Book, Newberry Library, Chicago, March 2, 2001).
10. On paste-on "cancels" generally see Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 134-36;
11. and R. W. Chapman, Cancels (London: Constable; New York: Smith, 1930).
12. In addition to the examples mentioned below, Daniel Traister has alerted me to paste-on illustrations in an edition of Desiderius Erasmus, Stultitine laus (Basil, 1676)
13. and William Sherman to a cancel in John Dee, General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (London: by Iohn Daye, 1577), 15.
14. This practice is best known from extensive study of the printing of the first Shakespeare folio. See Charlton Hinman, ed., The First Folio of Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1968);
15. and the additional work by Peter W. M. Blayney in his introduction to the second edition of this facsimile (1996).
16. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; or, The Mailer, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (London: for Andrew Crooke, 1651), 108.
17. See William B. Todd, "Note No. 29. The '1651' Editions of Leviathan," Book Collector 3 (1954): 68-69.
18. Augustine Vincent, A Discoverie of Errovrs in the First Edition of the Catalogve of Nobility (London: by William laggard, 1622).
19. This book includes an array of modes of correction: errata list, leaf cancels, paste-on cancels (of erroneous coats of arms), and overprinting: see pp. 210, 211, 569, 658, 660, and 692;
20. and E. R. Wood, "Cancels and Corrections in A Discovery of Errors, 1622," Library, 5th ser., 13 (1958): 124-27.
21. Catherine Gallagher, "Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England," Genders 1 (1988): 25; my emphasis.
22. See also Hilda L. Smith, Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
23. For more recent discussion of this formulation see David Norbrook, "Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson: Identity, Ideology, and Politics," In Between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 9 (2000) : 179-203.
24. See Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 156-64.
25. Criticism that has begun to break down the reliance on staged performance as the only barometer for Cavendish's plays includes Tomlinson, ""My brain the Stage'";
26. and, with an emphasis on private and public reading of the plays, Marta Straznicky, "Reading the Stage: Margaret Cavendish and Commonwealth Closet Drama," Criticism 37 (1995): 355-90;
27. Susan Wiseman, "Gender and Status in Dramatic Discourse: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle," in Women, Writing, History, 1640-1740, ed. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 159-77;
28. and esp. Jan Kuzminski, "Cleaning Out Drama's Closet: (Re) reading the Plays of Margaret Cavendish through Performance Theory" (paper presented at the Fourth Biennial Conference of the International Margaret Cavendish Society, Wheaton College, June 30, 2001).
29. I mean this term to carry the senses both of "the performative," in the Austin-Derrida-Butler genealogy of that term, and of "cultural practice as performance-to-be-analyzed," the sense most widely employed in performance studies. On the intersection of these two senses see Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds., Performativity and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1-18;
30. and Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
31. Margaret Cavendish, Playes, Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (London: by A. Warren for John Martyn, James Allestry, and Tho. Dicas, 1662). The pagination of plays in this volume is consecutive and is noted parenthetically below.
32. For discussions of the emergence of authorship in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century published drama see Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
33. Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), chap. 1;
34. Joseph Loewenstein, The Script in the Marketplace," Representations 12 (1985): 101-14;
35. Jeffrey Masten, "Ben Jonson's Head," Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 160-68;
36. Masten, Textual Intercourse, chaps. 3-4;
37. Stephen Orgel, "What Is a Text?" in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991), 83-87;
38. and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, "The Fair, the Pig, Authorship," in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 27-79.
39. For a discussion of the evidentiary problems attending attribution study in early modern drama see Jeffrey Masten, "Playwrighting: Authorship and Collaboration," in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 357-82.
40. On the use of paper as intellectual process, rather than or in addition to knowledge-storage system, see Malcolm Gladwell, The Social Life of Paper," New Yorker, March 25, 2002, 92-96.
41. As Sandra Sherman observes, "All we can ever 'know' of Margaret Cavendish is a text, and we can only know it because she has engaged with discourses that dissolve absolute self-hood" (Trembling Texts: Margaret Cavendish and the Dialectic of Authorship," English Literary Renaissance 24 [1994]: 203-4).
42. That Cavendish's husband "was pleased to illustrate my Playes with some Scenes of his own Wit" (my emphasis) casts his scenes as potentially supplemental or central to a reader's apprehension of the plays, since during this period illustrate might mean, as it does now, "to make clear or evident by means of examples, to elucidate . . . to exemplify," as well as "to adorn" (see OED, 2nd éd., s.v. "illustrate"). I am grateful to Jay Grossman for drawing my attention to this term.
43. In thinking about how the "worditive" and "material" activities represented by Cavendish's volumes might be considered feminist "intellectual process," I am influenced by Kegl's account of the Blazing-World (125).
44. John Guillory, "Canonical and Non-canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate," ELH 54 (1987): 483-527;
45. Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
46. The critique of traditional attribution study in the following paragraphs is drawn, with minor changes, from my essay "More or Less: Editing the Collaborative," Shakespeare Studies 29 (2001): tog-31.
47. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3. Revising Fuss for an earlier century, I would adjust her first sentence to say not "detour" but "tour" and not "the other" but "others": "Identification is the tour dirough others that defines the self."
48. Smart Hall, "Introduction: Who Needs 'Identity'?" in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 2-3.
49. Karen L. Raber, "'Our wits joined as in matrimony': Margaret Cavendish's Playes and the Drama of Authority," ELR 28 (1998): 464-93.
50. See also Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1963-65), s.v. "Cavendish, William," 3:1277.
51. For a brilliant exploration of one such precedent (Mary and Philip Sidney) see Jonathan Goldberg, "The Countess of Pembroke's Literal Translation," in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 321-36.
52. Or, to follow Traub's argument (see n. 30), it is the addition of the expectation of mutual desire within marriage that makes matrimonial collaboration imaginable.
53. Roger Chartier's commentary on reading aloud in the earlier period suggests the broader significance of such reading: "Reading was not separated from other cultural activities such as listening to books read aloud time and again in the bosom of the family, the memorization of such texts (which could then be deciphered because they were already familiar), or the recitation of texts read aloud and learned by heart. . . . The intense reading and rereading of the same texts shaped minds that were habituated to a particular set of references and inhabitated by the same quotations" (The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987], 222).
54. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 47.
55. Margaret Cavendish, CCXI. Sociable Letters, Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (London: by William Wilson, 1664), 51, sig. 62.
56. OED, 2nd éd., s.v. "sociable," a. and n., 1 .a, 2.a; my emphases. I would want to allow for the possibility that the sociability imagined in the quotations supporting this definition features an implied rather than an explicitly stated sense of class-or species - similarity. My chronology, like all such assertions based on the data available in the OED, must be regarded as tentative and awaits further research into period uses of sociable.
57. Concluding a discussion of The Convent of Pleasure, Traub writes, "Cavendish . . . reimposes marital alliance as the necessary outcome of female affectivity" (180).
58. For a historical contextualization of some of the convents evoked in this play see Julie Crawford, "Convents and Pleasures: Margaret Cavendish and the Drama of Property," Renaissance Drama, n.s., 32 (2003): 177-223.