Convents and pleasures: Margaret Cavendish and the drama of property

Renaissance Drama

Volumn 32, Issue , 2003, Pages 177-223

  Crawford, Julie ^a  

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EID: 61949304826     PISSN: 04863739     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/rd.32.41917380     Document Type: Review

References (223)

1. In one of her CCXI Sociable Letters (1664), Margaret Cavendish records that a ship, traveling from the Continent to England, went down with the manuscript of the first volume of her plays, a detail that suggests that she wrote her plays while in exile
2. See Letter CXLILI, cited in Henry Ten Eyck Perry, The First Duchess of Newcastle and her Husband as Figures in Literary History (Boston and London: Ginn and Company, 1918; reprint, New York: Johnson, 1968), 248
3. A commendatory verse prefixed to Natures Pictures (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1656) refers to "her tragedies and comedies, which will shortly come out." Due, perhaps, to the loss at sea, the collection of plays did not appear until 1662. A shorter
4. of plays was published in 1668
5. See Douglas Grant, Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623-1673 (London: Hart-Davis, 1957), 159. The Convent of Pleasure, which appeared in the 1668 volume, was almost certainly written in the 1660s
6. Most significantly for this essay, the plays included in the 1668 volume were probably written at Welbeck Abbey, the Cavendish home Margaret lived in after the Restoration. See Geoffrey Trease, Portrait of a Cavalier: William Cavendish, First Duke of Newcastle (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1979), 188
7. The Convent of Pleasure in Playes. Never Before Printed (London: A. Maxwell, 1668), 1.1, sig. B2v, 6. All subsequent references to the play will be cited parenthetically within the essay by scene, signature, and page
8. In the last scene of the play, the "Princess" tells Mimick the fool: "Well, to shew my Charity. .. I'le bestow my bounty [the convent] in a Present, on the Condition you speak the Epilogue" (5.3, Olv, 52)
9. See also Anne Shaver's introduction to The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays, ed. Anne Shaver (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)
10. and Laura Rosenthal's argument, in Playwrights and Plagiarist in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1996), 92, that The Convent of Pleasure "established marriage from the opening as a way for men to take over women's property."
11. Elsewhere in her writing, Margaret Cavendish imagines convents as a happier alternative to bad marriages. "Marriage," she writes in Sociable Letters, "is a very Unhappy Life when Sympathy Joyns not the Married Couple, for otherwise it were better to be Barr'd up within the Gates of a Monastery, than to be Bound in the Bonds of Matrimony" (Sociable Letters [1664; Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1969], 124)
12. Women's convents also appear in such texts as "The She-Anchoret," a prose tale in Natures Pictures, 287-357, and in Margaret's Utopia, The Blazing World. Like The Convent of Pleasure, The Blazing World features the founding of a convent
13. The Empress "resolved to build churches, and make also up a congregation of women, wherof she intended to be the head herself, and to instruct them in several points of her religion. This she had no sooner begun, but the women, which generally had quick wits, subtle competitions, clear understanding, and solid judgements, became . . . very devout and zealous sisters" (The Description of a New World Called the Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley [London: William Pickering, 1992], 162)
14. Hilda L. Smith has explained the Toryism of many seventeenth-century feminists in this way: by giving political articulation to their desire to restore or protect a stable social hierarchy, elite women's Toryism "both encouraged the general habit of critically reflecting on social arrangements and linked their interests as ladies and gentlewomen to the restoration of that hierarchy" (Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982], chap. 1, summarized by Catherine Gallagher in "Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England," Genders 1:1 [spring 1988]: 24-33, 25). Gallagher has complicated this argument by pointing out that that there were other social factors than class which might have inclined monarchist women toward (proto)feminism. In particular historical situations, she argues, "the ideology of absolute monarchy provides ... a transition to an ideology of the absolute self" (25)
15. Much in Cavendish's work "suggests that the absolutist desire, the desire to be the sovereign monarch, itself derives from a certain female disability: not from her inability to be a monarch but from her inability to be a full subject of the monarch"; "women were excluded from all State offices except that of monarch" (27)
16. As Gallagher puts it, "the subject, in order to be absolute, must have subjects" (30), and in The Convent of Pleasure, Lady Happy has a community of women who are her peers, but they are served by women of the lower classes. The concern with the maintenance of the class hierarchy (including opposition to the selling of titles) was also a concern of William Cavendish's
17. See Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, abridged ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 56
18. Andrew Man-ell, "Upon Appleton House," Andrew Marvell: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Frank Kermode and Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1. 280, p. 62
19. See also George Woodward, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (London: Blandford, 1966)
20. and Helen Miller, Henry VIII and the English Nobility (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1986)
21. Margaret Cavendish, The LIFE of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant PRINCE William Cavendishe, Duke, Marquess, and Earl of Newcastle; Earl of Ogle; Viscount Mansfield; and Baron of Bolsover, of Ogle, Bothbal and Hepple: Gentleman of His Majesties Bed-Chamber; one of His Majesties most Honourable Privy-Councel; Knight of the most Noble Order of the Garter, His Majesties Lieutenant of the County and Town of Nottingham; and Justice in Ayre Trent-North: who had the honour to be Governour to our most Glorious King, and Gracious Soveraign, in his Youth, when He was Prince of Wales; and soon after was made Captain General of all the Provinces beyond the River of Trent, and other Parts of the Kingdom of England, with Power, by a special Commission, to make Knights. WRITTEN By the thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, MARGARET, Duchess of Newcastle, His Wife (London: A. Maxwell, 1667), T2r. All subsequent references to this biography will be cited parenthetically within the text
22. "10 December 1651 Margaret, the wife of William, Earl of Newcastle, begs 1/5 of her husband's estate, sequestered for delinquency, according to the ordinances of Parliament, having no other means of livelihood. Noted as refused, he being an excepted person, and she married to him since be became a delinquent, so at the time of marriage he had no estate." Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for Compounding, 1643-1660, part 3, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (1889; reprint, Nendeln, Lichtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1967), 1733-34
23. See Greg , The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. chap. 2, "Household Drama and the Art of Good Counsel," 51-75. Walker argues that "household plays did not so much offer an alternative ideology as attempt to (re)define the practical implications of a shared ideology of good lordship already in existence" (74-75)
24. See also Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) for a sustained reading of the ways in which royalist court culture, including masques, sought to influence royal politics and policies through both criticism and compliment
25. On the relationship between the Cavendish country house entertainments and royal favor, see Cedric C. Brown, "Courtesies of Place and Arts of Diplomacy in Ben Jonson's Last Two Entertainments for Royalty," Seventeenth Century 9:2 (1994): 147-71
26. Nick Rowe, "My Best Patron: William Cavendish and Jonson's Caroline Dramas," Seventeenth Century 9:2 (1994): 197-212
27. James Fitzmaurice, "William Cavendish and Two Entertainments by Ben Jonson," Ben Jonson Journal 5 (1998): 63-80
28. and Lisa Hopkins, "Play Houses: Drama at Bolsover and Welbeck," Early Theatre 2 (1999): 25-44. The entertainments both flattered the king and promoted Cavendish's own political agendas, including his desire to be governor to Prince Charles (an appointment he received in 1636)
29. For criticism of the "private" argument, see Shaver, Convent and Other, 253
30. Karen L. Raber, " 'Our wits joined as in matrimony': Margaret Cavendish's Playes and the Drama of Authority," English Literary Renaissance 28:3 (1998): 464-93, at 468
31. and Julie Sanders, " 'A woman write a play': Jonsonian Strategies and the Dramatic Writings of Margaret Cavendish; or, Did the Duchess Feel the Anxiety of Influence," in Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama: Criticism, History, and Performance, 1594-1998, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (New York: Routledge, 1998): 293-305, at 295
32. Marta Straznicky, "Reading the Stage: Margaret Cavendish and Commonwealth Closet Drama," Criticism 37:3 (summer 1995): 355-90, at 357
33. See also Raber, "Cavendish's Playes, 472-73
34. and Hero Chalmers's claim that in Cavendish's closet dramas, female retreat is not "abdication of political engagement" ("The Politics of Feminine Retreat in Margaret Cavendish's The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure," Women's Writing 6:1 [1999]: 81-94, quotation at 89)
35. See Roger Chartier, "Leisure and Sociability: Reading Aloud in Early Modern Europe," Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. Susan Zimmerman and Ronald EE. Weisman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 103-20
36. Louis B. Wright, "The Reading of Plays during the Puritan Revolution," Huntington Library Quarterly 6 (1934): 86-107
37. and Margaret J. M. Ezell, The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (London and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)
38. On Cavendish's daughters, see Margaret Ezell, "'To Be Your Daughter in Your Pen': The Social Functions of Literature in the Writings of Lady Elizabeth Brackley and Lady Jane Cavendish," Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama, 246-58
39. See also Sanders, " 'A woman write a play.' "
40. Susan Wiseman, "Gender and Status on 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, esp. 162
41. Cited in Richard W. Goulding, Margaret (Lucas) Duchess of Newcastle (Lincolnshire: Chronic, 1925), 28. The members of the Cavendish family were not all at Welbeck Abbey during the same period, especially not in 1656, when the engraving was commissioned (Margaret and William were still in Antwerp). Yet Cavendish's imagination of the coterie indicates not only royalist sentiment and resistance but also her placing of herself, visually, in the Cavendish family: "My Lord, and I, here in two chairs are set, / And all his Children, wives and husbands met."
42. The quoted line is from the epigraph under the engraving itself: Thus in this Semy-Circle wher they Sitt Telling of Tales of pleasure & of witt Heer you may read without a Sinn or Crime And how more innocently pass your tyme. The frontispiece appears in both editions of Natures Pictures (1656 and 1671)
43. Fitzmaurice argues that the frontispiece was both a display of aristocracy and a way to mend fences with stepchildren in the later edition (James Fitzmaurice, "Front Matter and the Physical Make-up of Natures Pictures," Women's Writing 4:3 [1997]: 354, 356). The first edition reads: And hearing of such dangers in my way, I was content in Antwerp for to stay; And in the circle of my Brain to raise The Figures of my Friends crowned with Praise
44. Earl Miner, The Cavalier Modes from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 275
45. See Richard W. Goulding, Bolsover Castle, 5th ed. ( 1928), 21
46. During their courtship, William promised Margaret many things, including the pleasures of Bolsover Castle. See Douglas Grant, ed., The Phanseys of William Cavendish (London: Nonesuch, 1956)
47. and subsequent endnote 92
48. See Ezell, "To Be Daughter," 246-58
49. Wiseman, "Gender and Status," 161-63
50. and Alison Findlay, " 'She Gave you the civility of the house': Household Performance in The Concealed Fancies," Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama, 259-71
51. Both Margaret's autobiography and her biography of her husband show many parallels between her life and the events of her plays. See Grant, Margaret the First, 154
52. For interregnum contexts, see Straznicky, "Reading the Stage," 355-90
53. and Raber, "Cavendish's Playes," 464-93
54. Raber argues that Margaret's collaboration with William, as a response to the ravages of civil war and exile, "subtly pits William Cavendish's authority as husband, male aristocrat, and an author in his own right, against Margaret Cavendish's own imaginative authorial power to restore dramatically his damaged reputation and sense of self" ("Cavendish's Playes," 466)
55. "But in becoming 'subjects' of Cavendish's discourse, her peers, her King, and her 'lord' Newcastle must subject themselves to the authority of a woman's word, even to her right to publish her writing" (492). Chalmers argues that Cavendish's legal designation as a femme couverte, the property of her husband, "provided her with a license positively to embrace the printed publication of her texts
56. In view of her husband's ignoble silencing and exclusion from public affairs, she, as the legal function of his identity, might serve as his surrogate" and use "the notion that she was a spokesperson for her exiled husband as a means of finding a voice in print" ("Dismantling the Myth of 'Mad Madge': The Cultural Context of Margaret Cavendish's Authorial Self-Presentation," Women's Writing 4:3 [1997]: 323-39,325, 326)
57. After the Restoration, and in light of Charles II's disregard of William, her writing was less a gesture of "suppressed royalist resistance" and more of a forum for grievances that her husband himself could not voice (Chalmers, "Dismantling Myth," 334)
58. Jeffrey Masten has also pointed to the ways in which Margaret Cavendish used ideas of collaboration and individualism to create an authorial voice for herself. See Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 158-62
59. Karen Raber has perceptively noted that she is "not aware of any critic who considers the demoralizing effect of William Cavendish's service to the royal family and its outcome, or applies that context to Margaret Cavendish's writings" ("Cavendish's Playes, " 488)
60. In another essay, Hero Chalmers argues that "Cavendish's belated adherence to the model of pastoral retirement literature even after the Restoration (when the Convent was probably written) may, in part, be explained by the ailing political fortune of the Newcastles in the period following their return to England in 1660" ("Politics of Retreat," 87). The present essay seeks to add more fully to these insights
61. Margaret's 1667 biography of her husband and her Utopia, The Blazing World (1668), have been read in light of the Cavendishes' material and property concerns, but her plays have rarely been seen as part of this intellectual and political petitioning. I return to these ideas later
62. Marion Wynne-Davies, " 'My Seeled Chamber and Dark Parlour Room': The English Country House and Renaissance Women Dramatists," Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama, 60-68
63. and Findlay, "Household Performance."
64. Feminist scholars often idealize country homes as places for women writers. Wynne-Davies, for example, focuses on country homes as "secure situation[s] for female authorship," seeing Penshurst and Welbeck as places of "benign inspiration" for early modern women dramatists ("English Country House," 60)
65. See Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638-1651 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), esp. 164-67
66. See Chalmers, "Politics of Retreat," 87
67. As Leah Marcus has argued, "the Cavaliers crowned themselves monarchs in order to salvage the image of kingship" (The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], 258)
68. On royalist odes to fellowship as gestures of defiance, see Derek Hirst, "The Politics of Literature in the English Republic," Seventeenth Century 5:2 (1990): 132-55, esp. 148
69. Hero Chalmers sees both The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure as influenced by nostalgia for the feminocentric Caroline court ("Politics of Retreat," 82)
70. While in exile, Margaret also found a female community among the three daughters of their Portuguese neighbor, Signor Duarte: Eleonora, Katherine, and Frances. She also watched women perform in the show of the Italian Mountebank Jean Potage (Grant, Margaret the First, 136; 138)
71. In Sociable Letters, the author reminds her correspondent that the English Civil War was an affair among men: "But however, Madam, the disturbance in this Country hath made no breach of friendship betwixt us, for though there hath been a Civil War in the Kingdom, and a general War amongst the Men, yet ther hath been none amongst the Women" (Sociable Letters, 28)
72. Sophie Tomlinson, "My Brain the Stage': Margaret Cavendish and the Fantasy of Female Performance," Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama, 272-92
73. and "She That Plays the King: Henrietta Maria and the Threat of the Actress in Caroline Culture," in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, ed. Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope (London: Routledge, 1992)
74. As Theodora Jankowski has pointed out, the play is in many ways a celebration of female homosociality and homoeroticism - the ladies of the convent cross-dress as men and make platonic love to one other. See Theodora Jankowski, "Pure Resistance: Queer(y)ing Virginity in William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure,' Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 218-55
75. In The Blazing World, the Empress and the Duchess of Newcastle "became platonic lovers, although they were both female," and when they visit the Duke at Welbeck Abbey, the Duchess comments that "The Duke would have been like the Grand-Signior in his Seraglio, onely it would have been a Platonick Seraglio" (183; 110). The cult of platonic love had been popular at the court of Henrietta Maria
76. See Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
77. From the Oxford English Dictionary, ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989
78. OED online, Oxford University Press, Feb. 19, 2003, and ): "portion: The part or share of an estate given or passing by law to an heir, or to be distributed to him in the settlement of the estate." "jointure: The holding of an estate by two or more persons in joint-tenancy. Obs. 4. spec. a. orig. The holding of property to the joint use of a husband and wife for life or in tail, as a provision for the latter, in the event of her widowhood. Hence, by extension, b. A sole estate limited to the wife, being a competent livelihood of freehold for the wife of lands and tenements, to take effect upon the death of the husband for the life of the wife at least."
79. As Susan Staves points out, even when women did obtain jointures, they often yielded part of them back to the heir or other family member. A combination of familial affection and social pressure on occasion prompted such relinquishments. See Susan Staves, Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 115
80. Henrietta Maria was also associated with entertainments which, like those performed near the beginning of The Convent of Pleasure, featured nonaristocratic women. On Wednesday, February 23, 1635, "the Prince d'Amours gave a masque to the Prince Elector and his brother, in the Middle Temple, wher the Queene was pleasd to grace the entertaynment by putting off majesty to putt on a citizens habbit, and to sett upon the scaffold on the right hande amongst her subjects. The queene was attended in the like habitts by the Marques Hamilton, the Countess of Denbighe, the Countess of Holland, and the Lady Elizabeth Feildinge. Mrs. Basse, the lace-woman, leade in this royal citizen and her company." N. W. Bawcutt, ed., The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama. The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, 1623-73 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 197
81. On Henrietta Maria's penchant for the pastoral, see Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 251
82. Fletcher's Faithfull Shepherdess was revived for the queen at Somerset House in 1635 (251)
83. Chalmers also notes that The Convent of Pleasure draws on Walter Montague's The Shepherd's Paradise ("Politics of Retreat," 85)
84. For a discussion of the political significances of the play, see Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment, 39-44
85. Ben Jonson, The Kings Entertainment at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire, A house of the Right Honourable, William Earle of Newcastle, Viscount Mansfield, Baron of Botle, and Bolsover, &c. At his going to Scotland. 1633, in The Workes of Benjamin Jonson. The Second Volume (London: Printed for Richard Meighen, 1640), 279, 1.262
86. Cavendish also presented Loves Welcome: The King and Queenes Entertainment at Bolsover at his other home, Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire, during the summer progress of 1634 (Brown, "Courtesies of Place," 157-65)
87. In The Shepherd's Paradise, Bellessa, played by Henrietta Maria, is elected Queene, and announcement is made that "a Queene is to be elected the first of May every yeare, by the plurality of the sisters voyces, from wch election the brothers are excluded."
88. Walter Montagu, The Shepherds' Paradise, Malone Society Reprints, vol. 159 (Oxford: Malone Society, 1997), 23, 2.2.731-2
89. Thomas P. Slaughter, Ideology and Politics on the Eve of Restoration: Newcastle's Advice to Charles II (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984), 64
90. William saw a political efficacy in country holidays and sports, arguing in his letter of advice to Charles II, "Devertismentes will amuse the peoples thoughts And keepe them in harmless actions, which will free your Majestie from Faction, & Rebellion."
91. "Cromwell pointed to the entertainments of the gentry... as simple camouflage for political opposition" (Hirst, "Politics of Literature," 149)
92. Marcus, Politics of Mirth, 214
93. Included in S. Arthur Strong, ed., A Catalogue of Letters and Other Historical Documents Exhibited in the Library at Welbeck, (London: John Murray, 1903), 57-58
94. This kind of gesture was common at country house entertainments. During the dance of the 1636 Entertainment at Richmond, for example, dwarves came leaping in with shields bearing their masters' impresas, which they lay at the Queen's feet. See C. E. McGee and John C. Meagher, "Preliminary Checklist of Tudor and Stuart Entertainments: 1634-42," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 38 (1999): 23-85, 55-56
95. On country house display of family arms and heraldic devices, see Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 30
96. A scrip is a small bag, wallet, or satchel, especially one carried by a pilgrim or beggar. It is a fitting gift for the Cavendishes - who were impoverished in the service of their own king and queen - to offer to the King and Queen of the dance
97. Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 225
98. For more on post-Restoration maypoles, see Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658-1667 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 125-26
99. On August 17, 1634, there was a "Masque Performed at Holmby," which featured the queen and some other ladies, lords, and gentlemen (McGee and Meagher, "Preliminary Checklist," 27)
100. In January 1647, Parliament reached an agreement with the Scots, paying them over half a million pounds for their services to the common cause. The Scots went home, handing the king over to parliamentary commissioners. Charles was moved south to Holmby House
101. See D. R. Watson, The Life and Times of Charles I (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1972), 156-57
102. See also The Kings Maiesties Letter Intercepted by the Commissioners attending bis Majesty . . . And a List of ther of all the severall places where his Majestie bath lain, and it to lie everie day between Newcastle and Holmby House (London: A. Coe, 1647). There were also stories of royalist intrigue at Holmby
103. In May 1647, a lady "was suspected of visiting the King at Holmby, with a design of conveying letters to him; she was seized and searched: nothing was found upon her at the time, but a few days afterward, a letter, all in cipher, was discovered to have been slipped by her behind the hanging near which she stood" (Mary Anne E. Green, Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, Including Her Private Correspondence with Charles I [London: Richard Bentley, 1857], 337-38)
104. After the dance around the maypole, the stage directions announce the arrival of a "Wassel" and "Syllibubs," and a shepherd sings a verse in celebration of the marriage of the Shepherd King and Queen: "The Jolly Wassel now do bring, / With Apples drown'd in stronger Ale, / And fresher Syllibubs, and sing" (4.1, L1r, 39)
105. Wassail, a spiced wine used for toasting, and syllabub, a holiday punch made of milk and wine, were traditional symbols of country house hospitality, and during the civil war and interregnum they became symbols of Cavalier high life and resistance. A number of royalist books, such as Sir Kenelm Digby's Closet Unlocked (1669), included recipes for traditional English fare, including syllabubs ("My lady Middlesex makes Syllabubs of little Glasses with spouts"), as a way of registering the survival of royalist traditions of hospitality and festivity
106. See Sir Kenelm Digby, The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened, ed. Anne MacDonell (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1910)
107. Cavendish's play features these symbols or material props as a reminder of Welbeck's history. Welbeck Abbey was particularly famous for its brewhouse and "stronger ale," a reputation similarly celebrated in Loves Welcome at Welbeck in the character of "Father Fitz-ale, Herald of Derby and Nottingham."
108. In 1630, Dr. Francis Andrewes wrote the following verses about Cavendish properties: Hardwicke for hugeness, Worsope for Light, Welbecke for use, and Boiser for sight, Wor̀sope for walks, Hardwick for Hall, Welbecke for brew-house, Boiser for all
109. Cited in A. S. Turberville, History of Welbeck Abbey and Its Owners, 2 vols. (London: Faber and Faber, 1938-39), 1:52
110. Henrietta Haynes, Henrietta Maria (London: Methuen, [1912]), 21
111. Van Dyck, Charles I's painter, painted many of the principal noblewomen in Charles's court, including the Countess of Portland and the Duchess of Aubigny, in the habits of nymphs. Carola Oman, Henrietta Maria (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1936), 81
112. Cloridia. Rites to Chloris and Her Nymphs. Personated in a Masque at Court. By the Queenes Majestie And her Ladyes. At Shrove-tide. 1630
113. The masque was so thoroughly associated with Henrietta Maria that parliamentarian newsbooks used it as shorthand for her excessive privileges and frivolousness. Mercurius Rusticus of October 26, 1643, gloated that "the Queen will not have so many Masks at Christmas and Shrovetide this yeare as she was wont to have other yeares heretofore" (Joad Raymond, ed., Making the News: An Anthology of the Netvsbooks of Revolutionary England, 1641-1660 [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993], 101)
114. The play also includes a direct reference to the short-lived and controversial Adultery Act of 1650. When one of the male characters who is unhappy about the women's escape into the convent says that "we do Nature good service, when we get a Wench with Child, but yet the Civil Laws do punish us for it," his friend puns that "Those are Barbarous Laws that make Love Adultery" (2.4, E2v-Flr, 18-19)
115. On Lady Derby, see Ernest Broxap, The Great Civil War in Lancashire (1642-1651), 2d ed. (Manchester. Manchester University Press, 1973), 27
116. on Jane Cavendish, see Turberville, History of Welbeck Abbey, 92
117. A Great and bloudy Fight at Colchester (London, 1648), 72: E453 [18]
118. The pamphlet reports that soldiers cast "Granados out of their hands over amongst the Souldiers, and one of the said Granadoes falling into a roome where their Magazine lay, blew up divers barrels of powder and about 60 soldiers" (2)
119. A royalist account of the siege of Colchester reports that "The Enemie being possest of the house [of Sir John Lucas], exercis'd their brutall rage upon the bare Walls for there was nothing else that remain'd," Beaufort House, Gloucestershire, MS Duke of Gloucester, cited in John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 331
120. The pamphlet's illustration is a conflation of a number of attacks on St. John's Abbey, including an earlier one in 1642 (97-99; 106)
121. In her autobiography A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life (included in Natures Pictures), Margaret Cavendish wrote that the "unnatural war came like a whirlwind, which felled down their houses" (372)
122. A mob attacked her family home, St. John's Abbey, and carried off "Goods, Plate, Jewels, Money," and went into St. Giles's Church and broke open the Lucas vault and defaced the bodies (378
123. see Grant, Margaret the First, 53)
124. Bell in Campo (1662) features a similar system in which women are rewarded handsomely for defending property during the war. Thanks to the heroism of Lady Victoria, women will "keep the purse," order the servants, "buy in what Provisions they will," claim "all the Jewels, Plate, and household Furniture, and shall hereafter in this Kingdome be Mistriss in their own houses and Families" (631)
125. Turberville, History of Welbeck Abbey, 92
126. For more on Jane , see the Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for Compounding, 1643-1660: On "1 April 1650 Dame Jane Cavendish, daughter of the Earl of Newcastle, for her bothers and sisters, begs the fifth of her father's estate as formerly allowed. Granted."
127. On 26 November Jane and Frances campaign that "notwithstanding the Committee's allowance of her fifth, it is refused by the County Committee of Northumberland" (p. 1732)
128. Much of Cavendish's property was bought by parliamentarian colonels and majors (see pp. 1734-37)
129. Hutton, Restoration, 128, 136-37
130. For the disappointment of returning Cavaliers see J. R. Jones, Country and Court: England, 1658-1714 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978)
131. Paul Seward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1660-1667 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 196-214
132. and S. K. Roberts, "Public or Private? Revenge and Recovery at the Restoration of Charles II," Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 59 (1986): 172-88
133. There is an ironic analogue to thisproverb in one of William Cavendish's poems to Margaret from the 1640s, "Hymens Ancorett," in which he writes: Sweet harte, we are beggers; our Comfort's, tis seene, That we are Undunne for the Kinge and the Queene; Which doth make Us rejoyce, with Royal braggs, That now we doe foote it with Royall raggs (quoted in Grant, Phanseys, 78-79)
134. William Cavendish was keenly aware of his propertyless status. As he wrote to Margaret on the occasion of a royal marriage, "The Princes[s] Mary, Marrys Kinge of Poland, / And you, my Dear, do marry Prince of Noland" (Goulding, Margaret Duchess, 12)
135. After the Restoration, "pleasure" took on a more complicated valence. As Stephen Zwicker argues, although the culture of pleasure formed an important polemical position in the 1650s, "denying a once-much-trumpeted piety and saintliness," by the mid-1660s the idea of "pleasure" had taken on a darker side for a public disappointed by the license of the court of Charles II (Stephen Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689 [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University- Press, 1993], 91, 93)
136. After 1660 and before he retired to Welbeck, William Cavendish put on an entertainment for Charles II at his London lodgings that celebrated the king's return: "by the plessings / of Got, Charles is up, and is up, in spight of aule /the uglie Treasons, and rebellions in the Orlde." Lynn Hulse, " "'The King's Entertainment' by the Duke of Newcastle," Viator 26 (1995): 355-405, ll. 104-6, 389-90
137. In February 1658, while still in exile in Antwerp, Cavendish put on an entertainment for Charles II and his siblings prophesying the king's return to the throne (no text survives; 355)
138. The autobiography was included in the 1656 edition of Natures Pictures, 377
139. Of the eight parks Cavendish had before the wars, "there was but one left that was not quite destroyed, viz. Vfelbeck-Park of about four miles compass The rest of the Parks were totally defaced and destroyed" (Life of William, 92)
140. Writers in William Cavendish's coterie similarly recorded his losses. See, for example, Richard Flecknoe, The Portrait of William Marquis of New-Castle. To his Lady, the Lady Marchioness (London: Thomas Creake, 1660): His Entertainment of the KING was such The state so Royal, and expence so much It ever will be questioned whe're that, or The Entertaining's Army cost him more
141. Perry, First Duchess, 15
142. Margaret explicitly acknowledges these letters in Life of William: "I might have made this Book larger, in transcribing (as is ordinary in Histories) the several Letters, full of Affection, and kind promises he received from His Gracious Soveraign, Charles the First, and from his Royal Consort, in the time he was in the Actions of War, as also since the War, from his dear Soveraign and Master, Charles the Second" (sig. blv; italics added). She could only go so far in her reprimands
143. Charles II made William Cavendish a Knight of the Garter in January 1650, but investiture did not take place until April 1661. On August 15, 1654, Newcastle wrote to Secretary' Nicholas from Antwerp, revealing his increasing anxiety about reparation: "I desire you will be pleased to put his Majesty in mind that he will be graciously pleased to renew those offices and places unto me, that the King his father of blessed memory' gave me, that other may not possess them, his Majesty not knowing of it" (C. H. Firth, ed., The Life of William Cavendish Duke of Newcastle To which is added the True Relation of My Birth Breeding and Life by Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, 2d ed. [London: Routledge, 1906], 205)
144. In 1652 she wrote, "Cousin, I understand by Tuke that you fear I have forgotten you. I am very glad to assure you of the contrary, by him, and to tell you by this letter that I have too strong a remembrance of the services which you have done, and of the proofs which I have always received of your affection, to be capable of such ingratitude as that" (Green, Letters, 376)
145. The first part of the quoted letter from November 1658 reads: "I have received your letter and the book you sent me, for which I thank you, and I am very glad to see that you still remember me" (390)
146. Between 1649 and 1668, Margaret Cavendish published thirteen books, all ofwhichshe presented to the universities and to persons of political power in Stuart England. It was during her visit to England with Sir Charles Cavendish - when she petitioned for her property rights at Parliament - that she published her earliest work, Poems and Fancies (1653; reprinted 1664, 1668)
147. Chalmers ("Politics of Retreat") argues that after 1660, characters are placed in rustic settings to symbolize their alienation from the court of Charles II
148. Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London: William Wilson, 1663), sig. II 2r
149. In her memoirs of her husband, Lucy Hutchinson described how William Cavendish endeared himself in Nottinghamshire "through his great estate, his liberal hospitality, and constant residence in his country." However, she continues, "a foolish ambition of glorious slavery carried him to court, where he ran himself much into debt to purchase neglects of the king and queen, and scorns of the proud courtiers" (Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson [London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973], 61)
150. La Methode et Invention Nouvelle de Dresser les Chevaux was published in Antwerp in 1658 (Firth, Life of Newcastle, xx-xxi)
151. The Diepenbeck engravings feature Bolsover or Welbeck in the background (Perry, First Duchess, 137)
152. This may well be the book William sent to Henrietta Maria in 1658 ("I have received your letter and the book you sent me, for which I thank you" [Green, Letters, 390])
153. In 1661, Charles announced that only the £3,500 principal of a £9,249 debt was to be paid (Perry, First Duchess, 69)
154. A number of papers recording the debt and its lack of payment are included in William John Arthur Charles James Cavendish-Bentinck, 6th Duke of Portland, et al., eds., The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland Preserved at Welbeck Abbey, vol. 2 (London: Printed for Her Majesty's Stationery Office by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1891), 144-45
155. The citation is from the epistle dedicatory to William Cavendish, and the full title of the sermon is A Sermon Preached on the 29th of May 1661. The Day of His Majesties Birth, and Happy Restauration, After a long Exile, to bis Crown and Kingdome, Before His Excellency William Ld Marquis of Newcastle at his House of Welbeck. by Clement Ellis M. A. Houshold Chaplain to his Excellency (1661; reprint, Oxford: Henry Hall Printer to the University, for Edward and John Forrest, 1991)
156. The Description of a New World Called the Blazing World was coupled with Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy in printings of 1666 and 1668. See Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World Called the Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (London: William Pickering, 1992)
157. In The Blazing World, when the Empress asks to see Bolsover, "Alas! replied the Duchess, it is but a naked house, and unclothed of all furniture. However, said the Empress, I may see the manner of its structure and building. That you may, replied the Duchess: and as they were thus discoursing, the Duke came out of the house into the court" (193-94). The allusions to timber and ships were especially topical
158. On the destruction of these woods, see the Calendar of Domestic State Papers for 1655: "the forest is ruined ... by Mr. Clark, on pretence of a grant from the Committee for Sale of Traitor's Estates. He has felled 1000 trees, and daily fells more" (p. 71)
159. Margaret Cavendish also wrote about Bolsover Castle in her poem "A Dialogue between a Bountiful Knight and a Castle Ruined in War." In this poem, the Castle says to the Knight (presumably Newcastle): But, noble Sir, since I did see you last, Within me hath a garrison been placed: Their guns and pistols all about me hung, And in despite their bullets at me flung; Which through my sides those passages you see Made, and destroyed the walls that circled me, And let my rubbish on huge heaps to lie. And the Knight responds: But to restore thy health, and build thy wall, I have not means enough to do't withal. Had I the art, no pains then I would spare, But all what's broken down I would repair. (ll. 21-27, 43-46), cited in Alastair Fowler, ed. The Country House Poem (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), pp. 315-16
160. In The Blazing World, the Duchess insists that "she was not covetous, nor desired any more wealth than what her lord and husband had before the Civil Wars; neither, said she, should I desire it for my own, but my lord's posterity's sake" (217)
161. See Firth, Life of Newcastle
162. Trease, Portrait of Cavalier, 187
163. and Sara Mendelson's argument, "The myth of the duke's suffering which Margaret had created with such art was meant to serve a particular purpose. It was to prove to the world that Newcastle had been Charles's wisest, noblest and most loyal subject. . . This is why the Life was dedicated to Charles himself as a rebuke for his ingratitude" (The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987], 50)
164. On the visit to the king, see Mendelson, Mental World, 47
165. On the publicity around Margaret's visit, see Samuel Pepys's diary observations cited in Goulding, Margaret Duchess, 37
166. In 1663, Jasper Mayne wrote to Margaret, "Your Books have here had a very honorable, and publick Reception, and are not only placed in the private Libraries of every single College, but in the publick also" (Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable Margaret Duchess of Cavendish [London, 1676], 93)
167. For a full account of Margaret's post-Restoration modifications of Life of William and their relationship to her defense of her husband, see James Fitzmaurice, "Margaret Cavendish on Her Own Writing: Evidence from Revision and Handmade Correction," (1991): 297-308, esp. 302-7
168. Fitzmaurice suggests that she corrected those texts which "meant the most to her," but they could also have the most political, or polemical, intent ("Cavendish Own Writing," 307). Sociable Letters, Life of William, and her plays were all modified
169. Margaret writes that it is certain "[t]hat those that perform Publick Actions, expose themselves to Publick Censures; and so do Writers, live they never so privately and retir'd soon as they commit their Works to the Press" (preface, p. 69, cited in Goulding, Margaret Duchess, 33). This statement has been read as a sign of Cavendish's fears of publication and criticism, but it is just as likely that it refers to the political nature of her texts
170. She writes in the preface, which was dedicated to her husband, that he "was pleased to illustrate my Playes with some Scenes of his own wit" (cited in Raber, "Cavendish's Playes," 479)
171. See also Chalmers, "Dismantling Myth," 326. In addition to this reading, I draw attention to Margaret's own negotiation of her property rights not as his "surrogate" but for herself. In her works, Margaret sought not only authorial rights, as Chalmers suggests, but rights to class and material privilege
172. In The Bridals, Sir William Sage and the Lady Vertue his Bride stand in contrast to more frivolous lovers. Lady Vertue, like Margaret Cavendish, stands by her man, claiming that "it is the part of every good wife to express, on all occasions, their Love and Respect to their Husbands" (4.1, 02v-Plr, 52-53)
173. Lady Vertue is deemed wrongheaded; "Vice," as someone points out, "is a Vertue in this age," as in the restored court of Charles II. A Piece of a Play is self-styled as a "Farce" and features "Lady Phoenix," a figure for Margaret Cavendish, a wonderful lady who rises out of the ashes of disrespect and comes to London, a city foolishly besotted with "Mode Gallants" and "Mode Plays" (2.2, E2r, 19)
174. For more on Lady Phoenix, see my essay, "Preachers, Pleaders, and Players: Margaret Cavendish's Dramatic Petition," in Beyond the "All-Male" Stage in Early Modern England: Women Players 1500-1600, ed. Peter Parolin and Pamela Brown (Burlington, Ver.: Ashgate, forthcoming)
175. In The Sociable Companions, the players enact a series of witty "intrigues" to get their money back. They decide to go after the usurer, Get-all. Get-all initially insists that although "These poor Cavaliers haunt me like Spirits... they shall not catch my Wealth; for they have no Lands to Mortgage, nor Goods to Pawn" (3.1, P2r, 55)
176. At the end of the play, however, all the "poor Cavaliers" (4.1, Xlv, 78), including the women, are rewarded and Get-all gives money to everyone
177. See also Amanda Holton's introduction to The Sociable Companions; or The Female Wits, ed. Amanda Holton (Oxford: Seventeenth Century Press, 1996), 1-7
178. Cited in Grant, Margaret the First, 86
179. Rosenthal, Playwrights and Plagiarist, 76
180. In Rosenthal's reading, Cavendish's plays "imagine alternative economies of desire in which aristocratic women become owners of themselves, their words, and even sometimes of estates" (77)
181. "Marriage and sexuality occupy a prominent place in Cavendish's dramatic compositions because they stand as the greatest barriers to elite women's property and independence" (76)
182. Slaughter, Ideology and Politics, 45-46
183. William goes on to point out that it is "contempt, by the vulger of the Nobilety, - which breeds Faction, & disorder, which are the Causes of a Chill warr" (47)
184. "Seremoney, & order, of Noble-men" is the foundation of monarchy, and he tells His Majesty that he should "courte your Nobilety, & gentery, & Discourse with them & Cale them to you & cherishe them for they deserve itt" (48, 49)
185. Chalmers sees the women's convent as emblematic of the situation of all royalists during the interregnum: "Deprived of their rights to property, excluded from public office, and physically limited in various ways, interregnum royalist men were not only forced increasingly into the conventionally private sphere, but feminised, taking on crucial elements of the female condition" ("Politics of Retreat," 88)
186. In fact, the Cavendish family was well known for its powerful and property-building women. The contributions of both Christiana Cavendish and Bess of Hardwick (William's "Grandmother of his Father's side") are registered in Hobbes's Wonders of the Peak (1678, 12): Caesarian Piles built by a woman's hand - Piles fit for Kings to build, and monarchs rear, In Cavendistian Lordships do appear The petty products of a Female Care (cited in Fitzmaurice, "Two Entertainments," 79 n. 30)
187. The Lucases were minor gentry, and Margaret's portion would have been £2,000
188. Goulding, Margaret Duchess, 20
189. In October 1659, William wrote to his surviving son, asking him to reside at Welbeck and expressing concern about "furniture, pictures, and hangings belonging to both houses, which were to be sold into order to pay off his debts."
190. In May 1659, William's oldest son died at Bolsover, and the estate went to William's younger son, Henry. Henry, Viscount Mansfield, was £8,000 in debt by 1663
191. Thomas Longuville, ed., The First Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (London: Longman, Green, 1910), 217
192. He advises Charles II to "keep only what is right, & dewe, for their places, & Digneties, As one tiling, none under the Degree of a Barroness, can have Carpetts, by her Bedd, & shee but one, or two, at the moste, And now Every Turkey merchants wife, will have all her Floore over, with Carpetts" (Slaughter, Ideology and Politics, 45-46)
193. The poem is cited in Timothy Raylor, " 'Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue': William Cavendish, Ben Jonson, and the Decorative Scheme of Bolsover Castle," Renaissance Quarterly 52:2 (1999): 402-39, at 435
194. William always expressed particular concern about his pictures, writing to his son November 15, 1659: "The pictures there were most rare" (Perry, First Duchess, 67)
195. The song in The Convent of Pleasure "Wee'l please our Sight with Pictures rare; / Our Nostrils with perfumed Air" (1.1, C1v, 8) similarly echoes William's promise in "Loves Muster" of "Choysest, sweetest flowers, / Strow'd on the Ground with Spainishe sents that's rare; / Fanning our selves with this perfumed Ayre" (11. 13-16
196. cited in Raylor, "Pleasure Reconciled," 433)
197. As Raylor writes, "It is surely no coincidence that Cavendish's fantasy of sensual indulgence, composed in exile in the 1640s, should enumerate so precisely the features he had assembled with such care at his beloved Bolsover: the ceilings adorned with paintings; the soft furnishings.. .. Nor can it be coincidental that the senses are here enumerated in the very order employed by Jonson in Loves Welcome" (434). I am arguing for a similar tactic on Margaret's part in her play, in which she puts into print the material promises William made to her
198. On the physical, sensual detail of The Convent of Pleasure itself, see Misty G. Anderson, "Tactile Places: Materializing Desire in Margaret Cavendish and Jane Barker," Textual Practice 13:2 (1999), 329-52
199. Hopkins, "Play Houses," 29
200. In the period from 1660 to 1833, women functioned to transmit wealth from one generation of men to the next
201. In English property law, dower attached only to real property (land and buildings), not chattel property (movable things). See Staves, Married Women's Property, 31
202. In 1671, the Earl of Ogle wrote to the Earl of Darby: "I am very mallancholly, finding my Father more perswaded by his Wife then I could thinke it possible" (quoted in Strong, Letters and Other Documents, 63)
203. Mendelson, Mental World, 42; 57
204. Some defend her against these charges; see Kathleen Jones, A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623-1673 (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), 170
205. William certainly saw women's property values in patriarchalist economic terms. In October 1659, he wrote to Viscount Mansfield: "Your sister[-in-law] not being with child makes us know we can pretend but little interest in her. What her jointure is I know not" (Cavendish-Bentinck, Manuscripts of Duke, 143). William tried to arrange all the marriages of his children, presumably in order to control his property
206. For example, he asked his son, Henry Earl of Ogle, not to marry again (Longuville, First Duke, 220)
207. In her autobiography, Margaret says that she wrote her own life story "but to tell the truth, lest after-Ages should mistake, in not knowing I was daughter to one Master Lucas of St. Johns neer Colchester in Essex, second wife to the Lord Marquis of Newcastle, for my Lord having had two Wives, I might easily have been mistaken, especially if I should dye, and my Lord Marry again" (74, cited in Rosenthal, Playwrights and Plagiarist, 390-91)
208. Runar Strandberg, "Études et Documents: Sainte-Marie de Chaillot d'Après des Documents Inédits," Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire de l'Art Français (1970): 189-201, 192-94
209. The full story of the founding of the convent can be found in the Archives Nationale, Bibliothèque Nationale, MSS Mazarine 2436, fols. 525, 529, 531, 532, 537-39, 540-47
210. Quentin Bone, Henrietta Maria: Queen of the Cavaliers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 239
211. Montagu gave her a book of religious essays for her "holy retirement," marveling that Henrietta Maria who had "been dispossess'd of so many noble houses and pleasant situations, by the worlds violence and injustice," should finally have her own place of retreat (cited in Bone, Queen of Cavaliers, 238)
212. Joan Evans, Monastic Architecture in France from the Renaissance to the Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 95
213. Haynes, Henrietta Maria, 289
214. For many royalist poets, the restoration of the queen's property was symbolic of the restoration of the monarchy. See Edmund Waller's 1665 "Upon her Majestys New Buildings at Somerset House," in The Poems, ed. G. Thorn Drury (New York: Greenwood, 1968), 189-90
215. and "The Speech of Her Majesty the Queen Mother's Palace Upon the Reparation and Enlargement of it, by Her Majesty" (London: Henry Herringman, 1665)
216. Yet although she initially returned to England after the Restoration, Henrietta soon returned to France, choosing to stay at her home in Colombes and her convent at Chaillot. This decision was controversial; the king of England felt that her residence in France reduced him in the opinion of his subjects and no one knew where her sixty thousand pounds per annum were going. (On Henrietta Maria's financial situation see Bone, Queen of Cavaliers, 228-38
217. and Oman, Henrietta Maria, 170-78)
218. Bone, Queen of Cavaliers, 250)
219. Green, Letters, 372
220. Duvignacq-Glessgen, "Visitation de Chaillot," 390. In 1664 and 1665, Henrietta Maria brought more furniture and pictures back from England (Oman, Henrietta Maria, 217, 224)
221. See, for example, Wynne-Davies, "Country House"
222. and Rebecca D'Monté, "Mirroring Female Power Separatist Spaces in the Plays of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle," Female Communities, 1600-1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities, ed. Rebecca D'Monté and Nicole Pohl (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 93-110
223. Authors' entire oeuvres are thus read in terms of their feminist intentionality, and any ideas that seem inimical to this drive - such as political absolutism - are explained away. In her discussion of Cavendish and Brackley's A Pastorall, for example, Alison Findlay argues that "the heroines' proto-feminist ideals cannot easily be reconciled with such absolutism" ("'Upon the World's Stage': The Civil War and Interregnum," in Women and Dramatic Production, 1550-1700, ed. Alison Findlay and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, with Gweno Williams [Essex: Pearson Education, 2000], 68-94, 79)