Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections

Katherine Romack, James Fitzmaurice

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780754654537
• eBook ISBN: 9781351952965
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections explores the relationship between the plays of William Shakespeare and the writings of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673). Cavendish wrote 25 plays in the 1650s and 60s, making her one of the most prolific playwrights"man or woman"of the seventeenth century. The essays contained in this volume fit together as studies of various sorts of influence, both literary and historical, setting Cavendish's appropriation of Shakespearean characters and plot structures within the context of the English Civil Wars and the Fronde. The essays trace Shakespeare's influence on Cavendish, explore the political implications of Cavendish's contribution to Shakespeare's reputation, and investigate the politics of influence more generally. The collection covers topics ranging from Cavendish's strategic use of Shakespeare to establish her own reputation to her adaptation of Shakespeare's martial imagery, moral philosophy, and marriage plots, as well as the conventions of cross dressing on stage. Other topics include Shakespeare and Cavendish read aloud; Cavendish's formally hybrid appropriation of Shakespearean comedy and tragedy; her transformation of Shakespearean women on trial; and her re-imagining of Shakespearean models of sexuality and pleasure.

Chapter 1

“Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe”: Affiliation and Memorialization in Margaret Cavendish’s Playes and Plays, Never before Printed

Shannon Miller

As Margareta De Grazia has discussed in Shakespeare Verbatim, the mid-century publications of William Shakespeare’s, Ben Jonson’s, and Francis Beaumont’s and John Fletcher’s folios are central in determining the value accorded to each playwright’s works during the seventeenth century.¹ The shifting legacies granted to each playwright in the period—legacies that prepare for the gradual ascension of Shakespeare as the greatest playwright of all time—are in large part produced through these significant publishing ventures. Shakespeare’s 1623 folio is reprinted in 1632 and then again in 1664, Jonson’s 1616 folio is reprinted in 1640, while the Beaumont and Fletcher edition, which focuses much more on John Fletcher, is a latecomer to the folio market: it doesn’t appear until 1647. As Michael Dobson and De Grazia have illustrated, each writer was labeled with a characteristic aesthetic as a result of these volumes: Jonson was accorded the descriptor of “Art,” while Shakespeare becomes the one who could depict “Nature.”² Fletcher’s advocates would build upon this division of aesthetic power between these two playwrights, usurping for their man a fusion, rather than a division, of “Art” and “Nature” into what was also called “Wit”³; John Denham’s prefatory poem to the 1647 Fletcher volume solidifies these monikers, in particular presenting Fletcher as the playwright who combines these two, previously distinct, traits into one artist.⁴

¹ Margareta De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

² Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 29.

³ De Grazia, p. 47.

⁴ Dobson, p. 31.

Much work has been done on the revision of these playwrights’ reputations—and their shifting order in the emerging hierarchy of an established canon—during the Restoration and the 18th century. Studies such as De Grazia’s, Dobson’s, and Gary Taylor’s consider the on-going aesthetic re-assessment of these three playwrights, highlighting the multiple venues in which such comparisons and reassessments were taking place.⁵ We can observe this active process through an intriguing contemporary assertion of John Fletcher’s greatness as a playwright: an autograph poem on the front leaf of Ben Jonson’s second 1640 folio constructs a metaphoric court of public opinion in which these writers are constantly being evaluated. Writing in 1704, John Genest praises John Fletcher’s Faithful Shepheardess in his verse inscription “To Mr. John Fletcher upon his Faithful Shepherdes.” While Genest does not render judgment on Jonson, he does make reference to the “Wise and many-headed bench that sits/Upon the life and death of plays….”⁶ This “bench” encompasses all walks of life as it is “composed of Gamester, captain, knight, knight’s man,/ Lady or pucelle that wears mask or fan,” even “the shop’s foreman, or some such brave spark/ that may judge for his sixpence.” He complains throughout his poem about the “bench’s” judgments, motivations, even qualifications: “They saw it half, [yet] damn’d thy whole play and more.” Further, he complains, they find “vices” in the Faithful Shepherdess, an attack that he characterizes as Fletcher’s artistic “martyrdom.” We thus observe Genest’s implicit praising of a competing playwright within the leaves of the second Jonson folio. Such on-going assessments of these playwrights—individually and in relation to each other—suggest how widespread and sustained such cultural judgments of these authors were during the Restoration.

⁵ Gary Taylor, “Restoration,” Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, From the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989).

⁶ Folger 14753. This is copy 1 of the Jonson second edition within the Folger collection.

Amongst Restoration play critics—whom Genest describes as both ample and often undistinguished—Margaret Cavendish has often been credited with providing “the most enthusiastic and sympathetic account” of Shakespeare’s work.⁷ Further, her commentary on Ben Jonson’s plays is extensive and distinctly more critical than that of her contemporaries, who included Samuel Pepys, Richard Flecknoe, Samuel Butler, and John Dryden.⁸ As such, Cavendish offers us a significant intervention into the late seventeenth-century cultural conversation about the aesthetic of each of these playwrights. More critical of Jonson, Cavendish becomes an early voice in elevating Shakespeare over Jonson, a move she makes that both participates in and may help to shape the cultural debate about Shakespeare’s elevation into the playwright “for all time.”⁹

⁷ Dobson, p. 30.

⁸ Mami Adachi briefly discusses Cavendish’s use of Ben Jonson in “Creating the Female Self: Margaret Cavendish’s Authorial Voice and Fictional Selves” [Hot Questrists After the English Renaissance: Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. Yasunari Takahashi (New York: AMS Press, 2000), pp. 75–76]. She also cites a paper presented at the 1996 Margaret Cavendish Conference by Julie Sanders entitled “‘A Woman Write a Play!’: Jonsonian Strategies and the Dramatic Writings of Margaret Cavendish,” which has not appeared in print.

⁹ Ben Jonson, “To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us,” Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623), A4v. All subsequent references will be to this edition.

Cavendish’s assessments of each writer, though, do more than just add to Genest’s “many-headed bench” passing judgment upon these playwrights. Within her prefatory texts to the plays, Cavendish employs her evaluation of the distinct aesthetics of two early seventeenth-century writers for her own purposes. Cavendish draws upon traits associated with Jonson and Shakespeare to align herself with one of the “Triumvirate” of English playwrights: Shakespeare. By employing common comparisons between these two playwrights, Cavendish can deploy her account of Jonson’s work to elevate her writings through association with the emerging canonical frontrunner. This use of Jonson to effect her ends includes her appropriation of his own treatment of Shakespeare in the 1623 folio. Cavendish’s consequent alignment with Shakespeare thus allows her to construct her reputation and to establish her own textual memorial within her prefatory poems and theatrical criticism.

Further, her engagement of the emerging seventeenth-century canonical hierarchy of playwrights indisputably locates her work amongst the folio production of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher: as Jeffrey Masten notes, her 1662 and 1668 editions of plays “speak … resonantly in the folio tradition.”¹⁰ Since such folio publication throughout the seventeenth century was central in establishing reputations, Cavendish works first textually, in the 1662 folio, and then visually in the 1668 folio to re-enforce an association between herself and Shakespeare. Cavendish’s intercession into this thick cultural conversation about the major playwrights thus serves her own marketing strategies as she joins the “bench” of public aesthetic opinion.

¹⁰ Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 5. Masten’s study of the collaborative and homoerotic impulses that shaped Renaissance drama and dramatists provides the most extensive treatment of the folios of the three major playwrights. He argues that, through the seventeenth-century folio production of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher, one can chart the emergence of a modern “individual” writer that had not existed during the earlier part of the century. His closing chapter discusses, though much more briefly, Cavendish’s negotiation of this tradition in the publication of her folios.

The “Triumvirate of Wit,” the triad of Jonson, Shakespeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher described within John Denham’s “On Mr. John Fletcher’s Workes,”¹¹ is specifically engaged within the prefatory material to her 1662 Playes.¹² When comparing her plays to the standards against which she will be judged, she states, “But Noble Readers, do not think my Playes,/ Are such as have been writ in former dais;/ As Johnson, Shakespear, Beaumont, Fletcher writ;/ Mine want their Learning, Reading, Language, Wit.”¹³ Obviously, Cavendish is positioning herself in relationship to these male writers: from the beginning of her introduction to the reader, the cultural debate and discussion around these four playwrights frame her discussion of her own aesthetic.¹⁴ Such a focus on these four playwrights is also present within William Cavendish’s praise of Margaret’s writings in the prefatory material to the 1664 Poems and Fancies, though poets join the canonical list into which he places his wife:

Nay, Spencers Ghost will haunt you in the Night,

and Johnson rise, full fraught with Venom’s Spight;

Fletcher, and Beaumont, troubl’d in their Graves,

Look out some Deeper, and forgotten Caves;

And Gentle Shakespear weeping, since he must,

At best, be Buried, now, in Chaucers Dust.¹⁵

¹¹ John Denham, “On Mr. John Fletcher’s Workes,” Comedies and Tragedies (1627).

¹² Amy Scott-Douglass discusses the extensive prefatory material produced by Margaret Cavendish in “Self-Crowned Laureatess: Towards a Critical Revaluation of Margaret Cavendish’s Prefaces” [Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies, 9:1 (2000): 27–49)]. She points out that critics have relied heavily upon the prefatory material, though they have often employed it for autobiographical purposes, which blind them to Cavendish’s rhetorical purposes (pp. 27–28). Scott-Douglass, who seeks to correct this oversight, applies Richard Helgerson’s treatment of the self-created laureate to Cavendish’s poetic texts. In treating Cavendish’s prefatory material as a series of rhetorical moves, I am following Scott-Douglass’ lead in focusing on the rhetorical purposes behind Cavendish’s prefatory texts. Yet my reading focuses on Cavendish’s production of drama, which Scott-Douglass does not treat at all.

¹³ “A General Prologue to all my Plays,” Playes Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious and Excellent Princess, The Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (1662) A7v. All subsequent references will be made to this publication.

¹⁴ Mami Adachi in “Creating the Female Self: Margaret Cavendish’s Authorial Voice and Fictional Selves” claims that Cavendish “proceeds to declare that her plays are different from all others” (p. 76), yet Adachi’s assertion is undermined by Cavendish’s alignment of her aesthetic with aspects of Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s own distinguishing monikers of “Art” and “Nature.”

¹⁵ William Cavendish, “To the Lady Marchionese of Newcastle On Her Book of Poems,” Poems and Fancies (1664) A2r.

While both writing wife and praising husband invoke the by-then standard triad of Renaissance playwrights, Margaret’s focus throughout her prefatory material remains upon Jonson and Shakespeare—whom she often treats separately, but also compares in her writings.¹⁶ Jonson figures especially prominently, which might initially appear to be in keeping with a general preference for Jonson over Shakes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections
• 1 “Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe”: Affiliation and Memorialization in Margaret Cavendish’s Playes and Plays, Never before Printed
• 2 Shakespeare, Cavendish, and Reading Aloud in Seventeenth-Century England
• 3 Drama’s Olio: A New Way to Serve Old Ingredients in The Religious and The Matrimonial Trouble
• 4 Dining at the Table of Sense: Shakespeare, Cavendish, and The Convent of Pleasure
• 5 Testifying in the Court of Public Opinion: Margaret Cavendish Reworks The Winter’s Tale
• 6 Gender, the Political Subject, and Dramatic Authorship: Margaret Cavendish’s Loves Adventures and the Shakespearean Example
• 7 Old Playwrights, Old Soldiers, New Martial Subjects: The Cavendishes and the Drama of Soldiery
• 8 Enlarging Margaret: Cavendish, Shakespeare, and French Women Warriors and Writers
• 9 The Unnatural Tragedy and Familial Absolutisms
• 10 “I wonder she should be so Infamous for a Whore?”: Cleopatra Restored
• Index