Cavendish’s Clowns: Uses of Wise Folly in Four Plays by Margaret Cavendish

Martina Pranić

FULL TEXT

ABSTRACT (en)

This article explores the significance of the figures of folly in four plays by Margaret Cavendish: The Matrimonial Trouble, published in her first volume of drama, Playes, in 1662, and The Presence, The Bridals and The Convent of Pleasure from the 1668 Plays, Never Before Printed. An author of considerable breadth and some influence in her day, Cavendish, who also published poetry, natural philosophy, essays and a plethora of other genres, wrote at a time when the literature of folly, immensely popular only a few decades earlier, fell out of favour. After close consideration of the ways artificial fools are used in the four aforementioned plays, Cavendish’s decision to include these fools – so far largely passed over in criticism – is interpreted as an example of her creative appropriation of early modern folly as a discursive phenomenon which was, at its height in the works of Erasmus, Shakespeare, Rabelais and others, employed as a way of questioning the knowledge of the ostensibly reasonable world.

KEYWORDS (en)

Margaret Cavendish, early modern comedy, fools, folly, Shakespeare,humanism

DOI

https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2021.62.4

REFERENCES

Battigelli, Anna. Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

Bowerbank, Sylvia and Sara Mendelson, eds. Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader. Peterborough, Ont.; Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2000.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. London: Routledge, 1993.

Cavendish, Margaret. Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life. London: John Martyn and James Allestrye, 1656.

Cavendish, Margaret. Playes. London: John Martyn and James Allestrye, 1662.

Cavendish, Margaret. Plays, Never Before Printed. London: A. Maxwell, 1668.

Cavendish, Margaret. Sociable Letters Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle. London: William Wilson, 1664.

Cunning, David. “Margaret Lucas Cavendish.” In The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/margaret-cavendish.

Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Depledge, Emma. Shakespeare’s Rise to Cultural Prominence: Politics, Print and Alteration, 1642-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Devlin Mosher, Joyce. “Female Spectacle as Liberation in Margaret Cavendish’s Plays.” Early Modern Literary Studies 11, no. 1 (2005): 1-28.

Dodds, Lara. “Bawds and Housewives: Margaret Cavendish and the Work of ‘Bad Writing.’” Early Modern Studies Journal 6 (2014): 29-65.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1964). Translated by Richard Howard. London: Routledge, 2006.

Gilchrist Hall, Sam. Shakespeare’s Folly: Philosophy, Humanism, Critical Theory. London: Routledge, 2016.

Gordon, Colin. “History, Madness and Other Errors: A Response.” History of the Human Sciences 3, no. 3 (1990): 381-96.

Horatius Flaccus: His Art of Poetry. Englished by Ben: Jonson. With other workes of the author, never printed before. London: John Bonson, 1640.

Hornback, Robert. The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2013.

Jacobs, Lynn F. “The Triptychs of Hieronymus Bosch.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 31, no. 4 (2000): 1009-41.

Keats, John. “To George and Tom Keats, 21 Dec. 1817.” In The Selected Letters of John Keats. Edited by Grant F. Scott. 59-61. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Kellett, Katherine. “Performance, Performativity, and Identity in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure.” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 48, no. 2 (2008): 419-42.

Kelly, Erna. “Drama’s Olio: A New Way to Serve Old Ingredients in The Religious and The Matrimonial Trouble.” In Cavendish and Shakespeare: Interconnections. Edited by Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice. 47-62. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

Le Goff, Jacques. The Medieval Imagination. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Mendelson, Sara. “Playing Games with Gender and Genre: The Dramatic SelfFashioning of Margaret Cavendish.” In Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish. Edited by Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz. 195-212. Madison, WI, and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/Associated University Presses, 2003.

Moul, Victoria. “Translation as Commentary? The Case of Ben Jonson’s Ars Poetica.” Palimpsestes 20 (2007): 59-77.

Mould, Oli. Against Creativity. London: Verso, 2018. Murray, Daisy. Twins in Early Modern English Drama and Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge, 2017.

Oliensis, Ellen. Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Peacock, Judith. “Writing for the Brain and Writing for the Boards: The Producibility of Margaret Cavendish’s Dramatic Texts.” In A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Edited by Stephen Clucas. 87-108. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

Pedersen, Tara. “‘We shall discover our Selves’: Practicing the Mermaid’s Law in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure.” Early Modern Women 5 (2010): 111-35.

Romack, Katherine and James Fitzmaurice, eds. Cavendish and Shakespeare: Interconnections. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

Runco, Mark A. and Garrett J. Jaeger. “The Standard Definition of Creativity.” Creativity Research Journal 24, no. 1 (2012): 92-96.

Scott-Douglass, Amy. “Self-Crowned Laureatess: Towards a Critical Revaluation of Margaret Cavendish’s Prefaces.” Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2000): 27-49.

Screech, M. A. Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly. London: Duckworth, 1980.

Shaheen, Jonathan L. “The Life of the Thrice Sensitive, Rational and Wise Animate Matter: Cavendish’s Animism.” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11, no. 2 (2021): 621-41.

Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. General editor Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.

Shaver, Anne, ed. The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Siegfried, Brandie R. “Dining at the Table of Sense: Shakespeare, Cavendish and The Convent of Pleasure.” In Cavendish and Shakespeare: Interconnections. Edited by Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice. 65-86. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

Smith, Hilda. Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Walters, Lisa. Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Williams, Gweno. “‘Why May Not a Lady Write a Good Play?’ Plays by Early Modern Women Reassessed as Performance Texts.” In Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama. Edited by S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies. 95-108. London: Routledge, 1998.

Williams, Gweno. Margaret Cavendish: Plays in Performance. York: York St John University, 2004 .

Williams, Kathleen, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Praise of Folly: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Woolf, Virginia. “The Duchess of Newcastle.” In The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1928. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. 81-90. London: The Hogarth Press, 1986.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. San Diego, CA, and New York: Harvest Books, 1989.

Zimbardo, Rose A. A Mirror to Nature: Transformations in Drama and Aesthetics, 1660-1732. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1986.