“Here's no design, no plot, nor any ground”: the drama of Margaret Cavendish and the disorderly woman

Abstract

This article has two chosen fields of enquiry: the cultural anxiety surrounding Cavendish as a woman dramatist; and the dramatisations of theforward or disorderly woman in her plays. In both cases, the reader/audience is deliberately invited to rescript expectations concerning the nature of gender formulation in the seventeenth century. The study begins with a sampling of recent critical evaluations of Cavendish's dramatic writing. Particular emphasis is placed upon the scholarly irritation which has been stimulated by the plays' refusal to “affirm a unified metaphysical and experiential truth, order and stability” – and upon the fact that the intervention of William Cavendish's pen in these works has been viewed hitherto as areassuringstructuring force. Exploring Carolyn Merchant's affirmation that “disorderly woman, like chaotic nature, needed to be controlled”, the discussion then concentrates upon biographical material and contemporaneous responses to Cavendish's decisions to put pen to paper, to experiment with dramatic writing, and to assert herwill-to-publish. These opening insights into the potential for thedramatistCavendish to generate cultural disorder during the Interregnum and the early Restoration is underpinned and framed by references to the (post-Bakhtinian) theorising of Natalie Zemon Davis, Constance Jordan and Kate Chedgzoy regarding perceptions of femaledeviancyin the early modern period. In the second half of the article a wide selection of plays from both the 1662 and 1668 collections is examined. Cavendish is shown, in her markedly discontinuous texts, to probe the contradictions, rather than the unity, of female cultural subjectivity. Her very varied dramatisations of disorderly women scramble the conventional codes and parameters of gender formulation – interrogating and revising Aristotelian oppositions of male/female, public/private, active/passive and so on. Special attention is focused upon the implications of oratory/volubility, cross-dressing, communal living, absolutist aspirations and engagement in the vita activa with regard to dramatised female experience. Finally, the controversial question of Cavendish's conservatism is raised: is female authority, dynamism and intellectual prowess dramatised only so that those energies can be ultimately engaged in celebrating the habitual world of male-authored power?

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