Treble Marriage Margaret Cavendish, William

“Treble marriage”: Margaret Cavendish, William
Newcastle, and Collaborative Authorship
Valerie Billing
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Volume 11, Number 2, Fall 2011,
pp. 94-122 (Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2011.0022
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/458028
Access provided at 7 Jan 2020 12:07 GMT from San Francisco State University
“Treble marriage”:
Margaret Cavendish, William Newcastle,
and Collaborative Authorship
valerie billing
abstract
Margaret Cavendish’s publications abound with her claims to individuality as a thinker and as a
writer, yet her husband, William, Duke of Newcastle, appears throughout these works as a
teacher, a character, a co-author, and a promoter of her writing. These texts exhibit a tension be-
tween Cavendish’s public identity as the wife of an aristocrat and her self-constructed identity as
a unique writer. This article posits that Cavendish manages this tension by engaging in forms of
literary collaboration with her husband that revise discourses about and practices of collaborative
authorship while at the same time critiquing and renegotiating contemporary views on marriage.
In both her life writing and her plays, Cavendish imagines relationships that I term “collaborative
marriages,” which subordinate physical gender difference and heterosexuality in order to achieve
an equal spiritual and intellectual partnership. Her prefaces and life writing establish the hus-
band and wife as a writing team and use literary production to construct a revised, mutually
beneficial marital relationship. The plays The Convent of Pleasure (1668) and The Religious
(1662) posit yet other versions of this new concept of a collaborative marriage, experimenting with
ways in which a marriage could become a collaboration of bodiless souls rather than a sexual hi-
erarchy. The forms of collaborative marriage Cavendish develops in her life writing and her plays
revise both seventeenth-century collaborative literary practice and dominant cultural ideas about
marital relationships.
M argaret Cavendish’s dedication to her husband at the beginning of her

biography of him, The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince
William Cavendishe (1667), recounts a time when, in response to rumors that
the journal for early modern cultural studies

Vol. 11 , No. 2 (fall 20 11) © 20 11
Billing • “Treble Marriage” 95
she was not the author of the texts that bore her name, Newcastle defended his
wife’s status as an author: “[you were] moved to prefix an epistle before one of
them in my vindication, wherein you assure the world upon your honour, that
what was written and printed in my name, was my own; and I have also made
known that your Lordship was my onely tutor” (5). This statement represents
one example of Cavendish’s many declarations of her own individual author-
ship, but it also signals a reciprocal creative relationship with her husband,
William, first Duke of Newcastle. The aristocratic masculine honor associated
with Newcastle’s titles has the power to confirm her authorship and, in ex-
change, Cavendish credits him as her writing tutor. Cavendish’s writing fash-
ions an image of a husband and wife who rely on each other in the public realm
of print: Newcastle gains fame from Cavendish’s portrayals of him as a sup-
portive husband and a loyal subject to his king, while Cavendish presents her-
self simultaneously as a dutiful wife and a publishing writer. In tension with
this idea of reciprocity, however, are Cavendish’s claims to uniqueness as both
a person and an author. She characterizes her “singularity” in her narrative of
her own life, A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life (1656): “I took great
delight in attiring, fine dressing and fashions, especially such fashions as I did
invent my self, not taking that pleasure in such fashions as was invented by oth-
ers: also I did dislike any should follow my Fashions, for I always took delight
in a singularity, even in acoutrements of habits” (60). Singularity of dress be-
comes a metaphor for singularity of thought, and in this statement Cavendish
makes clear her individuality as a person and as a writer. Her marital and au-
thorial relationship with Newcastle is defined by this tension between her
main social identity as the wife of an aristocrat and another identity as a unique
“Authoress.”1 This irresolvable tension surfaces repeatedly in both Cavendish’s
life writing and her plays as she works throughout her career to develop an ar-
tistic persona that blends both of these identities. 2
Here, I argue that Cavendish manages this tension by engaging in forms of
literary collaboration with her husband that critique and renegotiate contem-
porary views of companionate marriage while at the same time revising dis-
courses about and practices of collaborative authorship. Newcastle exists in
Cavendish’s prefaces and dedications as both an addressee and an author of
praise for Cavendish, and he appears as a character in her life writing and as a
co-author of several of her plays. In both her life writing and her plays, Caven-
dish imagines relationships that I term “collaborative marriages” to distinguish
them from the much-studied forms of seventeenth-century companionate
96 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies • 11:2
marriage. Cavendish’s version of collaborative marriage subordinates physical

gender difference and sexual intercourse, instead privileging spiritual and intel-
lectual partnership. In other words, for Cavendish eliminating the physically
gendered aspects of marriage is the only way to undercut the sexual hierarchy of
marriage. This relationship takes place on a textual level in Cavendish’s work,
and thus collaborative marriage produces literary texts and more versions of it-
self rather than children. This interest in de-emphasizing heteronormative
physical sexuality plays out in Cavendish’s depictions of her husband and their
relationship in A True Relation and The Life of William, which construct him as
an inspiration for her writing but also separate this inspiration from her own
“singular” authorship. As a writer, Cavendish both leans on her husband’s aris-
tocratic identity and marks off her own individuality within their marital and
authorial relationships. Her plays The Convent of Pleasure (1668) and The Reli-
gious (1662) posit different versions of collaborative marriage, experimenting
with ways in which a marriage could become a collaboration of bodiless souls
rather than a sexual hierarchy that subordinates the wife to her husband.
Cavendish frequently mentions or discusses her marriage throughout her
published works. She always expresses deep love for her husband, but she
insists that it is “not Amorous Love,” which she describes as “a Disease” (A
True Relation 47). This denial of the erotic elements of her marriage may
exhibit her sense of aristocratic female modesty, but it is also arguably part of a
larger project of Cavendish’s to overcome or erase sexual hierarchy within
marriage. In making this claim, I do not mean to speculate about Cavendish’s
personal or sex life; rather, I examine how her texts present alternatives to sex
in order to rethink marriage through textual representation and collaboration.
Heterosexual sex involves differently gendered bodies that contemporary
discourses about marriage and gender declared unequal. However, these
discourses wavered when it came to issues of spiritual equality. Frances E.
Dolan discusses one of the tensions within the ideology of companionate
marriage, looking to Genesis, as many early modern commentators do, to
argue that “spiritual equality qualified Eve to be the sort of helpmeet to Adam
the other animals could not be,” but also that “her capacity for independent
choice and action was then crucial to her role in the fall” (44). According to
early modern marriage tracts, “spiritual equality and social inequality,
submission and conscientious judgment” (44) coexisted as part of a paradoxical
definition of marriage. As Constance Jordan succinctly puts it, “a woman was
supposed to be both men’s spiritual equal and his political subordinate” (248).3
Cavendish herself briefly mentions the spiritual equality of the sexes in The
Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666) when the
immaterial spirits tell the Empress “that there was no difference of Sexes
amongst them” (216). If husbands and wives are supposed to be spiritual equals,
then a sexless union of minds radically revises contemporary discourses about
marriage by eliminating the gendered bodies upon which marital hierarchy is
founded. At the same time, this kind of union makes room for varieties of
spiritual eroticism that, in Cavendish’s work, include both erotic love for her
husband’s soul and erotic love between women.4
Looking at Cavendish’s opus through the lens of collaborative marriage
opens new readings of her relationship with Newcastle: by aligning him with
the marital discourses in her plays, Cavendish turns their real-life relationship
into a literary re-examination of the marital relation.5 Critics have tended to
read Cavendish’s life writing in order to study the actual dynamics of her
relationship with Newcastle, leading them to read her other works with their
own reconstruction of the marriage in mind.6 Critics such as Hilda L. Smith,
an historian, and Emma L. E. Rees, a literary critic, examine Cavendish’s ideas
regarding royalist state politics; both see her as actively engaged with the
politics of her government. My study shifts this political focus onto
Cavendish’s writing on marriage. While Cavendish’s life writing takes her
own marriage as a model for marital revision, the two plays I examine represent
marriage as a relationship that affects the whole state. My approach aligns
most closely with that of Karen L. Raber, who also examines Cavendish’s life
writing and several of her plays. Raber positions Cavendish’s work in the
historical context of war and exile, arguing that Cavendish and Newcastle
struggle with each other in their collaborative work, each attempting to assert
his or her own agenda during this politically unstable time. She suggests that,
in the plays on which Cavendish and Newcastle collaborate, they establish “a
subtle blend of marital harmony and gendered one-upsmanship that
uncomfortably calls attention to Newcastle’s collaboration and makes him
subject to his wife’s literary production” (481). Raber focuses on the sites of
conflict in this writing and on a dialogue she sees established within their
collaborative work in order to understand Cavendish’s literary relationship
with her husband and her own identity as a writer. Building on Raber’s work,
I extend the focus on Newcastle’s role in Cavendish’s writing to the larger
social and political implications of the many re-workings of the marital
relationship that appear in Cavendish’s texts. Cavendish not only engages in
dialogue with her husband in her life writing, plays, and prefaces, but also
enters a cultural debate on how to define marriage.
For Cavendish, figurations of marriage are closely connected to collabora-
tive authorship, and I argue that she creates a unique form of collaboration
through the intricate relationship she establishes between herself, as an author,
and her husband, who appears as both a character in, and a second author of,
her texts.7 Jeffrey Masten analyzes a material oddity in Cavendish’s Plays Never
Before Printed (1668) in which Newcastle’s contributions are marked off by
paste-on slips of paper. He conjectures that Cavendish pasted the slips on her-
self (“Material Cavendish” 64) and that they place boundaries around New-
castle’s voice and intentionally portray him as an afterthought (58). Here, Mas-
ten returns to a topic he first addressed in the final chapter of his book Textual
Intercourse, a study that pioneered new ways to study literary collaboration
among men by examining the erotic and reproductive language of male col-
laboration. He sees in Cavendish’s collaboration with Newcastle a shift in dis-
cursive formulations of collaborative authorship in the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury that “demonstrates the emergence of male-female collaboration out of the
prior discourse of homoerotic friendship” (Textual Intercourse 158), a discourse
that he sees in, for example, the collaborative work of Beaumont and Fletcher.
Cavendish’s writing, then, reformulates collaboration as part of “the discourse
of companionate marriage” (158). Masten rightly notes Cavendish’s innovative
language for her work with her husband, but since his goal in this chapter is to
trace a shift away from early-seventeenth-century homoerotic formulations of
collaborative authorship rather than to analyze Cavendish’s literary relation-
ship with her husband, he does not explore the new set of problems the phrase
“companionate marriage” poses when applied to collaborative authorship.
While Cavendish, as a woman, does complicate earlier models of homosocial
or homoerotic collaboration, as Masten suggests, I argue that she creates an
entirely new discourse of collaborative authorship by incorporating her assess-
ment of the marital relation into her views on co-authorship. This article builds
on Masten’s chapter and article to discover precisely how and to what ends
Cavendish simultaneously addresses marriage and authorship in her work.8
The dynamics of the ideal companionate marriage were debated in
Cavendish’s time as they are in ours, and although Cavendish repeatedly
describes her marriage to Newcastle in loving and companionate terms, the
marriage metaphor necessarily troubles the partnership of collaboration: as we
have seen, marriage is a union of two people whose genders, according to most
seventeenth-century commentators, render them unequal in key ways.

However, Protestant marriage tracts also insisted that husbands and wives
should be helpmeets with a relative degree of equality.9 This ambiguity enables
Cavendish to construct a collaborative relationship with Newcastle in their
work, but it also problematizes the ways this relationship can be represented.
Cavendish’s textual collaborations with Newcastle simultaneously uphold and
challenge emergent discourses of companionate marriage in which
husbands and wives were intended by God to be companions and help-

meets, each with his or her own distinct realm of labor and contribution to
family welfare . . . The overall effect of companionate discourses was to con-
struct the family as essentially private, autonomous, and effective, rather
than public and permeable to kin and community. (Traub 259–60)10
When Cavendish applies the language of companionate marriage to

collaborative authorship, she certainly envisions herself and her husband
working together, each contributing individual talents to the texts. However,
they work together rather than in “distinct realm[s],” and Cavendish’s prolific
publication makes this relationship fully public, working against the supposed
privacy of companionate marriage, as some historians of the family describe it.
Perhaps most relevant to Cavendish’s situation as a wife and a writer is Dolan’s
argument that “marriage is an economy of scarcity in which there is only room
for one full person” and that, therefore, “for one spouse marriage and selfhood
are mutually constitutive and for the other [usually the wife] marriage and
selfhood are radically incompatible” (3–4). In her writing, Cavendish struggles
against this formulation of marriage that denies the wife’s selfhood. She marks
her work off from Newcastle’s to ensure that they both retain their names and
authorial identities within the space of the text, just as she envisions them both
retaining individual identities within the marriage.
“Our Wits Join as in Matrimony”:

Collaborative Authorship Defining Marriage
In the prefatory materials to her 1662 volume of plays, Cavendish provides the
following note to her readers about her husband’s contributions to this
publication:
My Lord was pleased to illustrate my Playes with some scenes of his own
wit, to which I have set his name, that my Readers may know which are
his, as not to couzen them, in thinking they are mine; also Songs, to which
my Lord’s name is set, for I being no Lyrick Poet, my Lord supplied that
defect of my Brain with the superfluity of his own Brain; thus our Wits
join as in Matrimony, my Lords the Masculine, mine the Feminine Wit,
which is no small glory to me, that we are Married, Souls, Bodies, and
Brains, which is a treble marriage, united in one Love, which I hope is not
in the power of Death to dissolve; for Souls may love, and Wit may live,
though Bodies die. (“To the Readers” A6)
This acknowledgment of her husband’s hand in a volume that includes only her
name on the title page allows Cavendish to construct a collaborative marriage
through collaborative authorship while asserting her own individual identity
within those two relationships. Indeed, this individuality is the key difference
between collaborative marriage and companionate marriage: souls, bodies,
and brains all exist in the plural in a collaborative marriage, eliding the tradi-
tional “two become one” marriage paradigm. Cavendish states that she does
not want to “couzen” her readers by not acknowledging the duke’s writing, but
marking off Newcastle’s voice more importantly ensures that she does not
“couzen” herself—allowing readers to confuse his voice with hers would dis-
rupt her project to become a singular individual who actively fashions her own
identity as a person and as a writer.11 Her image of a “treble marriage” gives the
husband and wife the opportunity to maintain individuality even as she and
Newcastle join their “souls, bodies, and brains.”
Cavendish’s concern that her readers distinguish her husband’s writing
from her own not only impacts this new formulation of collaborative marriage
but also revises dominant contemporary definitions of collaborative author-
ship. Central to Masten’s argument in Textual Intercourse is that seventeenth-
century male playwrights “wrote within a paradigm that insistently figured
writing as mutual imitation, collaboration, and homoerotic exchange” (9).
Cavendish, as a woman writer, troubles all three of these definitions of writing.
Her claims of “singularity” show an attempt to reject imitation: in The Blazing
World Cavendish figures this rejection in terms of the Duchess’s decision not
to follow any of the models for an ideal society laid out by her male predeces-
sors and contemporaries in the creation of her own world in her mind.12 When
Cavendish collaborates, she does so with her husband in a relationship that
contemporary notions of gender difference render unequal compared to col-

laboration between two men. And while the model of two men writing to-
gether creates a space for homoerotic play and punning, Cavendish specifically
de-eroticizes her own marriage. Mami Adachi calls attention to Cavendish’s
“departure from Elizabethan and Jacobean practices of collaboration in which
collaborators often did not precisely identify their respective contributions . . .
the ideal collaboration was a seamless whole, which precluded the identifica-
tion of authorship” (73–74). By interrupting the flow of the “seamless whole,”
Cavendish shows a greater concern for intellectual property than most earlier
and contemporary writers; her notes of authorial attribution set her apart
from both her husband and her predecessors.
As ideas about marriage were changing during the seventeenth century, so
were ideas about authorship and intellectual property. Cavendish, as a woman,
participated in this shift in unique ways and had a different set of issues at
stake than her male contemporaries. Adrian Johns argues in his study of the
term “piracy” that the printing press began to change the way people thought
about authorship through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: “precisely
when authorship took on a mantle of public authority, through the crafts of the
printed book, its violation came to be seen as a paramount transgression” (19).
What exactly constituted transgression was not clearly articulated during
Cavendish’s time, but complaints became more and more frequent, according
to Johns, especially through the political upheavals of war and parliamentary
rule (30). Similarly, Joseph Loewenstein argues that “authorial assertions of
property [grew] more common” throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries (168). Loewenstein analyzes Ben Jonson’s and John Milton’s feelings
about author rights and stationer rights to make this claim, but Cavendish’s
concern over separating her writing from her husband’s fits into this shift in
the cultural importance of authorship and at the same time addresses a larger
social problem that denied women property rights. As Jordan argues, full po-
litical equality between a husband and wife could not be realized during the
seventeenth century because women did not control their own money and
property (250). Coverture assumed a woman and everything she owned be-
came a part of her husband’s property after marriage and comprised a key ele-
ment of the ideology of companionate marriage during Cavendish’s life; a
woman herself became property, in a sense, once she was “covered” by her hus-
band’s identity. Though a wife’s intellectual property may also have fallen to
her husband in the public eye, Cavendish’s control over her texts can be read as
an attempt to regulate her intellectual property at this moment of its increased

importance in a way she could not regulate other physical property such as
land. Examining her notes of authorial attribution with this historical point in
mind perhaps explains why this issue is more important to Cavendish than to
her male predecessors and contemporaries.
Seemingly disparate issues involving property rights and heteronormative
sexuality come into conflict frequently throughout Cavendish’s work. I will
analyze two of Cavendish’s plays, including The Convent of Pleasure, in the next
section, but a brief look ahead will help us better understand what is at stake in
Cavendish’s subordination of heterosexuality in favor of a more complex intel-
lectual eroticism in her life writing and prefaces.13 Analyzing The Convent of
Pleasure, Erin Lang Bonin states that “the play’s early scenes represent mar-
riage as a purely economic arrangement, in which the wife is the losing partner.
As part of its disavowal of matrimonial romance, the play situates sexual desire
in explicitly feminine terms” (347), by which she means desire between two
women. In this play, heterosexual love is actually a property exchange that
gives the husband a superior position over his wife; paradoxically, heterosexu-
ality therefore must disappear in order to establish a truly collaborative mar-
riage, and female-female desire replaces heteronormative desire for part of this
play. Cavendish similarly writes property exchange out of her marriage in her
life writing and replaces it with spiritual and intellectual collaboration, but as
she does so she also downplays the importance of reproductive sex in her mar-
riage. While Protestant writers were extolling the virtues of chaste married
sex, Cavendish was relocating marital virtue to a textual space. By rhetorically
removing heterosexual sexuality and, implicitly, a sexual hierarchy, from rep-
resentations of her marriage in some of her writings, Cavendish claims to pro-
duce a marriage of equal minds and equal souls.14
The textual representations of Cavendish’s marriage that appear through-
out her life writing pursue this idea of a sexless marriage on the page. In A
True Relation, Cavendish divulges how she feared marriage and men, yet she
married Newcastle because “my Affections were fix’d on him, and he was the
onely Person I ever was in love with: Neither was I ashamed to own it, but
gloried therein, for it was not Amorous Love, I never was infected therewith,
it is a Disease, or a Passion, or both, I onely know by relation . . . but my Love
was honest and honourable” (47). She credits love and portrays their marriage
as a true love match that, paradoxically, gains its credibility, in her depiction,
from its lack of erotic passion. Thus, Cavendish seems specifically to counter
contemporary marital discourse that, as Traub describes it, “intensifies the

erotic relation between spouses” (265). However, the “Affections” mentioned
here as well as the intense desire the Duchess of Newcastle feels for her hus-
band in The Blazing World speak to a disembodied form of spiritual eroticism
that exists at the level of the text: the Duchess begs to visit her husband be-
cause she feels “an extreme desire to converse with the soul of her noble Lord
and dear Husband” (219). The “extreme desire” the Duchess feels is for her
husband’s soul and his conversation, not his body. Cavendish thus describes
their love in erotic but nonsexual terms; eroticism and sex are not the same in
these texts. While Traub sees a shift to compulsory heterosexuality in mar-
riage during the seventeenth century, Cavendish nuances the marital relation
in such a way that it does not need heterosexuality at all.
Sex, however, takes on a different role when Cavendish retells the story of
her marriage from Newcastle’s point of view in The Life of William. This brief
passage in The Life presents a single reason why Newcastle married her: “he
resolved to chuse me for his second wife; for he, having but two sons, purposed
to marry me, a young woman that might prove fruitful to him and increase his
posterity by masculine offspring” (63). Here, all of Cavendish’s value rests on
the reproductive potential of her female body, not her prolific brain.15 She por-
trays the marriage as less romantic and less spiritually equal from her hus-
band’s point of view than from her own in A True Relation because he focuses
on her gendered body; this text thus seems to undermine the image of their
collaborative marriage in A True Relation. However, her act of writing also
shows her command over her husband’s thoughts and her ability to see into his
mind to determine his motivation for the marriage. She troubles the image of
their equal marriage by pointing out the vast age difference between them and
by casting her wifely role as primarily reproductive rather than companionate,
but in this moment she also reasserts herself by becoming the author of her
husband’s thoughts and motives.16
Cavendish sustains a tension between obedient wife and singular author
throughout the biography of Newcastle, carefully managing her dual position
as his wife and the writer of his biography. She says in the preface that she has
told her husband’s history “according to his Lordship’s commands,” making
him a sort of author behind her authorship (17). She also begins her dedication
to Newcastle with a description of herself as a wife first and an historian sec-
ond: “It hath always been my hearty prayer to God, since I have been your wife,
that first I might prove an honest and good wife . . . next, that God would be
pleased to enable me to set forth and declare to after-ages, the truth of your
loyal actions and endeavours, for the service of your King and country” (4).
Although “wife” comes before “writer” here, Cavendish links the two by stat-
ing that she first had to become Newcastle’s wife before she could write his
history. The fourth book of The Life of William is subtitled “Containing Sev-
eral Essays and Discourses Gathered from the mouth of My Noble Lord and
Husband With some few Notes of mine own” (149). She begins this section of
pithy sayings with “I have heard My Lord say,” and indicates that many of his
wise sayings on good government came from conversations between husband
and wife in their home. As his wife, Cavendish casts herself as particularly
qualified to write his history because she has access to him in the home, the
most intimate setting in which he supposedly expresses his thoughts most
honestly. This depiction of honesty also speaks to the political function of this
narrative: to remind readers, among them Charles II, of everything Newcastle
has done for his “King and country.” As Raber suggests, Cavendish thereby
re-states and perhaps reclaims Newcastle’s aristocratic identity that had suf-
fered after the war.17 Cavendish therefore also indirectly refutes the notion
present in the telling of the marriage from Newcastle’s perspective that a wife’s
only role is to produce children. Although the marriage produced no heirs,
Cavendish perhaps better “increase[d] his posterity” by writing a text that
sought to restore both his reputation and his lost assets.18
In addition to the stories of their marriage, Cavendish tells other parallel
narratives in both A True Relation and The Life of William. She dwells on the
couple’s financial difficulties during their time in exile on the Continent, and,
significantly, both narratives describe her trip to England during this time to
ask Parliament for the return of some of her husband’s lands. Newcastle re-
mains in Antwerp while she travels to London with his brother, Charles Cav-
endish. Cavendish tells this story briefly in A True Relation, stating, “when I
came there, I found their hearts as hard as my fortunes, and their Natures as
cruel as my miseries” because Parliament had already sold the land (51). She
complains, “I received neither gold nor silver from them, only an absolute re-
fusal” (51). Here, she casts herself as a victim by stressing Parliament’s cruelty
toward her, a poor woman. The rest of the story in this narrative focuses on
Cavendish’s dignity, on her refusal to beg, and on the way “I whispereingly
spoke to my brother to conduct me out of that ungentlemanly place” (51).
In contrast, the telling of this event in The Life of William describes in
more depth the day-to-day details of this trip. She and Charles run out of
money on the journey and are “forced to stay at Southwark” until they can
pawn Charles’s watch; they later have to live on credit (76). Cavendish details
her own experience with Parliament as well as Charles’s attempts to reclaim
his own lands, and she describes how Bolsover, one of Newcastle’s estates, was
sold and partly demolished before Charles could buy it back (77–78). While
Cavendish does interrupt this narrative to remind her readers that Newcastle
continued to live on credit back on the Continent during the year and a half
she and Charles were away, these pages largely detail Cavendish’s own
thoughts and actions at a time when she was physically separated from the
man whose biography she is writing. The changes from A True Relation to The
Life of William reflect a shift in Cavendish’s interest in preserving her own
dignity to Newcastle’s interest in his finances and estates, but this section of
The Life of William is really about Cavendish and her efforts. She acts on be-
half of her husband, who cannot return to England himself because Parlia-
ment considers him “the greatest Traitor to the state” (True Relation 51). Trav-
eling, acting, and speaking for Newcastle, Cavendish herself becomes integral
to his life story at this juncture, and thus her story supersedes his. She focuses
on different details when she writes for him than when she writes for herself,
but this part of the narrative remains about her and her actions.
Cavendish’s autobiographical text, A True Relation, was published twice: at
the beginning of her career and again at the end. The tension between singular
authorship and inspiration from Newcastle runs through both this text and its
publication history, signaling continued struggle with a dual identity as wife
and writer throughout her career. She first published A True Relation with
Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life in 1656, and then again in
1667, appended to The Life of William. It did not appear with the second edition
of Natures Pictures in 1671; this absence leads Sara Mendelson to argue that in
1671 Cavendish “suppressed her prose memoir without supplying a new version
to take its place, for her 1667 Life of the duke contains hardly any material
about Cavendish herself ” (202). Mendelson sees the second publication of A
True Relation as an afterthought to Newcastle’s biography: “in the epic expanse
of the Life of the duke, her own autobiography was reduced to a miniscule part
of the whole, narrated virtually as a third-person appendage” (202). However,
Cavendish’s voice actually dominates The Life of William. She uses the pro-
nouns “I” and “we” throughout to remind readers that this biography is told
from her point of view. Additionally, I argue that Cavendish had no reason to
re-publish the text in 1671; rather than suppressing it, she relocated it in 1667. In
1656, the text introduced Cavendish to readers and declared her authorship of
Natures Pictures. By then joining her own history with her husband’s eleven
years later, she ensures that she plays a key role in his narrative and keeps him
from fully taking center stage in his own history. He needs her as both his au-
thor and as an integral part of his life. Elspeth Graham suggests that the Life of
William is “a further version of her [Cavendish’s] own story” (131) and argues
that “each of these texts is written . . . to mark both her relationship to, and her
identity as separate from, her husband” (146). In joining their two written his-
tories, Cavendish in a sense marries them in print, making their published
selves inseparable and situating their domestic relationship within the world of
printed texts.
Significantly, when Cavendish moves her life story to make it a part of her
husband’s biography, she individuates herself from him in the same moment
she joins their two lives together. The narratives are parallel and reflect many of
the same experiences, but they focus on two quite obviously different individu-
als. Even as she marries them in print, it is important that she writes a history
for each of them rather than one “Life of the Cavendishes.” The two texts, pub-
lished as one volume, work together as a paradoxically divided whole that tells
a similar story from different angles, thus also appearing as an early experi-
ment with point of view. For Cavendish, a wife’s separate and unique point of
view is significant enough to include with her husband’s biography, especially
when she is the author of both stories.
A True Relation sustains the complex connection between Cavendish’s two
identities as a wife and a writer by focusing on her domestic home as the site of
both her literary production and her relationship with Newcastle and by often
turning praise of her husband into an opportunity to discuss her own writing.
On several occasions, she moves suddenly from adoration of her husband to a
reflection on her own identity as a writer, in one instance stating, “not that I
speak much, because I am addicted to contemplation, unless I am with my
Lord, yet then I rather attentively listen to what he says, than impertinently
speak, yet when I am writing . . . I am forc’d many times to express [my ideas]
with the tongue before I can write them with the pen” (55). A description of her
dutiful role as a silent wife quickly becomes a reflection on her own highly ver-
bal writing process. Even more powerfully, as she begins the conclusion of her
own narrative, she writes, “Neither can I say I think the time tedious, when I
am alone, so I be neer my Lord, and know he is well: But now I have declared to
my Readers, my Birth, Breeding, and Actions, to this part of my Life” (59). Both
quotations suddenly move from an image of an adoring wife to one of an author

who writes her own unique thoughts and confidently “declare[s]” herself to her
readers. Newcastle’s placement before these statements of authorship estab-
lishes the husband as an inspiration for the wife’s literary production but also,
as Raber notes, resolutely makes him her subject: “he may be her lord, but New-
castle, in her plays and in her other texts, becomes her lord, the creation of her
pen” (492). Marriage inspires Cavendish to write, but she also subordinates her
husband to her own creativity by inscribing him in her work and making public
the privacy of their domestic home and relationship.
Marital Collaboration in The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious
Cavendish and her husband appear as characters through whom Cavendish

investigates the meanings of marriage in her life writing, but drama allows her
to continue this exploration in a new genre that offers a different set of conven-
tions and possibilities. Her plays often comment on the misfortunes of mar-
ried women and imagine new formulations of marriage that establish greater
equality between husband and wife or even privilege the wife. Drama gives
Cavendish the opportunity to extend the experiment with point of view in the
publication of The Life of William; she creates other characters and explores
their situations, motives, and how they react to social and ideological pres-
sures. As in her prefaces and life writing, heteronormative sexuality is contin-
uously subordinated as characters search for other terms on which to found a
collaborative marriage, but sex is nonetheless present in the plays and hetero-
sexuality reasserts itself by the plays’ ends. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) ques-
tions whether a woman and a man can ever fully achieve a collaborative mar-
riage. Lady Happy, an heiress who has refused to marry and instead turns her
house into a kind of secular convent for noblewomen, in the end marries a
prince who has entered her convent disguised as a princess. The play, which
largely takes place within an autonomous female community engaged in cross-
dressing, pastoral performances of courtship, and frightening performances
of marriage, does not give Lady Happy’s reasons for marrying the prince and
troubles the idea of wifely agency by nearly silencing her at the end. Further
complicating the marital issues within the play, Cavendish marks several
places in her text where Newcastle contributes songs or whole scenes. Here,
he is more than a creation of Cavendish’s pen, as he is in her prefaces and life
writing: his own, distinct voice blends with and competes with Cavendish’s
authorial voice in the text. A detailed reading of Newcastle’s contributions to

the play sheds some light on the ambiguities of its ending, revealing a complex
authorial relationship in which two voices work both together and in tension
to produce the ending. His songs and scenes are full of sexual puns and are
placed directly before scenes important to the marriage plot, and his presence
in the text ensures the heterosexual marriage at the end and creates a tension
that challenges the radical ideas about marriage Cavendish explores elsewhere
in the play as well as her redefinition of marriage as nonsexual but still produc-
tive. In this way, literary collaboration between a husband and a wife becomes
both a joint production and a competition over the form of the marriage end-
ing and over the definition of marriage itself.
The first half of the play marks no contributions by Newcastle, and Caven-
dish uses that space to explore alternatives to heterosexual marriage. Lady
Happy enters her convent saying that even if she married the best of men, “yet
would a Marry’d life have more crosses and sorrows then pleasure, freedom, or
happiness” (1.2.20–21), all of which she finds in the female society of her con-
vent. A series of vignettes performed for Lady Happy and the Princess brings
these “crosses and sorrows” to life in the form of unfaithful husbands, eco-
nomic troubles, and death in childbirth (3.1–3.10). As Katherine Kellett as-
serts, “the women at the convent are able to evade the dangers associated with
marriage as well as the economic hardships that result when they become the
legal property of their husbands” (426). The descriptions of a happy, sexless
marriage in Cavendish’s life writing seek a way around these same hardships
without actually avoiding marriage as the women in the convent attempt to do.
Cavendish instead writes heterosexual sex out of her own marriage, a strategy
that enables her to create within her texts a marriage of souls and minds with-
out the legal and physical subjection articulated by Convent’s vignettes.
The subordination of sex within a marriage between a man and a woman in
Cavendish’s life writing translates into a full experimentation with erotic rela-
tionships between women in The Convent of Pleasure. Bonin sees the vignettes
mentioned earlier, along with the mirrors placed around the convent, as meth-
ods of redirecting women’s desire away from men and onto the female body
(348–49). The Princess’s relationship with Lady Happy soon comes to illus-
trate the benefits of a romantic relationship between two women. The audience
does not know that the Princess is really the Prince until the end of act 4, so the
courtship that takes place prior looks like a lesbian relationship.19 Lady Happy
and the Princess discuss what form a physical relationship between two women
might take:
PRINCESS. Then let us please ourselves, as harmless Lovers use to do.

LADY HAPPY. How can harmless Lovers please themselves?
PRINCESS. Why very well, as, to discourse, imbrace and kiss, so mingle
souls together.
LADY HAPPY. But innocent Lovers do not use to kiss.
PRINCESS. Not any act more frequent amongst us Women-kind; nay, it
were a sin in friendship, should not we kiss: then let us not prove our-
selves Reprobates. (Convent 118)
The stage direction here indicates that they “imbrace and kiss” at this moment.
Traub rightly notes that this kiss functions as both a symbol of female friend-
ship and an eroticized sign of the growing love between the two female charac-
ters. She also points out that since Cavendish does not reveal the Prince’s gen-
der until later in the play, this latter reading depends on the reader’s lack of
knowledge in a way that, for example, Shakespeare’s cross-dressing plays do
not, since his audiences know the characters’ “real” identities from the begin-
ning (179). Keeping her readers in the dark, then, enables Cavendish to cast love
between two women as truly equal collaboration. For example, Lady Happy
and the Princess pledge themselves to each other:
PRINCESS. In amourous Pastoral Verse we did not Woo.

As other Pastoral Lovers use to doo.
LADY HAPPY. Which doth express, we shall more constant be,
And in a Married life better agree. (122)
The female lovers depart from tradition, here figured as the genre “Pastoral
Verse,” in their courtship, but they also depart from the tradition of hetero-
sexual marriage by loving each other instead of loving men. This new “genre” of
marriage, according to their pledge, both ensures their compatibility and re-
flects the spiritual elements of the collaborative marriage Cavendish depicts in
her prefaces and life writing.
However, if a truly collaborative marriage can only occur between two
women in this play, then Newcastle’s contributions close down this possibility
by driving the play toward its heterosexual ending. While the Prince remains
disguised until the end, Newcastle is present at the level of the text through
the second half of the play. His first song appears just before the Prince’s reve-
lation of himself to the audience and perhaps catalyzes this event, dispelling
the fantasy (or fear) of a marriage between two women. However, keeping in
mind Cavendish’s fascination with point of view, Newcastle’s intrusions into
her text may be Cavendish writing as him, likely with his endorsement, rather
than Newcastle himself. As it is impossible to know who actually wrote any
part of this play, it is important to keep in mind the many authorial possibili-
ties. In another publication, Cavendish does use Newcastle’s presence as the
beloved husband of the Duchess in The Blazing World to keep the Empress
and the Duchess from establishing a romantic relationship. The Empress and
the Duchess are described as “being like several parts of one united body,” hav-
ing “such an intimate friendship between them, that they became Platonick
Lovers although there were both Females” (210–11). The erotic and marital
metaphors that describe their relationship forge a space in which they could
potentially create a collaborative marriage of their own. However, the Duchess
is always anxious to return to her home, several times asking permission to do
so because “she long’d to be with her dear Lord and Husband” (248). The pres-
ence of his character forces the Duchess to move back and forth between Eng-
land and the “blazing world,” creating a physical and emotional distance be-
tween the two women. As in The Blazing World, Newcastle, or his persona,
may stop the experimentation with new forms of marriage in The Convent of
Pleasure, but he also serves what may well be Cavendish’s literary goals of pro-
ducing a socially and generically acceptable ending.
Newcastle’s first marked contribution to The Convent of Pleasure is a
pastoral speech in act 4. Lady Happy and the Princess have just been crowned
king and queen of the May festival, and a shepherd makes a speech penned by
the duke, ending, “For Dancing heretofore has got more Riches / Then we can
find in all our Shepherd’s Breeches” (123). This sexual punning is typical of
Newcastle’s writing, as we can see when Madam Mediator describes the
Prince’s discovery to the men in a full scene marked with Newcastle’s name
(129-31). In both examples, Newcastle’s light-hearted portrayal of hetero-
sexuality stands against the fatal picture of heterosexual marriage Cavendish
paints in the earlier vignettes. Heterosexuality, a serious problem for
Cavendish, is a joke for Newcastle. Most significantly, the pun in his song also
introduces a reading of the play that counters the homoeroticism of the
courtship scene penned by Cavendish. In this version, Lady Happy has already
discovered that the Princess is a man, and the pun on “got” as either “gotten” or
“begotten” in the line “Dancing heretofore has got more Riches” arguably
alludes to a pregnancy that has resulted from the dancing and other
entertainments Lady Happy has enjoyed with the “Princess.” In these two
lines, Newcastle’s contributions work in tension with Cavendish’s efforts, both
within this play and elsewhere in her writing, to establish a marriage without
heterosexuality and the production of children: in this play, penned by wife
and husband, heterosexual reproduction is inevitable, even when the audience
does not yet know that the Princess is really a prince.
The Prince reveals himself as a man right after Newcastle’s two songs, but,
since Cavendish does not mark where her husband’s voice ends, the authorship
of this crucial scene remains ambiguous. The Prince’s words align in many
ways with Cavendish’s concerns about gender hierarchy within marriage: “my
Kingdom wants me, not only to rule and govern it, but to defend it: But what is
a Kingdom in comparison of a Beautiful Mistress?” (123). The syntax here cre-
ates a double reading in which the Prince chooses love over his duty to rule, or
he equates Lady Happy with the kingdom as something he must govern. How-
ever, the rest of the scene continues in the vein of Newcastle’s song that posits a
potential pregnancy. Lady Happy begs the gods, “O strike me dead here in this
place / Rather then fall into disgrace” (124), and when the Princess enters,
Madam Mediator knowingly says, “your Highness hath sported too much I
fear. . . . the Lady Happy looks not well, she is become pale and lean” (124). The
meaning here remains ambiguous: Lady Happy’s statement and symptoms
could result from the “disgrace” of loving another woman, or from a pregnancy.
Indeed, in this convent pregnancy would likely occasion the larger disgrace.
Whether or not the duke wrote or collaborated on this scene, his contributions
earlier in the play have produced meanings that compete with those on the
surface of Cavendish’s text. I do not mean to argue that his contributions sim-
ply undermine Cavendish’s authorship from within a text that bears only her
name on the title page; rather, working simultaneously together and in tension,
the two create a unique form of collaborative authorship in which multiple au-
thors manipulate the structure of the play itself, multiplying meanings and
producing a richer exploration of the possibilities for marital relationships.
Modern critics and readers are frequently disappointed in the play’s end-
ing, but understanding Newcastle’s role in this text helps us make sense of Lady
Happy’s marriage to the Prince.20 Given a second look, Lady Happy’s possible
pregnancy reinforces, rather than undermines, Cavendish’s search for forms of
marriage that subordinate heterosexual sex. Though the marriage can be read
as a happy ending, many see it as a misfortune. The potential pregnancy thus
underscores the problems Cavendish finds with heterosexuality and therefore
bolsters her subordination of it: heterosexual sex produces pregnancy, which

forces women into unhappy marriages and endangers their health. While most
of her Protestant contemporaries were extolling married sex and reproduction,
Cavendish was pointing out the problems they could cause for wives. Kellett’s
reading of The Convent of Pleasure illustrates Cavendish’s subtle destabilization
of a heterosexuality that the play cannot completely eliminate. Reading Con-
vent in relation to Judith Butler’s theories of performance and performativity,
Kellett argues that “Cavendish’s characters cannot escape the power relations
in which they are embedded, but they can performatively resist them, render-
ing heterosexual hegemony not a stable structure but a flexible one” (436). Be-
fore Newcastle’s contributions, the play explores the possibilities of women liv-
ing without marriage and of a marriage between two women. However, when a
married woman and man collaborate on the ending, together they produce a
heterosexual marriage.21 The play’s form thus demonstrates one type of hetero-
sexual dramatic collaboration in which the husband and wife produce compet-
ing subtexts that resolve into one ending.22
The Religious (1662), from Cavendish’s earlier set of published plays, pro-
vides a counterpoint to the ambiguous marriage at the end of The Convent of
Pleasure. Cavendish does not mark any contributions from Newcastle in this
play, though Masten notes that she marks his authorship in other plays in the
same volume (“Material Cavendish” 55). Cavendish publishes this play, then,
entirely in her own voice. In this text, she uses remarriage (a concept that paral-
lels her own marriage, a remarriage for Newcastle) to re-think the definition of
a collaborative marriage. Lady Perfection and Lord Melancholy, forced by
Melancholy’s father to separate shortly after their marriage, create a new form
of marriage at the end of the play when they re-commit to each other. Lord
Melancholy’s father had forced him to marry another woman, but she, fulfill-
ing the fears of heterosexuality expressed in the vignettes in The Convent of
Pleasure, dies giving birth to Lord Melancholy’s son (The Religious 548). When
Lord Melancholy marries this woman, Lady Perfection enters a cloister so that
she will not also be forced to remarry. After the second wife’s death, however,
Lady Perfection and Lord Melancholy decide to reunite themselves through a
simultaneous suicide since Lady Perfection cannot break her vows. Lady Per-
fection proposes that Lord Melancholy
get a Sword pointed sharp at both ends, and when we are to dye put one
end of the Sword through this grate, and just when you set your heart to
the end toward you, I will set mine to the end towards me, and thrusting
forward as to meet each other, the several points will make several passages
or wounds into our several or rather our own united hearts, and so we dye
just together. (551)
This highly eroticized simultaneous penetration will remarry them through a

violent consummation and also collapse the gender distinctions, as they will
both penetrate and be penetrated. They undress for this moment, and Lord
Melancholy describes it as a “second Marriage” that will “ joyn our Souls” (553).
The remarriage, occurring at the moment of an intensely eroticized death,
paradoxically becomes bodiless and sexless, a collaboration in bodily destruc-
tion and spiritual unification that seems to realize the vision of the desexual-
ized, conversation-based marital relationship articulated in Cavendish’s pref-
aces and life writing.
However, when two religious fathers enter and stop Lady Perfection and
Lord Melancholy’s mutual suicide, the pair again re-thinks marriage and their
relationship. One of the fathers suggests that Lord Melancholy also “make the
same Vow, and enter into the same Cloyster, and into the same Religious Order
of Chastity” (553). The cloister becomes a space for re-envisioning marriage,
separate from the demands of family and the state. As the Arch-Prince re-
flects, “Indeed happiness lives more in cloysters than in Courts or Cities, or
private families” (555). Away from public and private obligations, the cloister
can be a space of marital collaboration free of sexual as well as social hierar-
chies. The father stresses, “First you shall make your Vow, then take a Reli-
gious Habit, and then be re-married” (554), showing Lord Melancholy the im-
portance of going through these steps in the right order. The collaborative
remarriage can only occur in the space of this cloister, which seems more iso-
lated and therefore more open to new forms of marriage than Lady Happy’s
easily penetrated convent.23 Like the space of Cavendish’s texts, the cloister be-
comes a space in which wife and husband can author alternative versions of
collaborative marriage.
Even within this encloistered relationship, which seems to be as close as
Cavendish comes to representing a collaborative marriage in her plays, tensions
still exist over heterosexual sex. When Lady Perfection enters her cloister, she
tells her mother, “though I cannot vow Virginity, nor a single life, having a
Husband, and been used as a Wife, yet I can vow Chastity and retirement”
(544). Her vow of chastity represents a return to a virgin-like state, and her
insistence to Lord Melancholy that she cannot break her vows although she
still considers him her husband underscores how seriously she has given up
sex. The religious father, however, presents a slippery definition of chastity that
complicates the sexuality of the play’s ending: he tells Lord Melancholy to
enter “into the same Religious Order of Chastity” as Lady Perfection, but then
continues, “and being Man and Wife you are but as one person, so that if you be
constant and true to your selves, you keep the Vow of Chastity; for what is
more Chast than lawfull Marriage, and Virtuous Man and Wife?” (553).
“Chastity,” in the father’s first use of the word, seems to mean virginity
connected with the religious order, but the definition shifts to faithful married
sex with the next two uses. Lady Perfection responds to this statement by
making a second marriage proposal to Lord Melancholy, asking, “Husband,
are you willing to make the Vow of Chastity, and to live an Incloystered life?”
(553). She adopts the father’s first meaning of chastity, stressing the difficulty of
this proposition, as she invites Lord Melancholy to give up sex in order to join
her. As another character comments, the religious order Lady Perfection
establishes “will make marriage as Religious in life as the marriage of Saints”
(555) by eliminating the bodily but maintaining the spiritual aspects of the vow.
Lord Melancholy, on the other hand, articulates the second meaning of
chastity, answering, “I am all will to that Vow and life, for so I shall enjoy thy
Soul and Body” (553). Lord Melancholy makes clear his intention of moving
sexuality into the space of the cloister.
The tension between the ways the husband and wife interpret the word
“chastity” opens a larger question about how Cavendish negotiates heterosexu-
ality in her plays. The Religious, like The Convent of Pleasure, ends with a mar-
riage between a man and a woman, but is heterosexuality upheld in The Reli-
gious if there is no sex in the cloister? In creating this tension, Cavendish posits
a collaborative union between a man and a woman that would not endanger
women with childbirth, but she also acknowledges that men will have a diffi-
cult time accepting such an arrangement. Lord Dorato wishes the couple well
in their new version of marriage, saying, “I hope God will bless you both, so as
that you may beget a Religious Generation” (556). This generation could be
children, or it could be converts inspired by Lady Perfection and Lord Melan-
choly’s example; the latter interpretation is supported by the Arch-Prince, who
envisions the marriage as “a great Generation, which may spread all over the
world” (556), taking Cavendish’s re-working of marriage to women and their
husbands everywhere. Even without sex, the marriage will reproduce a model
of itself; like the Cavendish marriage and its representations in their shared
texts, this remarriage will be productive, even without sexual reproduction.
Cavendish’s plays, like her life writing, invent and experiment with new
models of marriage that remove the husband and wife from traditional social
roles and hierarchies. Her thoughts on marriage align closely with her thoughts
on authorship in the texts I have examined, leading her to produce a hybrid
relationship I term “collaborative marriage.” The subordination of heteronor-
mative sex crosses the generic boundaries between Cavendish’s life writing and
her plays, enabling her to fashion a marriage of equal minds rather than one of
gendered bodies. However, her life writing makes it clear that in life Cavendish
is a woman married to a man who cannot act out for herself the homoerotic
female relationships or the separatist communities in her plays. Instead, her
literary collaboration with her husband engages them both in a public ex-
change of wit that plays out the bodiless, sexless love in her/their writing. Cav-
endish and Newcastle’s particular form of collaborative authorship thus re-
vises both seventeenth-century collaborative literary practice and conceptions
of marriage, and their relationship straddles boundaries between public and
domestic as Cavendish makes her name as an “Authoress.”
At the very end of A True Relation, Cavendish states her reason for writing
her life story:
neither did I intend this piece for to delight, but to divulge, not to please
the fancy, but to tell the truth lest after-Ages should mistake, in not know-
ing 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. (63)
These final words of Cavendish’s autobiographical text express an anxiety, spe-

cifically tied to her husband, about her identity. Any woman he marries will be
called the Duchess of Newcastle, and, just as Cavendish needs to separate her
identity from her husband’s, she also needs to separate it from the identities of
his other wives, past and, perhaps, future. In this text, remarriage threatens the
wife’s identity rather than allowing her to explore a new kind of marriage, as in
The Religious. In Cavendish’s life, remarriage means replacing wives, and New-
castle’s wives seem eerily indistinct and interchangeable in her formulation.
Cavendish instead traces her identity to her father’s name and her country of
origin, drawing on an identity that existed before her marriage. Her acts of
writing and publication, setting her name to printed texts, ensure her own sec-
ular version of religious generation: Cavendish imagines her texts carrying her
identity and her ideas to a larger, possibly worldwide, audience. Her texts al-
ways tie this identity to Newcastle, reproducing their marital literary collabo-
ration and underscoring Cavendish’s active, ongoing renegotiation of the defi-
nitions of both marriage and collaborative authorship.
Notes
I would like to thank Margaret W. Ferguson for her comments and critiques as this ar-
ticle developed. Many thanks also to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Rare
Book and Manuscript Library staff.
1. Cavendish often uses this specifically gendered term for her writing self, for instance,
at the end of A True Relation: “I answer that [this narrative] is true, that ’tis to no purpose,
to the Readers, but it is to the Authoress, because I write it for my own sake, not theirs”
(63). Though Cavendish publishes her work presumably because she wants it to be read, she
insists that her identity as an Authoress depends only on herself, not on her readers.
2. I use the term “life writing” throughout this article to refer to A True Relation and
The Life of William. This phrase avoids the potentially anachronistic terms “biography”
and “autobiography.”
3. See also Nyquist, who examines writing on marriage from the seventeenth century
that takes vastly different positions on equality between the spouses. All of her sources
draw upon the two different accounts of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 and manipulate the two
creation accounts to see a greater or lesser degree of equality between men and women. She
focuses on Milton, arguing that he reconciles the two creation accounts by using Genesis 2
to explain Genesis 1. In Genesis 2, Milton and other Reformers saw the spiritual element of
marriage “produc[ing] what has the appearance at least of an egalitarian view of the marital
relation” (103). Milton therefore uses Genesis 2 to justify divorce in the case that a husband
and wife (from the husband’s point of view) are spiritually or intellectually incompatible.
4. For example, The Blazing World explores a homoerotic relationship between women
and the possibilities this relationship creates for her female characters to fashion alterna-
tive versions of marriage. The intense friendship between the Empress and the Duchess
in The Blazing World establishes a paradigm for a relationship between two women that
is bodiless (since only the Duchess’s spirit is present) yet erotic in its intensity. Described
as “Platonick Lovers,” they represent the collaborative possibilities of a relationship be-
tween two women (216). Female homoerotic relationships allow Cavendish to explore love
matches without gender hierarchies and thus form a piece of the development of Caven-
dish’s idea of collaborative marriage. Although the Empress and the Duchess do not pur-
sue a sexual relationship, their friendship is characterized by a kind of intellectual eroti-
cism in which they share their entire minds with each other. For a few of the many critical
approaches to homoeroticism in Cavendish’s work, see Bonin; Traub; and Kellett.
5. I follow Raber in referring to Margaret Cavendish by her last name and to William
Cavendish by his title, Duke of Newcastle. I do this both for clarity and to emphasize that
Newcastle’s primary social identity comes from his status as a male aristocrat, while Cav-
endish’s comes from the man to whom she is married.
6. See, for example, Smith and Bennett, who study the political differences between
Cavendish and Newcastle to locate domestic conflict in both their marriage and their writ-
ing. See also Graham, who examines both Cavendish’s life writing and the letters she and
Newcastle exchanged during their courtship to analyze the ways in which they construct
each other in these texts.
7. Literary collaboration between women and men was rare during the early modern
period, but it did occur. For a study of a collaborative relationship between a writer and
an aristocratic woman in sixteenth-century Italy, see Ray. A few decades after Cavendish
ceased publishing, Mary Astell and John Norris published their correspondence, Letters
Concerning the Love of God. See Perry 81–82.
8. Hirschfeld also responds to Masten by taking his arguments in Textual Intercourse
as a starting point and then moving into a more specific analysis of case studies of collab-
orative authorship throughout several decades of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. Her study seeks the “psychic dimensions of collaborative work” by examining
the collaborative trends of particular authors and, most importantly, the commercial con-
ditions of writing for the theater in late Elizabethan and early Stuart England (15).
9. For a discussion of the ambiguity of the term “helpmeet” in these writings, see Dolan
33.
10. This quotation reflects Traub’s summary of early historians of the family, especially
Lawrence Stone. Traub’s own argument sees seventeenth-century marriage less in terms
of public and private spaces and more as a growing eroticization of the domestic couple.
11. Raber also reminds us that Newcastle wrote and collaborated on plays and that he
was a great patron of the theater (477). Cavendish, then, may need to set herself apart from
her husband as an author as well as an individual within a marriage.
12. After trying and discarding numerous models laid out by thinkers such as Pythago-
ras, Aristotle, and Descartes, the narrator of The Blazing World tells us: “at last, when the
Duchess saw that no patterns would do her any good in the framing of her World; she was
resolved to make a World of her own invention” (215). Bennett argues additionally that
Cavendish “deliberately disdains the practice of borrowing either subject material or liter-
ary style from previous writers” (181), showing a rejection of other, less-formalized types of
collaboration in which Shakespeare, Jonson, and even Newcastle engaged. Loewenstein,
however, highlights a paradox of imitation: “to an extent, all aesthetic practice is deeply imi-
tative, more committed to replicating other aesthetic objects than to mimesis, but in highly
competitive environments, in which a culture of severe connoisseurship can flourish, imita-
tion is vulnerable to remapping as overproduction” (87). We cannot necessarily take at face
value Cavendish’s declarations that she rejects imitation, just as her decision to publish and
her extensive prefaces belie the claims of shyness on which she insists in A True Relation.
13. For a discussion of the terminology early modernists use to talk about what today
we call homosexuality and heterosexuality, see Traub; Dolan; and Halperin. Dolan suc-
cinctly summarizes the problems these terms create when applied to the early modern
period: “historians of sexuality have shown that neither the terms nor the categories of
‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ existed in the early modern period; sexual practices did
not necessarily translate into identities; and sexual identities were therefore less rigidly
defined, less legible, than they are today” (135). I use these terms not to describe fixed
identities but rather to name relationships between people of the same or opposite sex.
When used to describe a marriage, “heterosexual” expresses both the sex act between a
man and a woman and the ideologies regarding gender and marriage attached to that act.
For example, as Rich and Bach have argued, heterosexuality operates as an ideology that
subordinates women to men. Rich describes “the institution of heterosexuality itself as a
beachhead of male dominance,” arguing that heterosexuality cannot simply refer to sexual
relations between a man and a woman but is actually a complex ideology that drives the
subordination of women in our culture (633). Bach points out that “most people would call
heterosexuality a natural feature of the human condition, not an ideology,” then goes on to
illustrate the ways in which the ideology of heterosexuality creates certain expectations for
men and for women and divides both groups into “normal” (those who desire to conform to
these expectations) and “deviant” (those who do not) (10–11).
14. For an analysis of Milton’s views on marital sexuality in his divorce tracts from the
1640s, see Nyquist. Milton also downplays the role of sex in marriage, but for reasons dif-
ferent from Cavendish’s: he wants to establish grounds for divorce based on spiritual and
intellectual incompatibility, not only sexual infidelity or impotence. See also Traub for the
opposite argument. Traub coins the term “domestic heterosexuality” (265) to describe a
rise in the importance of sexual compatibility in marriage during the second half of the
seventeenth century.
15. Cavendish and Newcastle, of course, had no children, and, according to Smith, the
couple’s childlessness was a difficult issue for Newcastle and may have contributed to Cav-
endish’s defense of “passionless love” (144) in A True Relation and elsewhere.
16. As Raber argues, “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” (492).
17. According to Raber, Newcastle’s humiliating military defeat at the battle of Mar-
ston Moor had led to widespread public jokes that portrayed him as effeminate and ineffec-
tual. She also posits that war and exile shifted definitions of aristocratic masculinity more
generally, devaluing courtly refinements like Newcastle’s prominence as a writer for and
patron of the theater in favor of skill on the battlefield (484–85). She concludes that “one
reason Newcastle might have remained indulgent of his wife’s desire to write, even publish,
is that she assiduously defended his reputation and his values as an aristocrat” (487).
18. Marriage surfaces far less often as an issue in Newcastle’s own writing than it does
in Cavendish’s, but the work of a few critics is worth noting. Wood quotes two lines from
Newcastle’s preface to Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666):
“You conquer Death, in a perpetual Life; / And make me famous too in such a Wife” (184).
Wood argues that Newcastle’s praise for Cavendish “subtly promotes the out-of-favour
Newcastle as a glorious courtier by representing his wife as an exemplary poet and a re-
splendent aristocrat” (185). In this figuration, marriage for Newcastle is far more public
than it is for Cavendish; while she writes about the dynamic between husband and wife,
Newcastle is concerned with the couple’s relationship to the larger social setting. Ravel-
hofer analyzes a bawdy mock-wedding scene in Newcastle’s play The Varietie (c. 1641) in re-
lation to the masque performed for Charles I and Henrietta Maria at his estate, Bolsover
Castle, in 1634. For the royal visit, Newcastle rededicated his garden of Venus, originally
symbolizing the love between himself and his first wife, to the king and queen to signify “a
perfect court of love wherever they are” (205). By the time he wrote The Varietie, however,
loss of royal favor seems to have affected Newcastle’s thoughts on royal married love. As
Ravelhofer asserts, “The idealized neoplatonic erotics of married love were replaced by
crude sexual allusion” (205). Since Newcastle’s vision of marriage is tied to this king and
queen, civil war and personal misfortune affect his outlook on marriage in a way they do
not affect Cavendish’s. Graham studies the relationship between Cavendish and Newcas-
tle through their courtship correspondence, discovering a similar concern of Newcastle’s
with his social identity. In one sonnet he wrote to her, “Love’s Muster,” he describes a part
of Bolsover Castle. Graham suggests that this allusion to his property “inscribes Marga-
ret as a potential figure within the particular conjuncture of discourses and practices that
make up his aristocratic identity” (140).
19. Traub uses the word “lesbian” throughout her book to refer to early modern erotic
relationships between women, but she italicizes the term to call attention to its anachro-
nistic quality. I use the term here to establish a greater contrast between the homoerotic
harmony Lady Happy experiences with the Princess and the potential problems for her
posed by the heterosexual marriage at the end of the play.
20. Bonin expresses one critical view of the play’s conventional ending: “the insistent
impermanence of Cavendish’s dramatic utopias suggests that women’s desires are marginal,
inappropriate, or even impossible to imagine and sustain outside of patriarchal contexts”
(352). Dash also writes candidly about a teaching experience with The Convent of Pleasure,
stating that her “students were indignant. . . . They had loved that ideal convent and the
refuge from injustice it represented. They had identified with the sufferings of women, and
now the writer had chosen to turn all of this into a work with a surprise ending” (393).
21. This marriage remains in tension, however, as it begins with the Prince’s threat to
“have her by force of Arms” (Convent of Pleasure 129). The play also ends with a property
debate about the future of the convent that parallels, in a way, the unusual property ar-
rangements of the married collaborators—only Cavendish’s name appears on the title page
of her published plays, thereby in a sense “covering” her husband’s identity beneath the
cover of her book.
22. As Cavendish’s scenes compete with Newcastle’s on the way to the ending, the
Prince(ss) and Lady Happy compete over the terms of their relationship. In a masque-like
performance just after the Prince’s revelation to the audience in which he plays Neptune
and Lady Happy plays a sea goddess, the Prince declares, “I am sole Monarch of the Sea,
/ And all therein belongs to me” (127). This statement competes with Lady Happy’s own
claim of authority in the masque: “I feed the Sun, which gives them light / . . . / Moist
vapour from my breast I give, / Which he sucks forth, and makes him live, / Or else his
Fire would soon go out” (125). Lady Happy represents a form of maternal rule that sustains
masculine power, contesting the Prince’s power in this masque and keeping open a hetero-
sexual power negotiation.
23. For further interpretations of the role of convents in Cavendish’s writing, see Kel-
let, who argues that “Cavendish uses the convent performatively to challenge the systems of
power that try to define the contours of women’s lives and limit them to heterosexual mar-
riage” (436). Julie Crawford takes up the political meanings of convents, asserting that “the
convent Lady Happy plans in The Convent of Pleasure restores royalists’ losses of property
and privilege to their former glory. Her convent is a royalist retreat that celebrates the val-
ues of an exiled court culture. . . . The Convent of Pleasure is not just a fantasy; it is a political
intervention aimed at a politically astute royal audience” (178). See also Adachi; and Kelly.
Works Cited
Adachi, Mami. “Creating the Female Self: Margaret Cavendish’s Authorial Voice and Fic-
tional Selves.” Hot Questrists after the English Renaissance: Essays on Shakespeare and
His Contemporaries. Ed. Yasunari Takahashi. New York: AMS, 2000. 69–88.
Bach, Rebecca Ann. Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature before Heterosexuality. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Bennett, Alexandra G. “Fantastic Realism: Margaret Cavendish and the Possibilities of
Drama.” Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish.
Ed. Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003.
179–94.
———. “Happy Families and Learned Ladies: Margaret Cavendish, William Cavendish,
and Their Onstage Academy Debate.” Ed. Lisa Hopkins, Emma Rees, and Gweno
Williams. Spec. issue of Early Modern Literary Studies 14 (2004): 3.1–14.
Bonin, Erin Lang. “Margaret Cavendish’s Dramatic Utopias and the Politics of Gender.”
SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 40.2 (2000): 339–54.
Bono, Barbara J. “Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.” Renais-
sance Genres 14. Ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. 189–212.
Cavendish, Margaret. The Convent of Pleasure. 1668. Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish
Reader. Ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson. Ontario: Broadview Literary,
2000. 97–135.
———. The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World. 1666. Paper Bodies: A
Margaret Cavendish Reader. Ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson. Ontario:
Broadview Literary, 2000. 151–251.
———. The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe. 1667. The
Life of the 1st Duke of Newcastle & Other Writings by Margaret Duchess. New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1916. 2–178.
———. Nature’s Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life Written by the thrice Noble, Il-
lustrious and Excellent Princess, the lady Marchioness of Newcastle. London, 1656. Early
English Books Online. Accessed 20 May 2009.
———. “To the Readers.” Playes written by the thrice noble, illustrious and excellent princess,
the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle. London, 1662. Early English Books Online. Accessed
20 May 2009.
———. The Religious. 1662. Brown University Women Writers Project. Providence: Women
Writers Project. Web.
———. A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life. 1656. Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cav-
endish Reader. Ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson. Ontario: Broadview Liter-
ary, 2000. 41–63.
Crawford, Julie. “Convents and Pleasures: Margaret Cavendish and the Drama of Prop-
erty.” Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 177–223.
Dash, Irene G. “Single-Sex Retreats in Two Early Modern Dramas: Love’s Labour’s Lost
and The Convent of Pleasure.” Shakespeare Quarterly 47.4 (1996): 387–95.
Dolan, Frances E. Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy. Philadelphia: U of
Pennsylvania P, 2008.
Graham, Elspeth. “Intersubjectivity, Intertextuality, and Form in the Self-Writings of
Margaret Cavendish.” Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England. Ed.
Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle. Burlington: Ashgate, 2007. 131–50.
Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love.
New York: Routledge, 1990.
Hirschfeld, Heather Anne. Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionaliza-
tion of the English Renaissance Theater. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2004.
Johns, Adrian. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2009.
Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP, 1990.
Kellett, Katherine R. “Performance, Performativity, and Identity in Margaret Cavendish’s
The Convent of Pleasure.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 48.2 (2008):
419–42.
Kelly, Erna. “Playing with Religion: Convents, Cloisters, Martyrdom, and Vows.” Ed. Lisa
Hopkins, Emma Rees, and Gweno Williams. Spec. issue of Early Modern Literary
Studies 14 (2004): 4.1–24.
Loewenstein, Joseph. The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 2002.
Masten, Jeffrey. “Material Cavendish: Paper, Performance, and ‘Sociable Virginity.’”
MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 65.1 (2004): 49–68. Project Muse. Web. 21 April
2009.
———. “Mistris Corrivall: Margaret Cavendish’s Dramatic Production.” Textual Inter-
course: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1997. 156–64.
Mendelson, Sara. “Playing Games with Gender and Genre: The Dramatic Self-Fashioning
of Margaret Cavendish.” Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Mar-
garet Cavendish. Ed. Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson
UP, 2003. 195–212.
Milton, John. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. John Milton: Complete Poems and
Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003. 696–715.
———. Paradise Lost. The Complete Poetry of John Milton. Ed. John T. Shawcross. New
York: Doubleday, 1971. 249–517.
Nyquist, Mary. “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Para-
dise Lost.” Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions. Ed. Mary Nyquist
and Margaret W. Ferguson. New York: Methuen, 1987. 99–127.
Perry, Ruth. The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1986.
Raber, Karen L. “‘Our wits joined as in matrimony’: Margaret Cavendish’s Playes and the
Drama of Authority.” English Literary Renaissance 28.3 (1998): 464–93.
Ravelhofer, Barbara. “Non-Verbal Meaning in Caroline Public Theatre: William Caven-
dish’s and James Shirley’s The Varietie (c. 1641).” The Seventeenth Century 21.2 (2006): 195–
214.
Ray, Meredith K. “Textual Collaboration and Spiritual Partnership in Sixteenth-Century
Italy: The Case of Ortensio Lando and Lucrezia Gonzaga.” Renaissance Quarterly 62.3
(2009): 694–747.
Rees, Emma L. E. Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile. Manchester: Manchester UP,
2003.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5.4 (1980):
631–60.
Smith, Hilda L. “‘A General War Amongst the Men . . . but None Amongst the Women’:
Political Differences Between Margaret and William Cavendish.” Politics and the Po-
litical Imagination in Later Stuart Britain: Essays Presented to Lois Green Schwoerer. Ed.
Howard Nenner. Rochester: U of Rochester P, 1997. 143–60.
Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. New York: Harper,
1977.
Straznicky, Marta. “Reading the Stage: Margaret Cavendish and Commonwealth Closet
Drama.” Criticism 37.3 (1995): 355–90.
Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP, 2002.
Wood, Tanya Caroline. “Borrowing Ralegh’s Mantle: William Cavendish’s Address ‘To
the Lady Newcastle, on Her Booke of Poems.” Notes and Queries 47.2 (2000): 183–85.

Treble Marriage Margaret Cavendish, William

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Treble Marriage Margaret Cavendish, William

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

“Treble marriage”: Margaret Cavendish, William

Newcastle, and Collaborative Authorship

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

For additional information about this article

M argaret Cavendish’s dedication to her husband at the beginning of her

the journal for early modern cultural studies

marriage. Cavendish’s version of collaborative marriage subordinates physical

seventeenth-century commentators, render them unequal in key ways.

husbands and wives were intended by God to be companions and help-

When Cavendish applies the language of companionate marriage to

“Our Wits Join as in Matrimony”:

contemporary notions of gender difference render unequal compared to col-

an attempt to regulate her intellectual property at this moment of its increased

contemporary marital discourse that, as Traub describes it, “intensifies the

quotations suddenly move from an image of an adoring wife to one of an author

Marital Collaboration in The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious

Cavendish and her husband appear as characters through whom Cavendish

authorial voice in the text. A detailed reading of Newcastle’s contributions to

PRINCESS. Then let us please ourselves, as harmless Lovers use to do.

PRINCESS. In amourous Pastoral Verse we did not Woo.

bolsters her subordination of it: heterosexual sex produces pregnancy, which

This highly eroticized simultaneous penetration will remarry them through a

These final words of Cavendish’s autobiographical text express an anxiety, spe-

You might also like