Margaret Cavendish and Ben Jonson: Ladies’ Spaces, Boy Actors, and Wit

Summary

THE lady renegade of the Restoration period, Margaret Cavendish was known for her eccentricities and passion for education. Though largely ignored or derided in her own time, her theatrical work has gained critical attention in the centuries since her death. The rediscovery of her work by scholars has revealed an innovative feminist voice from the English Restoration. Part of the academic discourse that surrounds her work is involved in reintegrating Cavendish into the theatrical canon that has excluded her for so long. I argue that Cavendish herself was invested in this project and wrote her plays with this goal in mind. In particular, her play The Convent of Pleasure can be seen as a direct response to Ben Jonson's Epicene, or The Silent Woman. With this move, she both addresses the overtly misogynistic tone of the original and rewrites it with her own feminist agenda and figures herself as a successor to the Renaissance playwrights, securing her place in the canon.

Part of the reason that Cavendish's plays have stayed out of the limelight for so long is that they were never performed during her lifetime. Wary of the reception they would receive and the treatment she would have to endure, Cavendish chose to publish her plays herself rather than subject them to the whims of the theatrical scene. Even though they were not performed during the Restoration when they were written, Cavendish's plays were clearly meant to be performed. They have a highly theatrical quality, incorporating a variety of performance styles and genres. Following in the tradition of Renaissance plays, Cavendish's Restoration era dramas play with the line between audience and performance. A comparison of her play The Convent of Pleasure and the play Epicene, or The Silent Woman by one of the most famous Renaissance playwrights Ben Jonson shows the way that Cavendish incorporates Renaissance performance strategies.

Cavendish was writing during the Restoration, after the introduction of female actresses. However, the similarities between The Convent of Pleasure and Epicene, The Silent Woman are striking enough to invite a comparison of the way that Cavendish plays with the conventions of the Renaissance stage and the politics of Jonson. It is well documented that Cavendish was familiar with the works of Ben Jonson.