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"Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue": William Cavendish, Ben Jonson, and the Decorative Scheme of Bolsover Castle*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Timothy Raylor
Timothy Raylor*
Affiliation:
Carleton College
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Abstract

The iconography of Bolsover Castle is much appreciated but little understood. This is because we have not recognized its dynamic, theatrical character, which centers on — indeed, implies the presence of its seventeenth-century owner, William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle. Read in terms of Cavendish's self-conception as a figure of patriachal authority and Herculean passions, the castle emerges as a witty apologia for its owner — and perhaps even as a site for the pursuit of his amours. This reading sheds new light upon the relationship between Cavendish, Bolsover, and Ben Jonson, who provided the text for a royal visit to Bolsover in 1634.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , Summer 1999 , pp. 402 - 439
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1999

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Footnotes

*

This article was written at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D. C , while I was on sabbatical from Carleton College; I am grateful to both institutions for their support. I am indebted to Dr. Lynn Hulse for conversations about Cavendish and Bolsover Castle and for her suggestions on a draft of this article. Professors Alison Kettering, Eva Posfay, Cathy Yandell, and the anonymous reader for Renaissance Quarterly also offered valuable advice. Thanks to Sarah Chapman of English Heritage for answering some queries about the castle, to the Northfield Renaissance Colloquium for allowing me to try out some of these ideas on them, to Professor Mark Greengrass and his colleagues at the University of Sheffield Centre for Early Modern Studies for inviting me to lecture on the subject, and to Paul Bryan, Head of English Heritage's Photogrammetric Unit, for supplying prints taken during the recent survey of Bolsover.

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