Early Modern Women in Conversation (Early Modern Literature in History)

Early Modern Literature in History General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, Brighton. Advisory Board: Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford; Donna Hamilton, University of Maryland; Jean Howard, University of Columbia; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard McCoy, CUNY; Cathy Shrank, University of Sheffield; Adam Smyth, University of London; Steven Zwicker, Washington University, St Louis. Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share a historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures. Titles include: John M. Adrian LOCAL NEGOTIATIONS OF ENGLISH NATIONHOOD, 1570–1680 Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox DIPLOMACY AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Andrea Brady ENGLISH FUNERARY ELEGY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Laws in Mourning Jocelyn Catty WRITING RAPE, WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Unbridled Speech Patrick Cheney MARLOWE’S REPUBLICAN AUTHORSHIP Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime David Coleman DRAMA AND THE SACRAMENTS IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Indelible Characters Katharine A. Craik READING SENSATIONS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Bruce Danner EDMUND SPENSER’S WAR ON LORD BURGHLEY James Daybell (editor) EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700 James Daybell and Peter Hinds (editors) MATERIAL READINGS OF EARLY MODERN CULTURE Texts and Social Practices, 1580–1730 Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (editors) THE RELIGIONS OF THE BOOK Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660 Tobias Döring PERFORMANCES OF MOURNING IN SHAKESPEAREAN THEATRE AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. (editors) ENVIRONMENT AND EMBODIMENT IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Maria Franziska Fahey METAPHOR AND SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA Unchaste Signification Kenneth J.E. Graham and Philip D. Collington (editors) SHAKESPEARE AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE

Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer ENGLISH HISTORICAL DRAMA, 1500–1660 Forms Outside the Canon Andrew Hadfield SHAKESPEARE, SPENSER AND THE MATTER OF BRITAIN William M. Hamlin TRAGEDY AND SCEPTICISM IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (editors) THE INTELLECTUAL CULTURE OF PURITAN WOMEN, 1558–1680 Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (editors) THE LAW IN SHAKESPEARE Claire Jowitt (editor) PIRATES? THE POLITICS OF PLUNDER, 1550–1650 Gregory Kneidel RETHINKING THE TURN TO RELIGION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE Edel Lamb PERFORMING CHILDHOOD IN THE EARLY MODERN THEATRE The Children’s Playing Companies (1599–1613) Katherine R. Larson EARLY MODERN WOMEN IN CONVERSATION Jean-Christopher Mayer SHAKESPEARE’S HYBRID FAITH History, Religion and the Stage Scott L. Newstok QUOTING DEATH IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb Jane Pettegree FOREIGN AND NATIVE ON THE ENGLISH STAGE, 1588–1611 Metaphor and National Identity Marion Wynne-Davies WOMEN WRITERS AND FAMILIAL DISCOURSE IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE Relative Values

The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the Renaissance Texts Research Centre at the University of Reading.

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Early Modern Women in Conversation Katherine R. Larson

© Katherine R. Larson 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 13 978–0–230–29862–0

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To Rebecca and Stephen Larson

What is it about the word ‘conversation’ that appeals to my imagination so much more than ‘discussion’ or ‘dialogue’? . . . From the Socratic dialogues on, dialogue, like discussion, has tended to be associated with the written treatment of certain ideas . . . , exercising one’s intellect – on whatever. As for whatever, she, to appropriate the generic, has had little to say in this case because the case he has made out for her is already closed. On the other hand, conversation elicits her participation, creates an opening for her to speak: to beg the question if she so desires, to reword it, return it, transformed by her own perspective. The mutual quality of conversation is embedded in its very roots. Daphne Marlatt

Perhaps what have to be uncovered are as-yet concealed relations between space and language. Henri Lefebvre

Contents Acknowledgements

viii

List of Abbreviations

xi

Note on Texts and References

xii

Introduction Beyond the Humanist Dialogue: The Textual Conversations of Early Modern Women

1

Part I Gendering Conversation and Space in Early Modern England 1 ‘Intercourses of Friendship’: Gender, Conversation, and Social Performance

19

2 Markets and Thresholds: Conversation as Spatial Practice

39

Part II The Sidneys in Conversation 3 Speaking to God with ‘a cloven tongue’: The Sidney-Pembroke Psalter

63

4 Conversational Games and the Articulation of Desire in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory and Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost

89

Part III The Cavendishes in Conversation 5 ‘The language of friendship and conversation’: Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s Conversational Alliances

113

6 The Civil Conversations of Margaret Cavendish and Ben Jonson

138

Conclusion

166

Notes

171

Works Cited

185

Index

205

vii

Acknowledgements Research for Early Modern Women in Conversation was generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Philanthropic Educational Organization, and a Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Toronto. The John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature provided invaluable support in the later stages of the project, while a research leave from the University of Toronto Scarborough in the fall of 2009 gave me the gift of time and space during the crucial period when I was completing the manuscript. I would like to thank the editors of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, English Literary Renaissance, and the Sidney Journal for allowing me to reprint material integral to this book. Part of Chapter 2 was published in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2 (2007): 73–93 as ‘Reading the Space of the Closet in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.’ An early version of Chapter 3, ‘From Inward Conversation to Public Praise: Mary Sidney Herbert’s Psalmes,’ appeared in Sidney Journal 24.1 (2006): 21–43. A version of Chapter 4, ‘Conversational Games and the Articulation of Desire in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory,’ was featured in English Literary Renaissance 40.2 (Spring 2010): 165–90. I am also grateful for permission to reprint the excerpts that appear as the book’s epigraphs. The extract from ‘In Conversation,’ an interview with Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei, Gail Scott, Susan Knutson, and the late Barbara Godard, appeared in Tessera 5 (September 1988). It is reproduced here by permission of Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei, Gail Scott, and Susan Knutson. The excerpt from Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (Wiley-Blackwell, 1991) is reproduced by permission of Wiley-Blackwell. I am indebted to the staff at the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Huntington Library, and the Nottingham University Library who patiently responded to my queries in person, by phone, and over email. I would also like to thank the staff at the University of Toronto libraries, particularly the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, for their invaluable assistance. The frontispiece from the first edition of Margaret Cavendish’s Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (1656), which appears on the cover of Early Modern Women in Conversation, is reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. viii

Acknowledgements ix

In a book that takes as its focus the transformative possibilities of conversation, it gives me particular pleasure to acknowledge the individuals whose choice company and conversation have enriched this monograph. I have benefited in countless ways from the astute feedback of generous colleagues at the University of Toronto. My greatest debt is to Lynne Magnusson, whose honest and exacting appraisals of my work, unfailing support, and meticulous scholarship have been a constant source of inspiration. I owe similar thanks to Elizabeth D. Harvey, in particular for pushing me to think in new ways about gendered bodies and voices and for reminding me of the importance of intellectual play. Mary Nyquist’s wisdom, critical acumen, and thoughtful questions have likewise been invaluable. First as my dissertation supervisory committee and then as colleagues and friends, all three have mentored, encouraged, and challenged me at every stage of this project. I am also grateful to Linda Hutcheon, Will Robins, Natalie Rothman, Marjorie Rubright, Paul Stevens, and Holger Schott Syme, who each provided incisive comments at crucial junctures, and to Germaine Warkentin, who shared helpful information on the Sidney family library. Early Modern Women in Conversation has emerged out of and contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations in early modern studies about the sociopolitical function of conversation, women’s rhetorical practices, and the gendering of space and language in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury England. Each section of the book has benefited from audiences at the meetings of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, the International Margaret Cavendish Society, the Modern Language Association, the Renaissance Society of America, the Shakespeare Association of America, and the Sixteenth-Century Society and Conference. My thinking about early modern women’s conversational practice has also been enhanced by feedback from the Early Modern Studies Seminar and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Friday Workshop Series at the University of Toronto. This book is no less the product of more personal conversations that have played out at conferences, in seminar rooms, over good wine and memorable meals, and via email. Special thanks are due to Margaret Hannay, who generously commented on substantial sections of the manuscript and shared material from Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Ashgate, 2010) with me prior to its publication, and to Penelope Anderson, Alysia Kolentsis, and Lindy Ledohowski, who perceptively read through chapter drafts. I am also indebted to Anna Beer, Elaine Beilin, Ilona Bell, Piers Brown, Darryl Domingo, Richard DuRocher, Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, James Fitzmaurice, Richard Firth Green, Hannibal

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Acknowledgements

Hamlin, Diana Henderson, Mary Ellen Lamb, Rebecca Laroche, Marina Leslie, Christina Luckyj, Laurie Maguire, Sara Mendelson, Naomi Miller, David Norbrook, John Ottenhoff, Diane Purkiss, Jan Purnis, Lisa Sarasohn, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Brandie Siegfried, Alan Stewart, Mihoko Suzuki, Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, Mary Trull, Michael Ullyot, Luke Wilson, Naomi Yavneh, and the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. I have learned much from the graduate and undergraduate students with whom I have worked at the University of Toronto. I am especially grateful to the students in my 2008–09 graduate seminar, ‘Early Modern Women’s Writing: Voices, Texts, and Spaces,’ who read and responded to sections of the manuscript, and to Jennifer McDermott, who read the book in its entirety and whose keen eye and careful attention to detail were invaluable in the final stages of proofreading and reference checking. It has been a pleasure to work with the editorial and production staff at Palgrave Macmillan. Felicity Plester and Catherine Mitchell guided the book (and its author!) through every stage of the editorial process with meticulous care. Ann Marangos was an attentive copy editor. I would also like to thank Cedric Brown and Andrew Hadfield, editors of the Early Modern Literature in History series, for their judicious comments on the manuscript as it developed and for their enthusiasm for and commitment to the book. Finally, Early Modern Women in Conversation would never have been completed without the support of my family. Lawrence Wiliford has lived with the intricacies of this project since its inception. His wisdom, insight, and good humor have inspired and upheld me throughout, as they do in all aspects of my life. My sister, Sarah Larson Moldenhauer, was living on the opposite side of the globe while I researched and wrote this book, but our interchanges over email and Skype kept me laughing and served as an important reminder of the ways in which conversational interaction continues to evolve in contemporary culture. I dedicate this book to my parents, Rebecca and Stephen Larson, who gifted me with my love of language, literature, and good conversation.

List of Abbreviations BW

The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World

FA

The Female Academy

Life

The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe

NP2

Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life, 2nd edn

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

OEP2

Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 2nd edn

PF

Poems, and Fancies

PL

Philosophical Letters

PNBP

Plays, Never before Printed

PPO1

Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 1st edn

PPO2

Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 2nd edn

PSPP

Poems Songs a Pastorall and a Play

SL

Sociable Letters

WO

The Worlds Olio

xi

Note on Texts and References In all citations of primary material, I have expanded abbreviations and modernized the long s. Otherwise original spelling has been preserved. All citations from Mary Sidney Herbert’s poetry come from The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). I cite Pembroke’s psalm translations, which appear in volume 2 of The Collected Works, by psalm and line number. Elsewhere, I rely on the following format to refer to volume and page number: 1.70. The discussion of Pembroke’s ‘To the Angell spirit’ that concludes Chapter 3 shifts to line number citations after the first reference to the poem. Citations from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost are taken from H.R. Woudhuysen, ed. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001). All other quotations from Shakespeare’s poetry and drama come from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997). All dramatic references are to act, scene, and line number, with the exception of citations from the following texts: Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (act and line number); Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in Campo and Loves Adventures (act and scene number); and Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy (page number). Unless otherwise specified, all other references are to page number. In referring to secondary material I rely on parenthetical citations. Abbreviations follow MLA format. A full list of works cited can be found at the conclusion of the book.

xii

Introduction Beyond the Humanist Dialogue: The Textual Conversations of Early Modern Women

Two years after the Restoration, an anonymous poem denounced the notorious interception of Charles I’s letters at the Battle of Naseby in 1645 and their subsequent publication as The Kings Cabinet Opened as a conversation gone wrong: In Presence, Whisper; and at Distance, Penne. Publick Decrees and Thoughts were else the same, Nor [were] it to Converse, but to Proclaim. Conceipts were else but Records, but by this care Our Thoughts no Commons, but Inclosures are: What bold Intruders then are [they], who assail To cut their Prince’s Hedge, and break his Pale? That so Unmanly gaze, and dare be seen Ev’n then, when He converses with his Queen? (Rump 170) The poem foregrounds the intricacies and intimacies of conversational interaction with which this book engages. Blurring the boundaries between oral and epistolary exchange, ‘Whisper’ and ‘Penne,’ the poet laments that the King’s ostensibly private conversations with Henrietta Maria and his advisors should be made public. He imagines that epistolary proclamation in terms of spatial violation: ‘bold Intruders . . . assail’ the carefully bounded ‘Hedge’ and ‘Pale’ of Charles’ private conversational space and, in so doing, the ‘Inclosures’ of his mind. Developing the erotic connotations of the word ‘conversation,’ the poet goes on to sexualize those images of attack and invasion. The intruders become treacherous voyeurs who gaze on Charles ‘convers[ing] with his Queen.’ It is this matrix of issues – the intersections among oral and written and verbal and physical interchange, the threshold between ‘private’ 1

2

Early Modern Women in Conversation

and ‘public’ communication, and the sanctity of the boundaries of conversational spaces – that together provides the focus for my analysis of women’s conversational practices in early modern England. To converse is, in its most fundamental sense, to engage with society. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, aspiring courtiers turned to conduct manuals and epistolary handbooks to hone the linguistic and gestural codes that would enable them to shine in a variety of social spaces and to negotiate a culture in which status was no longer guaranteed solely by birth. The potency of conversation as an early modern social networking tool is complicated, however, both by its gendered status in the period and by its conflation of verbal and physical interaction. Conversation was an embodied act, signifying social intimacy, cohabitation, and even sexual intercourse. As such, conversation posed a particular challenge for women, whose virtuous reputation was contingent on sexual and verbal self-control; conduct books addressed to women warned of the speed whereby oral and epistolary interchange could lead to physical intimacy. This book considers how five women writers from the prominent Sidney and Cavendish families negotiated the gendered interrelationship between conversation and the spatial boundaries delimiting conversational encounters to create opportunities for authoritative and socially transformative utterance within their texts. My argument begins from the premise that conversation is not limited to oral interaction. One has only to think of the ubiquitous online manifestations of social communication in our contemporary context – whether email, Facebook, text messaging, or chat rooms – to recognize the significance of written modes that can stand in for face-to-face talk. Written conversation regularly served as an extension of, model for, or alternative to oral exchange in early modern Europe. In his influential 1522 treatise De conscribendis epistolis, Erasmus defines letter writing as a continuation of oral communication, ‘a mutual conversation between absent friends’ (20). The principles he outlines for epistolary decorum, notably attention to audience, the relative social positions of interlocutors, and the context of an interaction, share much in common with the rules governing conversational protocol – ‘when, where and how we should speake’ (Brathwaite, English Gentleman 236) – circulating in prescriptive literature of the period. Courtesy books, popularized in Italy by Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (1528, trans. 1561), Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1558, trans. 1576), and Stefano Guazzo’s La civil conversazione (1574, trans. 1581/1586), conventionally structured accounts of courtly and civil behavior in dialogue form to model conversational decorum and to emphasize its value in maintaining reputation, achieving

Introduction 3

social position, and preparing young men for public state roles. The centrality of the letter and the dialogue testifies more broadly to the importance of written interchange in facilitating and manipulating social relationships in the period. Virginia Cox aptly summarizes the influence of these written conversational models: courtesy books ‘codified’ the art of conversation; letters ‘enacted’ it; while the dialogue ‘illustrated’ and celebrated it (25). Despite a growing critical interest in early modern oral and written conversational practice, the question of how English women writers engaged with conversational theories and strategically adapted the linguistic and spatial conventions associated with the dialogue has received surprisingly little attention. Over the past three decades, scholars have begun to unpack the wide-ranging cultural and political significance of ‘civil conversation’ as a marker and maker of social status in early modern England (see Bryson; Burke, Art of Conversation; Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness; Whigham). A related body of scholarship has traced the significance of the conversational salon and the dialogue for women on the Continent (see Beasley; Craveri; Goldsmith; Heitsch; Smarr). We are also continuing to gain insight into how gender informs rhetorical theory and practice in the period (see L. Bennett; Clarke and Clarke; Donawerth; Luckyj; Parker, especially Literary Fat Ladies; Richards and Thorne). More work remains to be done, however, in order fully to appreciate the gendering of conversation as well as the scope and rhetorical impact of women’s conversational practices in the English pre-Restoration context. This book contributes to this endeavor by examining the conversational strategies and spaces created by Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621), her niece Lady Mary Wroth (1587–1651), Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), and her stepdaughters Lady Jane Cavendish (1621–69) and Lady Elizabeth Brackley (1626–63). Highly attuned to conversational codes and to the importance of those precepts for positioning the self within society, these five women use their writings to shape their own conversational contexts. By appropriating and adapting conventions governing oral and epistolary interchange within these textual spaces, each claims conversation as a legitimate and strategic tool for social negotiation and political intervention.1 Bringing together historical formalism, feminist theory, discourse analysis, and cultural studies, Early Modern Women in Conversation focuses on what I call ‘textual conversation’: the interactive dimensions of genres that rely on a conversational structure. Reading psalm translations, verse epistles, dedicatory poems, prefatory addresses, household drama, and fictional and historical letters as written enactments of conversational

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exchange helps to elucidate how women writing out of very different circumstances in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries constructed authoritative speaking positions for themselves and their female protagonists and used language to mediate relationships within and through their literary works. My definition of textual conversation encompasses the fictional and autobiographically informed banter in Wroth’s Love’s Victory (c. 1619) and Cavendish and Brackley’s The Concealed Fancies (c. 1645) as well as the interactive conventions that shape Pembroke’s Psalmes (c. 1594), Jane Cavendish’s poetic letters, and Margaret Cavendish’s dedicatory epistles, prefaces, and fictional letters. As such, this book nuances the useful analysis of ‘practices of writing and reading conceived as dialogue, or the dialogue itself as a literary form’ recently explored in Zachary Lesser and Benedict S. Robinson’s Textual Conversations in the Renaissance (3).2 My readings move well beyond the dialogue to consider how the interactive features of a range of genres, including those that constitute one-sided conversations whereby the reader is privy only to the words of the speaker, illuminate the strategies informing early modern women’s conversational practices. The dialogue arguably stands as the consummate model of textual conversation. A hallmark of educational discourse, it encapsulates the humanist insistence on the close correlation between reading, conversation, and political counsel and represents ‘a miniature drama of communication’ in which personae play out ‘act[s] of persuasion’ in relation to ‘the reality of [an] addressee’ (Cox 5–7). Likely because of its affiliation with humanism and its concomitant emphasis on public responsibility, however, it was not a genre commonly chosen by women writers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Very few classical dialogues included female speakers, and, if women appeared at all in early modern English dialogues, they were more often the subjects of conversation or audience members than interlocutors in their own right (see Burke, ‘The Renaissance Dialogue’ 9–10; Deitch 51–5). All of the women writers I consider in this book would have had some exposure to humanist learning and, in the case of the Cavendish women, to a familial version of the seventeenth-century conversational academy. Though Pembroke titles her poetic exchange between Threnot and Piers a ‘Dialogue,’ none chooses to write a dialogue in the vein of Castiglione’s The Courtier or Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation; the colloquies that Margaret Cavendish includes in Natures Pictures (1656, 1671) or in plays like The Female Academy (1662) come closest to the genre. Yet to read the dialogue solely in terms of women’s exclusion not only neglects the prominence of women as interlocutors and hosts in male-authored dialogues like

Introduction 5

The Courtier or Thomas Elyot’s The Defense of Good Women (1540), it also overlooks the many ways in which women engaged with the dialogue’s conversational conventions in their own writings.3 By exploring the dialogic possibilities afforded to them by genres like the psalm, the verse epistle, and the paratext, Pembroke, Wroth, Cavendish, and her stepdaughters create alternative interactive modes for themselves and their female protagonists even as they appropriate and adapt the linguistic and spatial conventions of the dialogue to explore conversation’s authorizing and didactic potential for women. My choice of the word ‘conversation’ (as opposed to dialogue) reflects this broader – and fundamentally dynamic and performative – process of dialogic engagement enacted through the interactive features of other genres. It also reinforces the importance of considering the speakers I will be examining as situated and embodied interlocutors within specific conversational settings. Until relatively recently, there has been a strong critical tendency to divorce more formal literary dialogues from the attributes of embodied oral conversation: ‘It might be expected,’ Andrew Kennedy maintains, ‘that an interpersonal concept of dialogue would be hospitable to a conversational model; yet I would rather dwell on the distinction between conversation and dialogue – as concept and as practice – than run the risk of blurring the two or, worse still, equating them’ (7). Such a stance underscores the very real methodological challenges associated with drawing conclusions about oral habits from written texts (see Burke, Art of Conversation 15–23; Bryson 187–92). Even the ostensible traces of oral exchange preserved in early modern trial records, which provide valuable glimpses into women’s verbal practices across social classes, are complicated by questions of scribal production, literacy, gender, and legal motive (see Gowing; Ingram; Mendelson, ‘The Civility of Women’). While we have gained wonderful insight into the material voices and speaking bodies that animated the soundscapes of early modern England thanks to the work of scholars like Gina Bloom and Bruce Smith, it is tempting to conclude that ‘conversation (in our modern sense of informal exchanges of speech) simply cannot be recovered as a practice’ (Hutson, ‘Civility and Virility’ 1). Yet conversation in the early modern period constituted a broader verbal and behavioral phenomenon than this definition suggests. While it is vital not to treat textual instances of conversational exchange as reliable snapshots of everyday oral interaction, orality and textuality were closely linked in the period (see Mazzio 69–70). In particular, I contend that there are compelling connections between oral conversation and literary enactments of dialogue as ‘speech exchange system[s]’ (Herman 7) that have in many cases been neglected and overlooked.

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Early Modern Women in Conversation

In this respect, Early Modern Women in Conversation builds on the work of Keir Elam, Lynne Magnusson, and David Schalkwyk, each of whom has emphasized the value of reading early modern poetry, drama, and letters as moments of situated utterance. In a recent analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Magnusson defends the importance of considering ‘who is speaking, to whom, and in what situation’ in the poems. Even if the speaker of the sonnets ‘get[s] no direct answer,’ she argues, ‘the poems work like conversation . . . Most Shakespeare sonnets are less the isolated expression of an “I” than a social dialogue, albeit with only one speaker’ (630). Throughout this book, I am interested in the interrelationship between speaker and addressee that emerges within particular literary genres and textual settings. Whether manifested in the virtuosic exchanges between Luceny and Tattiney in The Concealed Fancies or in one-sided conversations like Margaret Cavendish’s dedicatory appeals and fictional letters, textual conversation, like its oral counterpart, provides considerable scope for examining intimate and aggressive relational nuances. I concentrate on a speaker’s self-positioning relative to her interlocutors, using tools derived from discourse analysis to trace patterns of conversational rapport and control.4 Attention to such patterns, manifested in interruption, silence, turn-taking, choice of personal pronouns, modal verbs, and deictic markers, helps to elucidate conversation’s strategic potential within particular encounters. Subtle shifts in pronoun and verb usage can sustain or undermine gender and social hierarchies, while interruption, domination of a conversational turn, or silence can signal the amount of authority an interlocutor holds in a given interaction. Taken together, these tools provide new insight into how speakers in women’s poetic, dramatic, and epistolary writings function ‘as speakers – the way they interrelate, dominate or balance one another’s speech and the way they exchange value-carrying lumps of language’ (Kennedy 8) within specific conversational contexts. Henrietta Maria’s letters revealed in The Kings Cabinet Opened, for example, illustrate her central role in helping to coordinate royalist military efforts. On 30 March 1644, she writes from York to update the King on the army’s progress: ‘the Rebells have quitted Tadcaster upon our sending forces to Whetherby, but they are returned with twelve hundred men: we send more forces to drive them out . . . Between this and to morow night we shall know the issue of this businesse; and I will send you an expresse’ (28). The confident modal verbs ‘shall’ and ‘will’ here underscore the force of the Queen’s stance and convey the authority she enjoys. By the end of April, she is on her way to Bristol to gather and return her husband’s carts, and she

Introduction 7

continues to counsel Charles in his engagements with Parliament after her arrival in Paris. While letter writing constitutes an important example of textual conversation in Early Modern Women in Conversation, I demonstrate that women were experimenting with conversational strategies in their poetic, dramatic, and paratextual compositions as well. Reading these texts in terms of their interactive function can in turn unsettle and reframe our understanding of their generic boundaries (see Deitch 48). Each of the writers I examine in this book taps into the interactive features of her chosen genres actively to engage with and reshape the formal conventions of the psalm, the elegy, the household drama, the verse epistle, and the paratext. The conversations enacted within and through these genres exist in complex relationship to early modern oral and epistolary exchange. ‘The creation of such [imagined] worlds,’ argues Vimala Herman, ‘draws on given, existing resources – of language, action, gesture, etc. and the conventions of use underlying these – but exploits them in order to design episodes, interactive events and situations’ (8). What Herman refers to as ‘metasocial’ space provides an important arena for exploring the performative dimensions of literary texts precisely because of the tension that can emerge between the strategic literary enactment of interactive play and the rules governing conversation in everyday contexts. I examine the linguistic and generic features of these conversational encounters in conjunction with the spatial boundaries that frame them. In its consideration of textual conversation as a situated, gendered, and spatial practice, this book contributes to our understanding of the gendering of space in the early modern context by attending to the question of how early modern women negotiated the intimate relationship between space and language in their writings. Each of the women featured in Early Modern Women in Conversation develops carefully bounded spaces within her texts that facilitate authoritative and transformative conversational interchange. As I will demonstrate, Pembroke conflates the architectural space of the closet with the physiological spaces of the heart and womb to provide the context for her psalmist’s intimate and politicized conversations with God. In Love’s Victory, Wroth uses the ludic space of the conversational game to explore her protagonists’ struggles to articulate their desires. For Cavendish and Brackley, the salon-like space created by their imprisonment in Welbeck Abbey enables them to develop an aggressively royalist code of conversational interaction. Finally, the liminal space of the paratext becomes for Margaret Cavendish a fantasy site of social encounter as she converses with her readers in her extensive prefaces and dedicatory epistles.

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In their emphasis both on protection and social engagement, Pembroke’s closet-heart, Wroth’s games, Cavendish and Brackley’s salon, and Cavendish’s paratext share important affinities with the closets and courts that shelter topical conversations in male-authored humanist dialogues. At its core, the dialogue seeks to model relationships mediated through language within carefully delimited spatial boundaries. Dialogues like Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516, trans. 1551), The Courtier, or The Civile Conversation foreground the close connection between those boundaries and the interchanges taking place within them. Their speakers are protected within the gardens, drawing rooms, and closets that house their conversations, a spatial distancing that makes possible the dialogue’s engagement with controversial social questions. For Lesser and Robinson, the civilizing attributes of conversation that the dialogue seeks to appropriate, represent, and foster already create a ‘safe social space’ that mitigates the potentially destabilizing effect of the dialogue’s ‘highly charged’ subject matter (2). The convention of isolating that conversation from everyday society within exclusive spatial boundaries further secures the dialogue’s self-conscious engagement with topical material, even as publication invites a wider readership into that interactive space. The dialogue’s role in modeling civil conversational interchange for the reader also underscores the didactic function of spaces like More’s garden or Castiglione’s drawing rooms. William Guazzo enters his brother’s closet in The Civile Conversation quite skeptical about the benefits of conversational interchange. As the dialogue unfolds, Anniball manages to persuade his interlocutor (and by extension presumably Guazzo’s reader) that conversation constitutes a civil and a civilizing process in part because their dialogue itself performs civil conversation. While the dialogue played an important role in illustrating and enacting textual conversation for women in the period, the protective and didactic conversational spaces integral to the genre were equally instrumental in facilitating women’s engagement and experimentation with conversational conventions in their writings. Eschewing the male-dominated spaces represented in many humanist dialogues but appropriating their didactic and protective function, Pembroke, Wroth, Cavendish, and her stepdaughters construct conversational spaces that train female speakers in the powerful potential of language use and create sanctioned possibilities for simultaneously pointed and civil critique that resonates far beyond the thresholds of their texts. In so doing, their textual conversations generate a very different kind of ‘safe social space.’ Unlike a speaker in an oral interchange who must adjust his or her words and gestures to the constantly shifting dynamics of

Introduction 9

that social context, a writer shaping a verse epistle, letter, or dramatic scene has considerably more scope to frame the parameters of a particular conversational setting and the relationship between speaker and addressee. This potential for linguistic and spatial manipulation held profound implications for women negotiating the gendered anxieties concerning conversational interaction and spatial practice in the early modern period. The written enactment of conversation enabled women writers to claim increased control over the boundaries delimiting a conversational encounter, over the speakers conversing within that space and, by extension, over the boundaries of the body and the self. As I will argue in more detail in Chapter 1, the physical and verbal self-control so valued in the chaste and ‘silent’ woman idealized by prescriptive writers was also a central feature of humanist conduct literature preparing men for public state roles. Precepts regulating male behavior emphasized the coexistence of decorous conversation and physical demeanor, noting that men should adapt their words and manners to different contexts. For women attuned to these codes, conversational dexterity could be recast in literary texts as evidence of virtuous self-control, thus enabling them to defend the sanctity of their bodies while they explored conversation’s socially transformative potential in their writing. Implicitly mirroring the physiological boundaries of the body, the delimitation of protective spatial boundaries further secured women’s textual conversations even as the architecture of these alternative interactive spaces worked to confront gendered assumptions concerning women’s conversational and spatial practice. Textual conversation rarely, if ever, guaranteed a writer complete control, as Cavendish’s inability ultimately to dictate her readers’ reactions to her writings through her paratext suggests. Uniting all of the examples of textual conversation that I examine in this book, however, is the strategic deployment of conversational conventions within spatial enclosures that simultaneously delimit and facilitate the imagined interactions taking place within them. The principal theoretical question underlying Early Modern Women in Conversation aims to address this interrelationship between space, linguistic agency, and resultant social action. Does linguistic agency create space, or does space create the conditions for linguistic agency? A consideration of language in relation to its contexts of utterance provides a much-needed foundation for historicizing and conceptualizing the notion of women’s agency in early modern England. The word ‘agency’ dates from the early seventeenth century, and its sense of authoritative action was in use by the 1630s. In The Kings Cabinet Opened, the word

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appears in reference to Henrietta Maria’s over-zealous epistolary ‘negotiations’ on behalf of her husband: ‘She confines not her agency to France, but solicits Lorrain for men, the Prince of Orange for Shipping’ (44).5 Yet the tempting quest to claim self-conscious agency for early modern women needs to be navigated with care. As Webb Keane reminds us, ‘As we seek to grant agency to historical subjects, we might ask ourselves not only what agency is and where to find it but under what terms, and with what entailments, it must be accepted’ (690). The fledgling concepts of subjectivity and creative selfhood emerging in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in conjunction with humanism and the Reformation and integral to pioneering historicist debates already complicate critical attempts to define agency as the action of an individual aware of herself as speaking agent (see Greenblatt; Dollimore). The flexible and often contradictory subject positions occupied by early modern women in the period further problematize any bald claim for female agency, particularly if one reads women as trapped between the linguistic extremes of shrewishness and silence (Belsey 149–221; Jardine 37–67). If women are left with no viable subject position from which to speak, how can they be linguistic agents? In the midst of these difficult questions, scholars continue to undertake the challenging work of teasing out what Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne have called ‘the varieties and effectiveness of women’s eloquence in a range of contexts’ (‘Introduction’ 10). Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Englishwomen across social classes were engaged in a rich spectrum of rhetorical practices, whether preaching, petitioning, gossiping, slandering, or penning poems, letters, and plays. Women used language – and silence – actively to engage with restrictive contexts of utterance and to carve out alternative rhetorical spaces for themselves. In this respect, my understanding of agency evokes the performative action integral to speech acts. While conversational strategies can reflect a speaker’s claim to reshape and reframe a particular context, however, they cannot be separated from the historical and cultural norms governing their production. ‘[L]anguage,’ Keane argues, ‘is both intimately bound up with the subjectivity of its speakers and consists of linguistic forms and pragmatic conventions not fully of their own making’ (676; see also Butler, Excitable Speech). The authoritative and transformative conversational practices of early modern women exist in dynamic tension with the gendered contexts and codes governing interaction and linguistic and spatial self-positioning in the period. The theories of pragmatic language use, spatial production, and spatial practice developed by Pierre Bourdieu, Henri Lefebvre and Michel

Introduction 11

de Certeau help to unpack the complex relationship between space and language integral to this book. The boundaries of the space an individual inhabits certainly inform his or her conversational practice. As Lefebvre notes, ‘Every space is already in place before the appearance in it of actors; . . . This pre-existence of space conditions the subject’s presence, action and discourse, his competence and performance’ (57). My analysis of the creation and definition of spatial parameters for conversational interaction attends closely to the question of how power dynamics among interlocutors play out in specific contexts of verbal interchange. Bourdieu’s insistence that the relative positions of interlocutors within a ‘market’ or ‘field’ determine the amount of ‘symbolic capital’ or linguistic ‘competence’ a speaker can accrue in a given situation has been particularly influential (‘Linguistic Exchanges’).6 In contrast to Bourdieu, however, my interest lies not so much in preexisting linguistic fields as in the creation of fictional conversational spaces that enable women, often denied authority in oral contexts, to maximize their symbolic capital. Space is a ‘product’ and a ‘result’ as well as a ‘producer’ and a ‘cause’ (Lefebvre 142). If space can create the conditions for agency, it is itself in turn shaped and created moment by moment through language and behavior, what de Certeau terms the ‘practice’ of place (117). Bringing the work of Lefebvre and de Certeau into dialogue with Bourdieu through an analysis of the creative force of situated utterance helps to illuminate what Lefebvre terms the ‘as-yet concealed relations between space and language’ (17) in early modern women’s writing. In Shakespeare and Social Dialogue, Lynne Magnusson accentuates the extent to which language and space can shape each other: ‘discourses encountering change in alien contexts can recombine or be otherwise transformed, and they in turn can reaccent or reorient the shifted context of situation’ (11). This process of what she calls ‘recontextualization’ was tremendously important for women writers.7 My exploration of the creation and delimitation of conversational spaces in the writings of Pembroke, Wroth, Cavendish, and her stepdaughters demonstrates that early modern women engaged with the gendered discourses surrounding conversation and space in order to create authoritative contexts of utterance in their writings. I situate their textual conversations as a dynamic and performative rhetorical practice that enabled them to reshape the spatial and linguistic binaries that sought to confine and silence them in early modern culture. Whether her chosen space is figured as a closet-heart, a game, a salon, or the fantasy social site of the paratext, each writer determines the boundaries and the features of her

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conversational spaces and negotiates the rules that govern the interactions taking place within them. These spatial boundaries do not, however, demarcate their textual conversations as strictly private. I juxtapose close analysis of individual conversational strategies and spaces with consideration of the broader intertextual conversations in which Pembroke, Wroth, Cavendish, and her stepdaughters were engaged. Each of these writers appropriates and adapts conversational strategies from conduct manuals, humanist dialogues, and epistolary and games handbooks circulating in sixteenthand seventeenth-century Europe, and from the literary interlocutors with whom they were in closest conversation: Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, William Cavendish, and Ben Jonson. The conversations between Pembroke’s psalmist and God cannot be considered in isolation from Pembroke’s own conversations with her brother, best exemplified by her elegy, ‘To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Phillip Sidney.’ The games that constitute the structure for Wroth’s Love’s Victory have an important precursor in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594–95). The conversational collaboration and alliances that inform Cavendish and Brackley’s poems and plays emerge out of the conversational models of royalist salon culture and of the Cavendish family, most importantly the sisters’ ongoing literary conversations with their father William, Duke of Newcastle. Margaret Cavendish’s highly controlled conversations with her readers, while also informed by her exposure to influential conversations within the Cavendish household, seem to have been modeled in part on Ben Jonson’s self-conscious paratext. Exposing the permeability of the threshold between ‘Inclosures’ and ‘Commons’ (Rump 170), the textual conversations of these five women writers thus represent utterances situated in relation not only to their individual dedicatees and addressees but also to their broader cultural context. While the women featured in this study were challenged to negotiate the gendered and sexualized connotations of conversation and of public and private space in very different ways than their male contemporaries, they build a ‘Hedge’ and ‘Pale’ (Rump 170) for their textual conversations, it seems, only to exceed those boundaries. • • • I develop the central thesis of this book in Part I, ‘Gendering Conversation and Space in Early Modern England.’ Reading conversation as an embodied and gendered practice complicates our understanding of civil conversation as a strategic social performance designed to protect and to

Introduction 13

negotiate class hierarchies. Chapter 1 explores how the conventions of ‘civil conversation’ engage the interface between language and the gendered body. I evaluate the corporeal, gestural, and sexual components of oral and written exchange emphasized in courtesy literature of the period in terms of the scope they afforded women to negotiate conversation’s complex conflation of body and words. Focusing on the extant correspondence of Mary Sidney Herbert, I consider how the central precepts governing dexterous conversation, namely moderation and attention to audience, could be reframed by women in their written conversational encounters as evidence of virtuous self-control. Chapter 2 reworks contemporary theories of linguistic pragmatics and spatial practice from a feminist perspective to consider how textual conversational spaces might be manipulated to maximize linguistic competence for a writer with limited authority in oral settings. I begin by examining the close association between interiority and female containment in the period alongside architectural changes within the early modern household. I enter the exclusive, interactive, and sexualized space of the closet in order to probe the tenuous border between private and public and to challenge the assumption that bounded spaces were synonymous with women’s silence and restriction. In the second part of this chapter, I illustrate how spatial boundaries could be transformed to create sites of social action in women’s texts through an analysis of the closets that shelter the conversational encounters between Aemilia Lanyer, her dedicatees, and Christ in her 1611 collection of poems Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. The aristocratic members of the Sidney and Cavendish families who provide the focus for Parts II and III of this book might seem to share more in common with Lanyer’s dedicatees than with Lanyer herself. Pembroke, after all, figures prominently as a poetic role model in one of Lanyer’s dedicatory poems. Although they write out of very different social circumstances than the nonaristocratic Lanyer, Pembroke, Wroth, Cavendish, and her stepdaughters wrestle with related questions of spatial access and conversational intimacy and control in their texts. Part II, ‘The Sidneys in Conversation,’ opens with an exploration of the psalm translations of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Pembroke elaborates on the conversational structure and ambiguous narrative stance intrinsic to the Psalms and modeled for her in her brother’s translations to establish the nested interchanges between psalmist and God and the interlocking physiological and architectural spaces that these speakers share as the basis for authoritative articulation. I elucidate Pembroke’s Augustinian insistence on the

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interrelationship between inward conversation and outward expression using Luce Irigaray’s model of transformative conversation, which represents the inward spaces of the female body as sites facilitating outward expression and, like the Psalms, blurs the boundaries between speaker and interlocutor. While seeming to highlight the private nature of the psalmist’s communications with God, Pembroke’s emphasis on inward closet conversations in fact reinforces the very public ramifications of her poems. Playing on the connotations of the word ‘conversation’ as both physical and verbal intercourse, Pembroke situates intimate and inward conversation with God and, in ‘To the Angell spirit,’ with her brother as the basis for her psalmist’s and her own political and poetic authority. Sharing her aunt’s fascination with conversation, Mary Wroth devotes particular attention in her writings to the intimate and authorizing attributes of conversational play. In Chapter 4, I examine the ludic conventions that shape the conversational encounters in Love’s Victory, drawing on Wittgenstein’s notion of the language-game or Sprachspiel to demonstrate the slipperiness of the boundary between games and everyday interaction in the early modern context. I read Love’s Victory alongside Love’s Labour’s Lost, an important precursor to Wroth’s pastoral tragicomedy in featuring conversational play as a formal and thematic device and in emphasizing women’s leadership of the courtship games that pervade the drama. Both Shakespeare and Wroth challenge the conventional ephemerality of ludic spaces, extending the verbal and social agency of their female protagonists beyond the parameters of their seemingly isolated playing spaces. The third and final section of the book shifts from the Sidney family, perhaps the most influential literary family of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to the Cavendish family, which operated at the heart of English literary culture in the years between Charles I’s accession and the Restoration. Chapter 5 explores the fictional and familial conversational alliances integral to the writings of Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley. Situating their work within the popular cultural phenomena of honnêteté and the salon tradition at the English court, I argue that the chaos of the Civil Wars, coupled with the sisters’ imprisonment at Welbeck Abbey, prompted the development of a miniature conversational salon. Within that space, Cavendish and Brackley adapt the ideals of wit and virtuous conversation promulgated by the royalist circle and nurtured within the Cavendish family to their wartime circumstances, using conversation to safeguard their personal and political interests. In their household drama The Concealed Fancies, their fictional

Introduction 15

counterparts Luceny and Tattiney develop alternative and collaborative conversational codes that preserve their marital happiness, their authority, and their virtue. Jane Cavendish, meanwhile, situates her occasional poems as a cabinet of poetic letters that testify to her sustaining alliances with other women even as they proclaim and defend her family’s heritage and political leanings. In Chapter 6, I turn to the writings of the prolific and eccentric Margaret Cavendish. Defending the value of a retired life that freed her from the torments of daily ‘Mode’ (SL 116–18) conversations, the bashful Cavendish constructs a position of conversational domination through her extensive dedicatory epistles and prefatory addresses. Her paratextual interventions, which, I argue, are modeled on those of Ben Jonson, reflect Cavendish’s desire to establish a position of rhetorical authority that compensates for her lack of political and oral influence during the English Civil Wars. The result is a formidable example of what Bourdieu would term linguistic competence, ‘the power to impose reception’ (‘Linguistic Exchanges’ 648). Focusing on her dedicatory epistles, prefatory addresses, and Letter 54 from Sociable Letters (1664), I examine the linguistic strategies whereby Cavendish establishes the conditions for effective, authoritative, and paradoxically civil communication. Cavendish fashions a paradigm for civility that claims conversational domination and manipulation as crucial components of her symbolic capital even as they emblematize her virtue and commitment to civil order. By the second half of the seventeenth century, the problematic ramifications of conversation for women had begun to dissipate somewhat. Writers like Madeleine de Scudéry and Mary Astell claimed conversation as a form of rhetorical training particularly appropriate for women (see Donawerth, ‘As Becomes a Rational Woman’ and ‘Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse’), and, by the eighteenth century, theorists from Hume to Addison and Steele were lauding the edifying benefits of women’s conversation. In its focus on pre-Restoration England, Early Modern Women in Conversation charts an important historical moment in these changing attitudes towards women’s conversations. Educated women were making use of the interactive dimensions of their writings in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and during the Interregnum to navigate the gendered assumptions surrounding women’s conversational and spatial practice and to explore – and exploit – conversation’s authorizing, didactic, and paradoxically virtuous potential. Textual conversation emerges over the course of this book as an alternative site of social interaction that facilitates critique, alliance, and self-authorization for women even as it

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problematizes the boundaries between public and private, speaker and addressee. By experimenting with the relational features of language within the boundaries and thresholds of their chosen conversational spaces – whether closet-heart, game, salon, or paratext – women could transform their positioning within the linguistic and spatial markets of early modern England.

Part I Gendering Conversation and Space in Early Modern England

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1 ‘Intercourses of Friendship’: Gender, Conversation, and Social Performance

In Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592), Richard, Duke of Gloucester, reacts to the news of Hastings’ execution with a carefully contrived and deeply ironic speech that centers on conversation: So dear I loved the man that I must weep. I took him for the plainest harmless creature That breathed upon the earth, a Christian, Made him my book wherein my soul recorded The history of all her secret thoughts. So smooth he daubed his vice with show of virtue That, his apparent open guilt omitted – I mean, his conversation with Shore’s wife – He lived from all attainture of suspect. (3.5.23–31) The word ‘conversation’ appears only once in this passage, seemingly as an afterthought. Yet Gloucester plays throughout on the rich nuances associated with early modern conversational interchange as he elides his verbal and social intimacies with Hastings with the supposed traitor’s sexual encounters with Shore’s wife. In its broadest manifestation, conversation was synonymous with human companionship and social interaction, ‘[t]he action of living or having one’s being in a place or among persons’ and ‘of consorting or having dealings with others’ (OED, def. 1, 2). The precise nature of this social engagement resists easy categorization in the period, however, not only due to conversation’s dynamic role as a marker and manipulator of relationships, but also because of its conflation of verbal and physical intercourse. Conversation’s simultaneous reliance on verbal dexterity and what Guazzo calls the ‘eloquence of body’ (1.132) is immediately apparent 19

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in the linguistic and gestural codes circulating in conduct manuals and courtesy books that trained aspiring individuals properly to interact within a hierarchical society. ‘Civil conversation’ constituted the ability to discern choice companions and regulate and integrate one’s physical behavior and words within that company. This fusion of words and bodies assumes particular significance when considering conversation’s close association with physical intimacy. In Cymbeline (1611), for example, the sexual nuances of conversational interaction inform Giacomo’s boast that he might seduce Innogen ‘[w]ith five times so much conversation’ (1.4.90). George Abbott is more explicit half a century later in A Briefe Description of the Whole World (1664), claiming that the inhabitants of the West Indies are ‘unclean in their conversation; and that not only in fornication and adultery with women, but also their detestable and excrable sin of Sodomy’ (313). By the eighteenth century, ‘criminal conversation’ was in common use as a synonym for adultery. Gloucester’s speech, with its dexterous reframing of Hastings’ language and behavior and its allusion to the ‘conversation’ between Hastings and Shore’s wife, taps into each of these features of conversational interaction. For early moderns, conversation denoted an embodied and gendered act that held the capacity to negotiate, manipulate, and transform social relationships.

‘Whisper’ and ‘Penne’: conversation, language, and the body In The Civile Conversation, Guazzo introduces conversation as an antidote to solitude that fosters learning, affection, and social responsibility through personal encounters. The full complexity of the term emerges only gradually over the course of the work. Anniball and William nuance Guazzo’s definition in their initial dialogue in Book One, depicting conversation in terms of civil conduct – ‘an honest commendable and vertuous kinde of living in the world’ – as well as verbal interaction. ‘[I]n conversation,’ Anniball declares, ‘the use of twoo things is chiefly requisite, that is, of our tongue, and of our behaviour’ (1.56, 119). Guazzo devotes Book Two to the ‘particular points’ (1.109) of language and comportment that should guide the social encounters of the civil individual. The final banquet, meanwhile, features eroticized conversational games that hinge on the close association between verbal and physical intercourse in the period. Throughout, Guazzo’s reflections on civil conversation, understood primarily as the integration of word and action within select society, are mirrored in his choice of the dialogue genre, as the conversations

Gendering Conversation and Space in Early Modern England 21

between Anniball and William and among the participants in the dinner party in Book Four model decorous social interchange. For Guazzo and his contemporaries, conversation was at once a civil ideal and a set of codified precepts that could be manipulated for personal advancement. In the passage from Richard III cited above, Gloucester reinforces Hastings’ supposed treason by juxtaposing his sexual misconduct, the ‘apparent open guilt’ of sexual conversation, with the accusation that his words and his broader behavior at court have failed to reveal his supposed inner corruption, ‘[s]o smooth he daubed his vice with show of virtue.’ Gloucester thus condemns his enemy as the epitome of incivility. One’s conversation was expected to be a mirror into the soul. In his popular De civilitate morum puerilium (1530), Erasmus defines ‘the external decorum of the body’ intrinsic to civility specifically as the product of ‘a well-ordered mind’ (273). Richard Brathwaite picks up on this idea in The English Gentleman (1630), reminding his readers of the continuity that should characterize thought and conduct: ‘For he that forgetteth to conforme or fashion his Life to his Speech, his Speech to his Life, is like unto a man beholding his naturall face in a glasse: for he beholdeth himselfe, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. Wherefore Gentlemen, of all others, ought to be most respective of their conversation’ (83). Misalignment among word, action, and inner character could be attributed to the ineptitude or ignorance of an uncouth individual unversed or unskilled in the codes of civil interaction. Such discrepancies, however, could equally result from a deliberate decision by those whose ‘Hearts are too farre from their mouths,’ as Brathwaite puts it (237), to mislead or manipulate one’s audience. Gloucester’s castigation of Hastings’ uncivil and seemingly treacherous language and behavior serves, of course, as a foil to his own manipulative and highly deceitful conversation in the play. Few Shakespearean characters thrive more on the mismatch between inner self, words, and actions than Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Yet Shakespeare’s decision to structure Gloucester’s speech around the multiple connotations of conversation and, in particular, around the conflation of language and behavior, foregrounds the popular assumption that civil and virtuous conversation relied on the reflection of one’s character in coordinated and honest action and speech. Nearly every conduct manual of the period emphasizes this correspondence between one’s language and one’s body. Prescriptive handbooks allocate discrete sections to the verbal and gestural components of conversational interaction. The popular Youths Behaviour, or Decency

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in Conversation Amongst Men (1646) includes chapters like ‘Of Cloathes, and arraying the body,’ ‘Of walking, bee it alone, or in company,’ and ‘Of Carriage at the Table,’ each of which features comically detailed behavioral precepts: ‘When thou blowest thy nose,’ the author warns, ‘make not thy nose sound like a trumpet’ (3). These chapters appear alongside sections like ‘Of discourse’ and ‘Of the fashion of quailfying [sic], or titling of persons to whom one speaketh,’ which elucidate decorous language use. In practice, however, one’s physical comportment could never be considered in isolation from one’s language. ‘[I]f Speech,’ Brathwaite muses in The English Gentleman, ‘be the Image of Life, why should not wee conforme our Life to our Speech?’ (83). He goes on to warn his readers of the consequences of behavior that contradicts or undermines one’s words. The author of Youths Behaviour concurs. ‘Let the gestures of thy body, be agreable to the matter of thy discourse’ (9), he declares in his opening chapter on civility. The ensuing guidelines emphasize the importance of integrating language and behavior, whether reminding readers not to ‘bedew’ the face of their interlocutors with ‘spettle’ or instructing them to match their ‘manner of saluting, or re-saluting by word’ with suitable gestures (6, 11). Physical comportment encompassed the restraint of involuntary acts like sneezing or belching as well as deferential gestures.1 Civil conversation required careful coordination and control of both body and words. This attention to the body extended to written instances of conversational interaction. Guazzo and Castiglione carefully highlight the interrelationship between word and gesture in the dialogues they construct to describe and exemplify decorous conversation. Letters, meanwhile, far from being disembodied instances of communication, were understood as material stand-ins for interlocutors separated by distance. Della Casa draws clear parallels in Galateo between greetings and salutations in oral and written contexts (56–7), while Angel Day poignantly describes epistolary conversation in The English Secretorie (1586) as the ‘familiar speeche of the absent’ (1). In her Preface to Sociable Letters, Margaret Cavendish expands on this notion, presenting her collection of letters as ‘the Correspondence of two Ladies, living at some Short Distance from each other, . . . [who] Discourse by Letters, as they would do if they were Personally together, so that these Letters are an Imitation of a Personal Visitation and Conversation’ (42). As these examples suggest, epistolary correspondence cannot be considered in isolation from the bodies of writer and recipient. Although epistolary rhetoric ‘could only represent at a physical distance’ (Schneider 28), letter writing was a material practice often imagined in corporeal

Gendering Conversation and Space in Early Modern England 23

terms. Paper, ink, and seal became the ‘paper body’ of the speaker.2 Guazzo concludes The Civile Conversation with William’s assurance that ‘there shall come (during our absence) letters from mee, to holde you still in talke, the which shall represent before your face, the perfect image of Cavallero Guazzo’ (2.216). And when Mary Sidney Herbert writes in August 1602 to thank Sir Robert Cecil for his favor, she characterizes her letter as a ‘dumb shew’ that stands in for her body until she can deliver ‘better performance of her thanks’ in person (1.292). Her theatrical metaphors underscore the performative role of the letter, which was expected to play the role of the speaker and secure the desired response without the benefit of the constant gestural and verbal adjustment afforded by oral interchange.3 The seemingly disembodied phenomenon of epistolary communication strove to recreate the physical scene of interaction and the experience of oral conversation across time and space. The word ‘conversation’ in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe thus defies easy categorization. Broadly understood as an individual’s interaction with a select community, conversation encompassed verbal intercourse, social and sexual intimacy, and the decorous integration of words and body in polite company. It is a word that highlights class distinction even as it implies familiarity. Moreover, its complex conflation of language and behavior did not limit it to oral contexts. Written conversation displayed remarkable affinities to its oral counterpart. Indeed, for Cicero the verbal encounters enacted through conversation (sermo) comprised ‘l’art de la lettre familière, du dialogue, de l’entretien, oral ou écrit’ (Fumaroli 32). It is not a coincidence that the precepts governing oral conversation meted out to aspiring courtiers in conduct literature, notably attention to audience, the relative social positions of interlocutors, and the context of the interaction, closely echoed the epistolary etiquette modeled by the classical ars dictaminis. The ability to maintain and manipulate reputation and relationships through language and gesture that lies at the heart of conversational interaction in the period informed both oral and textual social contexts.

The art of civil conversation In her recent study of civility in early modern England, Anna Bryson builds on the seminal work of Norbert Elias to interrogate the reciprocal relationship between the codification of individual manners and changing social structures in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century society. On one hand, codes of civil behavior worked to reinforce class hierarchies

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in a context in which social position was increasingly negotiable. An individual’s dress, demeanor, table manners, cleanliness, and language combined to position him or her vis-à-vis the elite. At the same time, as Gloucester’s deliberate misreading of Hastings’ outward manners suggests, the impossibility of interpreting an individual’s inner character and motivations on the basis of external behavior alone meant that civil codes could be mastered and manipulated to facilitate an individual’s trajectory up a progressively more flexible social ladder. As Bryson argues, ‘ “Civility” is both a static model of well-ordered humanity and a technique of self-orientation in a complex social world’ (96). The gestural and linguistic precepts of conversational interaction documented in conduct literature were integral to civil discourses. Guazzo’s definition of civil conversation as ‘an honest commendable and vertuous kinde of living in the world’ hallmarked by edifying encounters with implicitly upper-class social companions attests to the importance of conversation as a source of civility, stability, and social order. Yet, as the popularization and dissemination of courtesy books and conversational manuals across social classes in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries suggest, conversation was also acquiring value as a strategic tool for negotiation and self-positioning in a period in which that social order was beginning to shift. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed an outpouring of conduct and epistolary manuals in Italy, France, and England regulating oral and written conversation and presenting conversational decorum as a key element in the creation and maintenance of reputation and social relations. Practical tips and edifying models designed to enhance individual performance and secure status and reputation in a changing social context abound, whether in manuals structured as lists of examples and rules or in courtesy books presented as dialogues which, as Jennifer Richards notes, blur the boundaries between theory and practice by ‘allow[ing] the rules of conversation to emerge from its representation of the speech form’ (Rhetoric and Courtliness 30).4 The art of civil conversation relied on the assimilation of such codes, which had to be deployed in practice with a cultivated and graceful effortlessness reminiscent of sprezzatura. ‘Content not thy selfe with the bare knowledge of these Precepts,’ the author of Youths Behaviour affirms, ‘but when thou hast imprinted them in thy minde, expresse them in thy conversation’ (53). These rules can be categorized under two imperatives: moderation and the ability to adapt one’s conversation to a variety of audiences and social settings. Both of these imperatives applied equally to oral and written interchange and both relied implicitly on verbal and physical self-control.

Gendering Conversation and Space in Early Modern England 25

In The Civilizing Process, Elias locates the emergence of civility in the disgust with and resultant suppression of bodily functions and drives codified in early modern Europe. Over and over again, the authors of courtesy books enjoin their readers to curb their appetites and cultivate physical and linguistic self-control: ‘Runne not in the streets, also goe not too slowly, nor with thy mouth open’; ‘Drinke not too leisurely, nor too hastily, nor as chawing the wine, nor too often’ (Youths Behaviour 25, 49). Not surprisingly, the carefully restrained physical demeanor required of the civil individual also entailed verbal moderation. Warning against the danger of ‘immoderate excesse’ of the passions that threatened to corrupt civil conversation, Brathwaite commends ‘moderation of the tongue’ as ‘an absolute vertue’ (89). ‘No vertue,’ he declares, ‘can subsist without it’ (305). Youths Behaviour urges readers to ‘speake with measure, and in due time,’ not too loud or too soft, and to hold the floor for an appropriate amount of time, knowing ‘when one should hold his peace, or heare others’ (38–9, 3). Epistolary theorists similarly foreground the importance of moderation in maximizing a letter’s persuasive potential. In De conscribendis epistolis, Erasmus commends a writer’s ‘ability to concentrate material into the fewest words possible’ and cautions students not to succumb to the temptation of flattering addressees with excessive adulations and titles (13, 50–5). Brief pithy greetings best convey respect. Day elaborates on Erasmus’ model, devoting an entire chapter in his 1586 English Secretorie to ‘Breuitie’ in which he urges his readers to ‘auoyde all superfluitie of wordes, friuolous and vayne repetitions.’ Like the moderate speaker, the letter writer who successfully places appropriate bounds on his epistle will be far more effective in ‘the necessarie demonstration and deliuerie of any needfull occasion’ (7, 10). The self-restraint that Elias deems necessary for the maintenance of ordered society becomes especially productive as a category of analysis when read, as Bryson invites us to, in terms of the negotiation or ‘active practice’ (16) of social relationships. The self-control implied by moderation constituted a necessary prerequisite for mastering perhaps the most crucial element of civil conversation, also intrinsic to classical rhetoric: the ability to adapt one’s language and behavior to one’s audience and to the context of an interaction. ‘For that which concerneth ceremonies, or complements; we ought to have respect of time, place, age, and condition of persons’ (16), the author of Youths Behaviour advises. The majority of the precepts outlined in the chapter concerning ‘the first duties and Ceremonies in Conversation’ remind readers to cultivate a keen awareness of social hierarchies and assess one’s own position

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within particular social settings. The attention devoted to the ability to adapt to one’s audience underscores the inextricable relationship between conversational decorum and social status: Let thy Seremonyes in Courtesy be proper to the dignity and place, of him with whom thou conversest. For it is absurd to honour a Clown, with words covrtly and of magnificence . . . Shew thy self humbly, tractable, to thy Superiours, . . . let thy demeanour towards thy equals be such as may argue thee free from arrogancy. And be thou assured, that gentle affability towards thy inferiours, will fix to thy name the Epithite of courteous. (Youths Behaviour 18) Youths Behaviour goes on to detail the appropriate use of honorifics and the concomitant gestural codes that determined whether a speaker should bow, doff his hat, or give way to his companion in the street. These kinds of precepts recall Bourdieu’s hypothesis that language and behavioral strategies combine with the relative social positions of interlocutors to shape an individual’s linguistic competence within the boundaries of a particular social setting: ‘Politeness contains a politics, a practical, immediate recognition of social classifications and of hierarchies, between the sexes, the generations, the classes, etc.’ (‘Linguistic Exchanges’ 662). When properly executed, careful self-positioning relative to one’s interlocutors could at once reinforce social order and garner recognition and respect. Conversation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became, as Peter Burke has argued, ‘the art of showing oneself to be well bred’ (90). The absence of a letter’s addressee made the correct assessment of power dynamics more challenging in the epistolary medium, particularly when there was no prior relationship on which to build. How formal a title should the letter writer choose? How should he or she strike a balance between respectful deference and unwittingly excessive self-abasement? And how should a letter writer interpret an addressee’s failure to reply? As with oral interchange, the ability to adapt to different interlocutors and settings was key: In accompt of the person, is to be respected, first the estate and reputation of the partie, as whether hee be our better, our equal, or inferiour, next the lightnesse or grauitie, as whether he be old, young, learned, vnskilfull, pleasaunt, sage, stately, gentle, sequestred from affayres, busied: or of what disposition, shewe, or profession

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soeuer he be, that according thereunto, the methode of his Epistle may immediately be ordered. (Day, English Secretorie 13–14) Unable to adjust his or her linguistic strategies in reaction to physical cues, however, the letter writer carefully had to evaluate the context of an epistolary encounter without the benefit of the give-and-take of oral interaction in the hope of cultivating a sympathetic, albeit delayed, reply. If a successful letter constituted a ‘polyp [that] adapts itself to every condition of its surroundings’ (Erasmus, De conscribendis 19), it was nonetheless representative of a genre whose transmission and reception carried with it a different level of communicative unpredictability than oral conversation. The ever-present possibility that a letter might be read aloud, intercepted, or shared with an audience beyond the intended recipient further complicated epistolary nuances. The rhetorical strategies devoted to ensuring privacy in especially topical and personal missives anxiously testify to the fundamental ‘insecurity’ of the epistolary genre; other letters, meanwhile, were composed with full awareness that they would have to negotiate different reading audiences (Daybell, ‘I wold wyshe’ 151). Recalling Guazzo’s definition of conversation as one’s behavior within society, the letter can never be considered as an entirely private genre in the period. It always exists in tension with a wider public context, standing in for the speaker in varied settings.5 The proliferation of conversational precepts in the late sixteenth century emerged in large part as a result of the tension between established hierarchies and increasing social mobility. The moderate individual, trained to observe a social setting before entering into conversation and attuned to the power dynamics informing it, could ideally adapt and deploy verbal and behavioral conventions so as to position himself in the most favorable light. Bourdieu reads this careful self-positioning and self-adjustment as evidence of ‘an anxious striving for correctness’ within class-based society: ‘Speakers change their linguistic register . . . as a function of the objective relationship between their own position and their interlocutors’ positions’ (‘Linguistic Exchanges’ 657–8). At a time when class hierarchies were increasingly in flux, civil behavior became a crucial marker of good breeding that aimed to define and to secure social rank. This process, however, redefined gentility in terms of outward carriage and demeanor, rather than solely in terms of birth. As Guazzo notes, ‘it is the part of a Gentleman to behave him selfe so gently and curteously in all his dooinges, that out of his eyes, tongue, and maners, his gentlemanly minde may shewe foorth’ (1.195). The author

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of Youths Behaviour commends this decorous individual as worthy of ‘the Epithite of courteous’ (18). Yet recall the discrepancy between inner character and outward behavior that lies at the heart of Richard III. Once a distinct and widely circulated set of conversational precepts became the hallmark of the civil individual, gentility could be performed by anyone. Della Casa commends the individual who displays pleasant manners precisely because he ‘attain[s] high rank’ as a result, even if he is ‘not worthy of high praise in other things’ (32). Brathwaite similarly remarks that the chief end of acquaintance and conversation ‘is either to better [one’s interlocutors], or be bettered by them’ (English Gentleman 296).6 And Erasmus, while granting ‘that external decorum is a very crude part of philosophy,’ has to admit that ‘in the present climate of opinion it is very conducive to winning good will’ (De civilitate 273). The art of civil conversation combined reticence and self-control with a keen awareness of the power that language and behavior hold to sustain and negotiate social hierarchies. In an upwardly mobile society, the ability effectively to ‘package’ and ‘market’ (Cox 57) one’s conversation so as to maximize one’s symbolic capital became paramount. Conversation’s potency as a tool of social advancement and negotiation was not limited to oral interchange. Day extols the practical benefits of mastering epistolary decorum, playing to his audience of aspiring gentlemen.7 In the 1586 edition, he urges readers who are ‘desirous to take profite’ (fol. 1v) to pay attention to his precepts, drawing an explicit parallel between epistolary skill and social mobility: ‘I see no reason, but he that can frame him selfe to the varietie of these [rules], may with greater facilitie reache vnto the reste, the better to enhable him selfe hereafter if aduancement draw him to it’ (5). For Day, the role of the secretary provided a fitting goal for such an individual. The 1599 edition of the manual continues to highlight the ‘force’ a letter has to bring about a writer’s aims (sig. A3v). The sample letters Day includes in his manual, which generally follow the ars dictaminis categories outlined by Erasmus, provide detailed templates for negotiating a wide range of social scenarios. Many of these situations hinge on the delicate task of securing favor across social classes. The ability accurately to read a social setting and adjust linguistic codes accordingly becomes inseparable from personal profit in such instances, holding the potential not simply to secure but to transform a writer’s position within social hierarchies. The self-discipline, moderation, and suppression of physical drives intrinsic to the codification of civil discourses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem on the surface to be at odds with the banter and spontaneous ‘[i]nterchange of thoughts and words’ normally associated

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with ‘conversation’ (OED, def. 7a). Consider the transcripts of everyday oral interactions that constitute raw data for conversation analysts or, as a quite different example, the witty exchanges between Beatrice and Benedict, Rosalind and Orlando, Feste and Viola, which exude a playfulness and freshness that bear little resemblance to the tightly regulated codes of conversational decorum circulating in the period. Yet, whether manifested in elegant wordplay, in the ability to negotiate and reframe social boundaries, or in the growing emphasis in the seventeenth century on conversation’s familiar function, the dynamic features of conversational interaction paradoxically rely on self-control.8 Early modern theorists often characterize conversational interaction in terms of play only to situate that implied spontaneity within a carefully controlled framework. Guazzo’s wonderful comparison of conversational interchange to a game of tennis, for instance, hinges on a thorough understanding of the moderation integral to turn-taking, appropriate respect for silence, and attention to one’s interlocutor (1.151). Successful participation within the conversational games enjoyed by the dinner guests in Book Four of The Civile Conversation likewise necessitates virtuosic and seemingly improvised wordplay that nonetheless adheres to the strict rules laid down by the ludic sovereign and preserved in handbooks like Edward Phillips’ The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (1658). This fundamentally relational approach to self-restraint is integral to conversational interaction in the period. Self-discipline makes possible conversation’s elegance and freedom. Writing on Paradise Lost (1667), C.S. Lewis likens the coexistence of liberty and discipline in Milton’s works to a dance whose intricate choreography lies obscured beneath seemingly untamed movement (79–80). The art of civil conversation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England likewise relied on the internalized and seemingly effortless selfcontrol exhibited in the linguistic and physical self-adjustment required in oral contexts and in epistolary codes that governed conversation across time and space. Paradoxically expected to reflect spontaneity even as it was honed by careful study and to foster equality and inclusion even as it reinforced social hierarchies, oral and written conversation encapsulated both the challenges and the transformative possibilities intrinsic to early modern social negotiation.

‘Convers[ing] with Vertue’: women in conversation Gender complicates conversation’s authorizing and negotiating potential.9 The gendering of conversation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

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England has its roots in the classical emphasis on the sexualized relationship between a woman’s words and her body as well as in conversation’s implicit association with both verbal and physical intimacy. Distinctly gendered educational spheres further reinforced these boundaries and assured that normative expectations about speech and behavior were cultivated from a young age (see Charlton; Daybell, ‘Interpreting Letters’). In The Boke Named the Governour (1531), Thomas Elyot recommends that young boys preparing for public service be taken ‘from the company of women’ after age seven so that their ensuing education might be directed by ‘a tutor / whiche shulde bee an auncient and worshipfull man.’ Elyot places careful emphasis on the corrupting, and implicitly sexualized, influence of women’s conversation, insisting that the growing boy have limited contact with female companions: he may haue one yere or two at the most / an auncient and sad matrone attendynge on hym in his chamber / whiche shall nat haue any yonge woman in her company: For though there be no perille of offence in that tender and innocent age / yet in some children nature is more prone to vice than to vertue / and in the tender wittes be sparkes of voluptuositie: which norished by any occasion or obiecte / encreace often tymes in to so terrible a fire / that ther with all vertue and reason is consumed. Wherfore to eschewe that daunger / the most sure counsaile is / to withdrawe him from all company of women.10 (fols 20r–v) Conversation, particularly conversation transpiring between men and women (and even seven- year-old boys and their nubile nurses!), tapped into popular anxieties concerning the speaking woman, whose words were assumed to herald an unchecked sexual appetite. It is precisely this fear that prompts Herod to question Mariam’s virtue and command her death in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613): ‘She’s unchaste; / Her mouth will open to every stranger’s ear’ (4.432–3). Mariam dies largely because of Herod’s inability to reconcile her seemingly paradoxical commitment to sexual virtue and verbal openness. As a result, young girls too were taught to avoid conversation that might threaten their reputations. Lady Grace Mildmay recalls in her autobiography that the gentlewoman who instructed her ‘scoffed at all dalliance, idle talk and wanton behaviour, appertaining thereunto with a touch of a caveat to take heed thereof’ (26).11 Margaret Cavendish’s Monsieur Compagnion reinforces this view in the First Part of Bell in Campo (1662) when he relates that ‘Maids . . . are kept from the free

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conversation of men, by . . . Parents or Guardians’ (5.24) until their marriage. Conversation posed a particular challenge for early modern women, who were far more likely than men to risk accusations that their ‘conversations’ might signify or catalyze sexual indecorousness. In The Civile Conversation William goes so far as to misunderstand Anniball’s reference to ‘the Conversation of women’ as ‘those with whom men trie their manhood withall in amorous incounters’ (1.234). The risks associated with women’s conversation had as much to do with class boundaries as they did with the physical boundaries of the body. Guazzo condemns the decision to converse with wanton women, declaring that it is ‘not onely vayne and unprofitable, but daungerous and hurtfull’ to do so (1.232). William’s dialogue with Anniball situates a woman’s conversation – again understood as her sexual comportment within society – as the guarantor not only of her individual reputation but also of social order. Conversation with a civil woman ‘taketh from men all rude and clownishe behaviour’ (1.235). The opposite renders a man intemperate, steering him away from his civil duties. Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley tap into this conundrum in The Concealed Fancies as Luceny and Tattiney muse whether they should ‘lessen [their] conversation’ (2.3.128) to safeguard their reputations among the ladies of the town. Their concern is bolstered by the fact that the only other characters in the play who explicitly refer to the sexual nuances of conversational interaction are the decidedly unchaste maidservants Pert and Toy who gossip about ‘husbandly loved conversation’ (4.5.40) in Act Four. A woman engaging authoritatively in conversation risked censure for inappropriately sexual ‘Intercourses of Friendship’ (Codrington 34) and, concomitantly, for language and behavior that alienated her from and threatened the stability of Guazzo’s civil society. If Guazzo’s commendation of conversation as a mechanism for social encounter highlights the desirability of conversational interaction for the civil male speaker, its potential to disrupt the boundaries between social classes, bodies, and genders rendered conversation paradoxically suspect. Accordingly, although conversation features just as prominently in conduct manuals addressed to women as it does in texts like Brathwaite’s The English Gentleman, male and female readers were urged to cultivate the self-control intrinsic to conversational decorum for very different ends.12 For men, the ability to choose one’s words carefully while simultaneously adjusting one’s physical manners to a particular context facilitated the successful negotiation of court hierarchies and the fulfillment of public endeavors. These same conversational precepts

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assume a decidedly sexual twist when aimed at women. In The English Gentlewoman (1631), Brathwaite equates conversational moderation with sexual modesty: ‘An open countenance and restrained bosome sort not well together. Sute your discourse to your action’ (72). He warns of the speed whereby conversation can lead to physical intimacy: ‘Beware therefore with whom you consort, as you tender your repute . . . [I]ntercourses of Courtesies are not to be admitted, lest by this familiarity, an Entry to affection bee opened, which before was closed . . . Chastity is an inclosed Garden . . . Such Forts hold out best, which hold themselues least secure, when they are securest’ (41–2). The emphasis placed in this passage on ‘familiarity’ and ‘intercourse,’ together with Brathwaite’s preoccupation with the dangerously vulnerable entry points to the ‘Fort’ or ‘Garden’ of the female body, reinforces the sexual nuances of conversational interchange.13 The self-regulation intrinsic to conversational decorum in conduct literature of the period became for women synonymous with physical self-containment, an extension of the male and divine surveillance that, Brathwaite argues, should ensure women’s virtue even in their most solitary moments (English Gentlewoman 49). A woman conversed in order simultaneously to safeguard and to exhibit her chastity and her reputation. She should go into company only when ‘[s]he can discourse of Love without lightnesse; converse with Love without loosenesse; and consort with those shee loves without leudnesse’ (Brathwaite, ‘To the Gentlewoman Reader’ n.p.). Lack of conversational self-control threatened to move her across the thin boundary separating verbal and physical intercourse. A woman, Brathwaite aptly concludes, should ‘converse with Vertue’ (English Gentleman 264). If a man’s conversational self-control manifested itself in verbal and behavioral dexterity, the ability to adapt one’s words and one’s body to a wide range of situations so as to move up the social ladder, the most extreme form of feminine conversational self-control is usually represented as silence, the sealed mouth ostensibly mirroring the successfully sealed genitalia. The ‘sole ambition’ of a virtuous woman should be ‘to aspire to an inward greatnesse,’ Brathwaite affirms (English Gentlewoman 194). These gendered distinctions, however, were blurry at best. As Danielle Clarke and others have argued, prescriptive injunctions advocating women’s silence were much more ambiguous than many critics have claimed (‘Speaking Women’ 75–6). Guazzo states that women should avoid the chief fault of ‘talking too much,’ instead cultivating ‘silence’ that ‘maketh her thought to be verie wise.’ In this context, however, the word ‘silence’ suggests verbal moderation rather than

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the literal cessation of speech: ‘Yea, she must not only have regard to keep her tongue, but besides to accompany her words, her laughter, her lookes and behaviour, with such a grave and stately majesty, as besemeth a matron’ (1.240). Robert Codrington offers a similar qualification in The Second Part of Youths Behaviour, or Decency in Conversation Amongst Women (1664): ‘I would not have them think that I purpose to take away from them the use of Speech . . . I should not do well to go about to frame a Conversation of dumb persons.’ In urging women to moderate their words, however, he too insists on the value of women’s ‘Discretion, Silence, and Modesty’ (31–2). Such precepts would seem to place women in a no-win situation. Guazzo summarizes the potential paradox as he commends one particular woman who ‘frameth her jestures so discretely, that in speakyng, shee seemeth to holde her peace, and in holding her peace, to speake’ (1.241). Ann Rosalind Jones has compellingly read such contradictions as evidence of an untenable ‘masculine image of Petrarchan desire, not a practical guide for women’s behavior’ (‘Nets and Bridles’ 48). These kinds of injunctions, however, were a hallmark of conversational guidelines addressed to male readers as well. Simon Robson’s The Court of Civill Courtesie, first published in 1577, instructs a gentleman to give up his place at table ‘with sucth [sic] a modest audacitie, mingled with a smylyng grace, and curteous speeche, neither too lowd nor whisperyng’ (qtd in Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness 13). Moreover, men too were urged to cultivate silence in conversation.14 In a passage in The English Gentleman that might just as easily have appeared in his companion text addressed to gentlewomen, Brathwaite commends the man who ‘bridleth his tongue’ and goes on to laud ‘discreet Silence before loquacitie’ (89). For Guazzo, silence constitutes a crucial component of successful conversational interchange, facilitating turn-taking and demonstrating a male speaker’s decorum: ‘hee who knoweth not how to holde his peace, knoweth not howe to speake . . . [T]o use silence in time and place, passeth all well speaking’ (1.121, 151). If the effective use of silence here hinges on the notion of conversational moderation, silence also carried with it a disturbing capacity to obscure a speaker’s character or intentions. As della Casa notes in Galateo, Just as speaking too much is a nuisance, so keeping too silent is irritating, for to keep quiet where others are engaged in conversation seems to show an unwillingness to pay one’s share of the bill. Because speaking is a way of opening your soul to your listener, to

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keep quiet seems to imply, on the contrary, a willingness to want to remain a stranger. (82) Della Casa is addressing a male audience in this passage, but his concern about the alienating effect of silence has significant repercussions for women as well. As Christina Luckyj has convincingly demonstrated, silence could function not only as an emblem of the virtuously sealed female body but also as a powerful and often ambiguous rhetorical tool, rendering unreadable seemingly silent women like Elizabeth Cary’s Graphina. The physical and verbal self-control so valued in the chaste woman emerges in prescriptive writings as a sexualized version of the conversational self-control required of men preparing for public state roles.15 Yet silence, the emblem of that virtuous conversational control, shares important strategic features with the verbal moderation required of the dexterous male speaker. All speakers, whether male or female, finally had to negotiate a position between behavioral and verbal extremes that was often difficult to define. Viewing the rules of conversational interaction outlined in prescriptive literature as a spectrum of tools that the skilled speaker or writer, whether male or female, could appropriate depending on the context, rather than as a set of rigid – and rigidly gendered – injunctions, helps to illustrate the flexibility and adaptability that lies at the heart of conversational practice in the period. It also, however, shifts the site of women’s conversations from one of restriction to one of negotiated action. The physical and verbal moderation demanded of women in the period certainly necessitated careful negotiation of the sexualized nuances of conversational interaction. Mariam’s failure to carve out a tenable speaking position for herself in Cary’s tragedy, which taps into the shaming and silencing mechanisms in early modern culture that worked to place bounds on women’s self-expression, underscores the difficulties inherent in this task (see Boose; Dolan). But sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women – and their literary representations – were hardly carbon copies of the behavioral models outlined for them in conduct manuals; if anything, the anxious insistence on women’s silence in prescriptive writings ironically testifies to the reality of women’s speech. Far from being silent, women from all social classes were active participants in what Lynne Magnusson has called ‘the richly complex rhetoric of social exchange in early modern England’ (Shakespeare and Social Dialogue 1). The evidence of women’s wide-ranging rhetorical practices that has emerged in recent years complicates and challenges the restrictions – and the contradictions – surrounding the

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theories of women’s conversation circulating in early modern prescriptive literature. Early modern women seem to have been attuned not simply to the conventional conflation of female conversational self-control with sexual self-containment but also to the strategic potential of conversational interaction emphasized in conduct manuals addressed primarily to male audiences. Indeed, vernacular handbooks, together with ‘practical contact’ with genres like the letter and the dialogue constituted an important source of rhetorical training for women excluded from the formal educational spaces of the universities and the Inns of Court.16 In her autobiography, Lady Grace Mildmay recalls being asked to ‘write a supposed letter to this or that body concerning such and such things’ (26) to practice epistolary rhetoric. Anne Clifford’s extensive library depicted in the Great Picture of the Clifford family, meanwhile, includes The Courtier and Pierre de la Primaudaye’s The French Academie (1577, trans. 1586).17 Encounters with these kinds of texts together with their own observations of and participation within social exchanges gave women, like men, a repertoire of linguistic strategies that could be deployed in practice in a variety of oral and written contexts (see also Mack 133). The letters of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, exemplify this phenomenon. Pembroke reveals herself in her extant correspondence to be an extremely adept conversationalist. She adjusts her self-positioning carefully in relation to her addressees, who include members of her family and of the Privy Council as well as the Queen. In a 1601 letter to Elizabeth, for instance, Pembroke displays her mastery of epistolary scripts, framing her utterance in terms of utmost humility: ‘I againe, and againe in all reverent humblenes begg pardon for this fearefull boldnes.’ She concludes the epistle by signing off as ‘the humblest of yowr Creturs’ in the bottom right-hand corner of the page (1.291–2). Yet Pembroke also takes full advantage of the conversational control afforded by the epistolary mode. The length of the letter exemplifies the ‘deferential space’ (Daybell, ‘Gender, Obedience, and Authority’ 55) required in letters addressed to the monarch, reinforced here by Pembroke’s insistence on her ‘trembling hand’ and ‘worthless wordes.’ At the same time, however, the epistle paradoxically constitutes an exceptional conversational turn likely impossible in a comparable oral interchange, as the politic Pembroke thanks the Queen for her favor to her son. Letters documenting Pembroke’s dispatching of affairs at Cardiff Castle around the same time provide further evidence of her epistolary tactics. Writing to Sir Robert Cecil in 1602, she opens her letter with conventional deference: ‘Not that I can make any retorne unto yow worthey of yow; but

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that this blanke may wittnes what I woold had I powre to expres more then words can.’ Partway through, however, with a matter-of-fact ‘Now,’ Pembroke switches to a confident discussion of the ‘present submission’ of a prisoner: ‘this hand may in no reason consent to become any meane for his release till by a more thorow feeling of his fowle offence others lykewise will be better tought by his smart.’18 She returns briefly again to a deferential stance before signing off as ‘her whom yow have bownd ever more to acknowlidg the bond.’ The decision to bookend her castigation of the ‘seditious beggerly wreche’ whose release she opposes with ingratiating rhetoric helps to placate her addressee, while leaving Cecil in no doubt of her position (1.292–3; see Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix 178–9). Pembroke’s letters provide valuable evidence of the strategic deployment of epistolary tactics that have been elucidated in early modern women’s letters in recent years (see especially Daybell; Magnusson, ‘A Rhetoric of Requests’ and ‘Widowhood and Linguistic Capital’). Such written enactments of conversational interaction, however, also enabled women to recast the authoritative conversational control so valued in the dexterous male conversationalist as evidence of sexual self-control. Textual conversation afforded a writer considerably more control over the context of an interaction, and, by extension, over the boundaries of the body, than was normally possible in oral exchange. As such, it could enable a woman to defend the sanctity of her body by distancing herself from the physicality of oral intercourse even as she played with courtly conventions to explore the dynamic and authorizing potential of conversational interaction in her writing. Gary Schneider has read the epistolary mode in terms of a ‘social buffer’ that could be ‘exploited in difficult social situations where one intentionally wished to avoid face-to-face interaction for reasons of propriety such as shame.’ His analysis provides a helpful lens for understanding the strategic potential of textual conversation for women. Schneider defends the importance of the letter ‘as an alternative form of communication and expression in moments of embarrassment and anxiety’ and cites the example of a letter writer seeking to petition a social superior without having to worry about inadvertently dominating a conversational turn or interrupting his addressee (43–4). These features clearly inform Pembroke’s letter to the Queen, even as Pembroke capitalizes on her aristocratic status to construct a position of authority for herself in her letters to Cecil. But for a woman writer, letter writing – and textual conversation more broadly – could provide another kind of buffer as well. Mitigating the anxiety prompted by the sexualized speaking body, the

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epistolary mode detaches the writer from oral contexts while simultaneously allowing her more scope for self-expression. Pembroke’s epistles strategically negotiate the gendered assumptions associated with women’s speech. She characterizes her letters repeatedly as a stand-in for her own body, but in explicitly silent and unsexualized terms: as a ‘blanke,’ a ‘dumbe shew,’ or ‘dead paper’ (1.292, 289). This performative imagery is particularly prominent in her 1602 letter to Cecil, where she depicts herself ‘apeer[ing]’ before her interlocutor ‘in paper forme.’ Pembroke’s epistolary self-positioning here exemplifies the ‘fantasies of corporeal alienation’ explored by Carla Mazzio which ‘secured the possibility of virtuous speech’ (58).19 Although she promises ‘better performance’ (1.292) of her thanks in person at a later date, the silent genre of the letter facilitates her conversational intervention. Fittingly, she justifies her decision to reach out to Cecil in terms of a sanctioned breach of silence: ‘Sir to bee silent now finding so Just Cawse to bee thankfull were a wrong to yow and an Injury to my selfe,’ she tells him in 1597 (1.289). That same year, writing to Cecil to debunk a rumor, she claims that she composes the letter ‘in regard of truth and the respect I beare yow, for otherwise I woold be silent’ (1.290).20 Paradoxically, the choice of the epistolary genre enables her to maintain that silence even as she breaks it. In so doing, she typifies Guazzo’s female exemplar who ‘frameth her jestures so discretely, that in speakyng, shee seemeth to holde her peace, and in holding her peace, to speake’ (1.241). Engaging in dexterous exchange even as she emphasizes her physical self-control, Pembroke capitalizes on conversation’s strategic potential in her epistolary interactions while successfully negotiating the gendered ramifications of conversational interaction. If the speech from Richard III that opened this chapter highlights the complexities of oral and written conversation that made verbal and physical interchange so challenging for women in the early modern period, it also points to conversation’s performative function. The ability strategically to regulate and adjust one’s language, gestures, and behavior while avoiding ‘all attainder of suspects’ exemplifies the challenges faced by male courtiers (and would-be kings) striving to secure their reputation within increasingly competitive and fluid social structures. When appropriated by women and redeployed within the boundaries of their texts, this same skill could create the conditions for simultaneously authoritative and virtuous conversation and self-expression. Textual conversation did not entirely eliminate the problematic conflation of physical and verbal interaction that I have been tracing in this chapter.

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‘Linguistic capital,’ Bourdieu argues, ‘is an embodied capital,’ regardless of whether that capital is exercised in person or on paper (‘Linguistic Exchanges’ 660). At a time when conduct literature sought to regulate women’s unruly words and tongues, however, textual conversation could constitute an important and authorizing alternative to oral interaction, thus creating, to borrow a phrase from J.L. Austin, ‘felicitous’ or ‘happy’ conditions for a woman to converse while assuaging the anxiety surrounding the sexual repercussions of that act.

2 Markets and Thresholds: Conversation as Spatial Practice

To speak of conversation as a gendered and socially inflected phenomenon, the product and the process of an individual’s negotiation of carefully assessed hierarchical relationships, goes a considerable way towards explaining the nuances of conversational interaction traced in Chapter 1. As a situated linguistic and gestural practice, however, conversation is at once social and spatial. Any interaction is simultaneously informed by an individual’s relationship to his or her interlocutors and by the spatial boundaries framing their encounter. A conversation in a bus plays out in very different ways than a conversation at home, on a street, at an academic conference, in a classroom, or over email. These differences rely in turn on the social dynamics informing each conversational space and the relative positions of their occupants. Henri Lefebvre encapsulates this reciprocal formulation: ‘When we evoke “space”, we must immediately indicate what occupies that space and how it does so . . . Space considered in isolation is an empty abstraction’ (12). The transformation of a church into a restaurant likewise transforms the conversations produced within that space. Yet space is far more than a ‘passive locus of social relations, the milieu in which their combination takes on body’ (Lefebvre 11). Every space is shaped moment by moment by its inhabitants even as those inhabitants are shaped by the spaces they occupy. ‘Space,’ Lefebvre concludes, ‘is at once result and cause, product and producer’ (142). While bounded spaces were conventionally synonymous with women’s silence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, theories of spatial production like Lefebvre’s invite a more dynamic approach to the gendered relationship between space and language. Alison Findlay has probed the implications of Lefebvre’s ‘Janus-faced’ reading of space for early modern female dramatists, arguing that women used settings 39

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like gardens, cities, courts, and convents to negotiate between the ‘grid of spatial practices that framed their minds and bodies’ and ‘field[s] where strategic investment in a different spatial and cultural practice can be enacted’ (Playing Spaces 1). Her important study demonstrates that women could reposition themselves within society by playing with dramatic spaces in their writings. Yet the ideal early modern woman was understood, as Andrew Hiscock reminds us, ‘in terms of both space and sound’ (122). Women’s spatial practices are difficult to dissociate from their conversations. Prescriptive accounts of gendered behavior regularly conflated the two, imagining verbal self-restraint and confinement within architectural boundaries as together giving surety for the sealed female body. Such discourses existed in tension with a more complicated and fluid practice as women moved within and among a variety of decidedly interactive spaces. This chapter focuses on the most conventionally ‘private’ and gendered of these, the closet, a space that housed conversations with friends and family members, with servants, and with God. Examining conversation as a situated and spatial practice that holds the potential to reframe prescriptive boundaries, I enter the closet spaces that pervade Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum to consider how the creation of imagined spaces of social encounter within women’s texts could establish favorable conditions for authoritative and performative conversational interaction.

Conversation in context Space and conversation have come together productively in the field of linguistic pragmatics, which seeks to understand how language functions within particular sociocultural frameworks and relational settings (see Levinson; Horn and Ward). Central to many of the theories derived from pragmatics is the idea that conversation constitutes a transaction that can generate material or social advantage for the speaker within the parameters of a particular exchange. Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, for example, characterize the benefits at stake in conversation in terms of the ‘basic wants’ intrinsic to ‘face,’ which can be ‘lost, maintained, or enhanced, and must be constantly attended to in interaction’ (61–2). Pierre Bourdieu, who approaches pragmatics from a sociological perspective, situates language as the product of a speaker’s position relative to the power dynamics governing a particular linguistic ‘field’ or ‘market.’ He defines the ‘profit’ or ‘symbolic capital’ that a speaker can derive from a given interaction as his or her linguistic ‘competence,’ the ‘capacity to command a listener’ (‘Linguistic Exchanges’ 648). Linguistic

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competence shifts from context to context according to a speaker’s social position relative to his or her interlocutors and the resultant conditions embedded within a particular market: ‘The sense of the value of one’s own linguistic products is a fundamental dimension of the sense of knowing the place which one occupies in the social space’ (‘Price Formation’ 82). For Bourdieu, the power dynamics informing an encounter are established with the entrance of participants into a conversational space, immediately determining the profit each interlocutor will be able to achieve. A speaker’s conversational authority is thus shaped by and limited to individual markets. Maximum profit ensues when a speaker’s position within and ‘practical mastery’ (‘Linguistic Exchanges’ 647) of a field allows him or her to capitalize on authoritative linguistic strategies. The codes governing oral and written conversation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries placed significant emphasis on this interrelationship between language, social context, and conversational capital. As I argued in Chapter 1, speakers were esteemed for their ability to moderate and adapt their language and behavior relative to their ‘betters, equals, and inferiours’ (Guazzo 1.114). Bourdieu defines the ‘market’ in precisely these terms, as ‘a particular expression of the structure of the power relations between . . . groups’ (‘Linguistic Exchanges’ 647). The early modern conversational market, however, was spatial as well as relational, and courtesy theorists placed equal emphasis on the boundaries framing conversational encounters. Guazzo tells his readers that the conversation between William and Anniball takes place in ‘a little closet’ (1.15) and goes on to differentiate between ‘publike’ conversation, ‘which is abrode with strangers: and private, which is at home in the house’ (1.114). The author of Youths Behaviour similarly outlines separate linguistic and gestural precepts for conversations at the table and in the street. Conversational decorum involved strategic self-positioning relative at once to one’s interlocutors and to the space and setting within which an interchange took place. The social and spatial characteristics of a particular field usually go a considerable way towards determining how an individual is going to speak and whether he or she will profit within that market. Assuming that a field tends to have at least some influence on the amount of profit a speaker will be able to acquire, it is to a speaker’s advantage to seek out markets that will garner maximum capital. Bourdieu acknowledges, for example, the nonsensity of reading a surrealist poem in the Stock Exchange (‘Linguistic Exchanges’ 650). Bourdieu’s model does allow for some degree of agency within the parameters established by a particular field; he defines the ‘language habitus’ as ‘the capacity to use the

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possibilities offered by language and to assess practically the moments to use them’ (‘Linguistic Exchanges’ 662). However, he focuses primarily on the ‘censorship’ imposed on a speaker by the market: ‘This linguistic “sense of place,” ’ he notes, ‘governs the degree of constraint which a given field will bring to bear on the production of discourse, imposing silence or a hypercontrolled language on some people while allowing others the liberties of a language that is securely established’ (‘Price Formation’ 82). In reading linguistic strategies always as a product of their field, Bourdieu neglects to probe the extent to which an individual can transform a market or even create a new field that might facilitate greater symbolic capital and the freedom to experiment with or to redefine conversational conventions. Lynne Magnusson alludes to this possibility in her analysis of Shakespeare’s Iago as a ‘rhetorician of social context.’ Silenced in the Senate, Iago creates alternative occasions ‘in which . . . his speech can prevail over those of higher rank’ (Shakespeare and Social Dialogue 14, 175). If space can shape a speaker’s language and behavior, so too can a speaker shape and create a space. This vital relationship between space and the inhabitant acting upon that space is already implicit within Lefebvre’s notion of space as both ‘product and producer,’ but it is perhaps most helpfully articulated by Michel de Certeau, who differentiates between static ‘place’ and space as a ‘practiced place’ (117). ‘Place’ in de Certeau’s formulation positions every element ‘in its own “proper” and distinct location, a location it defines.’ Space, on the other hand, is the parole to place’s langue: ‘Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities’ (117). ‘Space,’ for de Certeau, is not univocal, nor is it stable. Although it is bounded – ‘there is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers’ – it is fluid, open, and capable of infinite variety as it is ‘modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts’ (123, 117). Space emerges in de Certeau’s work as inherently dynamic and ambiguous. As a ‘situated . . . act’ (117), space is the product of a particular interchange between person and place that in turn transforms a static location into a field of social action. Women’s attention to location and setting in early modern England can be traced in a wide range of literary genres; the blazoned city of London in Isabella Whitney’s 1573 poetic last will and testament, the caves and cabinets that shelter and engender the stories of Mary Wroth’s protagonists in The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania (1621), and the galleries and garrison towns of Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in Campo

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stand as just a few examples. Like the closets, caves, paratextual cities, and salons that I will be examining, however, these venues are rarely, if ever, only ‘places.’ As Alison Findlay has shown, a woman who creates dramatic settings is ‘already practicing place, mobilizing and perhaps challenging the “proper” positions allotted to her in a given social and physical order’ (Playing Spaces 4). For the women writers featured in Early Modern Women in Conversation, the creation of textual conversational spaces constitutes a feminist pragmatics, a strategic practice that enabled them to negotiate and to transform gendered constructions of women’s ‘place’ and language in the period through situated utterance. Pembroke, Wroth, Cavendish, and her stepdaughters do not represent architectural, physiological, or paratextual spaces in their writings in order to reproduce or passively to inhabit conventional social settings. Rather, by delimiting the parameters of those spaces, they create possibilities for negotiating new social positions through the conversations enacted within those boundaries. Engaged in what Douglas Robinson has called the ‘creative, active construction of context’ (106), these five writers appropriate, actualize, and transform recognizable ‘places’ in early modern culture by defining and prescribing the features of their textual conversational settings. In so doing, they set up alternative conversational markets that sanction new ways of speaking and being, and thus new social spaces, for themselves and their female protagonists.

Gendered interiors: the case of the closet In the list of duties outlined for husband and wife in the popular A Godlie Forme of Householde Government, first published in 1598, John Dod and Robert Cleaver’s insistence on a gendered system of spatial positioning follows closely on the heels of their defense of the binaries prescribing the conversations of men and women: ‘The dutie of the man is, to be skillfull in talke: and of the wife to boast of silence. . . . The dutie of the husband is, to dispatch all things without dore; and of the wife, to ouersee and giue order for all things within the house’ (sig. L4r). As this passage suggests, the gendering of conversational strategies cannot be separated from the question of space in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. For prescriptive writers, successful containment of the ideal woman was at once verbal and spatial; a woman’s moderate tongue and her confinement within sanctioned architectural boundaries substantiated her sealed body. The idealized and supposedly ‘silent’ early modern woman appears in such texts firmly positioned within the walls of her father’s or husband’s home. In The Instruction of a

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Christian Woman (1523, trans. 1529), Juan Luis Vives imbues household boundaries with the power even to control a woman’s thoughts which, he worries, are ‘swifte’ and ‘unstable, walking and wandring out from hoame, and soone will slyde by the reason of [their] owne slipprynesse . . . [I]f shee be good, it were better to be at home within and vnknown to other folkes’ (10, 29). Anxious writers who castigated women ‘gadding abroad’ were quick to associate the failure to observe spatial boundaries with sexual immoderation. In My Ladies Looking-Glasse (1616), Barnabe Rich characterizes the ‘harlot’ of Proverbs 7 in terms of her spatial mobility: ‘the pathes of a harlot (he saith) are mooueabl [moveable], for now shee is in the house, now in the streetes, now shee lieth in waite in euery corner, shee is still gadding from place to place, from person to person, from companie to company’ (43). Rich’s choice of the word ‘gad’ here underscores not only the harlot’s profligate movement – ‘shee is euermore wandring’ (43) – but also her implicit loquaciousness as she moves ‘from company to company’; by the nineteenth century, the word ‘gadabout’ was in use to denote someone who roves idly ‘from motives of curiosity or gossip’ (OED, n. def. B). Accordingly, private and interior domestic spaces were often gendered female, the restriction of the woman within the innermost parts of the home mirroring the ostensible containment of her body and words. Mark Wigley encapsulates this spatial model in his reading of Leon Battista Alberti’s fifteenth-century treatise Della Famiglia: ‘The virtuous woman becomes woman-plus-house, or, rather, woman-as-housed, such that her virtue cannot be separated from the physical space’ (337). A woman’s ability to restrict and adapt her physical movements within designated social and architectural spaces constituted a key element of her virtuous self-discipline. Such precepts, however, existed in tension with women’s spatial practices within the early modern English household (see Abate; Heal; Orlin, Locating Privacy; S. Roberts). Like the household more broadly, the closet complicates the gendered boundary between ‘private’ and ‘public,’ which was much more tenuous than Dod and Cleaver’s differentiation between feminine space ‘within’ and masculine space ‘without’ suggests. The exclusive and interactive space of the closet provides a valuable case study for considering the intersections between women’s spatial and conversational practice in the early modern period. Architectural changes in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England featured the development of specialized and increasingly personal spaces within the home that provided early modern individuals with retired rooms within which to read and reflect. These spatial reconfigurations engaged with emerging discourses of privacy in complex and

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often contradictory ways. The closet was certainly associated with interiority and non-public activities, whether religious or secular, assuming uses distinct from other domestic spaces designed for more extensive household entertainment.1 Both men and women made use of closets for private reading and self-examination. In The Practice of Christian Graces (1658), Richard Allestree describes the closet as a place where one engages in ‘private duties . . . , a mans own private prayers, reading meditating, and the like.’ He later differentiates between private prayers in his closet and family prayers, which he terms ‘publick addresses to God’ (47–8, 561). Lady Margaret Hoby makes a similar distinction in her diary in her frequent references to ‘priuat’ and ‘publeck’ prayers: ‘I returned vnto my Clossitt . . . and then I examened myselfe and praied : after, I went to supper, then to publeck praers and, lastly, after priuat [prayers], I went to bed’ (99–100). Descriptions of physiological chambers associated with the mind and the heart appeared increasingly interchangeably with allusions to architecture in theological and moral writings that urged readers to retreat into the closet of the heart for prayer and reflection (see Ferry 45–55; Rambuss 103–35). Closet spaces did not consistently equate privacy with solitude, however, nor did they neatly demarcate boundaries between public and private (see Orlin, ‘Gertrude’s Closet’ and Locating Privacy 296–323; Sanders, ‘The Closet Opened’; Straznicky 112–20). Most rooms within the early modern English household were multifunctional, and even the most private domestic spaces retained a communal purpose. Moreover, given the architectural layout of the early modern country house, the decision to withdraw to a smaller and more solitary room was rarely entirely private. Retirement ironically necessitated a public declaration of sorts, as individuals were forced to seek privacy by moving through a series of increasingly exclusive rooms, thereby ‘running a gauntlet of public outerness’ (Fumerton 71) to a more inward space. The furnishings and lavish decorations of rooms like Anne Bacon Drury’s Painted Closet suggest that some closets were intended for display as well as for intimate entertainment (see Meakin). Anne Clifford records an instance when her husband showed off her closet to visiting relatives (185), while Guazzo describes the closet where his brother and Anniball converse in The Civile Conversation as a place ‘where I use to have a fewe small bookes, rather for a shewe then for studie’ (1.15).2 The closet’s manifold uses, ranging from storage of household goods and documents to personal or communal reading and study, further reinforce its ambiguous status.3 Indeed, despite its conventional association with solitude, the closet emerges as a surprisingly interactive space. Its ‘transactive’ potential

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extended well beyond the exclusive encounters between master and secretary that Alan Stewart has traced (‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’ 83) to encompass other kinds of conversations – with God, with family members, servants, or close friends, and even with books – in which women were active interlocutors. While the closet underscores the fluidity of the boundary between private and public in the period, it also stands as a site that helps to problematize assumptions concerning women’s spatial authority and access. Mark Wigley has theorized early modern domestic thresholds in terms of gendered boundaries that facilitated women’s containment: ‘The spatial structure of the house is maintained by both the systems of locks, bars, bolts, and shutters that seal the openings and a controlling eye. In this way, the woman can be held to the thresholds of the house, the doors and windows’ (338). In practice, however, a woman’s position ‘within’ household boundaries was just as dynamic and fluid as the seemingly most ‘private’ rooms whose significance and function shifted according to time of day, use, and combination of occupants. In the first instance, that position was contingent upon social rank, informed by age, class, and marital status as well as relative standing within particular household encounters, whether with husband, parent, child, servant, or guest. As William Gouge notes in Of Domesticall Duties (1622), ‘we must distinguish betwixt the seuerall places wherein men are: for euen they who are superiours to some, are inferiours to others: as he that said, I haue vnder me, and am vnder authoritie. The master that hath seruants vnder him, may be vnder the authoritie of a Magistrate. . . . The wife, though a mother of children, is vnder her husband’ (5). Even as this passage resonates strongly with Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, Gouge’s reference to the ‘seuerall places’ occupied by an individual is also suggestive of the impact that physical location within household spaces had on domestic authority. Far from representing stable sites of subjection and containment, the exterior thresholds of the home and the lockable spaces within it help to foreground the scope of women’s spatial mediation and control. If we give credence to Dod and Cleaver’s contention that a woman’s wifely duty consisted in ‘ouersee[ing] and giu[ing] order for all things within the house,’ a fact substantiated by the accounts of women’s estate management featured in diaries like Lady Margaret Hoby’s, then domestic thresholds emerge as crucial transaction zones for women. There is strong evidence that women moved freely across thresholds, particularly when engaged in domestic duties.4 In her diary, Hoby provides detailed records of her household perambulations. On 7 January

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1600, for example, she recalls that she ‘praied, dined, and, after, went into the toune about som busines : then I was in the granerie receiuing Corne, and againe took order for supper and hard one of my wemen read of perkins, and, after that, returned to priuat praier and examenation’ (51).5 If early modern women enjoyed more movement across domestic thresholds than prescriptive writers imply, however, they also helped to monitor and control those boundaries. The exterior threshold was particularly important in mediating day-to-day interactions; the liminal space positioned women of all ranks safely within prescribed domestic boundaries even as it enabled them to determine and control household access. Hospitality, the ability to invite another person across one’s threshold and to host them adequately, provides one example of this phenomenon (see Heal; Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power 199–229; Flather 96–110). The ability to exclude unwanted visitors constitutes another. It is not a coincidence that threshold transactions became a prime site for slander and witchcraft accusations, as women claimed responsibility for the protection of household boundaries and reacted with hostility towards neighbors who violated those parameters (see Gowing 97–8; Purkiss 97–9). The metaphor of unwanted verbal and physical intrusion across thresholds appears consistently in trial accounts. In A True and Just Recorde, of the Information, Examination and Confession of all the Witches, Taken at S. Oses in the Countie of Essex (1582), Joan Smith testifies that her child died following an interchange on her doorstep that focused too much attention on the baby in her arms (134). The architectural threshold of the house merges here with the physiological boundary between maternal body and unweaned child. Young children and mothers figure prominently in such accounts as signifiers of liminality; ecclesiastical authorities attempted repeatedly to ban the use of popular charms and invocations designed for the vulnerable threshold moments of childbirth and baptism, as well as the lying-in period (see Purkiss 99–106; Sharpe 174–8; Thomas 222–3; Willis). Witchcraft was an arena that brought together linguistic, spatial, and physiological violation, as accusations anxiously targeted women whose words and whose movements transgressed established limits. ‘Magic,’ notes Diane Purkiss, ‘is about degrees of closeness, when closeness becomes unwelcome invasion. It is about setting and controlling limits: geographical, familial, local’ (120). Marking the interface between ‘within’ and ‘without,’ the thresholds of the home became particularly susceptible sites in this regard. Women played a crucial role in monitoring and protecting those boundaries.

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The lockable closet likewise emblematizes cultural anxieties about spatial and sexual access, control, and violation. If the closet was an interactive space in the period, housing encounters among family members, servants, and friends, it was also an exclusive space, thus conflating cultural anxieties about conversational intimacy with those surrounding spatial containment and penetration.6 The closet, whatever its purpose, was finally a space that ‘could be locked’ (Orlin, ‘Gertrude’s Closet’ 64). We know that men and women had at least some access to each others’ closets in the period; Lena Cowen Orlin cites the examples of Sir Edward Dering and Thomas Knyvett, whose wives oversaw their closets in their absence. Both entrust their closet keys to their spouses, instructing them to send documents stored there or to ensure the safety of books, letters, and legal records (Locating Privacy 313–14).7 While such examples productively illuminate the movement within and among closet spaces that took place inside early modern households, they also testify to a restrictive process that aimed to secure and control the closet and its contents. The recurrent metaphor of the individual breast or mind as a closet in the period underscores the concealment and protection associated with the space (Ferry 45–59). Angel Day, for example, commends the secretary who can keep his master’s secrets, like a good closet, under lock and key (Second Part 103). If, as Orlin suggests, ‘Closets were less about keeping people preclusively out than about keeping goods safely in’ (Locating Privacy 304), the closet’s lock and key nonetheless figure the capacity to control access, to delimit as well as to secure boundaries; the OED underscores ‘the power of custody, control, admission of others, etc., implied by the possession of the keys of any place’ (‘key,’ n1 def. I.2). As Sasha Roberts has shown, the distribution of household keys among servants and family members ensured a hierarchy of rooms organized along decreasing levels of access (52–6). While Dering and Knyvett trusted their wives to be their ‘closet partner[s]’ (Orlin, Locating Privacy 313), it is clear that neither Unton nor Katherine carried her husband’s closet keys in ordinary circumstances. Mark Wigley sees a wife’s possession of household keys and authorized access to interior spaces as ‘merely maintain[ing] the very surveillance system she is placed in and by. . . . She is ‘domesticated’ by internalizing the very spatial order that confines her’ (340–1). Given cultural preoccupations with the confinement and surveillance of women’s bodies and activities, however, locks and keys became problematically empowering tools when appropriated by women. When accessing their husbands’ closets, women did not necessarily limit themselves to errands like those requested by Dering and Knyvett. They were free to read, to peruse legal

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or family documents, and even to share closet materials with individuals outside of the household (see Orlin, Locating Privacy 312–14). Women, of course, also had closets of their own. Richard Brathwaite’s fantasy system of surveillance for their closet activities tries to compensate for his inability to access these spaces: Be you in your Chambers or priuate Closets; be you retired from the eyes of men; thinke how the eyes of God are on you. Doe not say, the walls encompasse mee, darkenesse o’re-shadowes mee, the Curtaine of night secures me: These be the words of an Adulteresse: Therefore doe nothing priuately, which you would not doe publikely. There is no retire from the eyes of God. (English Gentlewoman 49) His paranoid and sexualized injunctions ironically attest to the very real privacy that closets and their keys afforded women. Think of the closets and chambers pervading The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania into which Wroth’s female protagonists retreat to reflect, to write, and to converse or the ‘little Cabinet’ where Pamphilia stores her papers (1.62). Even in those moments when they were not alone, women controlled access to these more intimate spaces. When Anne Clifford determines to ‘keep [her] chamber and . . . not so much as go over the threshold of the door’ (189), for example, she invites her husband to come and dine with her in that space. Early modern texts that imagine women breaking into the closets of their male relatives or obtaining keys without the owner’s knowledge magnify the closet’s association with private and exclusive encounters as well as cultural fears about illicit closet access. In The Changeling (1622), Beatrice-Joanna discovers Alsemero’s closet, ‘The key left in’t, and he abroad i’ th’ park’ (4.1.17–18) and proceeds to search inside. By the end of the play, Beatrice-Joanna’s penetrated body joins the objects confined within Alsemero’s similarly violated closet space, while he imagines her and de Flores ‘rehears[ing] again / Your scene of lust’ (5.3.114–15).8 While Middleton and Rowley dramatize male fantasies (and concomitant anxieties) concerning women’s containment and control, Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley paint a somewhat different picture in The Concealed Fancies. Recalling Katherine Knyvett and Unton Dering, Sh. seems to have been entrusted with the keys to her uncle’s closet in his wartime absence. After entering the space, which contains ‘cordials’ (3.4.30), medicines, and foodstuffs as well as letters, however, she discovers another locked storage chest and determines to ‘pick [its] cabinet locks’ to discover ‘his magazine of love’ (3.4.72–3).

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When the smith appears in Act Four to assist the cousins in breaking the locks, Cicelley tells him that they wish to access ‘some books there . . . to pass away this sad and solitary life we’re in’ (4.3.8–9). The episode dwells on the cousins’ daring (Sh. boldly wishes that their uncle might witness their actions, Brathwaite-like, ‘in a prospective’ [3.4.46]), but it also poignantly dramatizes the logistical realities of negotiating household spaces in the Civil War context. While these moments constitute especially transgressive instances of women’s closet activities, they nonetheless help to underscore the privacy and exclusivity associated with this ambiguous and often sexualized conversational space as well as the richness of women’s spatial practices in the period. Far from enacting women’s restriction or confinement within interior domestic spaces, the closet and its keys, like the household more broadly, just as often emblematized women’s spatial access and control.

Aemilia Lanyer’s closet conversations The lockable closet’s close association with exclusivity and sexualized interaction, coupled with its liminal status on the threshold between private and public, provides a fitting entry point to my analysis of textual conversational spaces. But what does it mean to shift from the materiality of the closet’s locks and keys and the boundaries of the early modern home to textual spaces and textual thresholds conceived as arenas of social action? For de Certeau, it is language – or ‘stories about space in everyday culture’ – that holds the power to finesse the movement from ‘place’ into ‘space’ (121). Discourse both maps space and brings it into being. And what of the spaces produced by or reproduced within a written text? De Certeau characterizes the written text as a ‘place constituted by a system of signs’ that is only transformed into space by the act of reading (117). Like reading, however, the creative act of writing itself constitutes a spatial practice, one that can transform the static positioning associated with traditional hierarchies into contexts that bring with them possibilities for individual agency. By attending to the dynamic relationship between language and context, writers can create textual microsocieties that enable interlocutors to reshape and redefine social and linguistic conventions. Conversation constitutes, in Erving Goffman’s terms, ‘a little social system with its own boundary-maintaining tendencies’ (113). Those boundaries may well have material attributes, whether architectural or physiological, and they may well represent or engage with identifiable places in everyday life. Ultimately, however, they delimit performative contexts created in and

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through language and informed by the literary genres within which they are positioned. These spaces in turn generate what Vimala Herman calls ‘worlds that could or might be, in different modalities, to some operative notion of “what is”’ (8). The closets that pervade Aemilia Lanyer’s poetic rewriting of the Passion, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, provide compelling evidence for the authorizing and strategic potential of such textual spaces for early modern women writers. The question of social, spatial, and textual access is central to Lanyer’s project. As Leeds Barroll and Ann Baynes Coiro have argued, it is difficult to know how much proximity the nonaristocratic Lanyer actually enjoyed to her would-be patrons. Yet there is no doubt that she sets out in her dedicatory appeals to her readers to negotiate the class differences separating her, a ‘stranger’ (Lanyer 36), from them. The closet and its key become vital components in Lanyer’s ultimately unsuccessful bid to ‘insert herself into an aristocratic context’ (Barroll, ‘Looking for Patrons’ 35) and to reframe her social position relative to her dedicatees. Lanyer constructs metaphorical closets throughout Salve Deus that house intimate encounters between herself, her female dedicatees, and Christ. References to these closets, conceived in both architectural and physiological terms, appear most frequently in the paratext of her dedicatory epistles and poems addressed to nine aristocratic Jacobean women, virtuous ladies, and the virtuous reader. Lanyer’s description of the Cookeham estate in the country house poem that concludes the work likewise assumes features of the closet, emblematizing a private Edenic realm that makes possible Lanyer’s interaction with Margaret and Anne Clifford. In addition to these smaller closets that pervade her work, Lanyer characterizes her text more generally as a closet that provides her dedicatees with exclusive space for self-reflection and privileged contact with Christ. Lanyer deploys the imagery of the closet and its key in an attempt to oversee her readers’ access to her text and to Christ; this closeted space moreover facilitates her own imaginary encounters with her dedicatees. Lanyer seems to have been well aware of the authorizing potential associated with closets and keys in the early modern period. Only three figures have access to keys and lockable spaces in Salve Deus, each either female or feminized: Margaret Clifford, who holds the keys to the kingdom of heaven (109); Christ, who ‘tooke the keys of all Deaths powre away, / Opening to those that would his name obay’ (103); and, most important for my argument here, Virtue, who is often elided with Lanyer in Salve Deus.9 Lanyer uses the figure of Virtue – and her key – to position herself as the guardian of her textual threshold, claiming

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the authority to control her patrons’ reading experience even as she enjoys proximity to them. Lanyer’s dedication to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, opens with a personified Virtue preparing to unlock the closet of Bedford’s heart: Me thinkes I see faire Virtue readie stand, T’unlocke the closet of your lovely breast, Holding the key of Knowledge in her hand, Key of that Cabbine where your selfe doth rest, To let him in, by whom her youth was blest The true-love of your soule, your hearts delight, Fairer than all the world in your cleare sight. (32) This stanza, which offers the most explicit allusion to the closet in Salve Deus, demonstrates Lanyer’s preoccupation with exclusive spaces, access to which is restricted to and controlled by virtuous women. Entry to an aristocratic woman’s closet was often limited to an exclusive circle of female servants who maintained the secrecy of their mistress’ closets and cabinets (S. Roberts 54–5). Virtue assumes the role of such a servant in this poem as she determines entry to Bedford’s closet-heart and facilitates the intimate interchange between Bedford and Christ that takes place behind its locked doors. Crucially, however, this encounter is enabled through Lanyer’s poems. The dedicatory poem to the Countess of Bedford associates the closet not only with exclusive access and spatial control but also with reading conceived in terms of an intimate conversational encounter unfolding within sanctioned and lockable boundaries. As such, Lanyer’s closet conversations accentuate the secrecy and privileged access associated with the space, while simultaneously tapping into early modern cultural anxieties surrounding intimate conversational exchange. Closet reading shares important affinities with conversation in Lanyer’s poems. Virtue’s presence in the dedicatory poem to the Countess of Bedford seemingly heralds an innocuous spiritual encounter. Yet, as Wendy Wall highlights, the scene in this ‘spiritual bedroom . . . is fraught with sexual overtones’ (Imprint of Gender 327).10 Lanyer’s depiction of Virtue as a procuress ‘readie’ with her key to allow the Countess’ ‘true-love’ to access the closet of her heart, taps into the anxiety prompted by a woman’s ability to lock herself within her closet and to read unsupervised within that space. Textual and sexual practice merge all too quickly in representations of the female subject reading in her bedchamber or closet, such scenes often functioning as ‘a prelude to her entertaining a

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lover, or client’ (S. Roberts 44). Prefatory material addressed to women readers capitalized on the elision of transgressive sexual behavior and reading by figuring women ‘entertaining’ their books in their closets, hiding them under their skirts, and cradling them in their laps to read (see Hackel 207–8). In his letter to Lady Grace Darcy prefacing A Direction for the Weaker Sort of Christians (1609), William Bradshaw picks up on these resonances, introducing his newly published work in implicitly sexualized terms: ‘I hope that you which haue giuen [my papers] some entertainment in your closet, wil not passe by them as vnknowen, now they present themselues vnto you in the street’ (sig. A3v). Lanyer taps into these discourses in her poem as she conflates her text with the body of the feminized Christ, the ‘dying lover’ and ‘lovely guest’ who is ‘entertaine[d]’ by Bedford within the closet-like ‘bowre’ of the heart (33).11 The word ‘entertain’ picks up both on the importance of hospitality in Salve Deus as Virtue invites Christ across the threshold into Bedford’s closet-heart and on the interactive nature of the ensuing encounter; ‘entertain’ was a synonym for conversation in the period (OED, v. def. III, V). Elsewhere in the dedicatory poems, Lanyer heightens this association between reading and eroticized intercourse as she depicts her dedicatees’ meditations on Christ in terms of intimacy with his body. The closet-hearts of her patrons become the site for this merging of and mediation between human and divine. She urges Anne Clifford to ‘lodge [Christ] in the closet of her heart’ (47), enjoins Lady Susan, Countess Dowager of Kent to ‘Take this faire Bridegroome in your soules pure bed’ (20), and encourages Lady Katherine, Countess of Suffolk, to bathe her soul in the ‘flood’ (38) of Christ’s blood.12 This imagery culminates in the lavish blazon of Christ’s body in the central Passion poem. Lanyer concludes the blazon by presenting Christ’s body, opened to her readers’ view, to Margaret Clifford as a ‘perfect picture’ to be ‘engraved’ and preserved within the ‘holy shrine’ of her heart (108).13 Lanyer’s text, blurring with Christ’s body, receives protection, entertainment, and accurate interpretation within her patrons’ closet-like hearts. In addition to figuring her patrons’ hearts and minds as private closet spaces, Lanyer situates her own text more broadly as a lockable closet that facilitates these textual encounters between her dedicatees and Christ and that provides her with access to her patrons. Lanyer’s decision to liken her poem to a reflective mirror or glass in which her dedicatees can examine and view themselves immediately connects her poem with the exclusive self-reflection associated with closet space.14 Throughout the dedicatory poems, moreover, Lanyer assumes a role akin to the Countess of Bedford’s Virtue holding the ‘key of Knowledge’ (32)

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that provides access to her innovative rereading of Christ’s Passion and its correlative critique of gender and class hierarchies. In its non-material sense, a key is ‘[t]hat which serves to open up, disclose, or explain what is unknown, mysterious, or obscure; a solution or explanation,’ while in the case of ciphers or riddles, a key ‘facilitate[s] the work of learners’ (OED, n1 def. I.6a, b). Keys offered women access to knowledge as well as to space. Pamphlets and books associating keys with learning were widely disseminated in the early modern period, exemplified by Thomas Achelley’s The Key of Knowledge (1572). In his dedicatory epistle to Lady Elizabeth Russell, the sister-in-law of Lanyer’s primary dedicatee Margaret (Russell) Clifford, Achelley elides such knowledge acquisition with his addressee’s closet reading: I haue compiled this little booke of Prayers grounded vpon the deuine promises contained in the sacred Scriptures, . . . crauing that as ofte soeuer, as God shall put it in your mynde to withdrawe your selfe into your closet, there to meditate vpon the heauenly promises . . . that then you would vouchsafe to take this booke in hand. (sigs C.ii.r–v) Recalling the association that Achelley develops between knowledge and closet reading, Lanyer situates her text as the key to a transformative rereading of Christ and, in the dedicatory poems, herself as the guardian of that textual threshold. It is only through their encounter with her poem, Lanyer suggests, that her dedicatees will secure proximity to Christ. As she promises her readers, ‘Heere I present to you the King of kings: / Desiring you to take a perfit view, / Of those great torments Patience did indure’; ‘Here may they see him in a flood of teares, / Crowned with thornes, and bathing in his blood’ (38–9). Lanyer’s deployment of the deictic ‘here’ using anaphora appears as a frequent rhetorical, and inherently propagandistic, strategy in Salve Deus as she situates her text as the site for an authoritative, privileged, and eroticized conversation with Christ.15 Virtue’s ‘key of Knowledge’ that controls entry to Bedford’s inner self – ‘Key of that Cabbine where your selfe doth rest’ (32) – becomes in turn a metaphor of access connected to the act of reading and, in particular, the act of reading Lanyer’s poems. Virtue’s presence in Lanyer’s dedicatory epistles, the threshold to her Passion poem, reinforces the strategic potential of the paratext. For Gérard Genette, one of the most potent functions of paratextual material is its ability to command or instruct a reader to approach a text in a particular way (7–19). His characterization of the paratext as a transaction

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zone that conveys authorial intention to the reader recalls J. Hillis Miller’s reading of the prefix ‘para’ as a marker of threshold, a liminal boundary between interior and exterior spaces (219). The paratext both prepares a reader to enter and interpret a text and protects that text against readings that clash with authorial and editorial goals. The imagery of access that surrounds the paratextual threshold evokes the exclusivity of the closet. The analogy is particularly apt in the case of Salve Deus. Evidence that Lanyer never succeeded in gaining patronage reflects the elusiveness of the control that paratextual material seemingly offers. Yet, as the threshold to her Passion narrative, Lanyer’s dedicatory poems underscore her desire to direct her patrons’ access to her text. The dedicatory epistles are rife with imperatives, as Lanyer commands them to ‘feed upon’ (7) her words, ‘Looke in this Mirrour’ (5), and, finally, favor her text. This is not to deny that Lanyer constructs her patrons as skilled readers, nor that she desires – and needs – her aristocratic dedicatees to grace her text with their approval. However, as Edith Snook contends, ‘determining what and how to read, was itself a form of social power’ (132). By claiming the authority to guide her dedicatees’ reading experiences and their access to her poems and to Christ, Lanyer amasses some symbolic capital for herself. Her insistence on exclusive access to her textual closet becomes a crucial strategy in her quest for preferment. The affinities that I have been tracing between Lanyer and the keywielding Virtue are reinforced by Virtue’s ambiguous status in Salve Deus. Because Virtue is regularly depicted as presenting Lanyer’s text to her patrons in the prefatory poems, she often seems to be functioning as a substitute for Lanyer herself (see Silcox). Lanyer introduces Virtue in her dedicatory poem to Queen Anne. Like the self-deprecating Lanyer, Virtue stands ‘In poore apparell, shaming to be seene’ as she waits to present ‘This holy worke’ (6) to the Queen and Lanyer’s exclusive community of aristocratic and virtuous women. In ‘To all vertuous Ladies in generall’ Lanyer again suggests a parallel between herself and Virtue. This time, Virtue holds ‘in her hand the Booke where she inroules / Those high deserts that Majestie commends’ (12). The lines’ slippery third-person pronoun blurs the boundaries between Virtue and Lanyer-as-author presenting her book as a model for her female coterie. By eliding herself with the figure of Virtue, Lanyer strategically defends her authorial project and presumes to direct her social superiors even as she commends them for their goodness: ‘Let Virtue be your guide, for she alone / Can leade you right that you can never fall’ (12). Ultimately, it is Lanyer who figuratively provides access to the closet of her book,

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Lanyer who directs the encounters between Christ and his beloved women, and Lanyer who entreats her social superiors to ‘entertaine this dying lover’ (33). Like Virtue, Clifford, and Christ himself, Lanyer holds keys promising exclusive access to her textual chamber. Lanyer’s portrayal of Virtue also enables her imaginatively to enjoy the proximity to her patrons that eludes her in daily life. When Lanyer depicts her dedicatees lodging Virtue (whom, in the dedication to Queen Anne, Lanyer also associates with Christ), within the cozy boundaries of their hearts, she implicitly inserts herself into this intimate space. Lauding Anne Clifford’s ‘faire breast’ as the place where ‘true virtue then was hous’d’ (134) in ‘The Description of Cooke-ham,’ Lanyer at once praises her patron’s virtuous actions, locates Christ in the closet-like space of her heart, and grants herself access to the most intimate part of her patron’s self. The strategy, moreover, enables her to claim comparable status to her dedicatees. Lanyer repeatedly praises her chosen women, particularly the Cliffords, for their virtue. In the dedication to Anne Clifford, Lanyer urges her to cultivate the virtue bequeathed to her by her mother as the apex of her honor (43). In the conclusion of the main poem of Salve Deus, meanwhile, Lanyer contends that Margaret Clifford’s ‘rarest Virtues’ (129) surpass the most exemplary biblical and classical women.16 Elsewhere, in a passage that recalls her depiction of Christ lodged in the ‘bowre’ (33) of Bedford’s heart, she commends the virtuous as ‘beauteous bowres where true worth should repose, / And where his dwellings should be built most strong’ (42). The architectural allusions here are again suggestive of the closet. Associating herself with the figure of Virtue and heralding her dedicatees as virtuous paragons, Lanyer subtly claims similar status for herself even as she displays her longing to cross the social threshold separating her from her patrons. There is a third metaphorical closet in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum: Cookeham. In ‘The Description of Cooke-ham,’ Lanyer figures the estate where she stayed with Margaret and Anne Clifford as a utopian space of retirement that privileges reading, female community, and intimate conversational encounters with a host of Old and New Testament figures: ‘In these sweet woods how often did you walke, / With Christ and his Apostles there to talke’ (133). Lanyer prioritizes description of the grounds over the house in the poem, but she retains architectural images in her depiction of nature and the women’s activities at Cookeham. The trees shape themselves into ‘Canopies’ (131) to shield the Cliffords from the sun, while the oak under which Margaret Clifford sits to meditate and read lowers its branches to form an ‘abode’ (132)

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for her. And when Lanyer credits Cookeham with inspiring her poem, she locates it as the site of true virtue in a line that connects the estate with the closet-like space of the heart: ‘Farewell (sweet Place) where Virtue then did rest, / And all delights did harbour in her breast’ (130). Later in the poem, Lanyer again recalls the image of Anne Clifford’s closet-like heart, specifying that it, too, houses Virtue (134). Finally, within the Edenic feminine sphere that Cookeham represents, Lanyer emphasizes the pleasure derived from textual meditation, conversation with Christ, and reading; the kiss stolen from the Countess’ tree lends an erotic tone to the pleasurable world embodied in the estate. Exemplifying the realm of ‘entire love’ (135) that Lanyer yearns for in her appeals for the eradication of social barriers, Cookeham becomes a protected sphere that gives her privileged access to the Cliffords and their textual activities and enables all three women to enjoy intimacy with Christ. The poem maps out, in miniature, the coterie community that Lanyer tries so hard to create throughout Salve Deus. In so doing, it underscores Lanyer’s quest for exclusive space sequestered from male interference and enables her further to advance her claim for authorial recognition and social access. Once deprived of the sheltered world of Cookeham, Lanyer turns to the writing of Salve Deus to construct her own exclusive textual space. The publication of Salve Deus problematizes Lanyer’s representation of secluded closet spaces and her longing for an exclusive coterie. Although she takes the unconventional decision to address her text solely to women, her decision to publish her poems opens Salve Deus to the gaze of a reading public that includes the anonymous women of the print marketplace that she addresses in ‘To all vertuous Ladies in generall’ and ‘To the Vertuous Reader’ as well as men.17 This act seemingly contradicts her claim for exclusivity and protection from the male gaze, as her readers assume the transgressive stance of voyeurs observing the intimate encounters transpiring between Christ and Lanyer’s dedicatees within the nested closet spaces of her poem and of her patrons’ hearts. Unlike the heart figured in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 46, ‘A closet never pierced with crystal eyes,’ Lanyer’s closet-hearts are unlocked, opened to the penetrating gaze of a wider readership. Even as it taps into the male desire to spy on women in their closets, the decision to publish implicitly denies Lanyer’s patrons the privacy and exclusivity they command by virtue of their social status. Publication effectively exposes them to the public eye, challenging the privileges of social rank and, by extension, once again arguably shifting Lanyer into a position of relative authority and control. She claims to determine access to her

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texts, even as she undermines the exclusive class structure on which her bid for patronage ironically depends. In ‘creat[ing] the sense of an inner space’ (Wall 177), however, publication also paradoxically helps to guarantee Lanyer’s virtue. Not only God, as Brathwaite warns in The English Gentlewoman, but the (male) reader monitors the closet activities of Lanyer, her dedicatees, and Christ. In ‘The Description of Cooke-ham,’ Lanyer lashes out at Fortune for relegating her to a social ‘frame’ that distances her from her patrons: Unconstant Fortune, thou art most too blame, Who casts us downe into so lowe a frame: Where our great friends we cannot dayly see, So great a diffrence is there in degree. (134) To compensate for that social disparity, Lanyer creates an alternative ‘frame’ with her poetry: ‘This frame of Glory which I have erected, / For your faire mind I hold the fittest place, / Where virtue should be setled & protected’ (41). Lanyer credits herself with the construction of a textual and architectural ‘frame’ that enables her dedicatees to entertain their beloved in safety. Juxtaposing this imagery of access and protection with the ambiguous figure of Virtue, she imagines herself entering the chambers of her virtuous patrons’ hearts alongside Christ. In so doing, she achieves proximity to and intimacy with her ‘great friends’ and claims comparable worth and status for herself. The claim to control the relationship between reader and author did not, of course, guarantee that readers would interpret a text according to the author’s desire. There is no evidence to suggest that Lanyer was ever successful in securing patronage, reflecting the elusiveness of her bid for social preferment through textual control. Her textual closets, like Cookeham, are left sadly empty; even Echo dies at the conclusion of her poem (138). In part, her failure may be due to the bizarre conflation of humility and aggressive critique that characterizes her appeals to her patrons. Lanyer is not always an adept conversationalist in her dedicatory epistles. Yet in their defiant appeals for favor, coupled with their radical rewriting of the Passion and scathing critique of class and gender hierarchies, Lanyer’s poems exemplify how the textual spaces that house fantasy social encounters could help women writers to imagine and perform transformative social action in early modern England. Her emphasis on social, spatial, and textual access, manifested in the metaphors of the closet and its key, figures her longing for authority and favor and stands as a central strategy in her quest for self-promotion.

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Wielding the key to her book and to Christ, Lanyer uses the space of the closet and the intimate conversations housed within that space to situate herself in a position of privilege relative to her patrons. In so doing, she challenges the differences in rank that separate them in daily life and validates her authorial project, itself the product of her closet activities, as divine, authoritative, and, paradoxically, virtuous.

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Part II The Sidneys in Conversation

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3 Speaking to God with ‘a cloven tongue’: The Sidney-Pembroke Psalter

The sociopolitical, gendered, and spatial connotations of the word ‘conversation’ that I have been exploring converge in the psalm translations of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. The genre that Pembroke inherited when she undertook to complete her brother’s translations of the Psalms in the years after his death in 1586 was inherently conversational, offering a complex and varied model of interaction that traces the changing relationship between human and divine. Howard Neil Wallace aptly summarizes the Psalms as ‘dialogue-poems’ that comprise ‘a world full of conversations’ (21). Early modern Protestant commentators placed a similar emphasis on the Psalms’ dialogic foundations and urged readers to appropriate the psalmist’s flexible ‘I’ as their own in prayer and meditation. Arthur Golding, translator of John Calvin’s commentaries on the Psalms, characterizes the poems as a communication with God, [that] requireth rather an earnest and deuout lifting vp of the minde, than a loud or curious vtterance of the voice: there be many vnperfect sentences, many broken speeches, and many displaced words: according as the voice of the partie that prayed, was eyther preuented with the swiftnesse of his thoughtes, or interrupted with vehemency of ioy or greef. (sig. *.iiij.v) These inward conversations with God were inherently politicized. The Psalms became a feature of public as well as private religious practice in the sixteenth century, translated and arranged in popular, though often unimpressive, metrical and musical settings, sung and read in homes and churches, and brandished as battle cries by Protestants and Catholics throughout Europe. The significance of the Sidney-Pembroke psalter derives from its unique engagement with each of these features 63

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of the psalm tradition. It has been justly celebrated for its painstaking reworking of important Protestant source texts, for its dazzling poetry that draws on the work of other psalm translators, and for its fusion of psalm and lyric discourses.1 The siblings combine these rich intertextual dialogues with a strong emphasis on the Psalms’ intrinsic conversational structure and inward focus. Conversation is a particularly important feature of Pembroke’s contributions to the project. In what follows, I argue that Pembroke elaborates on the conversational elements, ambiguous narrative stance, and inwardness integral to the psalm tradition and accentuated in her brother’s translations to situate intimate and inward conversation as the basis for her psalmist’s and her own poetic and political authority. Insisting on the relationship between inward conversation and resultant outward expression, she establishes her psalmist’s confident ability to praise and teach as the product of the interchanges between psalmist and God unfolding within the conflated architectural and physiological space of the closet-heart. Although ostensibly underscoring the private nature of the psalmist’s communication with God, these inward conversations ultimately reinforce the public ramifications of Pembroke’s poems and sanction her own poetic agency. Pembroke further intensifies the dialogic features of her psalm translations by engaging in a rich array of intertextual conversations: with Augustine, with John Calvin, with Clément Marot and Theodore Beza, and, most important, with Philip Sidney. The psalmist’s intimate interchanges with God are mirrored in the Psalmes by Pembroke’s own conversation with the poetic model of her divinized brother. Tapping into the complex verbal and physical connotations of the word ‘conversation,’ Pembroke emerges from this creative and eroticized exchange, best expressed in her elegy to her brother’s ‘Angell spirit,’ to complete his poetic project.

‘[A] communication with God’: voicing the psalms Luce Irigaray’s theory of transformative conversation provides a helpful entry point for my analysis of Pembroke’s Psalmes. Evoking the political, behavioral, and sexual connotations of early modern conversational interaction, Irigaray uses the metaphor of physically intimate and linguistically experimental interchange to represent a new way of speaking and being that disrupts patriarchal social structures. She terms such conversation ‘amorous exchange’ (‘Bodily Encounter’ 43–4) and locates it within the recesses of the female body, where she imagines conversations of such profound intimacy that self and other blur. The

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creative merging of self and other integral to her work, an experience best expressed by her reading of the nested bodies of Christ and Mary in Marine Lover, prompts both self-expression and cultural intervention. Irigaray’s work registers this process on linguistic and structural levels, as the ellipses, sentence fragments, and asyndeton that characterize her writing dislocate syntax and transform her prose into quasi-poetic discourse. Even as her rejection of the markers of academic writing disturbs philosophical and linguistic parameters, Irigaray’s work models an approach to conversation that relies on intimate and nested interchange. In Speculum of the Other Woman, for example, she deconstructs philosophical and psychoanalytic conventions through conversations with Freud and Plato that blur the boundaries between speaker and addressee; in the original edition she omits quotation marks and references so that it is difficult to tell where the voice of, for instance, Freud lecturing ends and hers begins. Throughout her works, she inhabits the voices of her interlocutors even as she emphasizes the importance of metaphorically inhabiting the inward spaces of the body to facilitate articulation. The effect of Irigaray’s conflation of the physiological and the spatial in her depiction and enactment of these exchanges is, as Edward S. Casey has argued, ‘to burst the bounds of place . . . to make place something elastic and alive – an interactive and engaging envelope – that reflects the enveloped body in its dynamic and developmental being’ (326). The space of conversation constitutes, for Irigaray, a transformative ‘production of intimacy’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference 53). While Irigaray’s call for a feminism of difference is addressed to a late twentieth-century audience, her work enters into a debate concerning gender, conversational intimacy, and linguistic and political agency that emerged in sixteenth-century European conduct literature and that was enacted in the salons of seventeenth-century France and the coffeehouses of eighteenth-century England. These issues lie at the heart of Pembroke’s Psalmes. Building on the Psalms’ emphasis on inwardness and drawing on emerging discourses of privacy and interiority, Pembroke situates her psalmist’s conversations with God within a ‘clossett’ (143:41) that remains closely associated with the psalmist’s body. The Psalms’ ‘nested speakers,’ as Margaret Hannay has called them (‘House-confinèd maids’ 48), in conversation within that space, exemplify the extreme intimacy between self and other that Irigaray identifies as the prerequisite for articulation. Psalmist, poet/translator, and even God merge in the ambiguous first-person narrator of the Psalms, rendering conversational and physical boundaries between speakers fluid and often difficult to determine. A number of studies have convincingly pointed to the protection

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afforded Pembroke by this veiled narrative voice, demonstrating that she can insert political and personal references under the virtuous guise of the psalmist and of religious translation more generally (see especially Hannay, ‘So May I with the Psalmist’). Yet Pembroke also relies on this interpenetration of speakers for her reading of the Psalms, emphasizing the proximity achieved through conversation with God and arguing, in turn, that such inward conversation facilitates poetic agency and political intervention. Indeed, the problematically public connotations of closet space and of inward conversation in the early modern period, coupled with the Psalms’ ambiguous narrative stance, render the seemingly private interchanges between psalmist and God in Pembroke’s translations daringly assertive. Inward conversation grounds the psalmist’s and Pembroke’s confident claim to sing God’s praise publicly, praise fittingly expressed in the innovative poetry of the Psalmes. In reading Pembroke’s translations as an authorizing poetic conversation, I am not seeking to trace an essentialist or consistent female ‘voice’ in Pembroke’s writing or in the Psalms more generally. The relationship between voice and gender is highly problematic in the Psalms; as Suzanne Trill points out, ‘Any attempt to locate a gendered voice in [the poems] is fraught with difficulty and highlights a crucial problem at the center of feminist reading strategies’ (‘Sixteenth-Century Women’s Writing’ 155). Despite the references derived from women’s experiences that enliven her translations, Pembroke’s own psalmist is, as Hannay remarks, ‘carefully non-gendered’ (‘Joining the Conversation’ 117n6). The Psalms were traditionally understood as inspired by God and used as a lens to perceive Christ, in whom, Paul maintains, there is neither male nor female. David’s voice, meanwhile, was regularly read as male; in ‘Even now that Care,’ Pembroke refers to the poems as ‘his [David’s] praier, plaint, and praise’ (1.103). For many readers, the voice of the translator or poet disappeared, such that they interpreted the Psalms as the unmediated Word of God. At the same time, readers were encouraged to insert their own experiences into the first-person pronoun of the Psalms, using the poems for personal prayer. This application of the Psalms was particularly important in enabling women to claim a sanctioned position of self-expression in the early modern period, exemplified by the function of the Psalms in Anne Clifford’s diary (83; see Trill, ‘Speaking to God’; Hannay, ‘So May I with the Psalmist’). Golding declares to his dedicatee Edward de Vere that the scriptures ‘belong indifferently vntoo all men, of what estate, degree, sex, age, or calling so euer they be without exception’ (sig. *.ij.r). At best,

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therefore, we are left with an impressive plurality of voices; John Donne aptly describes the Psalms as poems sung with ‘a cloven tongue’ (34). My argument for a political and poetic voice in Pembroke’s Psalmes relies on a more strategic, flexible, and fundamentally relational understanding of ‘voice.’ Elizabeth D. Harvey’s ‘ventriloquized voice’ and, more recently, Edith Snook’s ‘intertextual’ voice provide helpful theoretical models for problematizing the relationship between voice and gender in early modern literature and for considering the implications of an author’s decision to appropriate a particular ‘I,’ especially a differently gendered ‘I.’ Similarly, Irigaray’s appropriation and infiltration of the voices of male philosophers demonstrates how multiple voices can inhabit speech and create opportunities for tactical articulation. Resisting attempts to isolate a consistent speaker or voice, the ambiguous firstperson narrator of the Psalms exemplifies this strategic flexibility. Such flexibility does not, however, preclude agency or authority; as William F. Hanks argues, ‘To speak is inevitably to situate one’s self in the world, to take up a position, to engage with others in a process of production and exchange, to occupy a social space’ (139). Recalling the strategic potential of epistolary and oral interchange, the Psalms’ first-person pronoun and emphasis on direct address enabled readers and translators to shape the articulation of their experiences and of their relationship to God through linguistic nuance. John Lyons underscores the importance of such a relational approach to ‘locutionary subjectivity’: ‘locutionary subjectivity is really interlocutionary subjectivity and . . . in consequence, subjectivity, in so far as it is manifest in language . . . is really intersubjectivity’ (14). The conversational framework of the Psalms exemplifies Lyons’ view. The psalmist as speaker is defined above all through verbal relationship with God. My understanding of voice, then, is one that recognizes the strategic flexibility, authorizing potential, and relationality of the psalmist’s narrative stance. Early modern Protestant descriptions of the Psalms emphasized the poems’ value in enabling an individual to try on a range of rhetorical positions, thereby learning effectively to petition God.2 For Anthony Gilby, translator of Theodore Beza’s Latin Psalm paraphrases, and John Calvin, both important sources for Pembroke, the Psalms functioned as a sacred conduct book for conversational interaction with the divine. In his epistle to the reader, Calvin tells his audience that they will learn from the Psalms how ‘too seeke remedies’ from God through prayer: ‘Agein if the calling vppon God bee the greatest defence of our welfare: . . . a better and more certeine rule therof cannot be fetched from

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elsewhere than out of this booke’ (sig. *6v). His description connects the Psalms with secular prescriptive literature outlining proper conversational decorum. Gilby makes a similar promise to his patron, Lady Katherine Dudley, Countess of Huntington. The poems will teach her ‘what we shal saie vnto God, and how we must prepare our selues to appeare before his maiestie, both in prosperitie and aduersitie.’ Like Calvin, Gilby presents the Psalms as verbal supplications ‘to moue the Lord our God to mercies’ (sig. a3v). Gilby’s motives in his epistle are decidedly political, a stance that anticipates Beza’s militantly Huguenot paraphrases; as Hannay argues in Philip’s Phoenix, his choice of dedicatee situates his work firmly in relation to the Protestant Dudley alliance (88). By dedicating his translation to Katherine Dudley, Pembroke’s aunt, Gilby also attributes the conversational and political agency associated with the Psalms to women. He urges his patron not to be afraid to use the Psalms to entreat God for personal assistance and on behalf of England, ‘that so by earnest praiers . . . we may turne away [God’s] fearce wrath’ (sig. a3v). Gilby offers Lady Katherine access to God through prayerful conversation while also validating her authority in moving those conversations into the public sphere. His epistle anticipates Pembroke’s fervent injunctions in Psalms 49 and 148 to ‘World-dwellers all’ (49:1) and ‘you others whose distinctions show, / how sex or age may fall’ (148:47–8) to praise God. The attention that she devotes to the psalmist’s poetic skill, confidence, and joy in her translations exemplifies her awareness of the Psalms’ significance as a culturally appropriate textual space within which women could experiment with and articulate different subject positions. The Protestant reorientation towards individual engagement with God revolutionized the Psalms’ emphasis on personal petition by increasing opportunities for intimate relationship between human and divine. Underscoring the vulnerability that an individual experiences in God’s presence, Calvin suggests that the Psalms will teach his readers ‘not onelye how wee may haue familiar accesse vntoo God, but also how wee may lawfully and freely vtter before him the infirmities which shame forbiddeth vs to be aknowen of vnto men’ (sig. *7r). Because only a small percentage of the Psalms represent God’s words, the hierarchically inferior psalmist is in an unusual position of conversational control. Pembroke clearly recognizes the strategic potential of the psalmist’s stance; in Psalms 86:12 and 138:10, she underscores the ‘carefull’ nature of her psalmist’s entreaties. Nor does she shy away from the Psalms’ more forceful moments. Many of the poems are shocking in their violence, and Pembroke’s psalmist regularly appears as an aggressive and even

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manipulative speaker (see Fiskin 236). Without mitigating or dismissing the psalmist’s potential for aggressive speech, however, Pembroke combines close attention to her psalmist’s strategic verbal self-positioning relative to God with an emphasis on the authorizing potential of familiar conversational interchange. In her translations, the intimate and inward encounters between psalmist and God enable and indeed constitute some of the psalmist’s most powerful and political assertions.

Vox cordis, vox corporis: reading the Psalmes as inward conversation While Pembroke displays an aptitude for constructing and negotiating relationships through conversation in all of her extant writings, nowhere is her fascination with verbal interchange more evident than in her Psalmes. Building on the Protestant emphasis on intimate inward engagement with God modeled for her by Calvin, Beza, Gilby, and Golding, and claiming the authorizing ‘I’ of the psalmist to an even greater degree than her brother, Pembroke’s poems rework and enhance her extant source texts to underscore the psalmist’s voice and to situate the psalmist’s petitions as part of a poetic conversation with God. Philip Sidney’s psalm translations provide an important model in this respect. While first-person narration is common to most translations of the Psalms, the extensive emphasis on dialogue and direct address that pervades the Sidney-Pembroke psalter is unusual (see also Rienstra 48–9; Hannay, ‘Joining the Conversation’ 120). Sidney’s translation of Psalm 39, for example, underscores the psalm’s insistence on the ‘fire’ of words determined to ‘forcibly out brake’ from the psalmist’s mouth (Sidney, Psalms 89).3 He highlights the psalmist’s ‘suites, and cries’ (39:37), dramatizing those appeals with rhetorical questions and apostrophes: O helpe, O helpe me; this farre yet I crave, From my transgressions me to save: Lett me not be throwne down, to so base shame, That fooles of me maie make their game. But I doe hush, why do I say thus much? Since it is thou that mak’st one such. (39:25–30) Pembroke follows her brother’s lead, elaborating on the rhetorical questions and direct address already present in her biblical sources. But her translations go much further. She infuses more descriptive Psalms with the vitality of dialogue and intensifies the dialogic effect of those poems

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that are situated as addresses to God by shifting the narrative stance from third person to first person, inserting what Beth Wynne Fiskin calls ‘breathless, tumbling questions’ (229), and emphasizing God’s response. Psalms 74, 77, and 89 offer good examples of these conversational elements. The Geneva Bible’s version of Psalm 74 declares, ‘Euen God is my King of olde, working saluacion in the middes of the earth’ (fol. 250v). Pembroke’s psalmist turns directly to God and elaborates on the image of God ‘working saluacion’ for five lines, figuring the divine as a midwife or nurse – though still a king – guiding the psalmist through the labor of sin to the release of grace: Thou art my god, I know, my king, who long ago did’st undertake the chardg of me: and in my hard distresse did’st work me such release, that all the earth did wondring see. (74:61–6) The shift from third person to direct address leads to Pembroke’s intimate meditation on God working salvation in the depths of the psalmist’s body rather than in the depths of the earth. Pembroke’s translation further intensifies the relationship between her interloctors by expanding the number of questions the psalmist directs to God. In the Geneva Bible, Psalm 74 opens with two questions: ‘O God, why hast thou put vs away for euer? why is thy wrath kindled against the shepe of thy pasture?’ (74:1). Pembroke’s translation expands this appeal into four questions spread over six lines: O god, why hast thou thus repulst, and scattred us? shall now thy wrath no lymmitts hold? but ever smoke and burne? Till it to Asshes turne the chosen flock of thy deare fold? (74:1–6) Increasing the number of questions in her translation underscores the psalmist’s attention to her addressee, anticipating God’s reply. As Susan Fitzmaurice points out, ‘direct questions . . . indicate the real expectation of relevant response’ (The Familiar Letter 192). Pembroke’s propensity for the interrogative mode is a recurring feature of her translations. In Psalm 89, she transforms the Geneva Bible’s account of God’s failure to

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defend the Davidic king into a series of questions that culminates in the psalmist’s climactic ‘How long ô lord’ (89:113): Takes he his weapon? thou the edge rebatest: comes to the field to fight? thou makest him fly: would march with kingly pomp? thou him unstatest: ascend his throne? it overthrowne doth ly.4 (89:105–8) The questions are not present in the Geneva version, nor in an earlier manuscript variant of the poem, which suggests a deliberate decision to revise these verses as interrogative challenges that urge the divine to reenter a relationship with the faithful even as they critique God’s apparent support of the king’s enemies. Facilitating dialogue, such questions at once foreground the psalmist’s uncertainty, desire for relationship with the divine, and militant challenge to the political status quo. Psalm 77 further exemplifies Pembroke’s emphasis on verbal relationship. The Geneva Bible does not structure the opening lines of this Psalm as direct address, instead distancing the psalmist from her own speech: ‘My voyce came to God, when I cryed: my voyce came to God, and he heard me. . . . I did thinke vpon God, and was troubled: I prayed, and my spirit was ful of anguish’ (77:1–3). Pembroke reworks these verses using second-person pronouns: To thee my crying call, to thee my calling cry! I did ô god, adresse, and thou didst me attend: ................... to thee unceassantly did praying handes extend. (77:1–8) Here, as in Psalm 74, the effect of the repeated familiar second-person pronoun is to emphasize God’s nearness and the intensity, immediacy, and intimacy of the psalmist’s appeal. Throughout her translations, Pembroke elaborates on the Psalms’ dialogic structure to highlight what her psalmist calls ‘my ernest, vehment, cryeng, prayeng’ (130:5). The reader is never allowed to forget that her psalmist is learning to speak with God and to solicit a divine relationship. That Pembroke intensifies her psalmist’s prayerful pleas through direct address is perhaps less surprising than her decision to insist on God’s reply. God is an active listener in the poems; Pembroke characterizes

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God as ‘prone to aid’ (116:11), ‘gratiously’ attending to the psalmist’s ‘harty sighes’ (66:60, 58), and boasting a ‘quick-hearing-eare’ (141:3). In Psalm 120, she declares that her psalmist’s pleas are ‘never unanswered’ (120:2), while Psalm 116 opens with the assertion, ‘The lord receaves my cry, / and me good eare doth give’ (116:1–2).5 As if to underscore her psalmist’s confidence in God’s responsiveness and receptiveness, she injects God’s speech into her Psalmes, again transforming what appears in her sources as God’s indirect speech to direct speech or else intensifying God’s verbal presence in her translations. In Psalm 81, for example, it is God, not the psalmist, who erupts in a series of rhetorical questions not present in Pembroke’s extant sources to ask, ‘why alas? why had not they / heard my voice, and held my way?’ (81:37–8). The psalmist listens eagerly to ‘the voice of god’ (81:18) in this poem.6 In Psalm 82, Pembroke dramatizes God’s address to the false judges by structuring it as an interrogation: ‘How long will ye just doome neglect? / how long saith he, bad men respect?’ (82:6–7). The regular appearance of tags like ‘saith he’ or ‘I say’ in Pembroke’s translations, a stylistic feature which she may well have gleaned from her brother, heightens the words of God and psalmist, evincing Pembroke’s attention to the dialogic framework of her translations.7 Pembroke further accentuates God’s speech throughout her poems by interpreting the repeated scriptural references to God’s Word, usually characterized in her sources as the law, covenant, or promise that cements God’s relationship with believers, literally as words, with an emphasis on dialogue. At the end of Psalm 64, for example, Pembroke blurs the identity of the ‘he’ to imagine God’s works specifically in terms of divine speech acts: ‘Not one I say but shall behold / this worke of God which he agayn / shall as he can in wordes unfold’ (64:33–5).8 In another instance, this time in Psalm 74, Pembroke depicts the psalmist’s longing for God’s succor as a plea for verbal response. Encouraging God to honor the covenant made with the chosen people, the psalmist, drawing on Beza, pushes God to ‘Rise’ and ‘pleade thyne owne case’ (74:121).9 Pembroke’s God manifests authority and care most regularly to the psalmist and to the world through language. God’s creative verbal power in turn inspires a reciprocal dialogue with Pembroke’s psalmist which fosters and validates the psalmist’s own verbal authority. While Pembroke’s translations, like the scriptural originals, deploy a plethora of images to figure the relationship between God and psalmist – God appears as redeemer, as shepherd, as protector, and as king – they place particular emphasis on characterizations that foreground a relationship based on verbal exchange. One of the

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most important of God’s roles for Pembroke is that of teacher. Whereas Gilby urges Katherine Dudley to learn to speak to God from the Psalms, Pembroke portrays her psalmist being taught to speak by God. She inserts references to divine inspiration, guidance, and support or refocuses references present in her source material to highlight the development and authority of the psalmist’s voice. In Psalm 119E, for example, Pembroke develops the Geneva Bible’s insistence on the didactic nature of the relationship between God and psalmist – ‘Teache me, ô Lord, the waie of thy statutes’ (119:33) – to evoke the conversational basis of their teacher-student relationship: ‘Explaine, ô lord, the way to me, / that thy divine edicts enfold’ (119E:1–2, my emphasis). Drawing on Calvin’s commentary on Psalm 119:171, Pembroke presents the psalmist as a ‘scholer’ inspired by God’s explanation of the divine covenant to sing her own response: ‘Then from my lipps shall flow / a holy hymn of praise to thee: / when I thy scholer taught shalbe / by thee thy lawes to know’ (119Y:9–12). Calvin’s reflection foregrounds God’s role in teaching the psalmist ‘too power foorthe [his] speeche’: ‘he sheweth . . . how hyghly he esteemed to bee admitted among Gods Disciples, and to profit aryght in his Schoole: namely, bycause he will stepfoorth with full mouth to prayse GOD’ (sig. Aaaa6v). Pembroke situates these didactic exchanges between psalmist and God, whom Calvin calls the psalmist’s ‘inward schoolmaister’ (sig. Aaaa6v) within the hidden recesses of the self. Pembroke’s emphasis on inwardness and inward space, an integral feature of the psalm tradition, taps into architectural and physiological descriptions of interiority prevalent in the sixteenth century, exemplified by popular allusions to the closet of the heart or the chamber of the mind as metaphorical sites for withdrawal, self-examination, and prayer.10 As I argued in Chapter 2, architectural changes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England made spaces like the closet particularly apt vehicles for describing inwardness. In foregrounding the image of the closet in her translations, Pembroke combines the devotional use of metaphorical and material closets and the protection and secrecy that space afforded with the strong associations between closet devotion and conversation prevalent in the early modern period. Private devotion was commonly figured in verbal terms. As Anne Ferry puts it, ‘thinking is identical with utterance in all but sound, and . . . a person alone thinks or talks aloud to himself in a formal pattern that differs significantly from speech to an outside listener only in the respect that it is not overheard’ (55). This emphasis on inward expostulation is intrinsic to the Psalms. Recall the ‘broken speeches’

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and ‘displaced words’ that Golding attributes to the individual seeking to communicate with God through prayer or Pembroke’s reference in Psalm 73 to the self speaking ‘within [her] self’ (73:37). Philip Sidney’s translation of Psalm 4 situates this inward conversation explicitly within architectural boundaries that conflate the space of the heart with the space of the bedchamber: ‘Talk with your harts and yet be still: / And when your chamber you do close, / Your selves, yet to your selves disclose’ (4:18–20).11 The lockable and exclusive space of the closet, however, would have been used not only for private meditation but also for intimate conversational gatherings.12 While self-examination figured in conversational terms remains an important feature of Pembroke’s translations, as it was for her brother, the closet becomes for her the preferred site for intimate and protected interchange between psalmist and God. Pembroke’s Psalmes build on and complicate her brother’s allusion to closet conversation in Psalm 4 by figuring the ‘hid schoole’ (51:21) in which the spiritual encounters between God and psalmist occur as a metaphorical ‘closet’ (91:2) synonymous both with God, whom Pembroke figures as ‘the clossett where I hide’ (119P:5), and with the psalmist’s body.13 As Psalm 139 elucidates, God demonstrates terrifyingly intimate knowledge of the psalmist, having ‘familiar accesse’ (Calvin, ‘To the godly Readers’ sig. *7r) to the ‘closest clossett of my thought’ (139:6) even before those thoughts are spoken.14 The image, which reminds the reader that the spiritual dialogue represented in the Psalmes is being played out within the closet of the psalmist’s mind and heart, looks forward to Irigaray’s description in Marine Lover of the nested bodies of Christ and the pregnant Mary that unite human and divine in the flesh. The ‘nested speakers’ of the Psalms are physically as well as syntactically nested in Pembroke’s translations, placed in an interlocking framework that mirrors sixteenth-century anatomical accounts of the womb’s stratified structure of ‘skins and membranes . . . “tunicles” and “panicles” layered one inside another like a set of Chinese boxes’ (Maus 190). Fittingly, the closet where the psalmist converses with God is also associated with the womb in Pembroke’s poems. Pembroke places particular emphasis on the womb in her translation of Psalm 51, where it becomes another hidden space within which God conveys knowledge and fosters ‘inward truth’: My mother, loe! when I began to be, conceaving me, with me did sinne conceave: and as with living heate shee cherisht me

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corruption did like cherishing receave. but loe, thie love to purest good doth cleave, and inward truth: which hardlie els discerned, my trewand soule in thie hid schoole hath learned. (51:15–21) God’s teaching within the ‘hid schoole’ functions here as a form of grace that compensates for original sin (see Rienstra 49–50; Hannay, ‘Unlock my lipps’ 30–3 and ‘Wisdome the wordes’ 73). At the same time, the poem continues to underscore the formative impact of the psalmist’s intimate encounters with God and the authorizing protection that their conversational space affords.15 This metaphorical closet clearly offers Pembroke’s psalmist sanctuary. In Psalm 143, the psalmist moves from an entreaty to God to ‘yeeld audience’ (143:6) to an acknowledgement of God’s protective role: ‘My cave, my clossett where I wont to hide, / in troublous tyde’ (143:41–2).16 Like its architectural counterparts in the early modern period, however, Pembroke’s closet exists on the boundary between private and public. As I argued in Chapter 2, closets often facilitated a strategic performance of privacy. Indeed, if closet prayers were overheard, that witnessing helped to corroborate a speaker’s godly virtue (Sanders, ‘The Closet Opened’ 134). The conflation of architectural and physiological language in Pembroke’s depiction of the closet-heart and closet-womb only intensifies the sense that a ‘ “privy” place’ (Parker, ‘Dilation’ 113–15) is being exposed here. Even as she seeks refuge within the ‘hid schoole’ (51:21) afforded by God, Pembroke unlocks that ‘closest clossett’ (139:6), opening her psalmist’s conversations with God to the reader’s gaze. Pembroke’s elision of the space of the closet with a ‘cave’ sought in ‘troublous tyde’ in Psalm 143 builds on these cultural resonances. The term ‘cave’ continues to hold maternal and gynecological implications in this psalm.17 But the allusion here also evokes the episode in 1 Samuel in which David seeks refuge from Saul in ‘the caue of Adullám’ (22:1). As such, it draws further attention to Pembroke’s emphasis on disclosure and also renders her imagery more political than it might at first seem. In their headnote to Psalm 143, Marot and Beza identify the song as David’s plea when hiding from Saul: ‘la priere qu’il fit, quand par crainte de Saul il se cacha en vne fosse’ (471–2). The ‘fosse obscure & noire’ that appears again in the fifth stanza of their translation may well have influenced Pembroke’s representation of God as the psalmist’s metaphorical cave; certainly, her readers would have noticed the political parallel, particularly given Pembroke’s elision of Queen Elizabeth with David in ‘Even now that Care.’ The cave in 1 Samuel becomes a

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place not only of protection but also of political agency for David. In Chapter 24, he hides again in ‘the inward partes of [a] caue’ (Geneva Bible 24:4), this time secretly cutting a piece from Saul’s robe and then emerging from his hiding place to claim precedence over his aggressor. Pembroke’s decision to locate her psalmist’s ostensibly private interchanges with God within the ambiguous space of the closet and to link that space in turn with David’s cave belies the apparent interiority of the poems.18 In presenting the Psalms as intimate conversations taking place within the inward closet recesses of the self and in drawing attention to the potentially public implications of such interchanges, Pembroke taps into a debate stretching back to Augustine that wrestles with the relationship between the inward human-divine conversation integral to the Psalms and effective outward articulation. In his Expositions on the Book of Psalms, Augustine distinguishes between silent utterances, what he calls vox cordis, the voice of the heart, and vox corporis, the voice of the body. The psalmist’s communication with God does not stem from the physical voice, but from the internal and often silent expostulations of the heart. Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 3:4 sums up his view: With my voice have I cried unto the Lord; that is, not with the voice of the body, which is drawn out with the sound of the reverberation of the air; but with the voice of the heart, which to men speaks not, but with God sounds as a cry. By this voice Susanna was heard; and with this voice the Lord Himself commanded that prayer should be made in closets, that is, in the recesses of the heart noiselessly. (Expositions 1.10–11) Eliding the secret spaces of the heart with a closet whose doors must be shut to temptation to ensure effective communication with God, Augustine dismisses outward and superficial appeals to God in favor of silent prayers audible only to the divine (see also Expositions 6.264). Augustine’s insistence on the vox cordis strongly influenced early modern translators of and commentators on the Psalms and contributed to reformist discussions concerning the proper relationship between inward prayer and outward expression. Published thirty years after the completion of Pembroke’s Psalmes, John Reading’s Dauids Soliloquie (1627) paradoxically depicts the Psalms as the psalmist’s conversation with God and as ‘a Soliloquie and priuate conference with himselfe; in his own soule’ (52). The psalmist addresses himself through the poems,

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‘an inward speaking of the soule within it selfe.’ At the same time, his soul addresses God: ‘the soule speaketh inwardly either to it selfe . . . or to God, who because hee heareth not like man, needeth not audible sounds, hee knoweth the vnutterable groanes and sighes of the spirit’ (102–3). Although Reading cites Aquinas in the margins of this passage, the distinction he makes between the verbum cordis, articulated in the heart, and the verbum vocis, the physical signifier of this silent expostulation, dates back to Augustine. Inward articulation in the soul becomes for Reading the source of effective outward expression: ‘the soul sendeth out that which it hath framed within, . . . & by the Ministrie of the tongue, & vocall instruments, framing such sounds as serue to conuay them to the eares, & soules of others’ (104–5). In contrast to the sealed doors of Augustine’s closet-heart, Reading depicts his interlocutors communicating through the ‘dores of the body, which God hath set open in man for such entercourse’ (105). Although predating Reading, Arthur Golding takes these ideas further, describing the individual’s private conversation with God as a prelude to public speaking on behalf of God; his stance highlights the importance of the Psalms as battle cries in late sixteenthcentury European religious conflicts. He informs his dedicatee that the Psalms provide a model not only for conversing with God but also for instructing kings and the wider public: ‘make it your counsayler, . . . too talke of it afore Kings and greate men, to loue it, too make your songs of it’ (sig. *.i.j.v). Pembroke taps into this relationship between intimate prayer and effective verbal expression. Psalm 73 provides the best example of the transformative impact that Pembroke and her contemporaries perceived in this shift from ‘inward’ (73:63) interchange with the self and with God to outward articulation. The poem begins by describing the psalmist’s internal debate as she strives to reconcile the visual evidence of wickedness rewarded with her knowledge that God will eventually set the wicked in ‘slippery place’ (73:52). Pembroke presents the debate as a conversation with the self that takes place in the privacy of the psalmist’s heart: ‘ev’n within my self, my self did say’ (73:37). The poem then shifts to address the gap between conversation with the self and physical utterance. Agonizing over the favor seemingly showered on the wicked, the psalmist wonders whether she should articulate the torments of her ‘inward part’ (73:63) – ‘and shall I then these thoughtes in wordes bewray?’ (73:43) – only to retreat again into silent interiority: ‘so then I turn’d my thoughtes another way: / sounding, if I, this secrets depth might find’ (73:46–7). The passage underscores the psalmist’s awareness of the importance of

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conversational decorum, her unwillingness to ‘give . . . offence’ (73:44) to God’s children, and her struggle to move effectively from private thought to godly poetic articulation. Ultimately, the psalmist turns to God, who appears as a teacher again in this psalm, as ‘inward’ conversation within the self leads to and merges with conversation with the divine. The closet Pembroke so often associates with God becomes, in Psalm 73, a protective house where the psalmist learns the reason for the earthly advancement of the wicked and urges God to ‘upon me spend / the treasures of thy sure advise’ (73:70–1) that will enable her to continue in godliness. Thus reassured, the psalmist ponders why she had to go through the experience of internal debate. Pembroke adds the rhetorical questions and the reference to inner conflict: ‘Then for what purpose was it? to what end? / for me to fume with malecontented hart, / tormenting so in me each inward part?’ (73:61–3). Unwittingly, she herself provides the answer in the final stanza: the experience enables her to articulate her love for God. The psalm conveys the interconnection between the dialogues with her self and with the divine taking place in the depths of her body and the psalmist’s resultant ability to express her desire and love for God. For Pembroke, inward conversation, vox cordis, provides the basis for confident outward expression. The experience outlined in Psalm 73 renders the psalmist’s assertion that she will praise God with ‘soule, . . . hart, / and every inward part’ (103:1–2) much more suggestive than it might at first seem. The authorizing potential of the inward conversations dramatized in Psalm 73 is mirrored by the intertextual conversation between Pembroke and her brother that takes place within this poem. Psalm 73 represents one of Pembroke’s most personal meditations on her own desire to continue Sidney’s poetic and political legacy by completing the Psalmes. Pembroke audaciously connects the psalmist’s newfound ability to praise and articulate her love for God with poetry, nesting allusions to Astrophil and Stella (1591), The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1590), and Sidney’s psalm translations throughout her poem. In so doing, she conflates the discourse of inwardness associated with the Psalms with that of the Petrarchan sonnet tradition (see Hannay, ‘Joining the Conversation’ 122–6). The poem seems to have been written with the fifth sonnet of her brother’s sequence in mind: It is most true, that eyes are form’d to serve The inward light: and that the heavenly part Ought to be king, from whose rules who do swerve, Rebels to Nature, strive for their owne smart. (167)

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Wrestling with his feelings for Stella, Sidney’s speaker acknowledges that his eyes ought to focus solely on the ‘inward light,’ reminding himself of the dangers of departing from heavenly rule. Yet, as he proceeds through his argument, the speaker realizes and concludes that, despite his best intentions, he must love Stella. Using the same opening structure as her brother and drawing on his allusion to inwardness, Pembroke’s interpretation of Psalm 73 similarly leads her to a declaration of love. The decision to ‘cleave to god’ (73:83), however, remains firmly allied with poetry and the resolution publicly to praise in Pembroke’s poem. The psalmist’s outburst, ‘O what is he will teach me clyme the skyes?’ (73:73), citing Astrophil and Stella 31, is at once an entreaty to God that underscores the psalmist’s longing for guidance and union with the divine, an invocation of Sidney, and a final question to herself. That question in turn prompts the speaker’s confident declaration that she will ‘sing’ God’s works ‘while breath shall give me space’ (73:84). The confident modal verb ‘shall’ underscores her resolve. Supported by God, the psalmist is finally able to ‘bewray’ (73:43) her thoughts in words even as Pembroke articulates her determination to complete her brother’s poetic project. The divine protection that the psalmist experiences during her ‘inward’ conversations with God imbues her with the confidence publicly to praise; as Pembroke notes in an original addition to Psalm 71, the psalmist tells God that she ‘shall thee sing by thee secure’ (71:75). Indeed, throughout her poems, Pembroke draws a clear correlation between her psalmist’s entreaties to God, God’s response, and the resultant determination publicly to speak. In Psalm 138, she declares: ‘There will I sing, how when my carefull cry / mounted to thee, my care was streight released, / my courage by thee mightily encreased’ (138:10–12). Her choice of the word ‘courage,’ gleaned from the headnote of the Geneva Bible’s version of Psalm 138, highlights the psalmist’s recognition of God’s active role in strengthening her soul as well as the pitfalls involved in making her poetic voice public, while her emphasis on the ‘carefull’ (138:10) nature of the psalmist’s petitions and, elsewhere in the Psalms, her ‘skill’ (111:2) presents both psalmist and Pembroke herself as acquiring poetic confidence, taught and validated by God. The appearance in these examples of the modal verbs ‘shall’ and ‘will,’ which connote command, confidence, and volition, further conveys the psalmist’s determination and claim to public rhetorical prowess. Pembroke makes most use of such modals when depicting her psalmist’s intention to spread God’s word and God’s reciprocal support of her poetic enterprise: ‘Thou shalt make my greatnes greater, / make my good with comfort better / thee my lute, my harpe shall ring’ (71:67–9).

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Fittingly, Pembroke figures that newfound authority in terms of a shift from a conversation between God and psalmist to one between psalmist and future generations: ‘Then shall my lipps declare / the sacred lawes that from thy mouth proceed: / and teach all nations what they are’ (119B:13–15); ‘Yet of thee the thankfull story, / fild my mouth thy gratious glory, / was my ditty long the day’ (71:25–7). In his poem praising the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter, John Donne draws further attention to this process of conversational transmission by describing the movement of God’s revelation to psalmist to future generations as whispering: ‘The songs are these, which heavens high holy Muse / Whisper’d to David, David to the Jewes’ (34). For Pembroke, inward and self-reflexive conversation with God provides the basis for confident poetic intervention. Pembroke extends this experience of intimate conversation with God and resultant public poetic expression to a wider reformed community that explicitly includes women: ‘all that share / This earthly ball’ (117:5–6) must sing, she declares. In Psalm 68, Pembroke positions her psalmist as part of an army of virgins who, taught and inspired by God, exercise their poetic voices together: ‘Ther taught by thee in this tryumphant song / a virgin army did their voices try’ (68:25–6). The women’s song emerges directly from their relationship with God, a detail reminiscent of the psalmist’s own didactic conversations with the divine. Drawing on Beza’s commentary and paraphrase, Pembroke structures part of the psalm as the women’s song: ‘fledd are these kings, fled are these armyes strong: / we share the spoiles that weake in howse did ly’ (68:27–8). The choice of pronoun is significant. While Pembroke tones down the ‘we’ in her revision of Psalm 68 (see Hannay, ‘House-Confinèd Maids’ 66–9), she consistently draws attention to her psalmist’s participation within the godly community as a singer and a teacher. In Psalm 145, for example, she depicts her psalmist joyfully joining with her audience to praise God: Both they and I will tell and sing how forcfull thou, and fearefull art: yea both will willing wittnes bring and unto comming tymes impart thy greatnes, goodnes, just desert: that all who are, or are to be, this Hymne with joy shall sing to thee. (145:15–21) The Geneva translation alludes to the psalmist teaching and participating in praise, but the elaboration of the promise to praise God, the

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confident modal emphasis, and the joyful insistence on ‘this Hymne’ are Pembroke’s. Her hymn, she argues, will be the hymn that teaches the godly to sing – and to sing with joy. Pembroke situates her psalmist as an authoritative speaker within a community of men and women, who are in turn inspired by conversation with God and by Pembroke’s own song publicly to teach others. Given the political role of the Psalms in articulating religious conflicts in sixteenth-century Europe, the Sidney family’s prominence in petitioning the Queen as a new David, and Pembroke’s self-characterization in ‘To the Angell spirit’ as continuing her brother’s work through the Psalmes, the implications of Pembroke’s claim to public teaching in her poems are profound. Although Pembroke did not publish her Psalmes, she clearly intended the conversations between her psalmist and God to be overheard by a coterie community and, significantly, by the Queen herself. In this respect, her representation of inward conversation evinces Katharine Eisaman Maus’ notion of ‘inwardness displayed: an inwardness, in other words, that has already ceased to exist’ (32). Playing on the complex connotations of the word ‘conversation,’ Pembroke elaborates on the Psalms’ conversational structure and ambiguous narrative stance to establish the nested interchanges between psalmist and God as the basis for authoritative articulation. Fittingly, like Irigaray’s experimental language, Pembroke’s own groundbreaking poetry exemplifies her interpretation.

‘Love which hath never done’: Pembroke’s angel spirit In her translation of Psalm 73, the most extensive reflection on her psalmist’s movement from inward conversation to confident outward expression, Pembroke positions the psalmist’s conversation ‘within [her] self’ (73:37) and with God alongside her own intertextual dialogue with Philip Sidney. Even as it encapsulates the extent to which Pembroke capitalizes on the Psalms’ propensity for interlocking and multiple voices, the poem exemplifies the impossibility of separating the conversations between God and psalmist in the Psalmes from Pembroke’s creative interchange with her brother. The impact that Pembroke’s intercourse with her divinized brother had on her own poetic maturation is epitomized in ‘To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Phillip Sidney,’ the dedicatory poem to Philip Sidney appended to the Tixall Manuscript of the Psalmes. The metaphors of physical fusion and doubleness that permeate ‘To the Angell spirit’ make this poem, like the Psalmes themselves, an apt case study for the overlapping verbal and physical connotations of conversation in Pembroke’s writing. Just as

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Pembroke depicts her psalmist’s acquisition of confident poetic articulation as emerging from her inward conversations with God, Pembroke presents her own fledgling authorial voice in ‘To the Angell spirit’ as the product of intimate interchange with Sidney. The nested voices afforded by the Psalms help to blur the boundaries between psalmist and God in Pembroke’s translations, creating an intimate human-divine conversation characterized by such a degree of proximity that self and other interpenetrate. Such inward conversations, as I have argued, in turn facilitate the psalmist’s – and Pembroke’s – public poetic voice. Pembroke creates a similar blurring of boundaries between herself and her brother in ‘To the Angell spirit.’ Her emphasis in this poem on her desire to be subsumed within her brother is often read as a strategy designed to validate her poetic authority, similar to humility topoi pleading divine inspiration or emphasizing the godly authority afforded by the Psalms. While attention to authorial validation undoubtedly influenced Pembroke’s anxious self-representation in ‘To the Angell spirit,’ her focus on physical and fluid union with her brother situates her translations as the product of an embodied creative conversation that mirrors her emphasis on intimate and inward conversation with God in the Psalmes. Intimate conversation with Sidney authorizes and enables Pembroke’s poetic expression. Pembroke inscribes her brother into her writings through the slipperiness of a narrative voice that, like the subject position of the Psalms, refuses gender categorization. Probing John Aubrey’s controversial allusions to Pembroke’s incestuous relationship with Philip Sidney, Jonathan Goldberg remarks on a dedicatory epistle from Sidney to his sister prefacing Arcadia that presents the text as the offspring of their creative coupling. He goes on to cite John Donne’s encomium to the siblings’ Psalm translations, noting Donne’s emphasis on the fusion and doubling of brother and sister that gives rise to the groundbreaking versification of the Sidney-Pembroke psalter: ‘Two, by their bloods, and by thy Spirit one’ (34). Without pushing his argument so far as literally to endorse Aubrey’s viewpoint (though he comes close), Goldberg demonstrates the recurrence of metaphors of sexual and artistic reproduction in Pembroke and Sidney’s descriptions of their collaborative literary ventures (114–31). Pembroke’s desire for artistic union with her brother plays a crucial role in her depiction of the interrelationship of intimate physical and verbal conversation and resultant poetic articulation in the Psalmes. Metaphors of fusion, doubleness, and union permeate ‘To the Angell spirit.’ Presenting the Psalmes as a ‘coupled worke, by double int’rest thine’ (1.110), Pembroke accentuates the collaborative nature of the

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enterprise; on the most literal level, she completes the project that Sidney began before his death.19 At the same time, in situating Pembroke’s translations as coupling with Sidney’s, the line alludes to the relational foundation of the work in ways that strongly suggest physical and verbal intercourse. The earlier variant of the poem, published in the 1623 edition of Samuel Daniel’s works, refers to the work as ‘joynt,’ a less sexualized word than the ‘coupled worke’ (2) of the revision (see Walker 78–9). Structuring her dedicatory epistle as a direct address to her brother, Pembroke presents her translations both as a response to his poems and as the issue of their combined Muses (5). As the poem progresses, Pembroke’s imagery of fusion grows increasingly physical, foregrounding the blurring of boundaries between herself and Sidney through repeated allusions to fluids. Pembroke’s ‘hart teares’ (20) grieving the bleeding wounds of her brother in stanza three become tributary ‘streames’ (32) flowing gratefully to meet the larger expanse of her brother’s poetic ‘great sea’ (33). Finally, in the penultimate stanza, Pembroke’s tears and blood merge as she presents the ‘offrings of my hart’ as ink: To which theise dearest offrings of my hart dissolv’d to Inke, while penns impressions move the bleeding veines of never dying love: I render here: these wounding lynes of smart sadd Characters indeed of simple love not Art nor skill which abler wits doe prove, Of my full soule receive the meanest part. (78–84) Mary Ellen Lamb has argued that the blood dissolved to ink emphasizes the physicality of Pembroke’s writing rather than its intellectual impetus. Pembroke’s Psalmes, Lamb maintains, ‘proceeds from love, not from learning’ (Gender and Authorship 117). While she is right, I think, to identify Pembroke’s primary motivation as love for her brother, she neglects the creative process whereby the loving blurring of selves through ‘conversation’ catalyzes poetic articulation. Love prompts a fluid intermingling of Pembroke’s tears and ‘bleeding veins’ with the blood from her brother’s wounds that in turn produces the ink for the Psalmes. Pembroke’s imagery literalizes the blurring of the ‘nested speakers’ that pervades her translations, charting the movement from love to physical fusion to creative expression. Desire for union with the other and the merging of selves triggers the birth of poetry. This notion not only recalls the Petrarchan convention that love catalyses the sonneteer’s voice but also provocatively anticipates Irigaray’s insistence

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that the capacity for innovative articulation is inseparable from and metaphorically enacted through a loving mingling of selves: ‘Let’s hurry and invent our own phrases. So that everywhere and always we can continue to embrace’ (This Sex Which Is Not One 215). Fittingly, Pembroke’s love for her brother and, by extension, for the divine, propels her into a world of excess which cannot be expressed in conventional language: ‘ ‘tis zealous love, Love which hath never done, / Nor can enough in world of words unfold’ (27–8). The groundbreaking poetry of the Psalmes is explicitly figured as the product of the siblings’ eroticized conversation. Pembroke’s obvious reference point in the poem is to her grief over her brother’s death at Zutphen. The imagery in lines 78–84, however, strongly evokes sexual intercourse and gestation. The word ‘render’ (81), which Pembroke accentuates by setting off ‘I render here’ from the surrounding lines, denotes not only artistic representation and return or exchange, but reproduction, both in the sense of textual transmission and childbirth. ‘Rend,’ nested within ‘render,’ in turn denotes a physical splitting suggestive of childbirth, an emotional and physical tearing prompted by deep grief, as well as, fascinatingly, melting, a word which evokes the dissolution of the self in the extremes of both sorrow and orgasm. Finally, an obsolete meaning of ‘render’ refers to the act of memorizing or memorializing (OED). In rendering the ‘offrings of [her] hart’ (78) through her poems, therefore, Pembroke presents her Psalmes as the offspring of her collaboration with her brother; her poems stand as a memorial to Sidney made possible by the dissolution and merging of Pembroke with her brother and, by extension, with God, through the grief and the pleasure of creative conversation. The image of the ink produced by the mingling of tears and blood, which is not present in the earlier manuscript version of the poem, stands as an apt metaphor for their blurred voices. Ultimately, physical and creative conversation with her brother/God enables Pembroke to complete the Psalmes. Pembroke’s insistence on Sidney’s wounds in conjunction with her imagery of blood and tears strengthens the impact of this poetic and physical ‘rendering.’ In stanza three, Pembroke juxtaposes the pain of her grief over her brother’s death with his physical wounds and ‘halfe maim’d’ (18) poems: ‘Deepe wounds enlarg’d, long festred in their gall / fresh bleeding smart’ (19–20); the word ‘smart’ crops up again in the penultimate stanza, conflating her brother’s body with Pembroke’s elegy, ‘these wounding lynes of smart / sadd Characters . . . of simple love’ (81–2). Wendy Wall has convincingly argued that one of the main ways in which Pembroke authorizes her Psalmes is by presenting them

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as the textual version of her brother’s wounded body (‘Our Bodies/Our Texts?’ 56–7). Because Pembroke likens her brother to ‘that which is divine’ (6), however, the emphasis on wounds, particularly within the context of Pembroke’s grief, also recalls the suffering Christ. Mystical texts often feminized Christ’s side wounds; medieval iconography displayed stunning parallels between Christ’s wounds and female genitalia. Women mystics were encouraged to ‘taste, touch, suck, kiss, and enter into Christ’s side wound’ (Hollywood 113), thereby uniting with the divine and deriving sustenance from Christ’s blood. Some texts went so far as to represent the wound with a slit in the parchment, which readers could then touch and kiss. While Pembroke does not depict herself kissing or touching her brother’s wounds, her self-representation does evoke female mystics grieving over the crucified Christ. In ‘To the Angell spirit,’ the ‘hart teares’ (20) falling from Pembroke’s wounded heart flow into her brother’s wounds and mingle with his blood. When read in conjunction with the tradition of feminizing Christ’s side wounds, Sidney’s wounds intensify the reproductive imagery that permeates the elegy. His bleeding body, coupled with his sister’s tears, gives Pembroke the agency to ‘render’ the Psalmes. These eroticized metaphors of poetic intercourse in many ways compensate for Pembroke’s failure verbally to communicate with her brother. ‘To the Angell spirit’ is structured as one half of a conversation. Pembroke addresses her brother directly throughout, using the intimate secondperson pronoun, and infuses the elegy with the immediacy of what Elizabeth Harris Sagaser calls ‘colloquial interjection’ (116). Apostrophes, parenthetical afterthoughts, and impassioned appeals to Sidney abound: Yet here behold, (oh wert thou to behold!) this finish’t now, thy matchlesse Muse begunne, the rest but peec’t, as left by thee undone. Pardon (oh blest soule) presumption too too bold: if love and zeale such error ill=become. (22–6) Whereas Pembroke’s incorporation of direct address and colloquial syntax in the Psalmes often reinforces the reciprocity of her psalmist’s relationship with God, particularly when juxtaposed with God’s replies, here the implied conversational structure rather underscores Pembroke’s isolation. Sidney never answers her appeals. As Sagaser remarks, the elegy throughout evokes Pembroke’s struggle to communicate with her brother, to discover a form of conversation that can transcend the distance between earth and heaven, between the living and the dead.20

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In the opening stanza, Pembroke humbly situates herself as a mortal being striving to reach her brother’s heavenly poetic heights: ‘So dar’d my Muse with thine it selfe combine, / as mortall stuffe with that which is divine’ (5–6). The deictic markers she deploys in the poem draw further attention to this gap. Pembroke is ‘here’ (62) on earth, while the inaccessible Sidney is ‘there’ (60, 77, 90) in heaven: ‘For there alone was praise to truth confin’de; / And where but there, to live for evermore?’ (41–2). Only the Psalmes, a textual stand-in for Sidney, are ‘here’ (81) with Pembroke. In the earlier variant of ‘To the Angell spirit,’ Pembroke gestures towards the creation of a protected space within which she can encounter her brother: ‘Where, in my heart the highest roome thou hast / There, truly there, thy earthly being is plac’t / Triumph of death: in life how more then blest’ (Variant, 33–5). In this case, the ‘there’ locates Sidney in his sister’s heart-room, an image which strongly recalls the closet-heart so integral to the understanding of inwardness in the sixteenth century and where Pembroke’s psalmist converses with God and with the self. Pembroke’s allusions to the Psalmes in the revision as ‘goodly buildings’ (64) and ‘Immortall Monuments’ (71) build on this architectural imagery. Yet, unlike the psalmist, Pembroke is left with the realization that her brother will not answer her, hence the longing in the final stanza to ‘take my leave’ and ‘meet thee there’ (90–1) in heaven. It is fitting, therefore, that it is an ‘Angell spirit’ which hovers behind the metaphors of eroticized conversation that permeate the poem. Early modern theorists emphasize the angel’s function as messenger and mediator, able to pass between heavenly and earthly realms. In The Happiness of the Church (1619), Thomas Adams underscores angels’ ‘mutable’ nature, neither human nor divine, and goes on to define the Angel as ‘a name of office . . . in regard of their Dooing’ (37, 41–2). Henry Ainsworth widens the definition to encompass a range of messengers: ‘The name of Angel, which is in English a Messenger, is in the scriptures attributed, 1. to our Lord Christ; 2. to the spiritual creatures in heaven; 3. and to some certaine men on earth, imployed in the message and service of God’ (302). Like Adams, he describes the angel’s ability to change shape and to mediate between earthly and spiritual spheres. Interestingly, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray also situates the angel as a messenger of love who is able to pass between God and humans. The angel becomes for Irigaray a symbol of a new relation between the sexes: angels would circulate as mediators of that which has not yet happened, of what is still going to happen, of what is on the horizon.

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Endlessly reopening the enclosure of the universe, of universes, identities, the unfolding of actions, of history. The angel is that which unceasingly passes through the envelope(s) or container(s), goes from one side to the other, reworking every deadline, changing every decision, thwarting all repetition. Angels destroy the monstrous, that which hampers the possibility of a new age; they come to herald the arrival of a new birth, a new morning. They are not unrelated to sex. There is of course Gabriel, the angel of the annunciation. But other angels announce the consummation of marriage, notably all the angels in the Apocalypse and many in the Old Testament. As if the angel were a representation of a sexuality that has never been incarnated. . . . The fate of a love still torn between here and elsewhere. (15–16) The implications that this passage, and the image of the angel more generally, have for ‘To the Angell spirit’ are startling. Although angels do not appear anywhere beyond the title of the early variant of the elegy, the image figures prominently in Pembroke’s revision. Stanza two declares that the Psalmes are meant ‘to praise, not to aspire / To, those high Tons, so in themselves adorn’d, / which Angells sing in their caelestiall Quire’ (10–12). Later, in stanza nine, Pembroke contrasts the ‘darkenes’ (58) of her earthly life with Sidney’s experience, as his ‘Angells soule with highest Angells plac’t / There blessed sings enjoying heav’n=delights / thy Makers praise’ (59–61). As an elegy, Pembroke’s poem is characterized above all by her longing for a reunion with her brother: Sorrowe still strives, would mount thy highest sphere presuming so just cause might meet thee there, Oh happie chaunge! could I so take my leave. (89–91) In anticipation of that meeting, Pembroke struggles to articulate her experience of a love literally ‘torn between here and elsewhere.’ In the variant, she imagines the siblings’ reunion taking place within her heart’s ‘highest roome’ (33). In the revision, acknowledging that any real encounter with Sidney must be deferred until they meet in heaven, she abandons that metaphor in favor of the angel, who is able to journey between heavenly and earthly realms. By envisioning her brother as an angel, Pembroke foregrounds the hope that he might mediate between heaven and earth, uniting with her in their poetic project. The siblings thus converse not within the boundaries of a closet-heart, but

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within the stanzas – those ‘goodly buildings’ (64) – of their collaborative psalter. Like the intimate conversations between God and psalmist that pervade Pembroke’s Psalmes, the fusion of angel and sister in the elegy – ‘as mortall stuffe with that which is divine’ (6) – is suggestive of the transformative conversation Irigaray advocates in An Ethics of Sexual Difference: ‘A sexual or carnal ethics would require that both angel and body be found together. This is a world that must be constructed or reconstructed. . . . A world that must be created or re-created so that man and woman may once again or at last live together, meet, and sometimes inhabit the same place’ (17). The siblings’ poetic union in ‘To the Angell spirit’ and their eroticized production of the Psalmes makes possible the coexistence of and exchange between human and divine even as it gives Pembroke the grounds to claim her part in the authorship of the poems. Provocatively anticipating Irigaray’s depiction of the growing Christ child lying peacefully within Mary’s body in Marine Lover, aptly positioned within a work in which Irigaray absorbs Nietzsche’s voice within her own, Pembroke’s insistence on her creative coupling with her angel brother encapsulates the authorizing effect of intimate and inward conversation in her writings. Pembroke situates ostensibly private and inward interchange, enacted through the blurred and interlocking voices of psalmist and God, sister and angel brother, as the basis for her confident claim to authorial and political agency: ‘And I secure shall spend my happie tymes / in my, though lowly, never-dying rymes, / singing with praise the god that Jacob loveth’ (75:25–7). Conversational encounters with the self, with God, and with Sidney enable Pembroke’s psalmist – and Pembroke herself – to praise and teach publicly, and to extend that ability to a godly community that includes and valorizes women’s voices. Giving birth to divine poems conceived through conversation, Pembroke shares some affinities with the biblical Mary in this regard. Immediately after the angel’s visit in the first chapter of Luke, Mary is propelled to eloquence, singing the experience of the annunciation to a pregnant Elizabeth in the ‘Magnificat.’ Pembroke’s experimental songs likewise emerge from transformative conversation with the divine, mediated through her angel sibling. Inward conversation with God and eroticized creative interchange with her brother give her the ‘double power,’ as Donne calls it, to sing ‘The highest matter in the noblest form’ (34).

4 Conversational Games and the Articulation of Desire in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory and Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost

In Book Four of The Civile Conversation, six lords and four ladies gather on a winter evening in Cassale for a banquet to demonstrate how civil conversation should play out in practice. The event features a plethora of conversational games. The guests begin by casting lots to choose a leader for their sports. Lord Vespasian passes around a collection of Petrarch’s sonnets, declaring that ‘everie one should choose a verse of the first Sonet, which in opening of the Booke, should apeare to him on the right side thereof, and that he or she, to whome anie one verse of that Sonet, more properlie touching regiment or seignorie, . . . should be by general consent created King or Queene’ (2.121). The group joyfully elects Lady Jane, whose verse aptly mirrors her virtue and wisdom. Assuming her role, she commands Lord John to devise ‘some pretie sporte of solitarinesse’ (2.123). The guests play the game he outlines, each choosing a proverb that describes a solitary place. From there, they move to riddling. They adjourn briefly for dinner, where their decorous conversation dazzles William Guazzo, after which the elected Queen commands a ‘pretie merriment of Conversation’ (2.169). When Lord Hercules, whom she appoints to lead the game, does not live up to her expectations, she devises a punishment for him, whereby he has to answer riddles posed by each guest. His elegant answers acquit him, while the riddles, whose subject matter quickly turns to courtship, propel the company first into a debate about the role of the eyes and tongue in conveying and eliciting love, and then into the performance of amorous madrigals and love lamentations. At the end of the evening, Lady Jane dismisses the guests and ‘laie[s] downe th[e] honourable and heavie burden’ (2.213) of her fictional monarchy. Guazzo’s banquet is valuable not only for the exquisite detail it provides about the content and structure of early modern conversational 89

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games but also for its emphasis on such games as rule-based encounters that are played out in physical isolation from everyday society – whether in a house, a salon, or a court – and that depend on a fictional social context. As François Lecercle maintains, ‘la société ludique forme une petite société imaginaire. C’est une microsociété régie par des règles nouvelles (celles du jeu) mais analogues aux règles sociales’ (194). In The Civile Conversation, the guests set aside their aristocratic titles in favor of an alternative and ephemeral society that temporarily suspends conventional hierarchies. Lord Vespasian renounces his rank at the onset of the banquet. ‘Imagine,’ he says, ‘that all my titles are left at home, and that amongst you here, Seignior Vespasian is but a private man, like anie other’ (2.121). Exemplified by Lady Jane’s election, this abdication of traditional hierarchical markers demanded by ludic contexts opened up important space for women’s leadership and speech. In The Courtier, for instance, Emilia Pia assumes responsibility for the games, even interrupting Messer Federico to announce the commencement of the evening’s entertainments (19, 14). Although she often selects men to determine the details of each game as Guazzo’s Lady Jane does, Emilia, together with the Duchess, maintains overall control of play. Even as participation in courtly sports showcased participants’ virtue and breeding, therefore, games provided a sanctioned conversational space within which women could achieve rhetorical, political, and even sexual agency. Margaret Hannay has demonstrated the influence of Mary Sidney Herbert on Mary Wroth’s writings, calling her Wroth’s mentor (‘Your virtuous and learned Aunt’). In addition to looking to her aunt as a literary model, Wroth shared her fascination with enabling conversational spaces. She devotes considerable attention to the intimate and playful space of the conversational game in her writings. This chapter argues that the authorizing potential of ludic spaces offers an important and overlooked context for considering the critique of conventional courtship roles that grounds Love’s Victory. I will begin by elucidating the political function of games in the early modern period, drawing on Wittgenstein’s notion of the language-game or Sprachspiel to demonstrate the slipperiness of the boundaries between games and everyday interaction and the importance of a game’s rules and context. I will then examine Love’s Victory alongside Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, which I contend is an important precursor to Love’s Victory both in featuring conversational play as a formal and thematic device and in emphasizing the ladies’ skilled and authoritative leadership of the courtship games that inform the drama. Shakespeare bases the rhetorical and political authority of the Princess and her companions on their mastery not only of courtly conversational

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interchange but also of conversational game-playing. Building on Shakespeare’s structural model, Wroth organizes her pastoral tragicomedy around interludes featuring conversational courtship games expertly led by her shepherdesses, which combine the conventions of pastoral eclogues with the verbal competitions and games depicted in conduct manuals like The Civile Conversation and The Courtier and practiced at the Jacobean court. Both plays rely on three elements derived from ludic conventions: an emphasis on isolated or semi-isolated playing spaces, the establishment of rules and hierarchies particular to those contexts, and an elaborate system of punishments and rewards that governs not only the smaller playing spaces that permeate both dramas but their courtly and pastoral play worlds as well. In giving Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Victory an overarching ludic framework, both Shakespeare and Wroth challenge the conventional ephemerality of ludic spaces, blurring the boundaries between individual games and the broader realms their characters inhabit. In so doing, they extend the conversational agency of their female protagonists beyond the parameters of their seemingly isolated playing spaces. It is this paradoxical insistence both on the boundaries and the permeability of ludic space that is of particular importance to my argument. The elevation of women to positions of authority within playing spaces could be read as a safely contained festive inversion of patriarchal culture. Historian Roger Duchêne warns of the impermanence and ambiguity of ludic authority. If the rules of the game equalize or reverse the social positions of the players, he suggests, that new formation holds only within the limits imposed by the game (230). This view is further complicated by the fact that many dialogues that feature conversational games – like The Civile Conversation, The Courtier, and Charles Sorel’s La Maison des jeux (1642, 1657) – are authored by men who ventriloquize the voices of women like Lady Jane and Emilia.1 Yet the boundaries of ludic space were in fact highly permeable in the early modern period. While conversational games provided a recreational outlet, they also represented politically significant examples of language use, facilitating individual self-fashioning and the articulation of political and sexual desire for both men and women.

Serious play: conversational games in early modern England Although Lady Jane reassures Lord Hercules not to take his punishment too seriously, for ‘whatsoever is either spoken or done here, is but in

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sport’ (2.174), the games outlined in The Civile Conversation are hardly trivial. Far from distracting Guazzo from his topic of civil conversation, the games and meal that constitute much of Book Four model decorous interaction: ‘By this banquet men may learne to take their meate temperatelie, to exercise their stile modestlie, to sport and jest discreetlie, to use concord without roisting, learning without vaineglorie, curtesie without blemish or fault’ (2.162). Indeed, while presenting recreation as a valuable respite from political responsibilities, every conduct and games manual of the period emphasizes the importance of games in contributing to the development of the courtier and statesman. Such recreation was not limited to hunting, wrestling, and jousting but also included the more controversial indoor sports of gaming, chess, cards, and repartee. Roger Ascham defends the importance of both physical and mental ‘exercises’ and ‘pastimes’ (sig. G3v), while Thomas Elyot urges gentlemen who enjoy cards and tables ‘to deuyse games / where in moughte be moche solace and also study commodiouse: as deuising a bataile / or contention betwene vertue and vice / or other like pleasaunt and honest inuention’ (Governour fol. 97v). Even James I instructs his son in Basilikon Doron (1599) to practice indoor games, albeit in moderation, thus ‘enabling you for your office, for the which ye are ordained’ (49). Charles Sorel sums up these views in La Maison des jeux when he lauds conversational games as the quintessential form of civilizing practice: ‘s’il y a quelque chose qui soit propre à nous rendre plus polis, plus ciuils, & plus iudicieux, dans les compagnies que nous n’estions de nostre natural, ce doiuent estre ces sortes d’exercices’ (472). Even as verbal play helped to prepare individuals for courtship, debate, and the pitfalls of social interaction, games themselves could enact political transactions. Like the sonnet and masque, which, as critics like Arthur Marotti and Stephen Orgel have demonstrated, helped to secure patronage relationships and royal authority, conversational games veiled negotiations for status. As Castiglione remarks, ‘under various concealments, those present revealed their thoughts allegorically to whomever they chose’ (13). The Jacobean court was particularly enamored with games and entertainments.2 Taken aback by the prevalence of seemingly childish activities at court, Arabella Stuart underscores in a letter to her uncle Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, how crucial it was for her to participate skillfully: Whilest I was at Winchester theare weare certein childeplayes remembred by the fayre ladies. Viz. I pray my Lord give me a Course in your park. Rise pig and go. One peny follow me. etc. and when I camm to

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Court they weare highly in request as ever cracking of nuts was. so I was by the mistresse of the Revelles not onely compelled to play at I knew not what for till that day I never heard of a play called Fier. but even perswaded by the princely example I saw to play the childe againe. This exercise is most used from .10. of the clocke at night till .2. or .3. in the morning but that day I made one it beganne at twilight and ended at suppertime. (193) Stuart was both ‘compelled’ and encouraged by ‘the princely example’ to join in the games. Her commentary demonstrates her awareness of the political valency of entertainments within the Queen’s circle, even as her allusion to a ‘mistresse’ of the Revels draws attention to women’s leadership and participation in courtly games. Charles Sorel defends this permeability of the boundary between games and real life as evidence of the seriousness of conversational play. Life, he suggests, is made up of ‘Ieux serieux’ (475): serious games. Even when individuals are not at leisure, the conventions of daily interaction constitute a form of play.3 Conversational games can perhaps best be understood as an example of what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls a language-game or Sprachspiel, a bounded moment of situated verbal interchange. Wittgenstein is quick to point out that the Sprachspiel is not meant to equate language use unconditionally with recreational games. However, like games, language is governed by specific rules – grammar, syntax, and vocabulary – which must be understood and accepted by participants in order to communicate successfully. Above all, language use requires an awareness of context. Language can only be performative insofar as participants are alerted to the rules of the game unfolding in a particular situation. Keir Elam and David Schalkwyk have demonstrated the value of Wittgenstein’s work for literary analyses of language in their readings of Shakespeare’s drama and sonnets as ‘a series of dynamic speaking situations’ (Elam 15). What happens, however, when we consider language games, the ‘sporte of Conversation’ (2.169) as outlined in Book Four of The Civile Conversation? Although Wittgenstein does not push his analogy between language and games so far as to equate the two, he does not entirely discard the notion of verbal play in his philosophical writings. In The Brown Book he associates languagegames with children’s games to explain the process of language acquisition. His descriptions of Sprachspiel also assume game-like features, emphasizing specific roles for participants, the rules of the interaction, and the desired goal.4 Finally, he includes examples in his list of language-games in Philosophical Investigations that recall the activities of

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Guazzo’s guests: ‘Making up a story; and reading it’; ‘Guessing riddles’; ‘Making a joke; telling it’ (10). In early modern England, games handbooks offered models to help participants master the rules of conversational sports that needed to be accepted and understood in order to ensure skillful participation. Edward Phillips’ The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, a text that combines courtship advice with practical assistance for developing expertise in conversational courtship games, offers an excellent example. Phillips provides long lists of sample questions and answers, riddles, and proverbs for individuals to memorize in preparation for amorous conversational games as well as miniature dictionaries of alphabetized adjectives and rhymes to help players come up with descriptions of their beloved in games of alliteration and poetic composition. He presents conversational games and the art of courtship more generally as a series of scenarios for which well-mannered individuals are expertly prepared both by virtue of their upbringing and by their careful assimilation of rules. As such, handbooks like Phillips’ assumed a function akin to conduct and epistolary manuals, preparing individuals to negotiate social hierarchies and to match courtship addresses, proverbs, and questions to particular audiences. Fittingly, The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence is partly a handbook for letter writing as well as for oral conversation. Phillips intersperses sample courtship letters, mock letters, dialogues, and practice addresses catering to a wide range of social settings and relationships alongside his ludic aide-mémoires.5 Nowhere is the authorizing potential of these playful spaces more evident than in courtship games, one of the most popular examples of conversational play in the early modern period. Innocentio Ringhieri’s collection of games, Cento Givochi Liberali, et d’Ingegno (1551), for example, includes the game of love, the game of Cupid’s ceremonies, the game of the husband and wife, the game of the lover, and the game of the love hunt. One popular game, known broadly as cross-purposes, required participants to whisper the answer to a question concerning their beloved to the leader of the game: What feature of your beloved do you most admire? What color are his/her eyes? The leader then matched the answers to the wrong questions. Audience members had to sift through the muddled answers to discover their admirer.6 Women could serve as the leader of the game, or else participate by indirectly publicizing their desire through the leader. Questions ranged from the highly personal to the abstract and philosophical, but replies had to be true. As Madeleine Lazard argues, such games ‘met en oeuvre tout un rituel de conventions pour provoquer la sincérité, et recourt à la confession publique pour

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révéler les sentiments les plus secrets qu’on redoute ou qu’on se défend d’avouer’ (141). The game thus provided a cover for serious courtship. In another game participants wed seemingly disparate objects together to form a union. The game is called le jeu de la conversation and puns on conversation as both dialogue and sexual intercourse: ‘Ie vous presente vne fleur que le Soleil & la Terre ont produite dans leur conuersation; . . . Ie vous presente vne broderie que l’ayguille & la soye conuersant ensemble ont faite’ (Sorel 563). Participants could present their witty creation to their beloved, signaling their desire. In some cases, conversational games facilitated both the articulation and the fulfillment of desire; the OED reminds us that the word ‘game’ connoted not only ‘amusement, diversion, pastime’ but also ‘[a]morous sport or play’ (n. def. I.3.a. and I.3.b). Punishments and rewards, for example, a common feature of conversational play as evidenced by Lord Hercules’ experience in The Civile Conversation, often took the form of kisses.7 In La Maison des jeux the men initially benefit from this system more than the women. Rather than remaining passive rewards for the male players, however, the women speak up, challenging a structure in which only they are asked to kiss or to be kissed and demanding full participation in the game (Sorel 306–8). Sorel’s account highlights the women’s rhetorical authority as well as their claim to sexual agency as desiring subjects. Courtship games, like the sonnet, became a powerful discourse for eroticized and politicized self-expression and the negotiation of relationships.

Strange and pretty pastimes: Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Victory Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost encapsulates this interrelationship among courtship, politics, and verbal play. The comedy overflows with references to games and sports like hunting (4.1), hide and seek (4.3.75), snapdragon (5.1.41), novum (5.2.540), tables (5.2.326), and dice (5.2.232–3, 326), while much of the later action of the play revolves around diversions, notably the masque of Muscovites and the pageant of the Nine Worthies. Critics have long noted the importance of sport and witty language play in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but not the conventions of conversational games that provide the structural basis for the work.8 The play’s comic impact and social critique derive from its structural reliance on conventions gleaned not only from Revels entertainments at the Inns of Court, as Lynne Magnusson has convincingly argued (‘Scoff Power’ 203–5), but also from conversational games. The creation of the

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academy in Act One with its elaborate penalties – cutting off the tongue of any woman who comes within a mile of the court and condemning any man who speaks with a woman to public shame ‘as the rest of the court can possible devise’ (1.1.129–30) – immediately situates the King, Berowne, Dumaine, and Longaville in a ludic space. When the Princess and her ladies-in-waiting arrive, Navarre is forced to create a second alternative court, associated in turn with a field, a tent, and a pavilion, which the women eventually claim as a counterpart to the men’s ‘academe’ (1.1.13). Love’s Labour’s Lost can be read as one long string of conversational games which fail to produce resolution because of the conflict between these different playing spaces, each of which is defined by its own set of rules. Excluded from the ‘academe,’ the women embrace their own ludic space. The gentlemen excitedly plot an ‘entertainment’ (4.3.347) for the ladies, convinced that ‘some strange pastime’ (4.3.351) and ‘revels, dances, masques and merry hours’ (4.3.353) will pave the way for their amorous advances. Meanwhile, the Princess and her companions prepare to beat the men at their entertainment, ‘mocking intended game’ (5.2.155) with their own disguises. When the King and his followers, disguised as Muscovites, enter the tent to woo the ladies, they discover that they no longer control the rules of the game that they in fact initiated. The veiled women force the men to woo the wrong partner and, when the courtiers return, the Princess devises a game of ‘confession’ (5.2.432) in which each disguised man whispers his affections and vows into the ear of the wrong woman. The result exemplifies the game of cross-purposes outlined in The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence in which participants are forced to discern the identity of their true beloved from statements separated from their original contexts. The Princess presents the encounter as the continuation of a perfect ‘pastime[ ] . . . and pleasant game’ (5.2.360). Recognizing the transformation of the academy’s carefully plotted entertainment into a courtship game determined by the ladies’ rules, however, Berowne is incensed. ‘Following the signs, [we] wooed but the sign of she’ (5.2.469), he blusters. The women’s refusal to accept Navarre’s belated hospitality shifts the play’s center of authority from the court to the ladies’ tent, forcing the men to acknowledge and accept the rules of the game that the women establish within their own context; much of the comedy results from the men’s ignorance of those rules. As the Princess comments, ‘That sport best pleases that doth least know how’ (5.2.514). The comic effect of the anxiously striving Holofernes and Armado, who valiantly but unsuccessfully try to appropriate the upper classes’

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linguistic register, stems from the same phenomenon. Unable to recognize the rules governing courtly conversational play – whether manifested in Berowne’s sonneteering or in the closely matched ‘set[s] of wit’ (5.2.29) played by the Princess, Rosaline, Katherine, and Maria – these characters end up parodying both courtly conversational games and language use more generally. The male courtiers continually misread the contexts in which they speak; this is best illustrated by the Princess’ insistence at the conclusion of the play that Berowne learn to match his language to his audience by trying to ‘enforce the pained impotent to smile’ (5.2.842). The pedants’ language, however, fails to fit any context whatsoever. Even their best attempts at matching language to context go awry. Armado’s painful letter to Jaquenetta hyperbolizes the difference in their social rank, while its interception by Navarre underscores the differences between Armado’s social striving and the King’s higher linguistic register. In Act Five, scene one, just before Moth, Holofernes, Armado, and Costard set up the Worthies play, the group engages in a mock conversational game. If the banquet in Book Four of The Civile Conversation exemplifies elegant after-dinner play, this scene foregrounds the ‘scraps’ stolen from ‘a great feast of languages’ (5.1.35–6): MOTH HOLOFERNES MOTH HOLOFERNES MOTH HOLOFERNES MOTH ARMADO

What is a, b, spelt backward with the horn on his head? Ba, pueritia, with a horn added. Ba, most silly sheep with a horn. You hear his learning. Quis, quis, thou consonant? The last of the five vowels, if you repeat them; or the fifth, if I. I will repeat them: a, e, i The sheep. The other two concludes it: o, u. Now, by the salt wave of the Mediterraneum, a sweet touch, a quick venue of wit! (5.1.44–55)

Parodying the riddles and alphabetical exercises in games handbooks, the interchange mocks Holofernes’ supposed learning even as it functions as a foil to the elegant repartee of the Princess and her ladies in the next scene (which also centers on alphabetical puns). Neither the male courtiers nor the pedants are able correctly to follow the rules of the language games they try so hard to participate in. In contrast, the elegance of the women’s games of wit in Act Five, scene two, and their deft manipulation of the

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male courtiers in the masque-turned-courtship-game situate the Princess and her companions as the undisputed leaders of the conversational sports in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The play’s conclusion, deferring marriage and comic closure, foregrounds the women’s leadership by juxtaposing their acknowledgement of the importance of a game’s rules and context with the courtiers’ failed ability to recognize or to follow either. In the final scene, Berowne is flabbergasted that the women will not seriously consider their proposals. The Princess, however, correctly points out that the men wooed within the parameters of a game: We have received your letters full of love, Your favours, the ambassadors of love, And in our maiden counsel rated them At courtship, pleasant jest and courtesy, As bombast and as lining to the time. But more devout than this in our respects Have we not been; and therefore met your loves In their own fashion, like a merriment. (5.2.771–8) Within the ladies’ playing space, the courtiers’ seduction attempts become simply a ‘merriment.’ Undermining any possibility of immediate nuptials, the Princess’ insistence on the rules of verbal play is ultimately designed to force Navarre and his men to acknowledge their inability to adhere to the rules of their own game laid out in the opening scene. Consider Lady Jane’s indictment of Lord Hercules in The Civile Conversation when Hercules fails to follow through on the promised sport of conversation: wee thinke it good everie one, to moove certaine questions to Lorde Hercules, which he alone, (for punishment and satisfaction of his faulte, which by generall consent he hath deserved) shall fullie aunswere unto. And when he hath sufficientlie satisfied our mindes, concerninge the resolution of those demaundes, and alleadged a reason for everie one of them, we are content then to restore him againe to our former grace, and favourablie entertaine him once againe into our companie. (2.172–3) The conclusion of Love’s Labour’s Lost unfolds in a similar manner as the Princess, Rosaline, and Katherine devise year-long penalties for their

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admirers. Berowne protests: ‘That’s too long for a play’ (5.2.866). However, the punishments fittingly recall the second penalty that Navarre breezily announced in Act One for those members of the ‘academe’ who dare to speak to a woman: ‘he shall endure such public shame as the rest of the court can possible devise’ (1.1.129–30). Forsworn, the men are forced to suffer versions of their own ludic punishment. Even as the ending of Love’s Labour’s Lost continues to rely on ludic conventions by punishing delinquent players, it emphasizes the permeability of the boundaries between games and everyday interaction. Louis Montrose has argued that Navarre’s courtship attempt fails because he is unable to integrate his political responsibilities with his propensity for play (542–6). While the Princess masters the art of using games to inform and extend her political authority, Navarre is so devoted to his games that he wants the game of courtship to spill over into real life. And it does, though not in the way he expects. While Shakespeare refuses to grant his protagonists comic closure, the Princess and her friends are not averse to the prospect of marrying their admirers. The courtship games that delimit the structure of Love’s Labour’s Lost do in fact stand in for serious proposals. The ladies’ deferral of the conclusion of the game for a year underscores their willingness, in Guazzo’s words, ultimately to ‘restore [the men] againe to our former grace’: If frosts and fasts, hard lodging and thin weeds, Nip not the gaudy blossoms of your love, But that it bear this trial and last love; Then, at the expiration of the year, Come challenge me, challenge me by these deserts. (5.2.795–9) The Princess’ rules determine the game of courtship and dictate marriage on her own terms. Indeed, her ludic authority does not abate with the conclusion of the sports. Marcadé’s announcement of the death of the King of France, which elevates the Princess to the rank of Queen, rather draws attention to her enhanced political power. The conclusion of Love’s Labour’s Lost provocatively extends the women’s leadership, authority, and desire beyond the parameters of their pavilion, as their mastery of the conventions and contexts of conversational play becomes the basis for their continued rhetorical and political agency. The ‘pastimes . . . and pleasant game[s]’ (5.2.360) that in Love’s Labour’s Lost facilitate the female protagonists’ agency and leadership likewise become the structural focus of Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory. Although

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critics like Rebecca Laroche and Naomi Miller have demonstrated Wroth’s indebtedness to Shakespeare in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) and The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania, the influence of Love’s Labour’s Lost on her writings and, in particular, on her fascination with verbal play and playing spaces in Love’s Victory, has not been recognized. It is an intriguing fact that Love’s Labour’s Lost was revived in mid-January 1605 as a special entertainment for Queen Anne either at Southampton House or in the Strand. In a letter to John Chamberlain written on January 15, Dudley Carleton remarks that ‘a great part of the court were feasted’ at the revels (qtd in Woudhuysen 84). Wroth, then about eighteen years old, was already a major participant in the Queen’s circle by 1605. The week before the revival, on January 6, she danced with Queen Anne in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness. It is entirely possible that she was in attendance at or, at the very least, heard reports about the performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost. The play’s obsession with sports would undoubtedly have captured her attention, for Wroth was an avid participant not only in masques but also in courtly games.9 When Anne Clifford visited Penshurst in August 1617, she, Wroth, and their female companions enjoyed sharing stories and conversation; Clifford also refers to the games played during that summer, including ‘glecko’ and ‘barley break upon the bowling green’ (137, 145).10 Furthermore, Wroth’s cousin and lover William Herbert, who was made Lord Chamberlain in 1615, helped to oversee court entertainments. There are strong reasons to believe that, together with the shared cultural context of courtly games that illuminates both plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost had an important influence on Love’s Victory – either on its own or perhaps in combination with Shakespeare’s lost work Love’s Labour’s Won, whose title bears a fascinating resemblance to Love’s Victory. What for Shakespeare is ‘some strange pastime’ (4.3.351), Berowne’s description of the proposed courtship masque, becomes for Wroth ‘[s]ome pretty pastime’ (4.1.352), Dalina’s name for conversational sports in Love’s Victory. Tapping into the authorizing potential of ludic enclosure, Wroth extends the ludic agency enjoyed by her shepherdesses beyond the parameters of their playing spaces to construct a society that affirms women’s passions and rhetorical practices. Love’s Victory relates the amorous sufferings of a group of shepherds and shepherdesses at the hands of Venus and Cupid.11 In addition to shadowing at least one figure from the Sidney coterie, each character or pair of lovers figures a different type of love (Cerasano and WynneDavies 94). Much of the plot centers on the experiences of Musella and Philisses as they struggle to confess and secure their mutual affections.

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Musella, betrothed to the uncouth Rustic, finally pledges her fidelity to Philisses, and the two vow to die together rather than endure Musella’s marriage to Rustic.12 Musella’s friend Silvesta, who has renounced all earthly love in favor of chastity, helps the lovers unite in death, offering them poison. Rustic absolves Musella from her vow, and Venus revives the lovers, freeing them to marry each other; Rustic instead claims the outspoken shepherdess Dalina. Wroth structures these events around a series of conversational games, played out in four separate ludic encounters that feature storytelling, a singing competition, fortunetelling, love debates, riddling, and confession. Providing a cover for courtship, the games help to alleviate the crises of communication and articulation that plague Wroth’s protagonists.13 Wroth situates each ludic encounter far from her protagonists’ pastoral responsibilities. Although she does not include specific details about the locations, the deictic markers employed by the characters, particularly ‘here’ (4.1.349) and ‘[t]here’ (1.3.2), coupled with their references to departure and arrival, signal the creation of separate and secluded playing spaces. Wroth reinforces her protagonists’ privacy with an emphasis both on the exclusiveness of the ludic community and on the importance of the rules of play. As in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the comic impact of Love’s Victory derives from the mismatching of characters to ludic contexts and their ability or inability to play by the rules. Nowhere is this clearer than in Wroth’s depiction of Rustic. The protagonists regularly employ descriptors that highlight the intimacy of the select group of players, a feature that draws attention to the exclusiveness and competitiveness inherent to game-playing. Rustic is the only player who does not fit in; the other characters are not subtle in reminding him of his outsider status.14 In Act Four, Rustic tries to claim the first-person pronoun that unites the players: RUSTIC MUSELLA

We’re all here now. ’Tis true, We are all here, and one too much by you. (4.1.349–50)

Musella claims the ‘we’ for herself and her companions, denying Rustic membership within the playing community. Dalina similarly excludes Rustic: ‘whosoever’s out, you’ll not be in!’ (1.3.46), she tells him as the group begins its first game. When Rustic does play, he does so poorly. His contribution to the singing competition in Act One is a hilarious parody of a Petrarchan blazon: ‘Thy cheeks are red / Like ochre spread / On a fatted sheep’s back’

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(1.3.67–9), he sings to Musella. He offers a similarly pathetic attempt at a definition of love in Act Two: What call you love? I’ve been to trouble moved, As when my best cloak hath by chance been torn, I have lived wishing till it mended were, And but so lovers do. (2.1.86–9) The courtly Philisses responds with scorn: ‘Call you this love? Why, love is no such thing! / Love is a pain which yet doth pleasure bring’ (2.1.93–4). Despite his lack of skill, Rustic gamely perseveres, until the riddling competition in Act Four. When asked to contribute his riddle, he admits defeat: Truly, I cannot riddle, I was not taught These tricks of wit; my thoughts ne’er higher wrought Than how to mark a beast, or drive a cow To feed, or else with art to hold a plough. (4.1.391–4) Wroth reinforces Rustic’s failure by denying him Musella’s hand in marriage. Successful participation within the drama’s playing community relies on a thorough understanding of the rules of play.15 Partly elucidated by the leaders of the games, these rules are also assimilated through class and courtliness. Although Musella professes ignorance at the riddling game, for instance – ‘Then I’ll begin, though scarce the play I know’ (4.1.364) – she makes an elegant contribution nonetheless, revealing her inherent understanding of courtly behavior. These ludic encounters rely on an artificial social structure that privileges the shepherdesses’ authority.16 In Act Two, the shepherd Lissius alludes in passing to the convention of choosing a ludic sovereign, proposing an election process that recalls Guazzo’s sonnet game: the individual who draws the best fortune should assume leadership of the sports. However, the social structure for the group’s games seems already to have been determined in the previous act without explicit election. Dalina initiates every one of the ludic encounters: ‘Now we are met, what sport shall we invent / While the sun’s fury somewhat more be spent?’ (1.3.21–2); ‘Methinks we now too silent are. Let’s play / At something while we yet have pleasing day’ (2.1.1–2). As in The Civile Conversation and The Courtier, Dalina initially seems to defer responsibility for the choice of game to the shepherds; in Act One, Lacon suggests the storytelling game. However, it is the shepherdesses who dictate the content and structure of the sports.

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Both Dalina and Musella veto Lacon’s suggestion, and it is Climeana who opens the song competition. Accepting defeat, Lacon instead urges the others to join in: ‘Climeana hath begun a pretty sport; / Let each one sing, and so the game is short’ (1.3.43–4). The shepherdesses maintain their edge throughout the games. The riddling game in Act Four, for example, opens as follows: DALINA

MUSELLA DALINA

Here be our fellows, now let us begin Some pretty pastime, pleasure’s sport to win. Sweetest Musella, what think you is best? That whereunto your fancy is addressed. Mine is to riddling.17 (4.1.351–5)

Musella offers the first riddle, followed by Dalina, who urges all to ‘mark then what I will say’ (4.1.371). It is not until nearly thirty lines after the beginning of the game that Philisses finally gets a word in edgewise. When he does speak, he reveals his discomfort with the extent to which the shepherdesses have been controlling play: ‘the women still will speak; / Rustic, come you and I this course will break’ (4.1.379–80). Philisses does his best to claim some authority, first offering a riddle that conveys his passion for Musella and then trying to position himself as ludic sovereign for the next encounter: ‘who shall then miss here / A punishment by us ordained shall bear’ (4.1.445–6). However, once again it is Dalina who decides when the group will meet – ‘When day appears’ (4.1.443) – and who validates Philisses’ claim to end the game with the commanding, ‘Let it be so’ (4.1.447). Philisses’ allusion to a ludic penalty signals the play’s overarching preoccupation with rewards and punishments. The rewards and punishments integral to Love’s Labour’s Lost always refer back to the larger structure of the game constructed by Navarre in the play’s opening scene. Love’s Victory relies on a very similar structure, in which the human protagonists’ conversational games play out within a larger ludic framework dictated by Venus. In the first scene, Venus commands Cupid to impose torments on the humans for failing to honor the power of love: ‘Cupid, methinks we have too long been still, / And that these people grow to scorn our will’ (1.1.1–2). Her words, the first in the play, are nearly identical to those Dalina uses to open the second ludic encounter: ‘Methinks we now too silent are’ (2.1.1). The moment implicitly situates the wider action of Love’s Victory as Venus’ sport. If Dalina stands as the primary leader of the human protagonists’ games, Venus is the undisputed ludic leader and judge of Love’s Victory.18 Wroth is clearly aware of the convention of appointing

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judges and leaders to arbitrate courtly sports, evidenced by Musella’s appointment of herself and Philisses as ‘judges’ (1.3.49) in Act One and by Lissius’ allusion to the need to elect a ludic sovereign in Act Two. The choice of Venus as the primary ludic leader is especially significant within the game-playing context, given that Venus and Cupid regularly feature as arbitrators in contemporary accounts of jeux d’esprit (Duchêne 223). Exemplifying the function of a ludic sovereign, Venus controls the ensuing action through an elaborate system of rewards and punishments. When she deems that the human protagonists have won their lovers too easily, she commands Cupid to prolong their agony. Like the Princess’ punishment of Navarre, however, these retributions are short-lived. As Venus declares in Act One, ‘Triumphs upon their travels shall ascend, / And yet most happy ere they come to end’ (1.1.35–6). At the conclusion of the play, Venus appears to the shepherds and shepherdesses to coordinate the revival of Philisses and Musella, bless their marriage, and reward the other protagonists with their desires. Observing the ‘wonder’ (5.7.65) of the lovers’ resurrection, Dalina likens the events to a game: ‘Rustic,’ she says, alluding to his loss of Musella, ‘what think you; is this called fair play?’ (5.7.115). Rustic’s reply underscores his respect for Venus’ authority in the pastoral play world: ‘When Venus wills, men cannot but obey’ (5.7.116). Only the villain Arcas endures further punishment. Just as Shakespeare’s Princess condemns Navarre and his courtiers to a penalty that exceeds the parameters of the game, Venus juxtaposes her rewarding of the faithful lovers with her decision to punish Arcas for his misconduct during both Dalina’s and Venus’ games of love: ‘you here must still abide / In these fair plains, where you shall never hide / The shame of falsehood printed in your face. / . . . This shall be your doom’ (5.7.143–9). The interlocking ludic framework that characterizes Love’s Victory enables Wroth to challenge the ephemeral nature of the smaller ludic encounters nestled throughout the play.19 As in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the boundaries between Dalina’s games and Venus’ play world dissolve as Love’s Victory progresses. When the shepherdesses gather to play a game of confession in Act Four, for example, Climeana and Simeana engage in a debate as to which of them has a better claim to Lissius’ affections. The rules of play, emphasizing honest confession, validate their fervent articulation of their desires and their determination actively to pursue their lovers: CLIMEANA SIMEANA

I love him most. I love him best. Can you Challenge reward, and cannot say you’re true? (3.2.133–4)

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In the scene immediately following the game, however, Climeana courts Lissius only to encounter violent rejection: ‘Is this for a maid / To follow and to haunt me thus? . . . / Fie, I do blush for you! A woman woo? / The most unfittest, shameful’st thing to do!’ (3.2.184–8). This is the first moment in Love’s Victory where Dalina does not clearly announce the conclusion of a game. The stage directions note simply that Lissius enters. While his entrance interrupts the gathering of players, Lissius’ interchange with Climeana also disrupts the boundaries between playing space and the everyday reality of the protagonists. Climeana continues to act on the desires that the confession game has sanctioned, while Lissius interprets that articulation of desire as a breach of conversational decorum. Venus’ increasing presence within the humans’ sphere reinforces this permeability of the boundaries between Wroth’s playing spaces and her pastoral realm. At the beginning of Love’s Victory, the shepherds and shepherdesses seem to have no awareness of Venus’ power over their lives. By Act Five, however, Philisses, Musella, and Forester all appeal to the goddess and, at the conclusion of the play, Venus appears to the humans: ‘Lovers be not amazed! This is my deed, / Who could not suffer your dear hearts to bleed’ (5.7.67–8). The complexity of this interconnection between games and play world is perhaps best exemplified by the actions of the shepherdess Silvesta. Silvesta represents an intriguing anomaly to the pattern of ludic agency that I have been exploring. Because she intervenes to save Philisses and Musella in Act Five, she arguably stands as the most influential human female protagonist in the play. Significantly, however, her agency does not derive from the elevation to ludic sovereign and judge experienced by Dalina and Musella, but rather from her decision to withdraw from romantic exchange. The other shepherdesses use their ludic encounters to hone their ability to articulate their desires and, in the case of Musella, Simeana, and Dalina, to secure their union with their lovers. Silvesta, in contrast, renounces all contact with men in her opening soliloquy: ‘now live I joyfully, / Free, and untouched of thought but Chastity’ (1.2.123–4). As such, she does not need the space of the game to enhance her courtship prospects. She does not participate in any of Dalina’s sports, appearing only briefly in the fortunetelling competition in Act Two, and then only to refuse Arcas’ invitation to draw her fortune: ‘Nor I, it is sufficient I could love’ (2.1.206). Despite her seeming disinterest in the games, Silvesta remains crucially implicated within the play’s ludic structure. In Act Two, as the shepherds and shepherdesses gather to play, Silvesta briefly becomes their game. When Dalina opens the ludic encounter, Lissius suggests that

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eavesdropping on Silvesta and Forester constitutes sufficient entertainment: ‘Here’s sport enough; view but her new attire, / And see her slave who burns in chaste desire’ (2.1.3–4). Spying on Silvesta and Forester from within Dalina’s ludic space and reading their interchange as a game, Lissius unwittingly draws attention to the play’s broader ludic framework. Silvesta passes effortlessly between these two ludic spheres. In the same scene, Wroth makes it clear that Silvesta and her companion are physically separated from the players: ‘they do not see the others’ (2.1). Yet nearly one hundred and fifty lines after Forester exits, Silvesta unexpectedly appears within the fortunetelling game, the moment of her arrival unannounced, to deliver her one line declining Arcas’ invitation. She is at once independent from and integral to Dalina’s sports. She plays a much more crucial role in Venus’ game, exemplified by the moment when Venus appears in Act Five to revive the lovers. The audience has just witnessed Silvesta’s impassioned plea to Musella and Philisses as she offers them poison: ‘O, hold your hands! I knew your minds and have / Brought fitter means to wed you to your grave’ (5.4.57–8). Despite this apparent emphasis on Silvesta’s agency, it is Venus who ultimately claims credit for her intervention: ‘Silvesta was my instrument ordained / To kill, and save her friends, by which sh’hath gained / Immortal fame’ (5.7.71–3). The most active female protagonist outside the boundaries of Dalina’s playing space, Silvesta is nonetheless vital to Venus’ ludic scheme. Her role links her implicitly to the play’s ludic structure even as it demonstrates the difficulty of distinguishing between games and the broader context of the play world in Love’s Victory. Such examples complicate the convention that women’s ludic agency should remain confined to courtly playing spaces. Although Climeana is rebuffed by Lissius and faced with the potential hazards of acting on the rhetorical authority sanctioned by a game of confession, she experiments with the aggressive and passionate speeches she has practiced in her debate with Simeana. Silvesta, operating beyond the limits of Dalina’s games, intervenes as Venus’ ‘instrument’ to save Philisses and Musella. Most tellingly, Venus’ appearance at the conclusion of Love’s Victory facilitates marital closure that acknowledges the importance of women’s choices in love. Rustic relinquishes all power over Musella – ‘Were she alive, she were her own to choose’ (5.7.61) – freeing her to marry Philisses. Dalina, meanwhile, chooses Rustic. Even Wroth’s decision to grant Venus supremacy over Cupid in Love’s Victory, which recalls Venus’ prominence in the Folger manuscript of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, reinforces the play’s commitment to female agency.20 Like

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the elevation of the Princess to Queen in the last act of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Love’s Victory concludes with Venus’ proud claim to be ‘your princess, crowned with victory’ (5.7.160). The larger ludic framework that undergirds Love’s Victory enables Wroth to extend the authority that her female protagonists enjoy beyond the limits of their conversational games and into the larger pastoral realm. Significantly, this juxtaposition of ludic and pastoral spaces affords her female protagonists two levels of enclosure and authorization. As George Puttenham notes in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), ‘vnder the vaile of homely persons, and in rude speeches [the pastoral is designed] to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters’ (38). The description recalls Castiglione’s reference in The Courtier to the veiled negotiations that characterize courtly conversational play and underscores the importance of reading Love’s Victory as a pastoral tragicomedy that experiments with both familial and political allegory.21 In fusing pastoral and ludic conventions, Wroth, like Shakespeare, creates a dramatic framework that enables her to imagine and cultivate authorizing rhetorical spaces for women. In both Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Victory, the space of the conversational game paradoxically ‘impos[es] limits that release freedom’ (Nardo 48). Shakespeare and Wroth situate their female players as ludic sovereigns, granting them opportunities in their games for rhetorical practice, virtuosic displays of wit, and the expression of desire that collectively become the basis for their continued agency in their relationships with men. At the same time, they challenge the conventionally ephemeral nature of ludic contexts by nestling the pastimes of their protagonists within the wider ludic frameworks established by Navarre and Venus. Shakespeare’s courtiers and Wroth’s shepherds and shepherdesses emerge from their playing spaces to find themselves still operating within a carefully constructed ludic context that is inseparable from their daily lives. Even as these frameworks, with their systems of ludic rewards and punishments enforced by the Princess and by Venus, continue to make possible the plays’ insistence on unmitigated female authority, they also provocatively anticipate Wittgenstein’s analogy between everyday language use and games. Wittgenstein argues that the bounded context of the language-game provides participants with training in the rules of interchange and communication. Early modern conversational games functioned in a very similar way, as participants entered ludic spaces to hone and display their courtly abilities, to negotiate for social advancement, and to engage in sanctioned eroticized interchange. Shakespeare and Wroth draw attention to this close intersection

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between playing spaces and the wider realm of court life. In contrast to Guazzo’s Lady Jane, however, Dalina, Musella, Venus, the Princess, and her ladies do not abdicate their rhetorical or sexual agency with the conclusion of their sports. Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Victory were written under very different circumstances. One, the product of an already well-established commercial male playwright, was performed before Queen Elizabeth and likely also on the public stage. The critique of courtship roles and of courtly language use implied by the open-ended conclusion of Love’s Labour’s Lost constitutes a surprising departure from Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. Yet the play, with its continued emphasis on the influence of the Princess, dates from the final decade of the reign of a monarch who by 1594–95 had already enjoyed nearly forty years as the consummate ludic sovereign. Love’s Victory, in contrast, written a quarter of a century later, is the sole extant dramatic work of an aristocratic woman from one of the most influential literary families in England. For Wroth, the rhetorical and romantic possibilities afforded by the exploration of ludic agency in imagined courtship games likely resonated in markedly different ways than for Shakespeare. Naomi Miller has persuasively posited that Wroth’s works foreground the discursive strategies employed by women to achieve agency in the face of social forces compelling their subordination (Changing the Subject). Courtly conversational games emerge as an important example of such authorizing discourse in Love’s Victory.22 Wroth would have been well attuned to the political currency of courtly games and entertainments as a means of securing and maintaining favor within the Queen’s circle. We know that she considered Anne to be an important ally. When she wrote to the court requesting support for the reconstruction of Loughton Hall, Wroth addressed her letter to Anne, asking her to intervene on her behalf to James, ‘your Majestie being the only help wheron I dare rely’ (Poems 233). Given the permeability of the boundaries between games and court society in the period and the importance of games as a politicized discourse at the Jacobean court, the notion that Wroth’s portrayal of Venus as a ludic sovereign celebrated as ‘your princess, crowned with victory’ (5.7.160) might double as Wroth’s own commendation of the Queen would not be unreasonable.23 From these different vantage points, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Victory each foregrounds the challenges of negotiating the competitive and eroticized world of court relationships and the strategic importance of conversational playing spaces within those contexts. As such, the ‘strange’ and ‘pretty’ pastimes that inform both works exemplify

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what Sorel calls ‘Ieux serieux’ (475), serious games that highlight the intermingling of play and politics in the early modern period and the significance of ludic spaces in helping to facilitate the expression of women’s political and sexual desires. Conversation and the spaces of conversational interaction became even more overtly politicized in the years leading up to the English Civil Wars. It is this context to which I now turn.

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Part III The Cavendishes in Conversation

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5 ‘The language of friendship and conversation’: Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s Conversational Alliances

As high-ranking and educated royalists brought up in a collaborative literary environment that encouraged their active participation in conversation and poetic composition, it is not entirely surprising that Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley should embrace conversation and conversational alliance as core elements of their familial and political identity. The sisters were encouraged to hone their oral and written conversational skills from a young age. Their father, William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, a noted dramatist, literary patron, and conversationalist who hosted a scientific and philosophical salon while living in exile on the Continent (see Whitaker 91–4, 112–20), structured his early letters to his children as poetic conversations.1 In one interchange, Newcastle invites Jane, Elizabeth, and their brother Charles to compose couplets in response to his: Sweet Charles, This letter, iff you like Itt nott, then race Itt: Butt Anser Itt, for Usus promtus facitt. W.N. ... Sweet Jane. I knowe you are a rare Inditer. – Ande hath the Pen off a moste redye writer. W.N. ... Bess, you muste write to, write butt what you thinke Nowe you’re a Girle, disemble when you Linke. W.N. 113

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While Charles replies sullenly – ‘My Lord. I can not tel what to wright’ – Jane responds to the couplet challenge: My Lord I know you doo but Jest with mee & so in obdence I right this nothing Jane Cauendysshe (W. Cavendish, ‘Autograph Letters’ sigs 18r-v; see also Turberville 45–6) In the mid-1640s, while garrisoned at Welbeck Abbey, the sisters built on these childhood conversations, compiling a manuscript, Poems Songs a Pastorall and a Play, as a gift for their father. The collection, copies of which are now held at the Bodleian and Beinecke libraries, contains nearly ninety poems authored by Jane, a pastoral masque, and a collaborative household drama, The Concealed Fancies.2 Conversation figures prominently in the manuscript as a structural device through which the sisters articulate their wartime experiences, their opposition to occupying parliamentarian forces, and their pride in their family heritage and court affiliation. While Poems Songs a Pastorall and a Play was partly a product of the sisters’ training within the literary, epistolary, and oral conversational circles of the Cavendish family, the increasing politicization of written and oral conversation in the years leading up to the Civil Wars, manifested for instance in the proliferation of pamphlet dialogues and playlets following the abolition of the Star Chamber in 1641, also had a strong impact on its content. Of particular importance, I suggest, was the Caroline court’s fostering of honnêteté and salon culture, whereby witty conversation became a marker of class, education, and courtliness. During the 1620s and 1630s, the growing popularity of honnêteté provided an important cultural model that validated women’s conversational skills as emblematic of social distinction and virtue (see Craveri 263–75; Stanton 14–30). Appropriated by Parisian salons like the famous chambre bleue of the marquise de Rambouillet and popularized by texts like Nicholas Faret’s L’Honneste homme, ou L’art de plaire à la cour (1630) and Jacques du Bosc’s L’Honneste femme (1632), both of which were quickly translated into English, honnêteté connoted the ability to participate strategically and elegantly in courtly activities without sacrificing piety or virtue. The concept strongly influenced the Neoplatonic theatricals that featured Henrietta Maria and her circle (see Sanders, ‘Caroline Salon Culture’; Tomlinson, ‘She that Plays the King’). Although the Queen was not the sole motivating force behind the trend in England,

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its increasing popularity at court politicized women’s conversation, affiliating it with rank and propriety as well as with royalist culture. Although critics have noted Cavendish and Brackley’s indebtedness to Caroline court culture in their dramatic writings (Bennett, ‘Defamiliarizing Nostalgia’; Milling), the sisters’ deployment of the conventions of epistolary and conversational interchange, particularly in relation to the tenets of honnêteté, has not been so clearly documented. Honnête circles tended to develop in times of cultural crisis and relied on enclosed and exclusive spaces – the cabinet, the maison, the ruelle, the alcôve – for their gatherings (see Veevers 15–16; Stanton 81; Goldsmith 48). Within these spaces, which Benedetta Craveri describes in terms of ‘a carefully circumscribed social reality’ (ix), the honnêtes looked to conversation to develop alternative and superior moral and behavioral codes. If the Caroline court cultivated honnêteté partly as a reaction to the coarseness of Jacobean court society, the Cavendish sisters react rather to the war’s complete undermining of their way of life, epitomized by their experience of sharing their home with foul-mouthed soldiers like The Concealed Fancies’ Action. Cavendish and Brackley adapt the ideals of decorous oral and epistolary interchange within the space created by their imprisonment to develop an aggressively royalist model of conversational interaction.3 As I will argue, this manifests itself particularly in their collaborative household drama The Concealed Fancies. Anticipating the combative wit characteristic of Restoration comedies like Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677) and William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), the sisters’ fictional counterparts Luceny and Tattiney rely on verbal manipulation to preserve their marital happiness, their authority, and their virtue. This emphasis on forceful and politicized conversation also informs the sisters’ writings more generally. Jane Cavendish structures her occasional poems as epistolary interventions that proclaim and defend her family’s heritage and royalist stance even as they underscore the enabling and sustaining role of her relationships with female relatives and friends within a wartime context. Textual conversation represents a crucial form of self-defense for Cavendish and Brackley, aligning them firmly with royalist culture and establishing the fictional and familial conversational alliances they develop as weapons of war.

Wartime conversations: Jane Cavendish’s occasional poems During the English Civil Wars, when both royalist and parliamentarian women were forced to assume greater political responsibilities by defending

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estates, enduring sieges, or relaying information to army leaders, textual conversation in the form of letters, poems, and fictional dialogue played a crucial role in maintaining relationships across geographical distance, providing material assistance, and defending political and familial interests.4 In a letter to Lord Fairfax, composed from Welbeck in April 1645, Jane Cavendish and her sister Frances thank the General for his protection but then go on to negotiate access to Bolsover Castle, asking ‘that if [Colonel Bright] concur with the committee of Derby and some others for disgarrison of that place, to have the favour to be admitted to that house, which we the more desire by reason that town is assigned to us for maintenance, which will yield very little, I fear, if it continue still a garrison’ (qtd in Starr 804).5 The carefully deferential letter, written from captured royalists to secure continued protection from Fairfax, underscores Cavendish’s awareness of the importance of strategic epistolary self-positioning in safeguarding herself and her sisters and in maintaining control of their father’s estates and possessions. Like her extant correspondence, the occasional poems that comprise the first section of Poems Songs a Pastorall and a Play evince Cavendish’s reliance on conversation as a political tool. Jane Milling calls the poems, which she treats only in passing, ‘almost conversational’ (411). I would go further. Drawing on epistolary and dramatic conventions, she structures the majority of her poems as an extended conversation with a wide range of individuals connected to the Cavendish family, her father in particular.6 Building on the literary training modeled by her father through epistolary and dramatic interchange, Cavendish constructs a poetic collection that defends the honor of her heritage, maintains her family network in the physical absence of her father and brothers, and fosters a coterie community comprised primarily of female relatives and friends to counter her isolation. Although only ‘Passions Lettre to my Lord my Father’ and ‘Thankes Lettre’ are explicitly identified as epistolary poems, Cavendish situates her collection as a series of poetic letters. Twenty-five of the poems open with some form of epistolary greeting that is set off from the remainder of the poem: ‘Brother,’ ‘Sister,’ ‘Madam,’ ‘Sir,’ or ‘My Lord.’ In addition to these tags, epistolary conventions such as the inclusion of dates, acknowledgement of previous correspondence, a request, or a recommendation regularly inform the subject matter. The first poem, ‘The Greate Example,’ addressed to Newcastle, offers the most elaborate instance of an epistolary framework. The poem begins: ‘To my Lord, my ffather, the Marquess of Newcastle. My Lord’ (1). The greeting situates both ‘The Great Example’ and the occasional poems more generally as

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a dedication to Newcastle and as a continuation of Jane’s childhood interchanges with her father.7 The format of the poems, with their epistolary tags and predilection for rhyming couplets, precisely mimics Newcastle’s early poetic correspondence with his children. It is fitting, therefore, that letters exchanged between Newcastle and his daughters are a frequent topic of the poems. ‘Thankes Lettre’ acknowledges a recent gift from Newcastle, while in ‘A recruted ioy vpon a Lettre from your Lordshipp,’ Cavendish recalls ‘Thou happy Tuesday since that now I see / My Fathers hand, that happy now I bee’ (29).8 In ‘Loues conflict,’ Cavendish’s relief at the news of Newcastle’s safety is surpassed only by receipt of his letter: But when your Lettre I did take My Joy did truely make mee quake And when I read, I read, & read againe Then thought I read not, then read ouer the same Each word did speake you well; then happy mee, Then sorry I, you not now, for to see. (43) The shift from iambic tetrameter to pentameter in line 3, coupled with the departure from the rhyme scheme in line 4, wittily portrays the pauses and returns characterizing Cavendish’s repeated readings as well as the excitement and distraction prompted by receipt of the letter. The poems document Cavendish’s anxious communication with her father during the Wars and root her poetic composition in such correspondence. By opening the manuscript with an extended epistolary greeting to Newcastle and embedding references to their letters throughout the poems, she represents herself as embracing his instructions to his daughters to ‘write butt what you thinke’ and to enhance their literary skills through poetic exchange. In Newcastle’s absence, textual conversation becomes the basis for Cavendish’s poetic creativity. Cavendish reinforces the conversational vitality of her poetic letters by inserting elements derived from theatrical conventions, notably embedded dramatic dialogue and direct address. ‘On a false reporte of your Lordships landinge’ offers one of the best examples. Cavendish structures ‘On a false reporte’ as a verbal attack on a servant who mistakenly reports her father’s arrival. Midway through the poem, she challenges the scout and the two enter briefly into dialogue: Fye false Scout doe you growe madd To tell a lye onely to make mee gladd

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Or wast your cunninge for to gett reward But now your knowne you’l have noe more regard For tatlinge tales, I shall not creditt thee Since that my Lord in England did not see Come tell mee truely was’t a cheat of you Noe truely Madam, Joy did sweare ’twas true Well goe your wayes put mee noe more in payne Till your good newes may purchase you iust gaine. (8) The dialogue turns the poem into a miniature drama, intensifying the immediacy of the scene and of Cavendish’s emotions.9 Her interaction with the scout underscores her anger and her authority. She dominates the interchange both in terms of turn-taking – he gets only one line out of the ten – and tone, as she berates him with imperatives and strong modal verbs. Significantly, the strongest of these modals comes in conjunction with her use of the informal second-person pronoun, underscoring their difference in rank: ‘I shall not creditt thee.’ Eagerness for her father’s arrival frequently catalyses the shift from a more formal epistolary stance to direct address or dramatic dialogue; in ‘On a false reporte,’ the truncated metre of the first line with its opening series of accented syllables helps to convey the passion of her outburst. Cavendish deploys a similar tactic in ‘Passions inuitation,’ clearly an appeal to Newcastle, again omitting the epistolary tag to launch immediately into direct address: ‘For Gods sake come away & land / And soe my Greife will proue a sand / . . . / Once more I beg this of you; Prethee come / Then ioy is my companions totall summe’ (15). Such moments undermine Nancy Cotton’s contention that Cavendish’s propensity for conversational structures derives only from epistolary training rather than from exposure to drama (41). More commonly, Cavendish’s poetry displays a complex fusion of epistolarity and theatrical convention, moving from personal narrative to reported speech to direct address to dialogue and back again. ‘Loues conflict,’ for example, relates Cavendish’s reaction to hearing news from her father. The poem begins as an address to Newcastle, relating the emotional turmoil Cavendish experiences when she is still ignorant of the nature of the news. In shifting to describe her quest to track down the messenger, the poem provides glimpses of dramatic discourse without losing sight of a narrative framework that retains the poem’s epistolary function: After thoughts, Joy, then feare begunn And then I hastily did runn

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Soe speakeing asked where is the man, Can you not speake, are you deafe Nan? For God sake bid him come away But I doe doubt there did come none today Then when hee came, because I him, not knew I did beleiue hee came not then from you Yet I did aske; Pray Sir, how doth my Lord, Madam hee’s well; then I had my Reward But when your Lettre I did take My Joy did truely make mee quake. (43) Operating as a response to Newcastle’s letter, the poem never sacrifices awareness of its audience, returning regularly to Cavendish’s first-person description. At the same time, rather than resorting to reported speech, she embeds her conversations with her chambermaid and with the messenger himself within the body of the narrative. Dramatic dialogue nestles within the larger poetic conversation between father and daughter, enlivening the poetic letter with the immediacy of oral interchange. The epistolary and dramatic structures on which Cavendish’s poems rely facilitate a strategic representation of her wartime circumstances aimed at defending her family and herself. In his analysis of friendship in medieval and early modern Europe, Alan Bray shows that men regularly deployed the intimate language of friendship, marriage, and kinship in their oral and written conversations to safeguard public and political interests. Familiar letters, he argues, were ‘material tokens of friendship that advertised the countenance of a friend and were designed to be preserved and circulated’ (54), functioning as a valuable source of social currency and composed with the awareness that readership could extend far beyond the specified addressee.10 Pushing beyond the parameters of her family coterie, Cavendish’s poetic letters exemplify this phenomenon. Although the poems were not intended for publication, they assume a decidedly public function (see Ezell). Gathered together, the poems – addressed to her living family members, her ancestors, Charles I, Henrietta Maria, and the Prince, noble friends, and servants – constitute an epistolary collection that advertises the quality of the Cavendish family and its aristocratic and royalist connections to a variety of audiences. In the early poems, Cavendish celebrates her relatives as exempla of true quality. Her father appears in the fittingly titled ‘The Great Example’ as ‘The Academy of all trueth’ and ‘Good natures quinticence’ (1). Her brother Charles is ‘the quinticence of modestie’ and ‘a patterne for obedience’ (2), while her uncle is characterized as ‘the true Example

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of a Saint’ (4). Cavendish lauds her ancestors and deceased relatives in similar terms. She inserts an epistolary tag in nearly all of these poems, a feature which stands out particularly in her letters to the dead.11 Given that these addressees could never physically have received Cavendish’s poetic letters, the question of readership assumes especial importance here. Although she creates an impression of intimacy by addressing her dead relatives using an epistolary frame and the second-person pronoun, Cavendish clearly intends a different audience for these poems, whether comprised of other members within the Cavendish network or individuals beyond the family circle. During the Civil Wars, private letters regularly fell into enemy hands and were published. The most notorious example was the publication in 1645 of King Charles’ correspondence with Henrietta Maria and his commissioners as The Kings Cabinet Opened.12 The possibility of epistolary interception was an acknowledged reality; in a recent essay, Roger Kuin identifies the letter’s implicit awareness of an outside audience and constant mediation between private and public as the ‘edge’ of epistolary form (168; see also Daybell, ‘I wold wyshe’). Throughout their correspondence, both Henrietta Maria and Charles employ codes, make reference to possible spies, and, in the Queen’s case, try to mislead anyone eavesdropping on the epistolary conversation with traps and misinformation. Writing from a garrisoned estate that changed hands repeatedly in the mid-1640s, Cavendish could easily be anticipating a time when the audience of her manuscript might include parliamentarian generals or plunderers.13 Such a strategic and self-defensive stance would not have been uncharacteristic; in her biography of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish credits Jane for safeguarding Welbeck and Bolsover’s artwork and furnishings and for negotiating the transfer of valuables and funds to her father abroad (Life 69–70). Cavendish’s poems reflect her awareness that letters and objects of exchange could operate as weapons of war. ‘Thankes Lettre’ offers a playful example. The gifts she receives from Newcastle become in the poem her metaphorical garrison, a reminder of her father’s imminent return, and motivation for her survival: My Lord Your present to mee was soe iustly kind Th’interpretation comfortable find The curious Fan, was sent to stand betweene To shadowe mee from Traytors as a Screene ...................................

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Thy dainty Twises say steale away tyme Let workes of silke bee a true Captiues signe. (15) The poem depicts correspondence and coterie exchange as a form of political intervention, however metaphorical, designed to safeguard herself, her father, and her household. Defending her aristocratic genealogy through epistolary poetry thus becomes important not only as a way of bolstering the family’s pride and courage but also in reaction to and preparation for enemy encounters. Cavendish’s frequent allusions to her family’s exemplarity as soldiers, in the case of her father and brother, or as peacemakers, in the case of her ancestors, underscore her awareness of this possibility. If part of her motivation in compiling these poems was to create a cabinet of letters testifying to the Cavendish heritage that might serve to defend her family to their enemies as well as to celebrate it within the safety of their coterie, Cavendish successfully represents her relatives, and especially her father, as paragons of virtue equal only to the King – like Newcastle, Charles appears as ‘the greate Example . . . the very trace / Of goodness selfe’ (9) – who fight valiantly and faithfully and whose blood holds the potential to establish peace. The poems are at once a proclamation of innocence, a reminder of the family’s fidelity to the crown, and a promise of ultimate victory. The dialogues embedded within the poetic letters, many of which dramatize reactions to ‘newes’ or false reports, intensify Cavendish’s claim to audience control even as they reinforce the potency and vulnerability of wartime communication. While Newcastle’s involvement in commercial drama likely provided the strongest model for these dramatic elements, the dialogic and semi-dramatic format of the news pamphlets that proliferated after the closure of the theaters in 1642 may also have helped to shape Cavendish’s depiction of the transmission and reception of ‘newes.’ Tracing the development of dialogic pamphlets, Susan Wiseman argues that the presentation of news and political debate in dialogue or dramatic form ‘operate[s] at an important border – that between printed and spoken discussion,’ thereby problematizing the boundary between private and public interchange. Fostering discussion and encouraging reader response, the genre ‘intervenes at the level at which it imagines public debate to be taking place, attempting to present (or mimic?) and defeat positions which might be enunciated in spoken debate’ (Drama and Politics 29). The dialogic structure of the pamphlets invited the buyer to participate in the discussion. Like the Renaissance dialogue, however, the pamphlets were often didactic, ‘attempt[ing] to shape a reader’s assent while, apparently, leaving the outcome open’

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(Drama and Politics 35; see also Randall 51–65). Giving the illusion of collaborative exchange, the pamphlets were intended rather to provoke and manipulate public opinion.14 By formulating a version of public events, the news pamphlets of the 1640s set out to shape ‘the way people think and speak’ (Drama and Politics 32). Sketching interchanges that draw the reader into depictions of her experience of the Wars and that celebrate her father and defend her own authority, embedded dramatic dialogue offers Cavendish a similar degree of control in her poetry.15 Her decision to situate these dramatic elements within an overarching epistolary framework only deepens this effect. Like the appeals to secrecy and illicit content that often characterized pamphlet literature of the period, the representation of epistolary interchange created the impression that an author was allowing an audience privileged access to a private conversation. The poems’ emphasis on solitude and isolation foregrounds the need for such a strategic and self-defensive stance. Despite being structured as an implicit interchange, Cavendish’s poetic conversations remain largely one-sided, exemplified by her addresses to her dead relatives. A number of the poems testify overtly to Cavendish’s sense of isolation. Nowhere is this one-sidedness more evident than in the poems where she draws on dramatic conventions to depict herself in conversation with inanimate objects or with herself. In ‘The Speakeing Glass,’ for example, Cavendish transforms her meditation on her reflection into an imaginary conversation with her mirror: When that I looke into my Glasse It tells mee truely I am rashe To thinke to fynd a face of faire For you are now a pale dispare Soe are you Loues Anothemy of Booke And I your Lecturer wilbee of looke. (42) What begins as the speaker’s report of the mirror’s opinion shifts in line 4 to the mirror’s voice. The mirror claims the ‘I,’ determined to be the speaker’s ‘Lecturer,’ and addresses Cavendish directly. It goes on to catalogue Cavendish’s melancholy features, each of which interjects to participate in the scene. Cavendish replies to the ensuing masque-like procession of her eyes and lips, asking the mirror what will ‘counier [conjure] mee to rest’ (42). She receives no answer to her appeals. The mirror’s sudden silence intensifies the solitude of the scene.

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In The Acoustic Mirror, Kaja Silverman explores female voices in cinema that ‘blur all distinction between diegetic interiority and exteriority’ and which in turn ‘redefine the relationship between spectator and spectacle’ (142). The ‘I’ in ‘The Speakeing Glass’ stands as a fascinating example of such a voice. Blurring the boundaries between subject and object, Cavendish is both spectator and spectacle, speaker and addressee. The ‘I’ is claimed in turn by Cavendish, the mirror, and Cavendish’s features. Cavendish assumes the ‘I’ again by the concluding lines, as she asks the mirror what will bring her peace of mind: What can that bee I pray you speake But I doe feare you are too weake Tell mee, O tell mee, then I am not leane If that my Lord in England is againe. (42) The final line provides the clearest evidence that it is Cavendish who is speaking here, and yet the ambiguous shifting of the ‘I’ throughout the poem merges Cavendish with her reflection. Who is asking who to speak? Does the mirror interject briefly to tell Cavendish that she is too weak to hear its answer, or does Cavendish speak all four of the final lines? If she does, then the conclusion stands as the loneliest portion of the poem, reminding the reader that Cavendish appeals to a silent and inanimate object. Earlier, however, Cavendish widens the parameters of what is essentially a conversation with herself. By attributing lines to the mirror and to her features, Cavendish’s interchange with her reflection, her eyes, and her lips obscures the limits between interiority and exteriority, self and other. Admittedly, the addressee is still the speaker’s reflection. Yet mirrors and glasses are consistently associated with spectatorship and publicity in Cavendish and Brackley’s writings. In The Concealed Fancies, the besieged cousins long for their uncle to observe them in his cabinet with a ‘prospective’ (3.4.46). The ostensibly private space of the closet, protected by lock and key, is made open to the outside gaze. Later in the play, when Luceny prepares for her wedding, Cavendish and Brackley specify that she fixes her hair while ‘looking in the mirror’ (5.6). When her brother questions her determination to be an obedient wife, Luceny replies, ‘Now do I view myself by all so looked upon’ (5.6.13). The scene shifts Luceny’s seemingly private encounter with her reflection from a moment of introspection to an explicit invocation of a wider audience, manifested both in her brother and in the play’s readers and spectators.

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Although ‘The Speakeing Glass’ does not go to the extreme of The Concealed Fancies in emphasizing the refractive and reflective potential of the mirror that Alison Findlay has traced (see ‘Scene Self’) it, too, problematizes the relationship between self and other, interior and exterior. As such, even as it provides poignant insight into the speaker’s solitude, the poem mirrors the broader function of Cavendish’s occasional poems, pushing beyond familial parameters in search of a wider audience. Despite the overt sense of isolation pervading the poems, Cavendish also reaches out to another audience. The collection makes it clear that Cavendish’s relationships with other women, particularly her sister Elizabeth, play a key role in validating her family, anticipating military conflict, defending her household, and providing a network to offset her solitude. Of the nearly ninety poems in the manuscript, fully one-third are addressed to women. Cavendish composes poems to Henrietta Maria; to female friends and acquaintances; to noble ladies; to anonymous other women; to her deceased grandmothers and aunts; to her deceased mother; to her sister-in-law; to her sisters; and to female servants. The contrast with the poems addressed to men is striking. Apart from the poems addressed either explicitly or implicitly to Newcastle, Cavendish devotes considerably less attention to her male peers and relatives.16 Of the remaining poems, one is addressed to her four deceased brothers and sisters, six to God, and one to a ‘discoursiue Ghost’ (26). Although eleven poems have no clear addressee and four others leave the gender of the recipient unclear, several of these still pertain to women, notably the two poems in which Cavendish celebrates the portraits of her sisters Elizabeth and Frances.17 Taken together, the poems demonstrate Cavendish’s reliance on a network of female friends and relatives who provide mutual economic, emotional, and political support.18 Cavendish was committed to ‘cement[ing] family ties through letters and visits’ (288), as Linda Levy Peck has demonstrated in her examination of Jane’s correspondence. These sustaining ties are integral to her epistolary poems. In one poem, Cavendish recommends a servant to a noble lady; in another, she credits an aristocratic acquaintance with helping to uphold her and maintain her ‘calme’: Thou sent a message late In this our thoughts relate That kindness is our fate Soe makes pure loue a state At last your selfe did come

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Which makes my totall somme Your pleaseinge speeche to bee A happy calme to mee. (7) Cavendish’s poetic letters push beyond the level of emotional support to highlight the prominent military role played by this network of women. The two poems addressed to Henrietta Maria, for instance, place significant emphasis on her military success. In the first, commendation of the Queen’s beauty becomes the basis for Cavendish’s celebration of her military might: Your Eye if Looke, it doth an Army pay And soe as Generall, you doe lead the way Mary of Henry foureth of ffraunce then name Great conquests getts, Armyes of Rebells tame. (9) The much briefer poem to the King, in contrast, does not mention courage or military ability at all, instead simply holding Charles up as the ‘best of humane race’ (9). Cavendish’s emphasis on Henrietta Maria’s military agency derives from the Queen’s high level of involvement in the Wars – she led her own troops, carried messages between army leaders, and was affectionately known by her husband as the ‘Generalissima.’19 Yet Cavendish extends comparable praise to her other female addressees, celebrating their beauty and self-control in military terms, exemplified by ‘An answeare to the verses Mr Carcy made to the Lady Carlile,’ where the lady ‘forbidd[s] possession, or a roome’ to suitors and refuses to ‘parl[ey] to let [her] honour fall’ (14).20 Cavendish’s commendations of her deceased Grandmother Elizabeth’s ‘Magazine of rich’ (35) and a Noble Lady’s sweetness which ‘conquers euery thinge’ (18) rely on similar imagery.21 Her decision to express these encomia in military terms reflects the very real involvement of aristocratic women in the Civil Wars, protecting households, safeguarding goods, and witnessing plunder. In the absence of male relatives, when households became the frontlines of the Wars, women constituted not merely a social network for each other but a crucial source of assistance and support. Jane’s sister Elizabeth holds a special place within this network.22 Whereas she addresses only one poem directly to her sister Frances, she addresses four to Brackley. A fifth urges an unnamed addressee to cull a model of divinity from Brackley’s picture, while a sixth curses the individuals who threaten to abduct her sister. Apart from Newcastle, no other addressee receives so much individual attention. In addition to

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holding up her sister as a paragon of ‘beauty, goodnes, trueth’ (11) and celebrating her as a model wife, Cavendish commends Brackley for the sisterly support and companionship she offers. In ‘The quinticence of Cordiall,’ she writes: Sister, Wer’t not for you I knew not how to liue For what content I haue, you do mee giue. (12) The only other ‘Cordiall’ that can match the comfort she derives from Brackley’s presence is the ‘Cordiall newes’ (7) of her father’s safety. The importance of the sisters’ relationship for Cavendish manifests itself not only in the volume of poems addressed to Brackley but also in the vehemence with which Cavendish reacts to the possibility of her sister being taken away from her.23 Whether fictional or based on an actual attempt at removal, ‘The angry Curs’ outlines Cavendish’s condemnation of the unnamed individuals proposing to separate her from her sister. Of all the poems, only the attack on the misinformed scout in ‘On a false reporte’ matches ‘The angry Curs’ in its vituperative tone: ‘Who is’t that darr tell mee they’l haue away / My Sister Brackley, who’s my true lifes day’ (25). Cavendish underscores her passion by labeling the poem a curse, a performative speech act. After challenging her adversaries, she enumerates the punishments in store for ‘The Plotters of this damned vgly plott’ (25): For Company Rats squeking their discourse And then Catts howleing should bee their Carous Their clothes in winter stiff Buckeram thinn In Summer Pollcat furr lyned all within Thus I would haue ill natures iustly payd. (25) Despite the comic hyperbole of this catalogue, the poem reveals profound anxiety.24 Cavendish presents the situation as a military ‘plott’ (25) requiring revenge, while her appeals to the foulness of her interlocutors recall the coarseness of the royalist soldier Action in The Concealed Fancies. If the poem is indeed addressed to enemy soldiers, ‘The angry Curs’ lends credence to my argument that Cavendish is writing for very different audiences in her poetry. While dramatic and epistolary conventions help elsewhere to situate her poems as a deliberately constructed private space that defends her family and Cavendish herself, ‘The angry Curs’ shifts explicitly to include her enemies within her

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poetic audience. The defiance and authority that Cavendish exhibits in her castigation of these ‘Plotters’ (25) make the aggressiveness of her authorial stance, implied throughout the manuscript, all the more overt. Significantly, it is to defend her sister and the importance of her companionship that Jane moves to condemn their captors. Regardless of the identity of the addressee, the poem exemplifies Cavendish’s reliance on Elizabeth. In the absence of their father, Elizabeth becomes the ‘Cordiall’ that sustains Jane.

The virtues of conversation: The Concealed Fancies Poetic production and collaboration lie implicitly at the heart of the sisters’ alliance. In ‘The angry Curs,’ Cavendish declares that her sister’s absence will prompt her own silencing: ‘For if hir absence I will bee a Nunn / And speak then nothinge, but when will shee come’ (25). The lines seem to credit Brackley with providing motivation and support for Cavendish’s literary projects. If Newcastle’s early cultivation of his daughters’ poetic proclivity enabled Cavendish to maintain her relationship with her absent father through textual conversation, the sisters’ daily intercourse encouraged that poetic interchange. Their creative conversation manifests itself most clearly in their two extant dramatic pieces: A Pastorall and The Concealed Fancies. Both works are self-consciously collaborative. A Pastorall opens with two epistles to Newcastle, one from each daughter. It is then divided into scenes that are credited to the appropriate sister with the initials ‘JC’ or ‘EB.’ Jane is responsible for the first antemasque, Elizabeth for the second; the authorship of subsequent scenes alternates more or less equally between the sisters, with the number of Jane’s contributions slightly outweighing Elizabeth’s. Although the division of labor for The Concealed Fancies is not as easily identifiable, the sisters’ collaboration is evidenced by the play’s paratextual material: two separate prologues to the audience, a ‘particular prologue’ written in the first person plural to Newcastle, epilogues assigned individually to the fictional sisters Luceny and Tattiney, and an epilogue to Newcastle structured as a dialogue between the sisters. Moreover, and most important for my argument here, we see their collaboration in the play’s preoccupation with women’s creative and aggressive conversational alliance. Overturning conventions governing decorous interchange and appropriating the honnête notion that assertive wit can coexist with and exemplify virtue, Cavendish and Brackley construct a highly manipulative code of conduct in the play that compensates for their political vulnerability and their isolation from the court.

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Awaiting the return of their father and brothers from the Wars, their fictional counterparts Luceny and Tattiney together challenge conventional marital and domestic hierarchies by verbally manipulating their suitors Courtley and Presumption into a code of courtship that preserves their marital happiness without compromising either their authority or their virtue. Luceny and Tattiney likely represent fictional versions of the authors and, if the play were in fact performed, may well have been played by Cavendish and Brackley themselves.25 They are skilled conversationalists who present themselves as ‘brought up in the creation of good languages, which will make us ever ourselves’ (2.3.142–4). Their suitors also are ‘held wits’ (2.3.140), but the sisters run circles around Courtley and Presumption, maintaining control of their interactions by refusing to honor the men’s linguistic and behavioral expectations. As I argued in Chapter 1, decorous oral interchange relied on a complex system of verbal and physical codes designed to safeguard the relative positions of interlocutors and to preserve the harmony of each interaction. In the first interchange between Courtley and Luceny, however, Luceny mocks every one of Courtley’s clichéd seduction attempts: COURTLEY

LUCENY

Ho! I’ll love myself better then [sic] to die for one that hates me! But, I could be a willing martyr to her that loves me. Ha, ha, ha! I think so! You would be a willing martyr to her that loves you? And do you think that is a high expression of love? (1.4.82–7)

By offering questions instead of answers and laughing in her lover’s face, Luceny draws attention to the affectation of what she calls Courtley’s ‘hypocritical language’ (1.4.74), thus undermining the effectiveness of his entreaties even as she reveals the hollowness of conversational and courtship rituals. Luceny further disempowers her lover by highlighting the conventional gestural codes that accompany his suit: ‘Now, will not your next posture be to stand with folded arms? But that posture now grows much out of fashion’ (1.4.67–9).26 Both sisters refuse to comply with their suitors’ requests for a customary ‘salute’ (2.2.33) at the conclusion of their interchange; Luceny dismisses Courtley rather by declaring, ‘there is nothing I hate more then a country gentleman, who must ever salute coming and going . . . I swear, I would rather cut my lips off than suffer you a salute!’ (1.4.105–9). Taking the manipulative potential of conversational interchange to its extreme, Cavendish and

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Brackley defend a performative and domineering approach to conversation that flies in the face of every conduct manual of the period. In their study of The Concealed Fancies in and as performance, Alison Findlay, Gweno Williams, and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright argue that such moments elevate ‘the verbal, physical and musical dimensions of wooing and betrothal as aspects of entertainment,’ calling attention to the performativity of courtship roles (138). These interchanges, however, also situate the sisters as unusually aggressive versions of honnêtes femmes determined to counter affectation and establish an alternative code of behavior. The sisters’ conversational tyranny seems to be in large part a result of political circumstance. Luceny and Tattiney are not opposed to gender hierarchy, eagerly anticipating their father’s return from the Wars and relying on him as their ‘alpha and omega of government’ (2.3.33). In his absence, however, strategic conversation and linguistic performativity become ways of controlling an otherwise unpredictable environment and of protecting themselves from unwanted male attention. Their tactics are effective. Courtley and Presumption both depart after these initial interchanges to regroup, offended by their ‘tyrant’ (2.2.19) lovers’ ‘insulting’ (1.4.49) language and behavior and frustrated at their misfortune to admire discerning women who ‘doth so truly see’ (1.4.111) through the theatricality of conversational ritual. Such ‘status games,’ as Alison Findlay calls them, immediately begin to problematize the interrelationship between gender and authority foregrounded by the play (‘Scene Self’ 156). If, for Pierre Bourdieu, a speaker acquires profit from manipulating the context of an utterance to advantage, the sisters’ linguistic competence stems both from their careful staging of their courtship encounters and from their determination to redefine the parameters of their conversational interactions. In their first appearance in the play, Luceny excitedly questions her sister: ‘Sister, pray tell me in what humour thou wert with thy servant yesterday? Prithee, tell me how you acted your scene?’ (1.4.1–3). She goes on to depict her own conversation with Courtley as a performance: ‘I dressed myself in a slight way of carelessness which becomes as well, if not better, than a set dress; and when he made his approaches of love, by speaking in a formal way, I answered him: I could not love so dull a brain as he had, always to repeat he loved me’ (1.4.6–11). The details of costume and script underscore her conscious manipulation of the interchange and her rejection of the conventional courtship codes represented by Courtley’s ‘formal’ way of speaking. Conduct books like The Second Part of Youths Behaviour, or Decency in Conversation Amongst Women instructed their readers on

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the importance of matching both appearance and address to circumstance: ‘Habits as well as Words should be conformable to the Times’ (Codrington 18). Luceny’s careful attention to her costume and her words in her rebuttal of her lover takes such injunctions to their logical extreme, using both to create the scene to her tastes rather than vice versa. Presumption ruefully acknowledges the sisters’ creative and performative abilities, declaring that his mistress ‘knows her scene-self too well’ (1.1.3–4). Judith Butler’s reworking of Bourdieu helps to unpack the relationship between conversation and performance in The Concealed Fancies. In Excitable Speech, Butler argues that the disruptive potential of performative language often derives from the decision to depart from conventional contexts of utterance (145). She grounds her argument on the premise that language, as an embodied act, is always to some extent beyond the control of the speaker (13). Situated on the boundary between written and performed text, closet and household drama problematizes performative language use. On the one hand, the speaking body remains central to The Concealed Fancies, as Luceny and Tattiney engage in a highly theatrical process of self-fashioning and a Butlerian performance of gender roles, both of which rely on their manipulation of gesture and costume. The play’s preoccupation with spectatorship, voyeurism, and audience, all details that recall the visual conventions of commercial drama, further underscores the performativity of the female characters. At the same time, however, Cavendish and Brackley are very conscious of their text as a written product; in the Epilogue, they refer to the play as having been ‘read’ (Epilogue 119) by their father. As writers, the sisters have the luxury of determining the parameters of the contexts within which their protagonists speak, which in turn grants Luceny and Tattiney a higher degree of control over their behavior and language; staging decisions can enhance or diminish this control in performance. The potency of performative language in the play derives not simply from the sisters’ consistent disruption of the interactive codes expected within particular settings, therefore, but also from the creation of new conventions and contexts that validate that disruption. Chief among these is the honnête notion that highly assertive wit can coexist with and exemplify virtue. Throughout the play, Luceny and Tattiney use their conversational theorizing as preparation for their encounters with Courtley and Presumption and with wider society. This in itself is not uncommon for the period, as shown by Guazzo’s understanding of civil conversation as one’s behavior among and interaction with chosen company. The sisters

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depart from these conventions by consistently equating their manipulative and domineering conversation with their virtuous behavior in society. In life, the Cavendish sisters seem to have been models of conversational decorum. Brackley’s epitaph celebrates her ‘charming discourse, most obliging conversation . . . so courteous and affable to all persons that she gained their love, yet not so familiar to expose herself to contempt’ (Ballard 267). In the Concealed Fancies, however, the sisters grant their aristocratic protagonists aggressive conversational skills that, rather than compromising their virtue, become the basis for their self-control in public and private. Despite Tattiney’s warning in Act Two that her sister’s refusal to ‘lessen [her] conversation’ (2.3.128) for her mother-inlaw might affect her reputation, the sisters defend a form of conversation grounded in highly manipulative rhetoric and performative self-display that does not detract from their virtue; Luceny replies: ‘as I hope for happiness I will continue my innocent freedom with Courtley, and he shall have a true piece of virtue of Luceny’ (2.3.133–5). The modal verbs ‘will’ and ‘shall’ foreground her confidence. This insistence on the coexistence of verbal aggression and agility with sexual virtue underscores Cavendish and Brackley’s awareness of the need to yoke verbal and physical selfdefense in war, a feature shared by many of the dramatic heroines created by their stepmother. However, it also testifies to the sisters’ indebtedness to honnêteté. If conversational dexterity shared important affinities with the self-control required of female speakers in conduct literature of the period, it was also the hallmark of the virtuous honnête femme. The Concealed Fancies arguably ends on a conservative note, with marriage and the symbolic silencing of the sisters occasioned by their father’s return. However, the lifting of the siege does not mitigate Luceny and Tattiney’s commitment to theatrical self-fashioning and manipulative conversation. Rather than silencing the sisters, the Epilogue mirrors their opening interchange in Act One as they compare strategies for controlling their new husbands at home and in public; references to costumes and play-acting again abound, reinforcing their continued commitment to performative self-definition. Luceny reports: ‘I looked soberly, as if I would strictly observe him, yet dressed myself contrary to his instruction, and my behaviour was according to my dress’ (Epilogue 14–17). The lovers’ training seems to have been successful. The Courtley and Presumption whom the sisters describe in this interchange bear little resemblance to their earlier selves. In Act Two, Presumption proudly defined his role as husband in a tone reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Petruccio: ‘she shall not stay with her own friends or family after she is married, not three days. Then, once a year, I’ll bring her down a gown

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in fashion, which with continuing long in the country, she shall not know how to put on; then all my discourse shall be to praise the ladies in London’ (3.3.28–34). By the conclusion of the play, the suitors’ confident ‘shall’ has diminished significantly. Courtley, who was never as commanding as Presumption, is reduced to hesitant suggestion. Hoping to curb Luceny’s behavior, he upholds the model of an obedient woman in town: ‘I wish . . . she might be your example’ (Epilogue 40–1), he hints. Presumption too is meeker, reduced to ‘silence’ in a gathering with his wife (Epilogue 77) and using his last ‘shall’ to defer command to Tattiney: ‘she shall be my mistress, joy of life’ (3.3.119). The word ‘mistress’ here resonates in a number of ways (see Findlay, ‘Scene Self’ 155–6). The word holds both romantic and authoritative connotations; a mistress is ‘a female sweetheart’ and ‘[a] woman who has the power to control, use, or dispose of something at will’ (OED, n. def. A.I). ‘Mistress’ was also the term adopted by the salons to elevate women within a Neoplatonic system of courtship (Veevers 15). Cavendish and Brackley appropriate the virtue intrinsic to this idealistic portrayal of women only to combine it with their claim to sexual pleasure and authority in marriage. Instead of a ‘mistress’ elevated above human passion and adored with intellectual affection, the sisters advocate a model whereby ideal love can be attained through domestic union and where the ‘friendship’ of lovers continues into marriage. It is this type of love that Walter Montagu’s The Shepheards Paradise (1633) trumpets, one in which marriage fuels, rather than stifles, love. Presumption’s romantic encomium to Hymen in the opening scene of The Concealed Fancies and Courtley’s depiction of marriage as the continuation of ‘the conversation and friendship of lovers’ (3.3.67–8) draw explicitly on this language. The sisters’ promises to each other that they will maintain their freedom as wives become a defining feature of their three principal interchanges in Act One, scene four, Act Two, scene three, and the Epilogue. They witness each other’s ‘pretty oath[s],’ variably expressed ‘as I hope to continue Tattiney/Luceny’ (2.3.100–2) or ‘as I hope to continue my own’ (2.3.108; Epilogue 3), that ensures they will remain ‘mistress[es]’ – virtuous, affectionate, and authoritative – within their marital relationships. Alan Bray has traced the parallels between men’s private oaths and the liturgical language and rituals of the marriage service (78–139). In The Concealed Fancies, however, the sisters’ vows to maintain an infinitely flexible and theatrical sense of self trump the speech acts that traditionally cement a hierarchical marital relationship. Tattiney declares, ‘For do you think, sister, the words saying in the church shall make me mind him more than I do now?’ (2.3.110–12);

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Luceny, punning on ‘altar,’ similarly expostulates, ‘Why do you think “I take thee” shall alter me?’ (1.4.43). The audience never witnesses the marriage ceremony of either sister, which is instead replaced by the ceremonial vows of selfhood, enacted and witnessed through sisterly conversational collaboration. Even as they congratulate each other after marriage on having reduced the ‘imperious’ natures and the ‘chid[ing]’ of their lovers (Epilogue 6, 10) by adapting their behavior to counter their husbands’ expectations, the sisters continue to rely on each other. In the Epilogue, they exchange a promise to continue their conversational encounters: LUCENY

TATTINEY

Swear you will tell your husband’s humour and your own, otherwise you shall have me no more your liberate fool. What oaths you please I’ll swear. (Epilogue 27–30)

The interchange mirrors the oaths exchanged in their first scene together, suggesting that marriage has failed to mitigate the sisters’ loyalty to each other and to their ongoing performance. Indeed, later in the Epilogue, Tattiney again makes a vow of selfhood to her sister: ‘I swear, by you, I was myself, and held my petulant garb’ (Epilogue 77–9). While Tattiney’s final oath reminds the audience of the sisters’ rejection of marital speech acts in favor of their own performative alliance, it also encapsulates the sisters’ determination to continue to fashion themselves through costume and conversation, exemplified by Tattiney’s insistence on her ‘petulant garb.’ ‘Garb’ connotes both costume and ‘[a] person’s outward bearing, behaviour, carriage, or demeanour’; a ‘garb-master’ is ‘one who professes the art of polite behaviour’ (OED, n2 def. 2, 4, 5). Like conversation, the word evokes the graceful mastery of the verbal and gestural rituals governing polite interchange. In defending her garb as ‘petulant,’ however, Tattiney reiterates that the source both of her self-control and of her control of Presumption lies in a highly unconventional enactment of conversational decorum. The ‘[i]nsolent or lascivious behaviour or speech; impudence, over-assertiveness, insolence; sauciness’ (OED, n. def. 1.a) associated with petulance hardly matches the decorous conversation advocated for young gentlewomen in The Second Part of Youths Behaviour. Yet Tattiney embraces these attributes, declaring that her ‘petulant garb’ enabled her to be ‘[her]self’ (Epilogue 78–9).27 The phrase epitomizes the sisters’ appropriation of indecorous and highly performative conversation as the basis for their virtue and self-control.28

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The word ‘petulant’ also picks up on the sexual connotations of conversational interaction. Tattiney’s ensuing declaration that she plays both Presumption’s wife and mistress in company ironically looks back to the ‘husbandly loved conversation’ (4.5.40) that fascinates Pert and Toy in Act Four even as it reveals her to be the sort of woman Pert idolizes, one who can ‘have her several scenes, now wife, then mistress, then my sweet Platonic soul’ (4.5.55–7). Tattiney insists that ‘matrimony is to join lovers’ (Epilogue 87), and her histrionic written and oral interchanges with Presumption underscore her ability to maintain his happiness in marriage even as they demonstrate her self-control; she writes to him ‘In as several humours as I will dress myself. His mistress, this you may see is an equal marriage’ (Epilogue 84–5). Her description of the marital relationship recalls Courtley’s idealistic encomium to marriage earlier in the play as the continuation of ‘the conversation and friendship of lovers’ (3.3.67–8). At the same time, however, Tattiney’s choice of the word ‘mistress’ again highlights the uneasy tension between affection and authority that characterizes her relationship with her husband. The sisters turn the complexity of the term ‘conversation’ to their advantage, exposing the superficiality of verbal and behavioral conversational conventions and advocating the pleasures of amorous intercourse even as they appropriate manipulative conversational strategies that uphold their authority and virtue. The Epilogue’s emphasis on the continued conversation and collaboration of the sisters, evoked particularly through Luceny and Tattiney’s oaths and their presentation in alternating lines of ‘An epilogue . . . to your Lordship,’ provides the clearest indication of the permanence of their alliance and of the transformation of gender roles that has taken place.29 Elsewhere in their writings, both Cavendish and Brackley insist on the importance of such contradictory ‘garb’ in maintaining marital harmony. In ‘Considerations concerning Marriage,’ Brackley maintains that the injunction of wifely obedience should not be interpreted as subjection to one’s husband, but rather as ‘esteeme’ for him (fol. 79r). Such respect should not be equated with excessive reverence.30 A wife, Brackley argues, should ‘not . . . be in such awe of him, as a servant of his Master, as not to speake, to contradict the least word he saith, but to haue an affection, and love to him, as to a friend, and so speake their mind, and opinion freely to him’ (fols 79v–80r). Verbal self-confidence facilitates mutual respect and companionship. Moreover, it secures the wife’s happiness: ‘if shee be over awed by her owne Fancyes, ’tis a sad life to her selfe, and a trouble to her Husband, who other wayes would be a friendly companion’ (fols 81v–82r). In her poem ‘A Songe,’

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Cavendish likewise defends the importance of a woman’s confidence in marriage, particularly in conversation with one’s husband. She couches her description of the marriage relationship in the same theatrical terms that pervade The Concealed Fancies: Now if a wife doe know hir seene What neede shee care what hee doth meane Soe n’er his foole hee should hir winn For that’s a matrimoniall sinn Now let them conclude in loue to each And not that language by awe to teach For that will then appeare to bee Ther’s noe free quarter for a shee. (PSPP 26) Maintenance of flexible and assertive conversational skills, nurtured through sisterly alliance, secures marital happiness for Cavendish and Brackley and their fictional counterparts, even as it becomes the basis for their determination ‘to continue [their] own’ (Epilogue 3) after marriage. Despite the sisters’ insistence on the equality of husband and wife in The Concealed Fancies, it is clear that Courtley and Presumption struggle to adjust to the model of marriage that their wives/mistresses advance. As Tattiney says, ‘when I am in company with [Presumption] he becomes a compound of he-knows-not-what, that is, he doth not appear my husband; neither is his garb my servant’ (Epilogue 68–71). As the men defer to the ever-changing behavior of the sisters, the conclusion of the play reverses the conventional comedic silencing of women in marriage. In addition to transforming the suitors’ speech patterns, the Epilogue implicitly silences Courtley and Presumption. After relating how she varies her appearance to counter her husband’s wishes to dominate her, Luceny confesses that she finally masters Courtley through conversation. She describes her victory as follows: Then he declared himself by allegory, and praised a lady, obedient fool, in town, and swore her husband was the happiest man in the world. I replied, she was a very good lady, and I accounted him happy that was her husband, that he could content himself with such a mechanical wife. I wish, said he, she might be your example, and you have no reason to slight her, for she is of a noble family. I know that, said I, and do the more admire why she will contract her family, nobleness and birth, to the servitude of her husband, as if he

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had bought her his slave, and I’m sure her father bought him for her, for he gave a good portion, and now in sense who should obey? Then he came with his old proverb and said he would teach me another lesson, and so with a forced kind of mirth, went out of the room, and I understood he had nothing else to say[.] (Epilogue 34–52) The passage elides conversational control with financial capital, literalizing the emphasis on conversation as social currency proclaimed by epistolary and conversational manuals. Overturning the patriarchal notion of wife as property, Luceny argues that her greater wealth should entitle her to greater power in the marriage.31 She defends that stance by, once again, silencing Courtley through conversation (doubly so through reported speech). Her husband can only express himself obliquely and hesitantly in allegory and proverb, eventually leaving the room with ‘nothing else to say.’ Just as it grants them control over Courtley and Presumption as lovers, performative conversation continues to function as the currency that guarantees Luceny and her sister authority in their marriages. Building on the sisters’ literary training within the conversational circles of the Cavendish family, the structural prominence of oral and epistolary conversation in Poems Songs a Pastorall and a Play underscores Cavendish and Brackley’s recognition of the public implications of seemingly intimate conversational intercourse and the importance of conversational alliance for women in the Civil Wars. Jane Cavendish’s occasional poems function as an epistolary collection that strategically defends her family’s political associations to an outside and potentially hostile audience and testifies to her reliance on her relationships with her female relatives and friends for support and physical defense. By positioning her occasional poetry as an extended and ostensibly private epistolary conversation, she draws attention to the coterie network that enables her to survive the experience of her imprisonment even as she uses her poetic letters to facilitate resistance. Meanwhile, in The Concealed Fancies, Luceny and Tattiney react to a world that, as the maidservant Care laments in Act Five, has been ‘turned upside down’ (5.5.17) in the Wars by overturning conventional codes of conversational decorum. In so doing, they create space for their individual agency, using their linguistic skills to defend themselves and to redefine marital roles. Challenging assumptions concerning the private nature of household theater, the play situates female alliance, played out in conversational interchange and authorial collaboration, as a tool of political resistance and social change. Within the salon-like

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space created by their imprisonment, Cavendish and Brackley strategically adapt the tenets of courtly interchange associated with honnêteté to construct an authoritative and aggressively manipulative – yet virtuous – model of conversation and courtship that safeguards their personal and political interests in their wartime context even as it redefines social and domestic hierarchies and the place of women within those structures.

6 The Civil Conversations of Margaret Cavendish and Ben Jonson

In the General Prologue prefacing her first volume of plays, Margaret Cavendish justifies her relative lack of learning and resultant natural wit in architectural and proprietary terms: . . . I upon my own Foundation writ; Like those that have a little patch of Land, Even so much whereon a house may stand: The Owner builds a house, though of no shew, A Cottage warm and clean, though thatch’d and low. Her self-professed freedom from classical and contemporary models enables Cavendish to position herself confidently in this prologue as both architect and owner of ‘the buildings of [her] natural wit’ (Playes sig. A7v).1 She stands guard over this ‘Cottage’ in her paratext, that ‘vestibule’ (Genette, Seuils 8) comprising titles, epigraphs, frontispieces, prefaces, dedicatory epistles, and other elements that together provide a guiding framework for a reader. As the threshold to her textual house, this liminal zone emerges in her prolific writings as a space of exclusive hospitality where she converses with her readers or ‘Neighbours’ (WO sig. A3v). Unlike oral interchanges, paratextual encounters entail no give-andtake with an interlocutor. Cavendish takes full advantage of this unique market for conversational domination and control. She consistently undercuts conventions of politeness, deference, and reciprocity, transforming potentially civil encounters with her readers and dedicatees into an aggressive claim to determine entry into her textual domain. ‘[T]hose that do not like my Book, which is my House, I pray them to pass by, for I have not any entertainment fit for their Palats,’ she announces to 138

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her readers in an epistle prefacing The Worlds Olio (1655) (sig. A3v). The result is a formidable example of Pierre Bourdieu’s linguistic competence, a model of conversational interaction even more manipulative and controlling than that practiced by Luceny and Tattiney in The Concealed Fancies. Cavendish’s paratextual strategies, which I contend are modeled on Ben Jonson’s, reflect her longing to establish a position of rhetorical authority that compensates for her lack of political and oral influence during the English Civil Wars. Her manipulative language challenges conventional notions of conversational decorum on all fronts. Recalling Luceny and Tattiney’s defense of their conversational virtue, however, Cavendish justifies her aggressive demands for recognition as a form of civility. Focusing on her dedicatory epistles and prefatory addresses, this chapter will argue that Cavendish uses the strategic space of the paratext to fashion a gendered paradigm for civility that situates conversational manipulation as a crucial component of her symbolic capital even as it paradoxically emblematizes her virtue and commitment to civil order.

Cavendish in conversation The Cavendish household was a stimulating center for conversational exchange. While Cavendish repeatedly insists in her writings that she had no part in the scholarly discussions hosted by her husband and his brother and had difficulty playing hostess, she would have been accustomed to an atmosphere of intellectual encounter: ‘you could hardly escape the Conversation of the most Learned in all the Arts and Sciences; unless you purposely withdrew your self from their Society, or shut your Ears against their Discourses,’ Walter Charleton wryly tells her in a 1654 letter (Letters and Poems 145–6). Cavendish acknowledges the importance of her conversations with her husband and her brother-in-law, crediting them for her knowledge of scientific and philosophical concepts (see, for example, PPO1 Av–A3r).2 We also know that she participated in Henry Lawes’ London gatherings, in the salon of Béatrix, Duchess of Lorraine, at Beersel, and in literary and musical evenings with the Duarte family in Antwerp (Whitaker 118–24, 136–7). Yet speaking and writing constituted crucially different forms of communication for Cavendish. The ‘greatest talkers,’ she declares in an epistle prefacing her first collection of plays, ‘are not the best writers’ (Playes sig. A5r). Cavendish did not consider herself to be a great conversationalist. She frequently alludes to her extreme bashfulness in her autobiography. Her plays, meanwhile, juxtapose shy recluses like Lady Bashfull and Lady Contemplation with

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chatty socialites like Lady Wagtail and rhetorical virtuosi like Lady Sanspareille in what Sara Mendelson has called a strategy of ‘anti-autobiography’ (‘Playing Games’ 195–212). Taken as a whole, however, her writings exhibit a fascination with conversational exchange. Cavendish’s preoccupation with conversation in her works as well as her portrayals of herself in Sociable Letters conversing with women, learned natural philosophers, and her beloved Sir W.N. can partly be attributed to her inability to amass symbolic capital in oral contexts. She longs for the skill and the opportunity to emulate men who can speak ‘on a Sudden and Extempore upon any Subject’ (SL 74). Denied this as a result of her gender, political disfavor, and her bashfulness, Cavendish opts for textual persuasion instead, structuring many of her works as conversations. In Sociable Letters, Cavendish tells the fictional Madam that, ‘since we cannot converse Personally, we should converse by Letters, so as if we were speaking to each other, discoursing our Opinions’ (47). She uses a similar framework for Philosophical Letters (1664). She situates the fictional narratives in Natures Pictures, many of which are dialogues, as stories traded during a fireside colloquy, while her lengthy dramas foreground discussions of ethical and philosophical questions. In addition to this penchant for dialogic structures and representations of conversational interaction, Cavendish maintains an ongoing conversation with her readers in her paratext. What is remarkable about most of these conversations is their onesidedness. Cavendish’s heroines give speeches that are quasi-orations, so lengthy that in a 2005 staging of The Convent of Pleasure (1668), director Gweno Williams had the actor playing Lady Happy carry a scroll with her longest monologues as a mnemonic aid.3 Nowhere is this one-sidedness more evident, however, than in Cavendish’s dedicatory epistles and prefatory addresses to her readers and her fictional collections of letters. As I argued in Chapter 1, letters and verse epistles offer a unique opportunity for conversational control; the letter writer holds the floor and may not be interrupted until the reader’s reply arrives. Because the addressee is not present to react moment by moment to the writer’s appeals, language must carefully be adjusted to anticipate and ensure the desired response. Janet Altman has demonstrated the importance of ‘the letter’s formal properties to create meaning.’ The impact of such ‘epistolarity’ is all the more pronounced in the case of an artificial onesided interchange: ‘The imagined dialogue . . . has an advantage over the real conversation: one can manipulate one’s partner. . . . The fantasy dialogue thus reveals more about the ventriloquist than the puppet’ (4, 139). It is not that Cavendish shied away from actual epistolary exchange; her

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extant correspondence with Newcastle before their marriage in 1645, the scientific letters she exchanged with Constantin Huygens, Joseph Glanville, Walter Charleton, and John Evelyn, and the collection of letters honoring Cavendish and published in 1676 after her death exemplify her willingness to engage with her contemporaries on a range of topics. Rather, her addresses to her textual audience and her fictional letters represent a conscious and strategic claim to authority through conversational control. Conversational domination stands as one of the primary faux pas of civil interaction. ‘To covet to speake alwayes, and never to heare others, is a kinde of tyrannie’ (1.151), Guazzo warns in The Civile Conversation (see also Scudéry 107). Cavendish knows these precepts well. ‘[I]n conversation,’ she declares to her readers, ‘every particular person must have his turn and time of speaking as well as hearing’ (Playes, sig. A5r). Yet to dominate a conversation is also to claim a significant degree of influence. Gregory M. Matoesian characterizes ‘the turn-taking system’ as ‘an economy, which distributes a scarce resource – turns at talking – across participants in systematically achieved . . . transactions’ (73–4). Cavendish’s paratext functions as a highly controlled conversational space designed to manipulate her readers to her advantage. While giving the illusion of interaction, her publication of one-sided epistolary conversations enacts a ‘fantasy . . . of oral dominance’ (Mazzio 69) that ensures that she maintains control of the floor. Cavendish’s aggressive paratextual stance can in part be attributed to a shift in prefatory rhetoric whereby writers increasingly positioned themselves in ‘contractual’ (Dunn 138) relationships with their readers, turning to the paratext to placate an increasingly broad, sometimes hostile, and disturbingly uncontrollable print audience. Reading Cavendish’s paratext within this context helps to situate her as an overlooked figure in debates about seventeenth-century prefatory rhetoric. At the same time, however, Cavendish’s paradoxical insistence on the civil and civilizing force of her manipulative conversational strategies both engages with and reframes seventeenth-century discourses concerning gender and civility. In examining the impact of these cultural forces on her conversations with her readers, my argument will focus on one particular model: Ben Jonson, a writer acutely sensitive both to civil discourses and to the architecture of his texts, whether manifested in the walls of ‘countrey stone’ that demarcate Penshurst, the ‘polish’d pillars’ of the edifice dominating the frontispiece of his 1616 printed works, or the paratexts that delineate the threshold to his writings (Workes 819–20).

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Jonson enjoyed an excellent relationship with the Cavendish family. He wrote two masques honoring Charles I’s vists to Welbeck Abbey and Bolsover Castle in 1633 and 1634, celebrated William Cavendish’s expertise as a horseman and fencer in two epigrams, exchanged a series of letters with the Earl, penned the epitaph for the tomb of Newcastle’s father, and wrote elegies on the deaths of his aunt and mother. Although Jonson died seven years before William Cavendish met his second wife Margaret Lucas in Paris, Newcastle’s later works attest to Jonson’s influence on the writings of his ‘best Patron’ (qtd in van den Berg 11).4 Cavendish was well aware of Newcastle’s admiration for his former client. In Sociable Letters, she confides to Madam: ‘in truth I never heard any man Read Well but my Husband, and have heard him say, he never heard any man Read Well but B.J.’ (238). Jonson emerges as a role model over the course of her writings. In the General Prologue to her 1662 collection of plays, she lauds Volpone (1606), Epicoene (1609), and The Alchemist (1610) as ‘Master-pieces, . . . wrought / By Wits Invention, and his labouring thought’ and commends Jonson for his learning and his language, ‘plain, significant and free, / And in the English Tongue, the Masterie’ (sigs A7r–v). Even in her castigation of Jonson’s devotion to the dramatic unities, Cavendish’s admiration is apparent. The events of The Alchemist and Volpone defy the unities despite themselves, thus implicitly justifying Cavendish’s own disregard for dramatic conventions (Playes sig. A4v). Many of Cavendish’s dramatic and non-dramatic writings reveal Jonsonian characteristics, not only in their propensity for humoral and bestial characters but in their exploration of social status, of literary genre, and of the relationship ‘between the multiplicity of dramatic meaning and the tyranny of the absolutist author’ (Sanders, ‘A Woman Write a Play!’ 296). Recent scholarship has tended to downplay the impact of the learned Jonson in order to highlight instead Shakespeare’s ‘natural’ genius as a more sympathetic model for the comparatively uneducated Cavendish. Shannon Miller, for instance, argues that Cavendish’s references to Jonson function as ‘a mode of ventriloquizing one playwright (Jonson) to link herself to another (Shakespeare)’ (17). While the rich relationships that critics like Miller have traced between Cavendish and Shakespeare are important and compelling, these readings have too quickly dismissed the influence that Jonson also had on Cavendish’s writings. Cavendish’s authorial self-construction bears marked affinities to Jonson’s. Both writers embraced print and the folio format as their favored means of textual circulation. Both produced a volume of collected works partway through their literary careers, Jonson in 1616 and Cavendish in 1658. Both worked hard to cultivate carefully controlled

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relationships with their audiences, mediated through their paratexts, and both were determined to create a sympathetic audience in the face of hostile responses to their writings. Finally, although of different social rank, both Jonson and Cavendish were ambitious, self-consciously seeking to position themselves as laureate poets within social and political climates in which their standing was far from guaranteed (see Helgerson; Scott-Douglass, ‘Self-Crowned Laureatess’). Both were determined to dictate fame on their own terms and to use their writings to reform and civilize their readers. If Cavendish found inspiration in Shakespeare’s plays, ‘writ by Natures light’ (Playes sig. A7v), she was also shaped by Jonson’s laureate self-construction and his careful mediation of his paratextual conversations with his audience.

‘[T]he better sort of you’: soliciting and silencing the reader In her persuasive reworking of Patricia Parker’s notion of ‘virile style,’ Lorna Hutson traces Jonson’s dramatic representations of conversational exchange in relation to the ‘regulatory’ elements of civil conversation. She locates Jonson’s ‘virile style’ in his resistance to encounters that risk ‘rendering men (rather like women) “open” to new kinds of moral and legal liability’ (‘Civility and Virility’ 12). Jonson’s paratext stands as a particularly high-stakes marketplace that encapsulates this tension between conversational vulnerability and control. Jonson constructs an elaborately self-defensive paratext – Joseph Loewenstein aptly calls it a ‘fortress’ (146) – that attempts to delimit an exclusive space of textual encounter, even as it anxiously registers the changing systems of patronage that required Jonson to ‘open’ himself to his readers. While Jonson was reliant on and careful to maintain productive relationships with patrons like Robert Sidney, Mary Wroth, and William Cavendish, he was well aware that his literary reputation rested with his print and theater audiences. His anxiety about the disconcerting power the print market gave to the reader hovers behind his texts and is especially overt in the quarto versions of his plays up to and including the publication of The Alchemist in 1612. Jonson acknowledges his lack of control over his writings: ‘It is your owne,’ he tells his ‘Reader in Ordinarie’ in an epistle prefacing the 1611 quarto of Catiline, ‘I departed with my right, when I let it first abroad.’ Yet he cannot conceal his apprehension as he imagines his readers ‘medling . . . busie with the Title, and tricking ouer the leaues’ (sig. A3r). Again and again, Jonson’s paratext suggests that he did not trust the majority of his audience to appreciate

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his meaning. Hostile reactions to plays like Poetaster, first performed in 1601, and Sejanus, performed in 1603, only intensified his desire to explain himself through arguments appended to the print versions of his texts and to defend his writings from faulty judgments by ‘those common Torturers, that bring all wit to the Rack’ (Sejanus sig. ¶2v). Jonson’s depiction of the ‘common’ multitude ‘medling’ with and misinterpreting his writings picks up on Guazzo’s warnings to his readers about the contaminating effects of uncivil conversation: ‘truly wee ought to avoyde yll companie, as well for the hurt which is received thereby, by the infection of naughtie conditions, as for the judgement and opinion of others’ (1.56–7). Jonson goes out of his way to distinguish himself from writers who glory in ‘generall’ fame: ‘that I should plant my felicity, in your generall saying Good, or Well, &c. were a weaknesse which the better sort of you might worthily coutenme [sic], if not absolutely hate me for’ (sig. ¶2v), he declares in his epistle to the readers prefacing the quarto of Sejanus.5 Jonson’s decision to publish, however, pushes him into that ‘generall’ – and potentially uncivil – marketplace. As Anniball reminds William in The Civile Conversation, ‘our name dependeth of the general opinions, which have such force, that reason is of no force against them.’ The individual who ‘coveteth to reape commoditie of conversation,’ Guazzo contends, has no other option but to seek out good company, ‘to bee amongst those that either may bee made better by him, or else may make him better’ (1.60–1). Jonson uses his paratext to enact such encounters, delimiting an idealized space of conversational exchange that aims to convince his ‘generall’ readers to distinguish themselves among ‘the better sort of you (Sejanus sig. ¶2v)’. Much of Jonson’s paratext seeks to consolidate his definition of his ideal interlocutor, his ‘Reader extraordinary’ (Catiline sig. A3r), or ‘Vnderstander’ (The Alchemist sig. A3r) and to quarantine this ‘learned, and charitable Critick’ (Volpone sig. ¶3v) from the undiscerning reader or spectator who ‘censure[s] by Contagion’ (Bartholmew Fayre sig. A5v). Jonson relies on this distinction in his conversational encounters with his readers, simultaneously flattering his audience and challenging them to prove that they have the good judgment and the discernment necessary to resist compromising opinions and to distinguish themselves among the ‘extraordinary.’ In ‘To the Reader in Ordinarie’ appended to Catiline, for instance, Jonson contrasts ‘the most’ who ‘commend out of affection, selfe tickling, an easinesse, or imitation’ with ‘men’ who ‘iudge only out of knowledge,’ and dares his reader to prove his ‘iudgment, if you haue any’ (sig. A3r). A related rhetorical strategy appears twenty years later in ‘The Dedication to the Reader’ prefacing

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the 1631 octavo of The New Inne. Jonson differentiates here between the reader, his ‘patron’ – ‘If thou be such’ – and his hostile theater audience (sig. *2r). Pronominal choice helps to reinforce the distinction Jonson develops between ‘thou,’ the reader, invoked using the familiar secondperson pronoun, versus the more distanced ‘they’ that booed The New Inne from the stage. Jonson sets up his dedication as an intimate, if disgruntled, conversation: ‘What did they come for, then? thou wil’t aske me. I will as punctually answer: To see, and to bee seene.’ The dedication creates an atmosphere of privileged exchange by contrasting the sympathetic patron with the proud and ignorant ‘Spectators.’ At the same time, however, Jonson warns the reader that the role of patron is conditional on a favorable response: ‘if thou canst but spell, and ioyne my sense.’ Jonson leaves the reader very little choice. To refuse his invitation to favor The New Inne is to lower oneself to the basest level of the ‘hundred fastidious impertinents, who were there present the first day’ and who misjudged Jonson’s play from lack of good sense. Jonson’s class-inflected language here further reinforces his manipulation of his reader. The epistle concludes with an unmitigated imperative: ‘Fare thee well, and fall too. Read’ (sigs *2r–*3r). Jonson’s named dedicatees typically model a proper response to his texts; this may help to explain why he chooses to retain these epistles among the encomia to friends, aristocratic individuals, and institutions included in the folio Workes, while excising the addresses to his wider readership. By positioning epistles to his readers immediately after the dedicatory epistles to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke in the quarto of Catiline and to Mary Wroth in the quarto of The Alchemist, Jonson offsets the disturbing democracy of the print market with the stable hierarchies of the traditional patronage system. Writing to Pembroke, Jonson contrasts the ‘ignorance’ of ‘these Iig-giuen times’ and the ‘crude, and ayry reports’ of the general ‘noise of opinion’ with ‘that great and singular faculty of Iudgment in your Lordship, able to vindicate truth from error’ (Catiline sigs A2r–v). He sandwiches his uneasy address to ‘the Reader in Ordinarie’ between this encomium to Pembroke and his pithy praise of ‘the Reader extraordinary.’ The positioning of these epistles encourages his readers to emulate Pembroke’s example and to make themselves worthy of the praise Jonson bestows on him and on his fantasy ‘extraordinary’ reader. These named epistles nonetheless rely on similar conversational strategies as those addressed to his more ‘generall’ audience. Jonson cajoles Pembroke too into a position of favor, ‘gently urging his subject to undertake an appropriate conduct by depicting him as already doing it’ (Roe 97). His ‘admonitory flattery’

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(Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth 155) appeals to the latent ambition and civility of each of his readers to help secure a positive response. Despite his civil nods to the freedom of his readers and spectators, Jonson outlines very clear expectations of his audience and of the scope allowed for their ‘Iudgement’ and ‘censure’ (Bartholmew Fayre sig. A5v).6 Stanley Fish has characterized this tendency as a ‘double strategy of invitation and exclusion in which the reader is first invited to enter the [text], and then met, even as he lifts his foot above the threshold, with a rehearsal of the qualifications for entry, qualifications which reverse the usual relationship between the poet and a judging audience’ (28). While Jonson clearly positions himself as a discriminating gatekeeper, Hutson’s emphasis on the ‘regulatory’ function of conversational exchange nuances and genders Fish’s reading in important ways. To converse was to hazard ‘the catastrophic effects of being drawn into incriminating or contaminating verbal exchanges’ (Hutson, ‘Civility and Virility’ 12). Jonson’s decision to publish his works, opening himself to the widest possible audience, paradoxically coexists with the creation of an exclusive conversational space defined by ‘inaccessibility’ and ‘nonpenetrability’ (Hutson 3) that seeks to mitigate this risk. While Jonson’s paratextual encounters underscore his reliance on and vulnerability to the ‘generall’ audience that throngs at his textual threshold, the conversational strategies on which he relies enact the resistance and discernment integral both to the ‘extraordinary’ reader he so admires and to Guazzo’s civil individual. When Richard Helgerson declared of Jonson that ‘[n]o other English Renaissance writer so intrudes on his work’ (183), he clearly was not familiar with the writings of Margaret Cavendish. She takes the selfconscious paratextual strategies exhibited by Jonson to a new extreme. A reader approaching Cavendish’s work for the first time is usually overwhelmed by her excessive paratext. Over ninety prefatory addresses appear over the course of her works – more if one includes title changes, in which the same preface appears in a later edition with an altered title.7 At the conclusion of the eight dedicatory epistles preceding Poems, and Fancies, Cavendish ruefully acknowledges the surfeit by including a final ‘excuse for so much writ upon my Verses’ (sig. A8v). Most of these addresses are epistles or else rely on an epistolary framework (by far the most common is a simple ‘To the Reader(s)’). Her paratext also features prefaces, dedications, prologues, a petition, a resolution, an epilogue, an argumental discourse, an excuse, an apology, an introduction, and a request. The prevalence of these elements does not diminish between the publication of Cavendish’s first work in 1653 and her last in 1671.

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She signals greater confidence in her political status after the Restoration by including a dedicatory epistle to Charles II, increasing the number of epistles to her husband, and claiming extensive titles for herself, but she still fights to win the approval of her audience at the end of her career; Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, published in 1668, boasts six addresses to her readers. The sheer quantity of her prefatory material testifies to her determination to control her readership: ‘it is not Probable,’ she declares, ‘that Forcible Arguments or Perswasions can be Contain’d in two or three Lines of Words’ (Orations sig. A2v). Emphasizing the combined impact of language and social position on a speaker’s linguistic competence, Bourdieu notes that ‘speech always owes a major part of its value to the value of the person who utters it’ (‘Linguistic Exchanges’ 652). Despite her aristocratic status, as a woman royalist writing predominantly from a position of exile, Cavendish’s social position was just as vulnerable as Jonson’s, though for very different reasons. If Jonson used his paratext to cultivate his reputation as a laureate poet, to differentiate himself from amateur dramatists at the Inns of Court and lesser professional playwrights, to create social standing for himself, and to challenge negative reactions to his plays, Cavendish fought to compensate for the loss of social stability and the threat of obscurity prompted by the Civil Wars, to make an ambitious bid for exceptionality and fame, and to justify her entrance into the literary sphere as a woman writer. In 1653, when she published Poems, and Fancies, she and her husband were in serious debt, and Cavendish and her brother-in-law had failed to persuade the parliamentary committees in England to allocate her share of her husband’s estates. By 1664, when Sociable Letters and Philosophical Letters appeared, she and Newcastle had returned to England only to discover that they were not to receive the favor they expected from Charles II and that they faced extensive losses resulting from the destruction of their estates. By 1671, the year in which Cavendish published the second edition of Natures Pictures, the Newcastle estates were beginning to flourish once more and Cavendish was achieving fame – or at least notoriety – as a writer and an eccentric. Yet, as a woman, she still struggled to assert her right to publish without compromising her reputation. Mary Evelyn’s horrified reaction to her behavior in London in 1667 testifies to the continued ambiguity of Cavendish’s social position at the end of her career.8 As a writer, therefore, and particularly as a woman writer, Cavendish could not rely solely on social status to ensure positive reception of her works.9 Her paratext emerges as an intriguing example of what Carla Mazzio has called ‘aggressive orality’ (69) that seeks to compensate for this

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instability. In choosing the paratext as a space of deliberate encounter with her audience, Cavendish situates herself within a discursive field that affords her a high degree of conversational control and enables her to dictate the power relations embedded within it on her own terms. Cavendish tries her best to portray herself as indifferent to hostile criticism. She acknowledges that she writes within the context of ‘a malicious, and envious Age,’ but she affects a lack of concern with potential attackers, ‘being very indifferent, whether any body reads [her works] or not; or being read, how they are esteem’d’ (PNBP n.p.). Despite such professed nonchalance, Cavendish’s prefatory materials reveal deep anxiety. Criticism threatens from all sides, whether from ‘crabbed censurers,’ ‘malicious detractors or sophsterian censurers,’ ‘Scholastical and Pedantical persons,’ or simply from ‘these Critical times and Censorious Age’ (PPO1, sigs A4r, A3v; Playes n.p.; Orations sig. ar). Although she does challenge specific rumors and objections, her paratext is designed more to anticipate and counter future ‘Asperions [sic]’ (SL 8) than to respond to current gossip. She positions her conversational encounters as a preemptive attack: ‘Thus write I much, to hinder all disgrace’ (PF sig. A8v). Accordingly, Cavendish makes use of the paratext to dictate – often in great detail – how her readers should interpret her texts. Notorious for sending her works out to be printed when they were still in draft form, she qualifies and amends faulty elements and outlines the order in which sections should be read (PPO2 sigs A4r, A3v). She further contains audience response by incorporating anticipated objections and critiques into her prefatory addresses, structuring them as imagined conversations between herself and her detractors that remain safely bounded by her text. She perhaps too honestly confesses her tactics to her readers: ‘You’l find that I go much by the way of Argumentation, and framing Objections and Answers; for I would fain hinder and obstruct as many Objections as could be made against the Grounds of my Opinions; . . . there is no Objection but one may find an Answer to it’ (OEP2 sig. c2r). She even tries to control oral interpretation of her works: ‘I Desire those that read any of this Book, that every Chapter may be read clearly, without long stops and staies,’ she declares in an epistle prefacing the first edition of The World’s Olio (sig. A6r). Such moments testify to Cavendish’s determination to delimit the reading experience even as she pictures her audience actively participating in the interpretation of her texts. As Emma Rees has argued in relation to Cavendish’s prefatory material more generally, she ‘establishes a quasi-contractual relationship with her readers, telling them how to read and leaving very little to chance’ (171).

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Unlike Jonson, Cavendish wrote only for the press; her spectators and her readers are one and the same. The bulk of that audience is anonymous and, to some extent, nonexistent; Cavendish repeatedly emphasizes that she writes ‘not so much [for] the present as [the] future Ages’ that will, she hopes, esteem her writings (PNBP n.p.). To compensate for an uncontrollable and potentially aggressive marketplace, she creates a fantasy audience of eerily silenced interlocutors characterized by their class, good breeding, and privilege.10 Recalling Jonson’s strategy in the epistle to the reader prefacing The New Inne, Cavendish differentiates between these select readers and her critics by creating an atmosphere of privileged conversational exchange. She condemns her critics in an epistle prefacing Orations of Divers Sorts (1662): ‘the worst is, that those Faults or Imperfections, I accuse my-self of in my Praefatory Epistles, they fling back with a double strength against my poor harmless Works, which shewes their Malice and my Truth.’ Her critique quickly gives way to a comparison between such hostile readers and her chosen audience: ‘Yet all my Readers have not been so Cross nor Cruel’ (sig. a2r). Cavendish shifts to direct address as she escorts these ‘Noble Readers’ to her orations: ‘first imagining my Self and You to be in a Metropolitan City, I invite you into the Chief Market-place . . . and there you shall hear Orations Concerning Peace and Warr’ (sigs a3v-a4r). The epistle creates an exclusive conversational setting for the readers who profit from Cavendish’s hospitality. In contrast to that select ‘we,’ her critics, lumped together dismissively as ‘them,’ receive harsh condemnation. Cavendish’s imagery of exclusive hospitality plays an important role in her construction of an ideal readership. Newcastle was famous for his hospitality at Welbeck, Bolsover, and on the Continent. In her paratext, Cavendish positions herself in the role of textual host, welcoming noble readers to her ‘feast’ (WO sig. A3v) or ‘Entertainment’ (PF sig. A6v), but extending a ‘better Welcome’ to those readers who are ‘better pleas’d’ with her writing (PF sig. A6v). The irony, of course, is that when Cavendish wrote the majority of her works, she was not in a position to grant lavish material favors. In the absence of such economic capital, she creates her own symbolic version by controlling her audience’s relative social position. Granting herself the power to determine who is and who is not a noble reader, Cavendish bestows privilege and status only on those who support her quest for fame: ‘those that have noble and generous souls will beleeve me, and those that have base and mechannick souls, I care not what they say’ (PPO1 sig. Bv). To deny her request is to deny one’s own sense of social and literary worth. Cavendish plays to

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the very same desires in her audience that constitute the basis for her own prolific output. By insisting on her role as textual host, moreover, Cavendish compensates for her own shaky social position. Bourdieu’s argument that a speaker’s linguistic competence is connected to the relative social status of speaker and addressee in a conversational interchange implies that one’s symbolic capital can shift depending on the status of one’s interlocutor. Claiming the authority to judge a reader’s nobility and, more audaciously, to define the very nature of nobility in terms of a favorable reception of her text, Cavendish assumes control of the social positioning of her interlocutors. In so doing, she signals a claim to what Scott Lash calls ‘the power to draw the limits of the field, to decide who is in and who is out’ (199). Cavendish’s determination to secure the favor of her audience, including her social inferiors, can arguably be attributed to the weakening of hierarchies and the growing power attributed to female petitioners in the Civil War and Interregnum years (see Crawford; Suzuki 182–202). Yet, throughout her works, Cavendish insists on social distinction as the basis for civil order and distances herself from citizen petitioners. In her autobiography, she condemns the customs of England being changed as well as the laws, where women become pleaders, attornies, petitioners, and the like, running about with their several causes, complaining of their several grievances, exclaiming against their several enemies, bragging of their several favours they receive from the powerful, thus trafficking with idle words bring in false reports and vain discourse. For the truth is, our sex doth nothing but jostle for the pre-eminence of words (I mean not for speaking well, but speaking much) as they do for the pre-eminence of place, words rushing against words . . . thinking to advance themselves thereby. (167–8) The passage exemplifies Cavendish’s horror at language’s potential to dismantle social hierarchy.11 The Civil Wars, however, created circumstances that justified the petitions of women of ‘worth and merit.’ Defending her decision to plead for her husband’s estates at Goldsmiths’ Hall, the one time in her life, she says, when she assumed the petitioner’s role, Cavendish distinguishes between citizen ‘pleaders’ and noble women who are enforced by ‘necessity . . . to submit, comply, and follow their own suits’ (‘A True Relation’ 168). Cavendish finds herself in a similar predicament in her prefatory epistles and addresses in her drive to secure her reputation amongst her

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readers. As Kate Lilley has argued, Cavendish’s need to solicit her audience stems from her awareness of the very real danger of oblivion: ‘the will to fame requires the solicitation and seduction of others . . . So it is that Cavendish is led into the indignity of supplicating for readers or subjects of her textual empire’ (28, 33). In this respect, Cavendish’s bid for control speaks less to her authority as a writer than to her awareness of the power of her audience, a power enhanced by the print market in which she circulates her works. Despite an author’s attempts to control reception through the paratext, a reader is still free to ignore, skip, or simply disagree with such commands. In order to attract her readers’ favor, therefore, Cavendish must, like the citizen women she vilifies, rely on ‘the pre-eminence of words’ – both in terms of ‘speaking well’ and of ‘speaking much’ – in her paratext, doing her utmost to consolidate her symbolic capital in her interchanges with her readers. Cavendish’s sense of ‘indignity’ (Lilley 33) highlights the difficulty inherent in making requests across social classes. The advice offered by Erasmus and Angel Day in their instructions to letter writers is telling. While Erasmus derides the tendency overly to defer to a social superior and advocates brevity, Day urges writers to highlight social distance or intimacy, as the case requires, what theorists Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson call ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ politeness respectively. Cavendish is in an unusual position because most of her epistles are addressed not to her superiors but to a general readership that nonetheless holds the power to determine her fate as a writer; she solicits their favor rather than the other way around. Her recurring declaration to her audience – ‘I must desire you’ (PL sig. b2r) to read/accept/favor her works – signals her discomfort with this awkward stance. The word ‘desire’ highlights her hopeful entreaty, while the modal ‘must’ registers the enforced nature of her appeal. Cavendish’s zealous determination to control her readers cannot be separated from her awareness that she relies heavily on that audience for their approbation and judgment. Though Cavendish addresses a range of audiences in her dedicatory epistles and adjusts her strategies of deference accordingly, her pattern of request-making stands as a crucial example of her claim to conversational control. She aggressively solicits her readership to favor her texts, combining conventional flattery and deference with manipulative and commanding syntax. The strange mix of command and request characteristic of her writing entails a seemingly contradictory juxtaposition of power and vulnerability that again raises the question of how much symbolic capital Cavendish actually enjoyed as an exiled aristocrat.12 On one hand, Cavendish deploys the powerful language commensurate

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with her rank. Yet, at the same time, her appeals to her readers represent a bizarre reversal of the patron-client relationship. Cavendish is at her most deferential when she makes specific requests for patronage: in the epistles to the universities and to her brother-in-law, in the epistle to Charles II that precedes the biography of William Cavendish, and in the letters to her husband. Even in these instances, however, Cavendish makes clear her expectation that her patrons’ favor will garner her capital with her wider audience. In the epistle to Charles Cavendish prefacing Poems, and Fancies, for example, she acknowledges the coarseness of the literary cloth she weaves, but goes on to dedicate her text to him ‘not that I think my Book is worthy such a Patron, but that such a Patron may gaine my Book a Respect, and Esteeme in the World’ (PF sig. A2r). Elsewhere, like Jonson, Cavendish combines seemingly deferential appeals to her dedicatees with overtly manipulative commands in an attempt to secure their favor. In the epistle ‘To all the Universities in Europe’ prefacing Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), she writes: ‘You are the Starrs of the First Magnitude, whose Influence governs the World of Learning; and it is my confidence, That you will be propitious to the Birth of this beloved Child of my Brain, whom I take the boldness to recommend to your Patronage’ (sigs A2r–v). This hyperbolic and deferential stance recalls the sycophantic epistolary openings that Erasmus derides in De conscribendis epistolis: ‘Here is an example of this kind of greeting, if you need one to lift your spirits: “To the most perspicacious lord, golden candlestick of the seven liberal arts.” ’ Such honorifics, Erasmus notes, are typically coupled with the author’s excessive ‘debase[ment] and belittle[ment], . . . calling themselves the lackeys and meanest slaves of the one to whom they are writing’ (53). Cavendish, however, juxtaposes her deferential greeting with the assured second half of the phrase: ‘it is my confidence, That you will be propitious’ (my emphasis). Cavendish’s entreaties are, as Susan Fitzmaurice aptly puts it in her reading of Sociable Letters, ‘aggressively polite’ (‘Tentativeness and Insistence’ 7). Cavendish was well aware of the manipulative impact of flattery and word choice. She mocks Madam in Sociable Letters for sending a flowery letter whose hyperboles nearly made her think ‘my self not to be the Same I am’ (151). In her epistle to the reader prefacing the first edition of Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), meanwhile, she laments the typographical errors whereby ‘one word alters the sense of many lines’ (PPO1 sig. A4r). Despite her professed commitment to writing and publishing as hastily as possible and her appeals to the supposed lack of learning and attention that prevents her from proofreading and editing, Cavendish is remarkably attuned to the linguistic nuances of her texts.

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Her strategic deployment in her paratext of modal verbs like ‘will’ and ‘shall,’ which connote command, authority, and volition, is a case in point.13 Cavendish makes particular use of such modals when testifying to her extreme ambition: ‘I will endeavour to be, Margaret the First’ (BW sig. A2v); ‘the Great God . . . will, I question not, preserve both our Fames to after Ages’ (Life sig. bv). She regularly disguises their force, however, by juxtaposing them with a conditional clause: if Fortune please, with her helping hand, she may place my Book in Fames high Tow’r, where every Word, like a Cymball, shall make a Tinkling Noise; and the whole Volume, like a Cannon Bullet, shall Eccho from Side to Side of Fames large Brasen Walls, and make so loud a Report, that all the World shall hear it. (WO sig. Av) If Cavendish does not explicitly command her readers to favor her works, she nonetheless relies on such constructions to bait them with the promise of reward: ‘if you Please to give your Plausible Votes, they will have their Reward’ (PPO2 sig. b3v). While the conditional clause gives the illusion of deferring to her addressee, the modal ‘will’ manipulates her audience into a favorable position.14 Nowhere is this strategy clearer than in the Preface to Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. Aware that her work might encounter censure, she declares: but if this should chance, the impartial World, I hope, will grant me so much Justice as to consider my honesty, . . . and pass such a judgment as will declare them to be Patrons, not onely to Truth, but also to Justice and Equity; for which Heaven will grant them their reward, and time will record their noble and worthy Actions in the Register of Fame, to be kept in everlasting Memory. (sig. b3v) Cavendish’s nod to the possibility that her audience might refuse – ‘I hope’ – pales in comparison to her confident and commanding stance. Her readers, she argues, ‘will grant’ her justice and, in return, not only Cavendish herself but Heaven and Time ‘will grant them their reward’ and ‘will record their noble and worthy Actions.’ Cavendish does not so much solicit her audience as direct them into a position of cooperation. Deference, and politeness more generally, assumes a complex function in the paratexts of Jonson and Cavendish. On one level, deference reinforces the vulnerability of both authors to their readers. Faced with a broad and ultimately uncontrollable print market, Jonson and

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Cavendish must win over their audiences. Yet both juxtapose their appeals to their readers with constructions that clearly indicate the response they expect. Deference placates their audiences, inviting them to judge freely, even as the corresponding declaratives and imperatives, together with the construction of an idealized reader, maneuver them into a position of compliance. In this respect their paratextual appeals constitute carefully veiled commands, exemplifying Bourdieu’s ‘formula of insistence which pretends not to insist’ (‘Price Formation’ 80). Paul D. Cannan has attributed such contradictory rhetoric to a conflict between ‘playwrights’ experimentation with asserting authorial control over their texts while still operating within the bounds of the modesty topos’ (187). This analysis, however, fails to account for the laureate enterprises of both Jonson and Cavendish, which stand at the opposite extreme from modesty, and for the tension between gender, class, and sociopolitical circumstance that each negotiates, albeit from very different perspectives. The seemingly contradictory juxtaposition of deference and command and the fervent desire for control exhibited by both writers has its roots not only in changes in prefatory rhetoric taking place in the seventeenth century, but also in contemporary discourses of what it meant to be civil. The paradoxical construction of Cavendish’s paratext, like Jonson’s, stems in particular from a strategic deployment of civil conventions that at once clash with and help to justify the desperate aggression of her prefatory addresses.

‘The principal and the increase’: redefining civility Like conversation, civility has a complex history, particularly in relation to women.15 Etymologically, the word carries political connotations (cives, civitas), whether relating to civil government or the humanist education that prepared men for public state roles. By the seventeenth century, civility was primarily associated with proper modes of social interaction and politeness within and among social classes. The word, however, could also denote modesty or sexual propriety. In practice, the line between civility and incivility was thin. Even as codes of civil behavior worked to maintain smooth and structured social interaction, the number of early modern court cases prompted by incivility and slander illustrates the potential for social unrest latent within these conventions (see Gowing). ‘Civility’ is thus a loaded word for Cavendish. It underscores her insistence on the importance of rank and her belief that civil behavior is closely connected to class. It highlights the need to reconcile her decision to publish with her virtue as a woman writer.

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It foregrounds her awareness of the danger of disorderly behavior; dissolution of hierarchy and loss of self-control, she repeatedly maintains, lead directly to faction and war. Above all, it exemplifies her preoccupation with the capacity of language and conversation either to destroy or to regulate social distinction, individual reputation, and political order. Sara Mendelson has fruitfully pondered whether women developed paradigms for civil interaction distinct from men in the early modern period (‘The Civility of Women’). Her question is particularly apposite in the case of Cavendish, who advances a seemingly contradictory model of civility in her writings that combines the emphases on class, social order, and virtue integral to seventeenth-century civil discourses with her indecorous and manipulative conversational strategies. This paradoxical reformulation of civility is in turn intimately connected to her fierce patrolling of her textual threshold. The architectural boundaries of Cavendish’s conversational spaces cannot be separated from the boundaries of her body. Recalling the active virtue displayed by her dramatic heroines, Cavendish redefines civility such that she is able to dominate her interchanges with her readers while simultaneously justifying her aggressive conversational strategies as a civil and civilizing force emblematic of her own virtue. As my reading of his ‘virile’ paratext earlier in this chapter suggests, Jonson offers an important precedent for Cavendish’s understanding of civility. In a move characteristic of the laureate poet, he positions himself in his paratext as a didactic writer who intends to better his readers by modeling civil encounters with his works. In the epistle to the universities prefacing Volpone, he presents ‘the good Poët’ as ‘a Master in manners’ who ‘is sayd to be able to informe yong-men to all good disciplines, [and] inflame growne-men to all great vertues’ (sigs ¶v– ¶2r). His anxious encounters with his audience and his resultant attempts to control their reactions are closely connected to his self-representation as an edifying and civilizing literary force, one who strives, following the model of Aristotle, Horace, and, in his own period, Philip Sidney, to ‘mixe profit, with your pleasure’ (Volpone sig. A4v). Like Bartholomew Fayre’s Overdo, Jonson’s ‘intents’ as he invites his readers over his textual threshold, ‘are Ad correctionem, non ad destructionem; Ad aedificandum, non ad diruendum’ (88). Even as she draws on this model, positioning herself as a civil and civilizing writer, Cavendish must also contend with her status as a woman writer, with the political context of the Civil Wars, and with her excessive desire for widespread fame, all of which impact her understanding of civility. Claiming her natural wit as an alternative to material and social capital, aligning herself with truth and virtue, and

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insisting that aggressive language is necessary to ensure social order, Cavendish advances a model of civility strongly rooted in existing codes of civil behavior but uniquely adapted to her gender, her political circumstances, and her singular ambition. Despite her staunch refusal to conform to conventional codes of decorum, civility lies at the heart of Cavendish’s work. In her autobiography, she underscores the civility of her upbringing, noting that she and her siblings behaved with ‘an humble civility’ towards their servants and praising her mother for raising her so ‘virtuously, modestly, civilly, . . . and on honest principles’ (157–8). In The Female Academy, she critiques women of low birth for ‘knowing not how to be civil, nor what belongs to civil Persons’ (660). Loves Adventures (1662) likewise emphasizes the importance of civility; Affectionata lauds Lord Singularity for his civil behavior, while Sir Serious Dumb contrasts the dangers of Sir Timothy Complement’s flashy rhetoric with his own ‘civil words’ (73). As an aristocratic royalist whose writings regularly debate civic responsibility, foreground the importance of social hierarchy, and question women’s roles in Civil War England, it is perhaps unsurprising that Cavendish should place so much emphasis on civility. Her encomia to civil behavior, however, exist in uneasy tension with her exclusive and manipulative paratextual interactions with her readers. Quite apart from bombarding them with epistles and limiting their replies to her own representation of their voices, she goes much further than Jonson in eschewing a conventional patronage relationship: ‘I have my delight in Writing and having it printed; and if any take a Delight to read it, I will not thank them for it; for if any thing please therein, they are to thank me for so much pleasure’ (WO sig. A3v). Indecorum in this ‘Censorious age’ (Orations sig. ar) matters little as long as she is able to guarantee a lasting reputation for herself; she writes, she repeatedly reminds her audience, for ‘future Ages’ (PNBP n.p.). Paratextual rudeness becomes for Cavendish a necessary tactic contributing to this quest: ‘I had rather venture an indiscretion, then loose the hopes of a Fame’ (PF sig. A4v). Cavendish begins the process of validating her conversations with her readers as simultaneously domineering and decorous by foregrounding her reliance on natural wit and natural reason and her commitment to truth. While social rank, her husband’s sanction of her work, and aristocratic self-display all help to corroborate Cavendish’s authoritative stance, the success of her aggressive conversational self-positioning rests particularly on her claim to natural wit and reason.16 As a way of compensating for her lack of education and her entrance into a predominantly male form of literary exchange, Cavendish depicts natural

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reason in terms suggestive of Bourdieu’s symbolic capital. Building on the idea that education functions like currency, begetting continual ‘increase,’ Cavendish argues that ‘natural reason, is both the principal and the increase, for natural reason produceth beneficial effects, and findes out the right and the truth, the wrong and the falshood of things, or causes’ (PPO1 sig. B2r). She declares that nature has granted her this potent form of knowledge despite, and indeed because of, her lack of learning: ‘it pleased God to command his Servant Nature to indue me with a Poetical and Philosophical Genius, even from my Birth’ (Life sig. av); ‘since nature is so generous to distribute to those that fortune hath cast out, and education hath neglected, why should my readers mistrust nature should be sparing to me’ (PPO1 sig. A4v).17 The economic imagery situates natural reason as an alternative to material and cultural capital.18 Accordingly, Cavendish reminds her readers not to expect her writing to conform to ‘the nicities of Rules, Forms, and Terms’ (Playes n.p.). The restriction she associates with rhetorical, grammatical, and generic conventions ‘fetters Nature’ (NP2 sig. cr) and prompts a slavish form of writing.19 Natural wit justifies her self-control and singularity even as it validates her departure from conventional civil codes. Her professed dedication to truth functions in a similar way. Cavendish grounds her natural philosophy on the premise that truth can never fully be known; at best, natural philosophers strive to express probabilities. Her argument helps to bolster the authority of her opinions: since God obscures the truth of nature, all opinions and hypotheses must command respect. More importantly, this stance implicitly undermines the confident conclusions of her contemporaries, instead situating herself as an advocate for truth.20 Deriding the experiments promulgated by the Royal Society and, in particular, Robert Hooke’s defense of the microscope in Micrographia (1665), she argues that such supposed forays into knowledge actually hinder reason: ‘The truth is, most of these Arts are Fallacies, rather then Discoveries of Truth; for Sense deludes more than it gives a true Information, and an exterior Inspection through an Optickglass, is so deceiving, that it cannot be relied upon.’ Cavendish rather embraces ‘Regular Reason’ as ‘the best guide to all Arts’ and defends her philosophical projects as a campaign ‘to find out truth, or at least the probability of truth’ (OEP2 sig. b3r). If her philosophical and scientific writings seek truth in the natural world, her dramatic and poetic works strive to reveal the truths of human society. ‘I would have my Playes to be like the Natural course of all things in the World,’ she declares in an epistle prefacing Playes (sig. A4r). The stories in Natures Pictures are similarly advertised as ‘many sorts of Passions, Humours, Behaviours, Actions,

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Accidents, Governments, Laws, Customs, Peace, Warrs, Climates, Arts and Sciences’ (NP2 sig. b2r) for her readers’ benefit and instruction. By situating herself as a natural truth-teller, Cavendish taps into another connotation of civility prevalent in the seventeenth century: the strong association between civility, truth, gentility, and social order that Steven Shapin has elucidated. At a time when class hierarchies were increasingly in flux, civil behavior signaled truthfulness, authority, and good breeding, thus helping to secure social stability. Guazzo ponders the connection in The Civile Conversation: ‘If they be uncivill, howe are they Gentlemen? And if they be Gentlemen, howe are they uncivill? I pray you even at once undoe mee the knot of this gentry’ (1.175). If one’s credibility and status depended on the practice of civility, Cavendish knew that she had to situate herself as a trustworthy and civil advocate for truth. Yet her strategic and excessive manipulation of her audience and her clamoring bids for fame stand at the opposite extreme from the reciprocity, moderation, and modesty expected from the truly civil and credible individual: ‘gentle and curteous speeche, is the Adamant stone whiche draweth unto it the heartes and good willes of all men’ (Guazzo 1.157). If Cavendish nods to the conventions associated with a disinterested and consensual model of civility in her paratext, why does she ultimately embrace conversational strategies that would seem to undermine her authority as a truth-teller? Part of the answer to this question lies, I think, in her status as a woman writing during a time of intense political instability. Shapin omits gentlewomen nearly entirely from his analysis, arguing that, because women’s words were deemed to be unreliable, they could not figure in the economy of trust (86–91). Cavendish’s linguistic aggression stems in part from her need to assert her gentility and her truth in the face of assumptions concerning women’s language. Bourdieu points out that, ‘some persons are not in a position to speak (e.g. women) or must win their audience, whereas others effortlessly command attention’ (‘Linguistic Exchanges’ 650). Cavendish’s paratext exemplifies his assessment; her concerted effort to win over her audience to her cause is palpable, however one might quibble with the effectiveness of her chosen strategies. Certainly, her paratext testifies to her fear that her audience will not take her writings at face value. In places, she does not even seem to trust the defensive power of her own words. Over and over again, her husband makes appearances in dedicatory epistles to reassure Cavendish’s audience that her writings are in fact her own and worthy of respect. Cavendish’s self-positioning as a civil writer within her texts is further impacted by her political situation. How can

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gentility be distinguished when the hierarchies guaranteeing status are called into question? If gentility and veracity are interdependent, how does one trust, and, by implication, how does one ensure social order? Cavendish’s consistent emphasis on civility underscores her desire to retain some semblance of her wonted rank and to combat the obscurity threatened by the Wars. Fundamental to her self-representation and aggressive conversational stance is her determination to control the boundaries of her self, her text, and her society in the face of a political context that is very much beyond her control. This claim to control is not inconsistent with contemporary notions of civility. Above all, as I argued in Chapter 1, the gentle individual was characterized by self-control. The ability or inability to adjust language and manners to specific contexts, to moderate one’s speech, and to listen patiently helped to signal the differences between ‘civile people’ and ‘rude countrie loutes’ (Guazzo 1.166). Throughout her writings, Cavendish idealizes conversation and behavior that reflects and respects social position. Her viewpoint is exemplified in The Female Academy in a passage that equates proper language use with self-government and the maintenance of class hierarchies: ‘a woman must not behave her self, or discourse unto a great Lord or Prince, as to a Peasant, or to a Peasant as to a great Lord or Prince, nor to a Souldier as to a Divine, nor to a Divine as to a Souldier . . . Also an antient Grave Matron must not behave her self like a wanton young Girl, nor a Wife like a Maid, nor a Widow like a Wife’ (660). A woman’s discursive decisions constitute the basis both for self-control and for civil order. Cavendish’s understanding of such self-control is active, even militant. Highly attuned to the power of language, she imbues conversation with the power to safeguard a woman’s social position and reputation, while simultaneously insisting on its aggressive and strategic potential: there requires as much skill, care, and conduct in a womans behaviour, in visiting, entertaining, . . . and discoursing, as to a Commander in Mustering, Training, Intrenching, Besieging, Inbattelling, Fighting, and Retreating; for it is not enough for a woman to behave her self according to her Degree, Quality, Dignity, Birth, and Breeding . . . But according to Time, Place, and Occasion . . . as also to the Humours, Capacities, Professions, . . . Births, Breedings, Fortunes, Ages, and Sexes of those persons she is in Company and Conversation withall. (FA 660) It is not a coincidence that Cavendish likens civil interaction to a battlefield. In Sociable Letters, she repeatedly reminds Madam that she blames

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the misuse of words, particularly religious debates, for the outbreak of the Civil Wars. But she goes much further than her stepdaughters in underscoring language’s manipulative potential. Declaring that orators should either be advanced within society or utterly banished, she muses that ‘you cannot chuse but Admire, and Wonder at the Power of Eloquence, for . . . it Charms the Senses, and Inchants the Mind, . . . and makes the Souls of men the Tongue’s Slaves’ (SL 75). Cavendish’s definition of civility is very much a product of her wartime context and of her vulnerable status as a royalist woman writer, a reformulation consistent with the ‘rhetoric of paradox’ that Hero Chalmers has traced in Interregnum royalist writings (Royalist Women Writers 105). Like her understanding of female virtue more generally, civility for Cavendish is an active and aggressive quality holding the power to protect the boundaries of both self and state.21 An ability to exert control through language was, like self-control, implicit within discourses concerning civility, underscoring the subtle pressure of obligation that could control interlocutors in conversation. Like the carefully cultivated effortlessness of Castiglione’s sprezzatura, civility relied as much on the illusion of consensus as it did on actual reciprocity. The civil speaker had to avoid making explicit demands of his audience, but still might direct them towards assent through rhetorical nuance. As Shapin puts it, ‘Just as one was to avoid the spirit of contradiction, so one was to refrain from forms of speech that asserted too positively. Strong, precise, and certain claims demanded of one’s fellows a forced and unnatural assent. It was an assent they might consider themselves obliged to yield, but it was not civil to demand it of them’ (117). Recall the paratextual examples cited earlier in which Jonson and Cavendish maneuver their readers into favorable positions, manipulating them without commanding them outright. Both maintain the atmosphere of consensus integral to civil interaction, inviting their readers to bestow their judgment freely, yet it is impossible for the reader not to be aware of which side he or she is meant to favor. Jonson reassures his audience in the Induction to Bartholomew Fayre that they have the ‘free-will of censure, to like or dislike at their owne charge’ (sig. A5r) even as he upholds the irresistible example of the ‘Reader extraordinary’ (sig. A3r) he addresses in Catiline. Inviting her ‘Ingenious Reader’ (sig. e2r) to intervene in the debate between her new and former thoughts in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, Cavendish too affirms what Stephen Dobranski calls her audience’s ‘interpretive free will’ (38) while imposing a value judgment that effectively delimits their options. Both Jonson and Cavendish use deference and consensus

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ultimately to control the reception and interpretation of their works. The reader who is truly ‘extraordinary’ or ‘Ingenious’ will take the authors’ part, joining with them to condemn and preempt potential detractors. Even as Cavendish pushes decorous conventions to their limits, her attention to the balance between deference and manipulation and her fundamental commitment to control and social order can be seen as hallmarks of the civil individual. It is fitting, therefore, that Cavendish presents herself not only as civilized but also as civilizing. Wrestling with the paradox that lies at the heart of her work, she insists that her decision to publish and her aggressive quest for fame are not inconsistent with her virtue. ‘[T]is a part of Honour to aspire towards a Fame,’ she writes to Mistress Toppe in Poems, and Fancies, ‘For it cannot be an Effeminacy to seek, or run after Glory, to love Perfection, to desire Praise. . . . For though my Ambition’s great, my designes are harmelesse, and my wayes are plaine Honesty’ (sigs A4r–v). Her emphasis on virtue enables her to negotiate the moral minefield associated with women seeking to be civil truth-tellers. Cavendish’s dedication to civility counteracts her potentially indecorous decision to publish her writings and her aggressive conversational stance, reinforcing her selfpresentation as a virtuous and truthful writer: ‘though it be done carelesly, yet not loosly’ (NP2 sig. cr), she maintains. In a move fitting for a laureate poet, her writing testifies to her own honesty and extends harmonious, ordered, and virtuous behavior throughout society. She defends the civilizing potential of her publications most overtly in Natures Pictures: I hope, that this Work will rather quench Passion, than enflame it; will beget chast Thoughts, nourish the love of Virtue, kindle Human Pity, warm Charity, encrease Civility, strengthen fainting Patience, encourage noble Industry, crown Merit, and instruct Life: will damn Vices, kill Follies, prevent Errors, forewarn Youth, and arm the Mind against Misfortunes; and in a word, will admonish, direct, and perswade to that which is best in all kinds. (NP2 sigs bv–cr) The passage equates the forceful and implicitly controlling language that ‘admonish[es], direct[s], and perswade[s]’ with civility and virtue. Far from prompting social disorder and lasciviousness, Cavendish argues that her aggressive appeals, stemming from her natural wit, will actually help to ‘encrease Civility’ amongst her audience and within society more generally. In this respect, she assumes the role not only of the laureate poet but also of the classical orator who combines aggressive oral eloquence with moral virtue and a commitment to civil order.22

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Denied ‘Eloquent Pleadings’ (NP2 sig. bv) in oral contexts, Cavendish constructs a one-sided textual conversation with her readers that is at once forceful, virtuous, and civilizing.

‘An Imitation of a Personal Visitation and Conversation’: Letter 54 I want to conclude by turning briefly to Sociable Letters. Like the epistolary addresses prefacing Cavendish’s works, the 211 letters that constitute Sociable Letters can be read as a one-sided conversation.23 Sociable Letters also offers the most extensive descriptions of conversational interaction of any of Cavendish’s works, as she reflects on dinner parties, gatherings of gossips, discussions with philosophers and learned divines, evenings at the Duarte household, conversations with Newcastle, shockingly boring ‘Mode’ (SL 116–18) conversations, and edifying conversations grounded on natural wit and reason. Pervading all of these meditations on conversational interaction is Cavendish’s fascination with the destructive and the civilizing potential of language. In Letter 32, she contrasts the behavior of Lady D.D. and Lady C.C. at two dinner parties. While Lady D.D. retains her self-control in the face of her husband’s rude comments about her and ‘Addrest her self . . . to Entertain her Friends Civilly and Courteously’ (82) despite her anger, Lady C.C. erupts over her husband’s decision to serve beef. Their argument quickly escalates from verbal to physical violence: ‘from Words they went to Blows, flinging whatsoever came next to hand at one anothers head’ (83). Shying away from such disruptive and warlike discourse, Cavendish uses Sociable Letters to defend the importance of civil conversation and, paradoxically, the often aggressive language required of truly civil orators. Letter 54 exemplifies her stance. Despite occasional references elsewhere in the letters to her tongue-tied bashfulness, Cavendish situates herself here as a speaker gifted with natural wit and reason, an orator and conversationalist who holds the capacity to mitigate strife prompted by rhetorical misuse. In Letter 54, Cavendish describes a visit from Lady D.C. and Lady G.B. The ladies’ conversation moves from ‘History, and so of former Times, and Persons of both Sexes, . . . [to] Married Wives,’ and ultimately to the question of whether Lucretia’s decision to take her own life stemmed more from a desire to preserve her own honor or her husband’s (105). Cavendish provides a detailed script of the interchange: [T]he Lady D.C. said, that Lucretia was the Best Wife that ever History mentioned, in that she Kill’d her self to save her Husbands

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Honour . . . The Lady G.B. said, that though she did believe Lucretia was a very Chast Woman, and a Virtuous and Loving Wife, yet whether she Kill’d her self to save her Husbands Honour or her Own, she could not Judge. (105) The ladies go on to consider the judgment of the world, whether Lucretia’s husband would have killed her regardless, and whether the rape constitutes a public or a private offense. Their argument finally escalates to the point where, like Lady C.C.’s dinner party, physical violence seems inevitable: these two Ladies arguing whether Lucretia Kill’d her self for her Husband’s Honour or for her Own, at last grew so Earnest in their Discourse, as they fell to Quarrel with each other, & in such a Fury they were, as they were ready to Beat one another, nay, I was afraid they would have Kill’d each other. (105–6) Until this point, Cavendish has remained a silent observer. At the beginning of the letter she specifies that it is her ‘Visitants’ who ‘Discourse’ (105). She merely witnesses and records their conversation. When their argument reaches its climax, however, Cavendish intervenes: ‘I was forced to be a Defender of both, standing between them, and making Orations to the one and then to the other; at last I intreated them to Temper their Passions, and to Allay their Anger.’ The remainder of the letter records Cavendish’s oration to her visitors, as she urges them to ‘Allay your Passions, for why should you two Ladies fall out, and become Enemies for Lucretia’s sake’ (106). Letter 54 offers a fascinating counterpoint to the paradoxical relationship between civility and aggressive conversational domination that Cavendish enacts in her paratext. As in her prefatory writings, Cavendish retains firm control over the parameters of this conversation. She embeds the conversation between Lady D.C. and Lady G.B. within her letter, but distances them from their own speech by reporting their words. Even though she holds the position of silent observer for the first two-thirds of the letter, Cavendish, as letter writer, is in a position of linguistic control as she describes the encounter to Madam. Moreover, she describes herself as entering the fray against her will: ‘I was forced to be a Defender of both.’ Distancing herself from the chatty gossips who torment her in Letters 91 and 103 and women like the violent Lady C.C. who have no control over their words, Cavendish portrays herself as a modest and moderate speaker who is forced into a

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position of conversational domination in order to preserve civil order. Cavendish’s function in this interchange as a self-professed civil ‘Peacemaker’ relies on her ability to overpower and silence her interlocutors through persuasion (106). She emerges from the sidelines of the discussion eloquently to remind her friends that a war over a dead woman is not worth it: ‘give me leave Ladies, said I, to ask you what Lucretia was to either of you? was she of your Acquaintance or Kindred, or Friend, or Neighbour, or Nation? . . . leave Lucretia to live and dye in History, and be you two Friends in present Life’ (106). Note again the juxtaposition of polite deference at the beginning of Cavendish’s intervention – ‘give me leave Ladies, . . . to ask’ – with the force of the carefully structured and extensive oration that follows. The main difference between Cavendish’s approach to conversational domination and Lady C.C.’s seems to lie in the extent to which each is able to control her words and her emotions. Cavendish critiques Lady C.C. in Letter 32 for falling ‘into a raging Passion’ (83) that prompts behavior verging on insanity. Similarly, the argument between Lady D.C. and Lady G.B. in Letter 54 arises primarily because of immoderate passion. Cavendish entreats the women to ‘Temper their Passions, and to Allay their Anger’ and, having mediated peace between them, speaks specifically to her success in ‘calm[ing] their Passions’ (106). In contrast, Cavendish models a highly controlled approach to conversation both in Sociable Letters and in her paratext, one that is carefully adjusted to the context she creates. In this respect, she continues to epitomize the virtues of civil interaction that she extolled in Letter 32 even as she exerts considerable authority over her addressees, in this case Madam, the arguing ladies, as well as her wider reading audience. Conversational domination and, in the case of Letter 54, interruption, normally classified as breaches of civil interaction, constitute important tools for Cavendish in her attempt to secure social and civil order and, paradoxically, to demonstrate her own civility and virtue. It is fitting, I think, that her forceful yet civil intervention as a ‘Peace-maker’ in this letter should take place within the context of a discussion concerning Lucretia, herself an exemplum of chaste virtue and an aggressive defender of her own reputation. Cavendish’s eloquent silencing of Lady D.C. and G.B. and, indeed, her extensive orations to Madam on the elements that contribute to civil society, stand in marked contrast to the food fight sparked by Lady C.C.’s words in Letter 32. It seems somewhat incongruous, given that conversation, civil behavior, and social hierarchy rely so heavily on mannered rules and codes, that the class-conscious Cavendish should defend the freedom from

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convention condoned by natural wit and her own insistence on conversational domination in her texts as the epitome of civility. This paradoxical construction of civility, which both engages with and represents a radical departure from conventions of prefatory rhetoric and civil behavior, enables Cavendish to situate herself (however unsuccessfully) as dominating and manipulating her readers in textual conversation and in her representations of conversational interchange while defending those actions as indicative of her propriety, self-government, and dedication to social order. Her preemptive approach to audience objection, her careful appeals to her readers’ own sense of nobility and social ambition and, perhaps most important, her decision to situate her encounters with her readers within the highly strategic space of the paratext, together help Cavendish to define and control the parameters of her discursive field. While Ben Jonson’s strategic use of the paratext and his self-representation as a civil and civilizing force resisting the contagious censures of the multitude provides a crucial precedent for Cavendish, her model of civility and her even more aggressive paratextual strategies are equally indebted to her conscious need to negotiate her status as an exiled royalist woman writer. Cavendish’s insistence that her aggressive language contributes to the civilizing impact of her work allows her to defend conversational domination – normally a feature of uncivil behavior – as a crucial element both of her symbolic capital and of her own virtue. She elaborates on this self-representation in the one-sided epistolary conversation that constitutes Sociable Letters, appropriating the oratorical and conversational prowess that eluded her in oral contexts to depict herself in Letter 54 as a speaker whose rhetorical aggression does not detract from, but rather bolsters, her commitment to order, virtue, and civility. Cavendish’s strategy recalls Lady Victoria’s plea to her army of ‘Heroickesses’ in the Second Part of Bell in Campo to advance their claim to fame through ‘honourable, but unusual actions’ (1.3). For Cavendish, an ability to manipulate and redefine codes of civility to advantage in order to master a discursive field, it seems, remains as important, and as paradoxical, an element in securing an eternal reputation and maintaining civil order as the active virtue exemplified by her dramatic heroines.

Conclusion

In Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, Stephen Miller questions the relevance of conversation for a society that is becoming more solipsistic by the day. As technology decreases opportunities for face-to-face interaction and isolates individuals behind iPods and computer screens, he argues, conversation can seem increasingly obsolete. Miller, who focuses primarily on oral interchange, is right to lament the erosion of politeness and conversational decorum that has accompanied the shift to a more individualized society and to ponder whether ‘conversation avoidance device[s]’ (282) like digital music players and video games promote or inhibit sociability. Yet he overlooks the extent to which written conversation is flourishing in place of and in conjunction with oral interaction. In developed countries, our days are infused with, sometimes even dominated by, textual conversation. Email beckons; instant messaging allows textual conversation to approximate oral interchange in real time; text messaging and online chatting have prompted a twenty-first-century version of epistolary codes designed to prevent parents from eavesdropping on teenagers’ conversations; chat rooms enable individuals to assume fantasy personae and to take advantage of the protection and freedom afforded by alternative social spaces. Textual conversation does raise tantalizing and disturbing questions about its potential for solipsism and isolation. To what extent is a blogger who directs her entries to an unseen and anonymous internet audience engaged in conversation? Is Mary Sidney Herbert’s psalmist talking to God or to herself? What about Jane Cavendish, composing poems addressed to her reflection? Even epistolary exchange, which early modern conversational theorists present as a written alternative to oral communication, is contingent on the absence of the interlocutor. When we have access to only one half of an epistolary conversation, as in Margaret 166

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Cavendish’s Sociable Letters, how do we draw conclusions about the conversation as a whole? Perhaps conversation is, as Rebecca West suggests, nothing more than a series of ‘intersecting monologues’ (85). Yet even in its seemingly most solitary manifestations, conversation is fundamentally concerned with mediating relationships between self and other. The explosion of online social networking sites exemplifies this phenomenon. A Facebook status update or a Twitter ‘tweet’ may masquerade as a solipsistic statement, but both are inherently interactive, and their blatantly public formats mean that these personal updates regularly generate often animated, albeit truncated, responses from members of one’s community of ‘friends’ or ‘followers.’ The speaking and writing subject, however isolated, is always a subject in relationship, situated within a particular social context. Early Modern Women in Conversation has sought to demonstrate that textual conversation functioned as a powerful tool for linguistic and social engagement in early modern England, particularly for individuals denied authority in oral contexts. Exemplifying what Judith Butler has called ‘fantasy’ moments of ‘sovereign action’ (12), the higher degree of linguistic and spatial control afforded by textual conversation enabled Pembroke, Wroth, Cavendish, and her stepdaughters to achieve some measure of rhetorical, social, and political agency and even to equate their virtue with strategic language use. The ‘mark of the body’ (Butler 152) still haunts these exchanges, whether located in the physiological imagery that characterizes Pembroke’s representation of her psalmist’s conversations with God or in the attention devoted by Cavendish and Brackley to gestural details in The Concealed Fancies. Each of the writers featured in this book, however, manipulates and generates interactive codes and contexts in such a way as to confront and negotiate the sexualized connotations of women’s conversational and spatial practice. Gender was not, of course, the only factor affecting a woman’s conversational capital in the period. In The English Gentlewoman, Brathwaite alludes to women who are ‘of esteeme in the State’ as ‘powerfull Petitioners’ (195), while Lynne Magnusson cites the example of Desdemona, who enjoys significant verbal authority in the Senate scene in Othello (1603–4) because of her ‘class habitus’ within Venetian society (Shakespeare and Social Dialogue 168–70). At least part of the power that Pembroke, Wroth, Cavendish, and her stepdaughters claim in commanding the gestures, words, and spatial positioning of their interlocutors through textual conversation derives from the authority they enjoyed by virtue of their social and familial status. All five were aristocratic, wealthy, raised within prominent literary and political circles, and, despite Margaret Cavendish’s

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protestations to the contrary, at least somewhat educated. All had family members who supported their literary endeavors. All were able to circulate their texts at least temporarily, whether through coterie manuscript exchange or through publication. Ultimately, however, gender and social status combine with specific linguistic strategies and relational circumstances to determine the force of language within a particular context. ‘It is certaine,’ declares Guazzo in The Civile Conversation, ‘that a sentence hath so much the more or lesse force and vigour, according to the difference of persons from whom it commeth, and of the words by which it is uttered’ (1.125). If upbringing, social standing, and education provided these writers with tools to turn language to their advantage, it was paradoxically the loss or destabilization of privilege and of social and familial relationships that often prompted the most aggressive and self-conscious examples of conversational manipulation and control in their texts. What Margaret Ferguson has called ‘gendered literacy’ already problematizes the literary authority and influence of this select group of women (Dido’s Daughters 367–8). All of the writings I have examined, moreover, were produced at a time when at least some of their authors’ markers of social status were called into question. By the time Wroth composed Love’s Victory she was struggling with debt. Many of her surviving letters testify to her financial woes, and her writings reveal her determination to secure continued court favor. The circumstances of imprisonment and exile out of which the Cavendish women wrote were far more extreme. Deprived of her aristocratic titles, deeply in debt, and faced with the loss of her husband’s estates, Margaret Cavendish turned to her writings to construct an alternative position of authority for herself relative to her readers. Her stepdaughters, meanwhile, separated from their father and imprisoned within their own home, develop aggressive and manipulative relational codes and self-defensive conversational alliances within their texts to compensate for their vulnerability during the Civil Wars. Their collaborative works provide valuable evidence of the increased politicization of women’s conversation during this period. Even Pembroke’s Psalmes are informed by the destabilizing effect of Philip Sidney’s death, the uncertain outcome of the religious wars, and Pembroke’s tenuous position as self-appointed advisor to Queen Elizabeth. The precise nature of the control afforded by textual conversation – and its potential for success – shifts markedly according to the particular conversational setting and the generic conventions that inform its creation. The one-sided and carefully nuanced letter offers a very different model of textual conversation than the more playful give-and-take

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of comic dialogue or the exchange between God and the flexible and ambiguous subject position of the psalmist. The courtly ludic space with which Wroth plays in Love’s Victory likewise brings with it conventions and rules that stand in stark contrast to the closet-heart permeating Pembroke’s psalm translations or the textual threshold represented by Margaret Cavendish’s paratext. The desire for conversational control, however, seems to have been particularly acute during periods of highest personal and political uncertainty. The written enactment of conversation offered the attractive possibility of generating spatial and social parameters that might facilitate linguistic competence and authority without risking sexual reputation. In itself, the notion of a protected and enabling conversational space for women is not unusual in literature of the period. Yet such representations, exemplified by the forest experiences of Shakespeare’s romantic heroines or the banquet depicted in The Civile Conversation, conventionally conclude with a return to ordinary life, containing temporary hierarchical reversals through marriage, a change of clothing, or the dethroning of the ludic sovereign. The radical challenges to social and gender hierarchies and the claims for rhetorical and sexual agency articulated within the boundaries of the conversational spaces I have been exploring, however, reach beyond those limits. Recalling the exclusive estates and courts that house the controversies debated in humanist dialogues, Pembroke’s closet-heart, Wroth’s games, Cavendish and Brackley’s salon, and Cavendish’s paratext operate on a liminal boundary between private and public, enacting at once confinement, protection, and the possibility of social and political intervention. Each writer insists on the permeability of her alternative conversational space. Pembroke’s psalmist emerges from her closet-heart confidently to teach the godly, a political move fittingly expressed in Pembroke’s decision to dedicate her manuscript to Elizabeth and her depiction of her own poetic authority as the product of intimate interchange with her angel brother. Wroth’s protagonists leave their playing spaces to find their ludic agency undiminished. Cavendish and Brackley’s salon, indistinguishable from their besieged estate, becomes the site where they hone the rhetorical weapons they require for their own self-defense. Even Margaret Cavendish, despite her obsession with patrolling the boundaries of her works, opts for publication rather than for a more restricted coterie circulation of her writings. The rhetorical, sexual, and political agency facilitated by each of the conversational spaces I have examined transcends the boundaries of those enclosures, in turn creating dynamic openings for ‘different kind[s] of performative act[s]’ (Butler 12) within early modern culture.

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Conversation, as idealized by humanist writers, entails an individual’s participation in the civil and civilizing process of social engagement. ‘[A] man can not be a right man without Conversation’ (1.47), Anniball tells William in The Civile Conversation. Neither, it seems, can a woman. Pembroke, Wroth, Cavendish, and her stepdaughters shape their own conversational contexts, adapting conventions governing oral and epistolary interchange to defend women’s rhetorical and political agency and to claim conversation as a legitimate form of public intervention for women. In so doing, they demonstrate that they were highly attuned to codes of conversational interaction and to the importance of those precepts for positioning the self within early modern society. Each of the writers featured in this book draws on and transforms those models to challenge the exclusivity of the humanist dialogue and to create alternative didactic and authorizing settings for themselves within a wide range of genres, even as they negotiate the gendered pitfalls of conversational intercourse. Their imagined conversational spaces in turn create opportunities for broader interchange with their male contemporaries on the place of women within humanist education, within psalm and lyric discourses, within courtship and marriage, within court circles, and within conversational and epistolary theory and practice. The textual conversations of early modern women demand to be read, therefore, not as isolated interactions unfolding within sealed spaces, but rather as utterances situated in dynamic engagement with diverse interlocutors and, ultimately, as a powerful rhetorical and creative practice that remaps women’s relationship to space and language in early modern England.

Notes Introduction 1. I use the word ‘political’ throughout this book in the broader sense of ‘political culture’ as articulated, for example, by Lois Schwoerer (57–8). 2. My understanding of ‘textual conversation’ shares more in common with what Lynne Magnusson calls ‘the written language of social exchange’ (Shakespeare and Social Dialogue 3) and what Jennifer Richards terms ‘the textual practice of civil conversation’ (Rhetoric and Courtliness 7). Lorna Hutson’s notion of ‘literate utterance’ (‘Civility and Virility’ 2) also constitutes a valuable analogue. 3. Janet Smarr has traced how French women writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries experimented with ‘multi-voiced conflict and persuasion’ in drama, letters, lyric poetry, and games in ways that bear close affinity to the dialogue. She convincingly concludes that dialogues helped to create ‘real openings . . . for the inclusion of women in . . . cultural conversation, whether written or oral’ (24–5, 10). 4. I am indebted to the work of Susan Fitzmaurice, Lynne Magnusson, and Louise Schleiner, which has established the value of such linguistic approaches for reading early modern women’s writing. 5. The word ‘agency’ here arguably also connotes ‘instrumentality, intermediation’ (OED, def. 2), situating the Queen as a representative for the King even as it accentuates her role as active solicitor. Elsewhere in The Kings Cabinet Opened, Charles refers to the ‘Portugall Agent’ (24) who serves as an epistolary mediator for him. The insistence throughout The Kings Cabinet and in other parliamentarian propaganda on Henrietta Maria’s influence over her husband, however, supports the notion that the Queen is functioning as more than a messenger in this passage: ‘She interposes so in the businesse of Ireland, that the King is not seene therein’ (44). 6. The methodology that Lynne Magnusson develops in Shakespeare and Social Dialogue, ‘Widowhood and Linguistic Exchange,’ and ‘A Rhetoric of Requests’ provides an important model for my engagement with Bourdieu. She situates Bourdieu’s linguistic work in relation to theories of politeness, modality, early modern epistolarity, and women’s petitioning rhetoric. 7. Alison Findlay’s Playing Spaces, for example, persuasively reads women’s redeployment of everyday spaces in their dramatic writings as evidence of a spatial practice that renegotiates their more static cultural positioning. See also Kate Chedgzoy’s recent analysis of women’s ‘politics of location’: ‘though profoundly shaped by the historical and geographical place in which they find themselves, women do have some scope to choose to take up different positions in these changing landscapes’ (147, 139).

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1 ‘Intercourses of Friendship’ 1. The voice too could escape the control of the speaker. On the ‘inherent unmanageability’ (11) of the material voice, see Bloom. 2. Cavendish alludes to this idea in Letter 143 of Sociable Letters, in which she characterizes her manuscripts as ‘Paper Bodies’ (203), figurative offspring sent off into the world. On the orality imagined by letters and the materiality of epistolary exchange, see Schneider 28–37; Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters 39–74; Stewart and Wolfe 35–53. 3. Messengers played a crucial communicative role in this regard. In addition to traveling with a letter to ensure safe delivery, messengers could try to secure a sympathetic response through accompanying gestures and speeches. On the function of the messenger in early modern epistolary transmission, see Magnusson, ‘Donne and the Genre of the Letter’; Schneider 51–60; Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters 193–230. The convention of reading letters aloud created similar ‘opportunities for embellishment, emphasis and explanation’ (Daybell, ‘I wold wyshe’ 160–1). 4. For valuable overviews of conversational codes in the period, see Bryson 151–92; Burke, Art of Conversation 89–122; and Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness 20–42. 5. The author of Youths Behaviour likely has these issues in mind when he nervously urges his readers to proofread their mail: ‘it will not bee to ill purpose to read over again that which thou hast written, to the end thou mayest correct the faults, if any therein bee found’ (8–9, 17). 6. Brathwaite is quick to clarify that this goal should not foster a perpetual ‘preying and feeding one upon another’ (English Gentleman 297), particularly when considering the mutual support required of friends. 7. On the class dynamics informing epistolary manuals in the period, see Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue 61–90. 8. On the emancipatory possibilities associated with vocal and physiological self-discipline in the period, see Bloom; Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves. 9. The gendering of conversation is hardly unique to the early modern context and has become an important feature of contemporary linguistic analyses. See, for example, recent work by Deborah Cameron, Jennifer Coates, Susan A. Speer, Deborah Tannen, and Ann Weatherall. 10. Brathwaite offers similar advice in his chapter on education in The English Gentleman. Noting how easily a child can imbibe positive or negative values from nurses and caretakers, he notes: ‘How necessary then is it, that an especiall care or respect be had herein, that choice be made of such, whose modest and blamelesse conversation may tender you their brests in your infancie, and furnish you with grave and serious precepts in your minoritie?’ (91). 11. The word ‘dalliance’ carries the same nuances of verbal and physical intimacy as ‘conversation’ (OED, def. 1, 2.). 12. My argument here resonates in important ways with Gina Bloom’s exploration of the material voice. The merit of vocal control in the period was not, Bloom persuasively posits, ‘gender neutral’ (11). For a related analysis of self-restraint pertaining to gendered identity and the gendered body, see Paster. 13. Elsewhere, Brathwaite defines moderation more broadly in spatial terms. A man without moderation, he notes in The English Gentleman, is ‘like a City

Notes 173

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

without a wall, a house without a doore’ (308). The moderate individual, in contrast, ‘stands fortified against all assailants’ (313). On the androgyny of silence, see Luckyj 47–58. Vocal restraint was also crucial to the construction of masculinity in the period. Gina Bloom persuasively shows how the ‘higher standards of bodily discipline’ (25) required of men impacted socially acceptable vocal production. Daybell, ‘Interpreting Letters’ 707–8 and ‘Women’s Letters of Recommendation’ 172–9; see also Bennett 1–31. Mary Ellen Lamb reads the presence of these books as evidence of Clifford’s ‘relatively ungendered’ reading practices (‘The Agency of the Split Subject’ 363). The move exemplifies the ‘greater levels of female confidence, tenacity, and forcefulness in writing to men’ recently explored by James Daybell in ‘Gender, Obedience, and Authority’ (57, 65–7) and ‘The Rhetoric of Friendship.’ The writers of mothers’ advice books frequently capitalized on the distancing effect of ‘dead’ conversation enacted by their written works. Lady Grace Mildmay employs the strategy in her autobiography: ‘I thought good to set [these meditations] down unto my daughter and her children, as familiar talk and communication with them, I being dead, as if I were alive’ (24). See also Cox, who argues that the dialogue constitutes the ‘most radical’ (42) example of the humility topos because it distances its author from the opinions under discussion and Ferguson, who interprets writing as a ‘figurative mode’ for women that draws on classical notions of written discourse as ‘ “silent” speech’ (‘A Room Not Their Own’ 101; see also ‘Running On’ 49 and ‘Renaissance Concepts of the “Woman Writer” ’ 154–6). Pembroke’s deployment of these conventional humility topoi constitutes an intriguing variation on the ‘negative female gender assumptions’ that James Daybell has traced in the deferential tropes employed by women in sixteenth-century letters of petition (‘Gender, Obedience, and Authority’ 57).

2 Markets and Thresholds 1. A number of scholars have helped to elucidate these aspects of closet space, often in decidedly gendered terms. See especially Hackel 34–43; Jagodzinski 13–17; Knowles; S. Roberts 31–9; Stewart, Close Readers 161–70 and ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’; and Wigley. 2. The circulation of seemingly private documents presented as closets and cabinets opened for public display capitalized on this phenomenon. I will explore these issues in more detail in Chapter 5. 3. Even as a storage site, the closet resists privacy; closet inventories indicate that these rooms were often used to house valuable objects associated with property, lineage, and estate management. Thomas Adams, for instance, lists the contents of a chest in one man’s ‘Closet and Cabinet’ as ‘his bonds & morgages, money and plate’ (348). Angel Day aptly characterizes the closet as ‘a place where our dealings of importance are shut vp’ (Second Part 103). 4. When Guazzo worries in The Civile Conversation about the number of ‘women in the streetes, which go from house to house,’ he is focused on those who visit ‘without occasion’ simply ‘to shew themselves in their bravery’ (2.77).

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5. She also documents more leisurely excursions, including trips to the Exchange, to the London glass-works, and to the court, as well as visits to friends and relatives. 6. Patricia Parker has productively traced the overlap between architectural descriptions of the closet and references to female genitalia in the period alongside the early modern preoccupation with exposing such ‘close’ spaces to the gaze (see ‘Dilation’ 112–18). 7. Such practices challenge the strictly gendered demarcations of closet space and the exclusivity of the male closet discussed by Alan Stewart and Mark Wigley. 8. Alsemero’s ultimate inability to read Beatrice-Joanna correctly is compounded by his initial characterization of her maidservant Diaphanta as a closet-like space: ‘These women are the ladies’ cabinets, / Things of most precious trust are lock’d into ’em’ (2.2.6–7). 9. Micheline White has explored the significance of Margaret Clifford’s keys, arguing that they demonstrate the charity and compassion of Lanyer’s dedicatees as they minister to others. While Clifford’s keys do symbolize her Christian virtue, they also suggest the access, proximity, and affinity to Christ that Clifford, along with Lanyer’s other dedicatees, enjoys. 10. In Wall’s reading, Christ unlocks the door. Lanyer makes it clear, however, that Virtue has the key and provides access to Christ. 11. One of the definitions of ‘bower’ current in the early seventeenth century was ‘[a]n inner apartment, esp. as distinguished from the ‘hall,’ or large public room, in ancient mansions; hence, a chamber, a bed-room.’ The word applied particularly to ‘a lady’s private apartment’ and often held sensual and sexual connotations, exemplified by Spenser’s Bower of Bliss (OED, n1 def. 2a, b). 12. Medieval affective piety stands as an important source for this imagery. See Larson, ‘Reading the Space of the Closet’ 80–1. On the eroticization of devotional discourse, see also Rambuss 73–101. 13. The line, which recalls the ‘bosom’s shop’ where beauty’s ‘true image pictured’ hangs in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 24, taps into early modern medical and theological discourses situating the heart as the site where an individual’s inmost thoughts and feelings are housed and inscribed. See Erickson, especially 25–60. 14. Before 1630, mirrors were valuable commodities associated with an aristocratic lifestyle and often stored in closets and chambers (Melchior-Bonnet 28–9). By situating herself as the owner of a textual mirror, Lanyer contributes to her bid for social access even as she reinforces her claim to textual authority. On the trope of the mirror in Salve Deus, see also Beilin 186; Clarke, Politics 161; and Wall, Imprint of Gender 322. 15. On Lanyer’s rhetorical strategies in Salve Deus, see L. Bennett 167–228. 16. On exemplarity in Lanyer’s poems, see Wiseman, ‘Exemplarity, Women and Political Rhetoric.’ 17. ‘To all vertuous Ladies in generall’ invites a broader social spectrum of women to ‘be transfigur’d with our loving Lord’ (14). Like ‘To the Ladie Anne’ and ‘The Description of Cooke-ham,’ the poem emphasizes social difference, glorifying the elevation of the lowly and the riches to be gained in heaven. Lanyer’s readers here exemplify the virtue and sympathy attributed to her named dedicatees, but they are more closely associated with Lanyer, appearing as her familiars and social equals: ‘some of you me thinkes I heare to call / Me by

Notes 175 my name’ (15). ‘To the Vertuous Reader,’ in contrast, constitutes a querellelike defense that warns both men and women ‘to speak reverently of our sexe, . . . especially of all virtuous and good women’ and, by extension, of Lanyer’s own ‘imperfect indeavours’ (50). The dedication anticipates Lanyer’s preoccupation with the visual and interpretive acuity of her readers and of the women who encounter Christ in Salve Deus. See Hutson, ‘Why the Lady’s Eyes’; Larson, ‘Reading the Space of the Closet’ 83–4.

3 Speaking to God with ‘a cloven tongue’ 1. On the reception of the Sidney-Pembroke psalter and its relationship to early modern devotional and poetic practices, see Coles 75–112; Hamlin, Psalm Culture 19–84 and ‘The highest matter in the noblest forme’; Hannay, ‘Re-revealing the Psalms’; Quitslund; and Zim 1–42, 152–202. 2. In ‘Even now that Care,’ Pembroke likens the flexible rhetorical stance of the Psalms to ‘holy garments’ which ‘each good soule assaies’ (1.103). 3. Subsequent references to Philip Sidney’s psalm translations will be to Rathmell’s edition, cited by psalm and line number. 4. In the Geneva Bible, these verses are addressed to God, but they omit the questions: ‘Thou hast also turned the edge of his sworde, and hast not made him to stand in the battel. Thou hast caused his dignitie to decay, and cast his throne to the grounde’ (89:43–4). 5. As Debra Rienstra notes, ‘God’s active presence in the psalmic economy is precisely what distinguishes poems modeled on the psalms from those in the love lyric tradition’ (58–9). 6. The Geneva Bible reads: ‘Oh that my people had hearkened vnto me, & Israél had walked in my waies’ (81:13). 7. See, for example, Sidney’s translation of Psalm 2: ‘And I will (saieth his kinge) the Lordes decree display / And saye that hee did say: / Thou art my Sonne indeede this daie begott by mee’ (2:15–17). 8. The Geneva Bible attributes the words to the ‘men’: ‘And all men shal se it, and declare the worke of God, and thei shal vnderstand, what he hathe wroght’ (64:9). 9. The Geneva Bible version reads: ‘Arise, ô God: mainteine thine owne cause’ (74:22). 10. Katharine Eisaman Maus and Michael C. Schoenfeldt have traced the important interconnection between inwardness and agency in the early modern period. Examining the disparity between outer behavior and inner thought in drama and trial records, Maus points to the attraction offered by the ‘possession of a hidden or unreadable space’ (191). Schoenfeldt, in contrast, posits a material interiority that situates physiological self-regulation as a key element of subjectivity (Bodies and Selves). See also Ferry; Slights. 11. The Geneva Bible version reads: ‘examine your owne heart vpon your bed, and be stil’ (4:4). 12. The connotations of the term ‘inward’ common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included this insistence on intimate interchange: ‘[b]elonging to the inner circle of one’s acquaintance or friends; . . . intimate, familiar, confidential’ (OED, a. def. A.I.3).

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13. In Psalm 4, Philip Sidney also characterizes the protection afforded by God in physiological and spatial terms: ‘For it is thou, Lord, thou it is, / By pow’r of whose own onely brest / I dwell, laid up in safest neast’ (4:33–5). 14. On God’s privileged access to the interior self, see Maus 8–12. 15. Exploring male writers’ deployment of imagery of gestation and childbirth in early modern poetry, Katharine Eisaman Maus figures the womb in architectural terms as a space that facilitates creative articulation (192). While Pembroke does not explicitly liken poetic production to childbirth, her attention to poetic and physical gestation is nonetheless a noteworthy and poignant feature of her poems. See Hannay, ‘House-confinèd maids’ 58–64; L. Bennett 60–4, 69–72. 16. The Geneva Bible version reads: ‘Deliuer me, ô Lord, from mine enemies: for I hid me with thee’ (143:9). 17. In the Geneva Bible, Psalm 143:11 refers to God ‘Quicken[ing]’ the psalmist. Psalm 139 reinforces these resonances. Calvin’s commentary on Psalm 139 likens the womb to ‘the nethermoste caues and cabins of the earthe’ (sig. Ffff6v), while the Geneva Bible glosses Psalm 139:15 (‘My bones are not hid from thee, thogh I was made in a secret place, & facioned beneth in the earth’) as follows: ‘That is, in my mothers wombe: which he compareth to the inward partes of the earth’ (fol. 265r). The cave and the womb are important images for Irigaray as well. In Speculum of the Other Woman she figures the womb as a cave that holds the potential to shatter philosophical assumptions. 18. This reading is corroborated by the political and social commentary that Margaret Hannay has traced in Pembroke’s translations (‘Princes you as men must dy’; ‘When Riches Growes’). Pembroke’s description of the Queen’s ‘brest’ as a ‘Cabinet’ in ‘Even now that Care’ (1.103) also picks up on the political nuances of private space in her poetry. 19. Subsequent references to the poem will be by line number. In ‘Upon the translation of the Psalmes,’ John Donne describes David as singing the Psalms with ‘double power,’ inspired by God. The Sidneys, singing with what Donne calls a ‘cloven tongue’ and ‘cleft . . . spirit,’ do likewise (34). 20. Sagaser locates this struggle and Sidney’s silence in the Protestant rejection of purgatory and the resultant shift in the funeral ceremony ‘from directly addressing the recently dead to referring to them in the third person’ (129). Yet Pembroke only shifts once from second-person to third-person address, in the third stanza: ‘Oh, had that soule which honor brought to rest / too soone not left and reft the world of all’ (15–16). The fourth stanza, in many ways the most conversational stanza of the elegy, goes back to direct address, and Pembroke continues to insist on second-person address throughout the remainder of the poem.

4 Conversational Games and the Articulation of Desire in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory and Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost 1. On male authors’ appropriation of female voices, see Harvey. 2. Masques and entertainments assumed notable cultural and political significance within Queen Anne’s circle. See Barroll, Anna of Denmark, especially

Notes 177

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

36–116; Lewalski, ‘Subversions of Masquing’; McManus; and Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers 107–49. Sorel also considers drinking, eating, and basic table manners as games: ‘boire tour à tour tantost à la santé de l’vn, tantost de l’autre, & de chanter chacun sa chanson c’estoit vn veritable Ieu. . . . Qu’il se faisoit encore quantité d’autres galanteries à table qui pouuoient passer pour des Ieux’ (507). ‘There is this game: I say to someone, “I shall explain to you the word ‘w’ by showing you various objects. What is in common to them all is what ‘w’ means.[”] I first show him two books and he asks himself “Does ‘w’ mean ‘book’?[”] I then point to a brick, and he says to himself, “Perhaps ‘w’ means ‘parallelpiped’[”]; finally I point to glowing coal, and he says to himself “Oh, it’s ‘red’ he means”, for all these objects had something red about them. It would be interesting to consider another form of this game where at each stage the person has to draw or paint what he thinks I mean’ (Wittgenstein, Brown Book 87). For examples of these letters and dialogues, see Phillips sigs Br–D6r, H7r–L5v. The letters include ‘A Pedagogue to his Mistress,’ ‘A Cockney to his Mistress,’ and ‘A Countrey Bumpkin to his Mistress,’ all of which implicitly mock wooing across social classes. The publication of manuals like Phillips’, however, made precepts for courtly games available to a wide readership, thus facilitating social mobility. This game did not have to have an amorous context: ‘Crosse Purposes is when everie one askes a question & answers another, as B askes C one & answers A another softly in his eare. When they are gone round, B puts Cs answer to As question saying, the question that was asked was &c., the answer was &c. Now C answering to Bs & not to As quaestion makes the sport’ (Willughby 200). Edward Phillips describes how the game might be played within a courtship setting: ‘Every one round the Company are to whisper their Questions about, which are to be conceal’d, till every Question is gone round . . . The first was askt in secret of all complexions, which he lik’d best, the answer was whispered a black Woman; the second was ask’t in secret, how many women he had lain withall in his life, to which he whispered, as many as he had fingers and toes; the third was secretly ask’t, what kind of pleasure he found in lying with a woman, to which he whispered this answer, pretty pleasant encounters; Now for the publishing of this sport, it must be thus managed, the first was ask’t what complexion he lik’t best in a woman, the cross answer to his purpose was, as many as he had fingers and toes, the second was ask’t, how many women he had lain with, the cross answer was pretty pleasant encounters; the third was ask’t, what kind of pleasure he found in lying with a woman, the crosse answer was a black woman, and so it goes circling round according to the number of the Persons’ (sig. Vr). Jean-Michel Mehl’s description of le jeu de propos (which sounds like a medieval version of the children’s game ‘Telephone’) includes a moment where the lover takes advantage of the game to kiss the lady who demands a reward from the court (111). Kisses also appear as rewards in card games (see C. Cotton 68). See, for example, Calderwood and Montrose. Patricia Parker also considers the intersection of play and language use in Love’s Labour’s Lost, although she is concerned more with the relationship between rhetorical and social inversion than with games (‘Preposterous Reversals’).

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9. On the importance of theatricality and courtly entertainments for Wroth, see Hagerman; Jones, ‘Designing Women’; Larson, ‘Certein childeplayes’; O’Hara; Weidemann. 10. Margaret Hannay posits that Wroth’s depictions of coterie amusements, notably storytelling, likely offer a glimpse of the activities of Wroth, Mary Sidney Herbert, and their friends (‘Your vertuous and learned Aunt’ 27–8). See also Wynne-Davies, ‘For Worth, Not Weakness’ and ‘So Much Worth.’ 11. In Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth, Margaret Hannay dates Love’s Victory to c. 1619 and suggests that the play may have been composed for the wedding of Wroth’s younger sister Barbara (218–21). Marion Wynne-Davies dates the play slightly earlier (Women Writers 96–7 and ‘Here is a sport’). 12. Critics have traditionally read Rustic as an unflattering representation of Wroth’s husband Robert. Margaret Hannay challenges these views in Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth, suggesting that the closest parallel may well be to the story of Penelope Devereux Rich and Philip Sidney/Charles Blount. Blount’s daughter Isabella Rich was a close friend of Wroth’s sister Barbara (214–15). Interestingly, Penelope Devereux Rich has also been suggested as a source for the sympathetic portrayal of the Princess and her ladies in Love’s Labour’s Lost (see Woudhuysen 70–1). 13. On the difficulties of communicating in Love’s Victory, see McClaren. 14. Alexandra Bennett reads the alienated Rustic as an ‘antimasque figure’ who disrupts ‘the courtly pastoral’s rarefied environment [and thus] reinforces the practical goal of class consolidation inherent in Wroth’s selected mode and genre’ (‘Playing By and With the Rules’ 129). 15. As Louise Schleiner notes, Rustic’s failure underscores the skill demanded by these challenging games of wit (Tudor and Stuart Women Writers 109). 16. On the significance of these playing spaces for Wroth’s female protagonists, see Lewalski 99–101; Swift 180–1; and Waller, The Sidney Family Romance 242–3. Louise Schleiner has productively explored the sports pervading Love’s Victory alongside the parlor games of ‘Newes’ and ‘Edicts’ popular at the Jacobean court (Tudor and Stuart Women Writers 107–49). She concludes that the play ‘brings to narrative embodiment the mode of gossipy, politicized, eavesdropping, and matchmaking social life of Queen Anne’s court, as Wroth had known it, at the same time as it invents for her a way to . . . find a politically resonant voice’ (149). 17. Their dialogue recalls the exchange between the Duchess and Emilia that begins the games in The Courtier (14). 18. Margaret Anne McClaren notes the important connection between the gods and the games in Love’s Victory: ‘the two mythological figures function as a structural device not unlike the diversions, played one by one in each of the first four acts . . . Each diversion offers the opportunity for the aims of Venus and Cupid as spelled out at the end of act I to be realized’ (282). 19. In this respect my argument builds on recent studies that have demonstrated the authorizing potential of seemingly private spaces of withdrawal in Wroth’s writings. See Miller, Changing the Subject 184–5; Waller, ‘Mary Wroth and the Sidney Family Romance’ 39 and The Sidney Family Romance 103–5; Jones, ‘Designing Women’; R. Smith. 20. See Lewalski 88–108. Ilona Bell fruitfully probes the implications that the differences between the autograph manuscript of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,

Notes 179 Folger Library MS V.a.104, and the sequence published with the first part of The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania in 1621 have on our reading of the relationship between Venus and Cupid in Wroth’s poems. 21. Marion Wynne-Davies, for example, examines Love’s Victory as a commentary on the negotiations surrounding the marriage of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick of Bohemia (Women Writers 98–103). See also J. Roberts, ‘Deciphering Women’s Pastoral’ 163–74; Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers 134–49. 22. Games feature prominently in Wroth’s other writings as well. On the significance of ludic conventions in The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, see Larson, ‘Certein childeplayes.’ 23. Wroth’s portrayal of Venus may also playfully accentuate her longing for a sovereign who models active intervention and confident government. My thanks to Christina Luckyj for remarking on this contrast between Venus and James I.

5 ‘The language of friendship and conversation’ 1. Newcastle’s second wife, the prolific Margaret Cavendish, similarly idealizes the family in terms of conversation. She alludes to formative conversations with her husband throughout her writings and, in a frontispiece to the 1656 edition of Natures Pictures (which is featured on the cover of this book), she depicts herself leading a fireside family gathering. 2. Alexandra Bennett provides an overview of the differences between Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet 16 and Beinecke MS Osborn b. 233 in ‘Now let my language speake.’ 3. Marion Wynne-Davies also reads the sisters’ imprisonment as a major catalyst for their creative output, though without linking those circumstances to the wider court context (‘My Fine Delitive Tomb’). 4. Katherine Philips’ poetic Society of Friendship stands as perhaps the most famous example of this phenomenon. On the significance of such connections for the Harley and Cavendish families, see Wiseman, ‘Epistolary Networks.’ 5. A postscript at the conclusion of the letter includes Brackley in the appeal: ‘My sister Brackley presents her most humble service to your lordship, and gives your excellence many thanks for the favour of your lordship’s protection’ (qtd in Starr 804). 6. Although two of the poems, ‘A Songe’ and ‘A recruted ioy vpon a Lettre from your Lordshipp,’ are written primarily in the first person plural, pointing to the possibility of joint authorship, the remaining verses are all written from a firstperson singular perspective. This, along with the poems addressed to Elizabeth Brackley and the evidence that Alexandra Bennett and Marie-Louise Coolahan have presented from the Beinecke manuscript, has led me to concur with their conclusion that Jane Cavendish was responsible for most, if not all, of the poems. See Bennett, ‘Now let my language speake’ 3.5–6; Coolahan, 87–8. 7. The Beinecke manuscript makes this dedication much more overt. The title page that appears in the Bodleian manuscript is absent in MS Osborn b.233, which instead proceeds directly to a poem addressed to Newcastle from Jane

180

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

Notes that dedicates ‘my workes’ to him. The poem does not appear in the Oxford manuscript (Bennett, ‘Now let my language speake’ 3.5–6). The extended epistolary tag that begins ‘The Great Example’ serves a similar function in situating Newcastle as the primary recipient of the manuscript and of Jane’s poetic correspondence. The remainder of the letter shifts from the third person to address Newcastle directly. A sense of immediacy derived from ‘oral speech patterns’ was also a feature of Charles I’s letters to Jane’s father in the 1640s (see Poynting 140). Bray only briefly extends his insights regarding strategic male alliance to women, arguing that women’s place in the history of friendship is mostly silent before the eighteenth century. Mary Ellen Lamb has traced a similarly sustaining ‘ghostly conversation’ in Anne Clifford’s reading practices and her relationship to her deceased mother and other ancestors (‘The Agency of the Split Subject’ 354). The metaphor of the unlocked closet or cabinet, which predates the Civil Wars, became increasingly popular after the publication of the King’s letters, promising to reveal secret knowledge of all sorts (see Patterson 5–8; Potter 3–6, 39, 61–2). Particularly common were pamphlets promising to reveal ‘Incomparable Secrets’ in ‘Physick, Chirurgery, Preserving, Candying, and Cookery,’ such as The Queens Closet Opened (1655) and The Treasury of Hidden Secrets Commonly called, The Good huswives Closet of provision of the health of her Houshold (1653). In The Concealed Fancies, the cousins’ exploration of their uncle’s closet draws on this context. Lord Calsindow’s closet contains exactly the types of chirurgical concoctions touted by pamphleteers as well as, fittingly, what seems to be a sealed letter. Although postdating most of Cavendish’s verse epistles, the discovery in 1645 of a collection of letters by Newcastle and other royalists and its publication as A New Discovery of Hidden Secrets would also have accentuated the very real possibility that her poems might be seized. On the question of the authenticity of these letters, see Milling 426n33. Newcastle’s letters continued to be intercepted into the 1650s. Wiseman concludes that the explosion of dialogic pamphlets and playlets as a vehicle for public debate reflects the massive shift in cultural production in the 1640s, particularly in relation to news and to the theater. It also, of course, exemplifies the centrality of politicized conversation – both oral and written – in the period. Jane Milling sees such control as a feature of drama more generally, arguing that the ‘creative possibilities of dramatic dialogue’ enable the sisters’ female protagonists ‘to manipulate events to [their] own advantage’ (419). She composes only one poem each to King Charles and the Prince; two to her deceased grandfathers; two to her uncles; one to her nephew; two to her brothers; five to male friends; two to male servants; and one to male soldiers. ‘On my Sister Brackley’s Picture’ appears in Act Four, scene four of The Concealed Fancies as Presumption’s address to Tattiney’s picture. Barbara J. Harris has demonstrated how letters, visits, and gifts likewise facilitated mutual support among aristocratic women in Yorkist and Tudor

Notes 181

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

England and became particularly important during times of personal or political crisis. For helpful studies situating Henrietta Maria in relation to the literature of the Cavendish family, see Raber, ‘Our Wits joined as in matrimony’ and ‘Warrior Women’; Scott-Douglass, ‘Enlarging Margaret.’ Luceny and Tattiney employ related metaphors in The Concealed Fancies. In her interchange with Courtley in Act One, for example, Tattiney retorts, ‘I thought you had learned better manners than to offer to plunder me of my favours’ (1.4.94–5). A ‘magazine’ was a storehouse, often used for military purposes: ‘[a] building, room, or compartment (of a ship, etc.), for the storage of arms, ammunition, or other military provisions’ or ‘[a] store for large quantities of explosives.’ The word also connotes linguistic potency: ‘[i]n literary use or rhetorically: a store or repertoire (of resources, ideas, rhetorical weapons, etc.)’ (OED, n. def. I.2.a, b, and II.5). When the cousins plot to break into their uncle’s cabinet in The Concealed Fancies, they characterize its contents as a ‘magazine of love’ (3.4.73). Cavendish’s desire to name her first daughter after Brackley indicates the importance of her relationship with her sister (Peck 289). Although Nathan Comfort Starr initially posited that The Concealed Fancies was composed at the Bridgewater estate at Ashridge (804–5), evidence points to the sisters’ shared residency at Welbeck during the composition both of the poems and of the dramatic pieces. Elizabeth married John Egerton, Viscount Brackley, in 1641, but because she was ‘too young to be bedded,’ she was allowed to remain with her family (see Cavendish, Life 95). Since Brackley was still living apart from her husband when the poem was written, it is possible that Cavendish angrily reacts to a request from a servant of the Bridgewater family to have Elizabeth return to Ashridge. Given the effusive praise she lavishes on Egerton in ‘On the Lord Viscount Brackley’ and her scathing invitation at the conclusion of the poem to ‘all good people that haue gallant minds’ to ‘Shun this foule creature, as the worst of kinds’ (25), however, it seems more likely that the poem is written in reaction to an actual or imagined intervention by parliamentarian soldiers. This evidence should not be taken as conclusive, however. Luceny, Tattiney, and the three female cousins in The Concealed Fancies regularly react rudely to their servants. On the autobiographical parallels between the Cavendish family and the characters of The Concealed Fancies and the resultant interrelationship in the play between play-acting and subjectivity, see Findlay, ‘Scene Self’ 166–71; Findlay, Williams, and Hodgson-Wright 139–40; Wynne-Davies, ‘My Fine Delitive Tomb’ 121–2. Alison Findlay has also traced the renegotiation of household roles, objects, and spaces in The Concealed Fancies (Playing Spaces 44–53). In Galateo, della Casa laments the superficiality of such gestures: ‘But when men first began to pay respect to each other in artificial, inappropriate ways, and to call each other Lord and Sir, bowing and bending and writhing as a sign of respect, and uncovering their heads, and giving themselves exquisite titles, and kissing each others’ hands as if they were sacred like a priest’s,

182

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

Notes someone who did not have a name for this new, silly habit called it a ceremony’ (53–4). A similarly paradoxical evocation of ideal behavior appears in Jane Cavendish’s poem ‘The cautious man, or wits wonder.’ Cavendish testifies to the importance of ‘garb’ that combines ‘resolution’ with ‘a careles way’ by refusing to be confined by ‘set speech’ (PSPP 27). Tattiney’s self-characterization may be modeled on Henrietta Maria. On the Queen’s reputation for ‘informality, authority, and impulsiveness,’ see Tomlinson, ‘She that Plays the King,’ 206n46. In her edition of The Letters of Henrietta Maria, Mary Anne Everett Green contends that the Queen’s ‘petulance’ (4) appeared at an early age. The sisters do, however, continue to defer to their father: ‘But if you like not, I pray let me know, / The pen and ink shall have a fatal blow’ (Epilogue 123–4). On the textual and authorial challenges represented by Brackley’s ‘Loose Papers,’ which were transcribed after her death in 1663 and preserved in British Library MS Egerton 607, see Travitsky. Jane Cavendish seems to have enjoyed a comparable situation in her own marriage. In the funeral monument in Chelsea Old Church that he designed for his wife, Charles Cheyne credits her superior financial status for his own success and grants her agency even in death to oversee the family’s continued well-being: ‘This burial place was purchased and made by Charles Cheyne Esq for his most dearly beloved wife, the most incomparable and pious lady the Lady Jane eldest daughter to his Grace William Duke of Newcastle who lately deceased lyeth here interred, by the help of whose portion he became Lord of this Manor of Chelsea and desires that by her he and his may at their appointed time be here likewise interred’ (qtd in Peck 295).

6 The Civil Conversations of Margaret Cavendish and Ben Jonson 1. On imaginary property as an alternative to material property for women, see Rosenthal 58–104. 2. Alexandra Bennett (‘Happy Families’) and James Fitzmaurice have productively explored how Cavendish’s writings enter into intellectual dialogue with her husband’s works. See also Battigelli 45–7; Whitaker 278. 3. The Canadian premiere of The Convent of Pleasure was performed at McMaster University on 9 July 2005 as a part of the International Margaret Cavendish Society’s Sixth Biennial Conference. 4. See, for example, The Triumphant Widow, or The Medley of Humours (1677), where the Doctor celebrates Jonson as ‘the Honour of his Nation, and the Poet of Poets’ (61). Marion Wynne-Davies points out that Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, then in their childhood, were likely in attendance at the masques at Welbeck and Bolsover (‘How Great is Thy Change’ 46). 5. In this regard, Jonson is more conservative than Cavendish in his bid for fame. Careful to specify in the epistle to the universities prefacing Volpone that he seeks fame only if it is bestowed on him by his ideal readership, he declares: ‘I chuse rather to liue grau’d in obscuritie, then share with [those,

Notes 183

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

that wil . . . make themselues a name with the Multitude], in so preposterous a fame’ (sigs ¶2v– ¶3r). Cavendish, in contrast, confides to Madam in Sociable Letters: ‘I am so Ambitious, as I am restless to Live, as Nature doth, in all Ages, and in every Brain’ (142). Jonson anticipates Dryden’s strategy in his Preface to the Fables (1700) in this respect. Dryden defers to his reader as the ‘judge’ to whose decision he promises to ‘submit,’ only to dictate quite explicitly how he expects that judgment to proceed (sig. *Dr). Most of these are written by Cavendish herself. Her husband also makes regular appearances in Cavendish’s paratext to vouch for and commend her work. Newcastle’s secretary, John Rolleston, and Cavendish’s maidservant and confidant, Mistress Toppe, each pen one prefatory address. Describing her visit to the Cavendish home, Evelyn characterized Cavendish’s speech as ‘airy, empty, whimsical and rambling as her books . . . I acknowledge, though I remember her some years since and have not been a stranger to her fame, I was surprised to find so much extravagancy and vanity in any person not confined within four walls’ (qtd in Whitaker 293). The connections that I am exploring between Jonson and Cavendish provide a striking example of ‘[h]ow class and gender interact or offset each other in terms of the privileges they might enable’ (Mitchell 116). Her readers are ‘Noble,’ ‘Worthy,’ ‘Courteous,’ and ‘Learned,’ all epithets used to describe the few historical individuals and institutions favored in her dedicatory epistles. Despite Cavendish’s denigration of citizen petitioners, she displays surprising sympathy for their petitions and social aspirations in her dramatic works, particularly in Bell in Campo, The Female Academy, and Orations. See Wiseman, Drama and Politics 110–13; Suzuki 187–95. Alfred Harbage notices the same juxtaposition of ‘hesitant decision, a mixture of timidity and nervous assurance’ in Cavendish’s prefatory writings, but he is satisfied to account for it as a ‘delightfully feminine’ (232) characteristic of her work. Susan Fitzmaurice reads Cavendish’s juxtaposition of authority and tentativeness in Sociable Letters as evidence of her assumption of a variety of personae in her ‘epistolary essays’ (‘Tentativeness and Insistence’ 7–9). Even ‘may’ assumes a manipulative function in Cavendish’s writing. While usually signaling permission or possibility, in some contexts ‘may’ can ‘suggest the control assumed by the speaker’ (Fitzmaurice, ‘Tentativeness and Insistence’ 19). Although Jonson does not rely on this construction as heavily as Cavendish does, a similar formulation appears in the epistle to the universities prefacing Volpone: ‘if my MVSES bee true to me, I shall raise the dispis’d head of POETRY againe, & stripping her out of those rotten and base ragges, wherewith the Times haue adulterated her forme, restore her to her primitiue habite, feature, and maiesty’ (sig. ¶4rv). Elsewhere, even without the presence of the ‘shall,’ Jonson uses conditional clauses to entice deserving readers with the promise of reward. He opens the epistle prefacing the ‘apologeticall Dialogue’ preserved in the folio version of Poetaster, for instance, as follows: ‘If, by looking on what is past, thou hast deseru’d that name, I am willing thou should’st yet know more, by that which followes’ (Workes 348).

184

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15. See Elias and, more recently, Bryson; Burke, ‘A Civil Tongue’; Ingram; Mendelson, ‘The Civility of Women’; and Richards, Early Modern Civil Discourses. 16. Bourdieu underscores the importance of such ‘non-linguistic properties’ in contributing to an individual’s symbolic capital: ‘aristocratic and academic titles: clothing, especially uniforms and formal dress; institutional attributes like the priest’s pulpit, the professor’s platform, the orator’s rostrum and microphone’ (‘Price Formation’ 70). Cavendish could not profit from the rostrum or the platform, but she made full use of aristocratic titles and costume. On the significance of performance and self-display for Cavendish, see Chalmers, ‘Dismantling the Myth of “Mad Madge”’; Tomlinson, ‘Too Theatrical?’ and ‘My Brain the Stage.’ 17. The 1676 collection of letters praising Cavendish is quick to reinforce this claim. Charles Cheyne, who married Cavendish’s stepdaughter Jane Cavendish, lauds her freedom from convention: ‘Who means to Improve, Madam, by your discoveries, must study them alone, and freeing themselves of the Pains of Grammar Rules, tedious Methods, and the Fallacies of unproved Maxims, may arive early at Truths, may know and be able to discourse things.’ In a letter written in May 1667, Walter Charleton marvels at Cavendish’s poetry, inspired by ‘a certain divine Fury’: ‘Hence it is, that you do not always confine your Sense to Verse; nor your Verses to Rhythme, nor your Rhythme to the quantity and sounds of Sillables’ (Letters and Poems 79, 115). 18. Cavendish here offers a very different version of linguistic capital than Bourdieu, who argues that capital relies on a speaker’s access to ‘instruments of production, such as rhetorical devices, genres, legitimate styles and manners and, more generally, all the formulations destined to be “authoritative” ’ (‘Production and Reproduction’ 57–8). Cavendish grounds her authority on her failure to appropriate such tools. 19. Cavendish is in this regard very much a product of her time, aligning with writers like Montaigne, Bacon, and Lipsius (who advocated a simpler approach to oratory) and with the Royal Society’s defense of individual experience and reason as the basis for knowledge. 20. Stephen Clucas defends Cavendish’s rejection of authority in her philosophical and scientific writings as characteristic of the essayistic probabilism of seventeenth-century scientific discourse. 21. On the importance of active virtue in Cavendish’s writings, see D’Monté; Leslie; and Schwarz. 22. Cavendish suggests that public speaking is less likely to compromise a woman’s sexual reputation than private intercourse. In her dramatic writings, Lady Sanspareille and Affectionata demonstrate their virtue through eloquent orations, while the fifth female orator in Orations paradoxically defends her virtue and chastity through a public speech (see Bennett, ‘Testifying’ 98–9). 23. Susan Fitzmaurice has persuasively traced the function of epistolary conventions, patterns of modality, and deictic markers in the letters, arguing that Cavendish uses her imaginary interchanges with her interlocutor better to position herself for lengthy essay-like meditations on a range of topics.

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Index Abbott, George, and A Briefe Description of the Whole World, 20 Achelley, Thomas, and The Key of Knowledge, 54 Adams, Thomas, and The Happiness of the Church, 86, 173n3 adaptability in conversation, 24, 25–6, 34, 41 in letter writing, 26–7 adultery, and criminal conversation, 20 agency, women’s, 9–10 and conversational games, 90, 91, 95; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 14, 96, 97–9, 107; Love’s Victory, 14, 102–3, 106–7, 90 Henrietta Maria, 6–7, 9–10, 125, 171n5 and inwardness, 175n10 and the Psalms, 67–8; Pembroke’s Psalmes, 64, 65–8, 76, 85, 88, 175n10 and space, 11, 41–2, 50, 169 and textual conversation, 167–70 Ainsworth, Henry, 86 Alberti, Leon Battista, and Della Famiglia, 44 Allestree, Richard, and The Practice of Christian Graces, 45 Altman, Janet, 140 angels, 86–8 Anne of Denmark, Queen, 55, 56, 93, 100, 108, 176n2, 178n16 architecture, and development of personal spaces, 9, 44–5 Ascham, Roger, 92 Astell, Mary, 15 Aubrey, John, 82 Augustine, 64, 76–7 Austin, J.L., 38 Barroll, Leeds, 51 Behn, Aphra, and The Rover, 115

Beza, Theodore, 64, 67, 68, 69, 72, 75, 80 Bloom, Gina, 5, 172n12, 173n15 body Christs’, 53, 74, 85, 88 correspondence with language, 21–2 in conversation, 12–14, 19–20, 29–32 self-control, 9, 24–5, 31–2, 34, 36–7, 172n8, 175n10 and spatial boundaries, 7, 9, 13, 40, 43, 45, 47, 50, 51, 65, 73–7, 155, 176n13 in written conversation, 9, 22–3, 137, 167, 172n2 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10, 130, 154, 158, 171n6 language habitus, 41–2 linguistic capital, 38, 184n18 linguistic competence, 11, 13, 15, 26, 40–1, 129, 139, 147; social status, 150 linguistic market, 11, 40, 41–2 power dynamics, 11, 27, 41 space, 11, 40, 41–2 symbolic capital, 11, 40, 42, 46, 150, 157, 184n16 bower, 174n11 Brackley, Lady Elizabeth, 3, 5, 160, 167, 170, 179n5, 180n15, 181n22, 182n4 and Caroline court culture, 14, 114–15, 132 childhood conversations, 113–14 The Concealed Fancies, 4, 14–15, 31, 49–50, 114, 115, 123–4, 126, 127–37, 167, 180n12, 180n17, 181n20, 181n21, 181n24, 181n25; collaborative nature of, 127; composition of, 181n23; control of husbands, 131–2; honnêteté, 127, 129, 130, 131, 137;

205

206

Index

Brackley, Lady Elizabeth – continued linguistic competence, 129; maintenance of freedom as wife, 132–3; manipulation in, 115, 127–30, 131, 134, 137; marriage, 132–6; mirrors, 123–4; mistress, 132, 134; overturning conversational conventions, 128–31; ‘petulant garb,’ 133–4; plot, 128; relationship between conversation and performance, 129–30; transformation of gender roles, 134–6; verbal aggression, 128–9, 131; vows of selfhood, 132–3; women’s conversational alliance, 127, 133, 134, 135, 136 ‘Considerations concerning Marriage,’ 134 conversational alliance, 12, 14–15, 113 conversational models, 12, 114–15 education, 4, 113, 136, 168 honnêteté, 14, 114–15 intertextual conversation, 12 marriage, 134, 181n23 A Pastorall, 127 Poems Songs a Pastorall and a Play, 114, 136, 179n6, 181n23, 181n24 politicized conversation, 115, 168 royalist model of conversational interaction, 115 salon as conversational space, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 16, 43, 113, 114, 132, 136, 169 social status, 13, 113, 167–8 space, 7, 8, 11–12, 14, 43, 115, 167, 169 Bradshaw, William, and A Direction for the Weaker Sort of Christians, 53 Brathwaite, Richard chief end of conversation, 28 education, 172n10 The English Gentleman, 2, 21, 22, 31, 33, 172n6, 172n10, 172n13 The English Gentlewoman, 32, 49, 58, 167 integration of language and behavior, 21, 22

moderation, 25, 172n13; sexual modesty, 32 rules governing conversational protocol, 2 silence, 33 women’s closets, 49, 50, 58 women’s conversation, 32 Bray, Alan, 119, 132 Brown, Penelope, 40, 151 Bryson, Anna, 23–4, 25 Burke, Peter, 26 Butler, Judith, 130, 167, 169 Calvin, John, 63, 64, 67–8, 69, 73, 74, 176n17 Cannan, Paul D., 154 Carleton, Dudley, 100 Cary, Elizabeth, and The Tragedy of Mariam, 30, 34 Casey, Edward S., 65 Castiglione, Baldassare, 160 conversational games, 90, 91, 92, 102, 107, 178n17 The Courtier, 2, 4–5, 8, 35, 90, 91, 102, 178n17 integration of language and behavior, 22 Cavendish, Charles, 113, 114 Cavendish, Sir Charles, 139, 147, 152 Cavendish, Lady Jane, 3, 5, 160, 167, 170, 182n4 and Caroline court culture, 14, 114–15, 132 childhood conversations, 113–14 The Concealed Fancies, 4, 14–15, 31, 49–50, 114, 115, 123–4, 126, 127–37, 167, 180n12, 180n17, 181n20, 181n21, 181n24, 181n25; collaborative nature of, 127; composition of, 181n23; control of husbands, 131–2; honnêteté, 127, 129, 130, 131, 137; linguistic competence, 129; maintenance of freedom as wife, 132–3; manipulation in, 115, 127–30, 131, 134, 137; marriage, 132–6; mirrors, 123–4; mistress, 132, 134; overturning conversational conventions, 128–30, 130–1;

Index 207 ‘petulant garb,’ 133–4; plot, 128; relationship between conversation and performance, 129–30; transformation of gender roles, 134–6; verbal aggression, 128–9, 131; vows of selfhood, 132–3; women’s conversational alliance, 127, 133, 134, 135, 136 conversational models, 12, 114–15, 117, 118, 121 conversational alliance, 12, 14–15, 113 education, 4, 113–14, 136, 168 funeral monument, 182n31 honnêteté, 14, 114–15 intertextual conversation, 12 marriage, 134–5, 182n31 occasional poems, 115–27, 136, 182n27; ‘An answeare to the verses of Mr Carcy,’ 125; ‘A Songe,’ 134–5; authorship of, 179n6; Brackley as subject of, 125–7; conversation as political tool, 116; conversational nature of, 116; direct address, 118; dramatic elements, 117–19, 121, 122; emphasis on solitude and isolation, 122–4; format of, 117; fusion of epistolary and theatrical conventions, 118–19; intended audience, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126–7, 179n7; interiority and exteriority, 123–4; letters from father as topic of, 117; ‘Loues conflict,’ 117, 118–19; military role of women, 125; motivation for compiling, 121; network of female friends and relatives, 124–7; ‘On a false reporte of your Lordships landinge,’ 117–18, 126; ‘Passions inuitation,’ 118; as poetic letters, 116–17, 120; praise of family, 119–20, 121; public function of, 119, 120, 121; ‘Thankes Lettre,’ 116, 117, 120–1; ‘The angry Curs,’ 126–7; ‘The Greate Example,’ 116–17, 119–20; ‘The quinticence of Cordiall,’ 126; ‘The Speakeing Glass,’ 122–3, 124

A Pastorall, 127 Poems Songs a Pastorall and a Play, 114, 116, 136 politicized conversation, 115, 168 protection of family estates, 116 relationship with sister, 125–7, 181n22 royalist model of conversational interaction, 115 salon as conversational space, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 16, 43, 113, 114, 132, 136, 169 social status, 13, 113, 167–8 space, 7, 8, 11–12, 14, 43, 115, 167, 169 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, 3, 4, 5, 6, 15, 167, 170 attention to location and setting, 42–3 Bell in Campo, 30–1, 42, 165, 183n11 citizen petitioners, 150, 183n11 civility, 15, 139, 141, 154–62, 163–5; as active and aggressive quality, 159–60, 163–4; centrality of, 156; as civilizing writer, 161–2; consistent emphasis on, 159; and paratextual rudeness, 156, 158; dedication to, 161; model of, 155–6; paradoxical construction of, 139, 154, 159–61, 164–5; significance for, 154–5; and truth, 158; wartime context, 158–60 The Convent of Pleasure, 140, 182n3 conversational control, 9, 138–9, 140–1, 147–8, 149–50, 151, 154, 159, 160–1, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168–9; letters and verse epistles, 140–1 conversational structure of works, 140; one-sided conversation, 140–1, 162, 165 The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World, 153 desire for fame, 143, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156, 158, 161, 182n5 and the dialogue, 4

208

Index

Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle – continued education, 4, 139, 156–7, 168, 179n1 epistolary conversation, 22, 140–1, 146, 162–4 The Female Academy, 4, 156, 159, 183n11 influence of Cavendish household, 12, 139, 179n1 intertextual conversation, 12, 182n2 Jonson’s influence on, 12, 15, 141; as role model, 142; similarities between, 142–3 lack of skill as conversationalist, 15, 139–40 The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe, 120, 153, 157, 181n23 linguistic competence, 15, 139, 147, 150, 184n16, 184n18 Loves Adventures, 156 manipulative language, 15, 139, 148–54, 160, 168 natural reason, 156–7 natural wit, 138, 155–7 Natures Pictures, 4, 147, 157–8, 161–2, 179n1; conversational structure, 140 Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 147, 148, 153, 157, 160 Orations of Divers Sorts, 147, 148, 149, 156, 183n11, 184n22 paratext, 7, 15, 138, 139, 143–54; ‘aggressive orality,’ 141, 147–8; anxiety within, 148; attacks critics, 149; commanding language, 151, 152, 153, 154; conditional clauses, 153; contradictory rhetoric, 154; as controlled conversational space, 8–9, 11–12, 16, 43, 138, 139, 141, 148; controlling readers’ interpretations, 148; conversational features of, 5, 7, 138; deference, 152, 153–4, 160–1;

excessive use of, 146–7; exclusive hospitality, 149–50; ideal audience, 149; manipulation, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 160–1; modal verbs, 153; patterns of requestmaking, 151–2; power of readers, 151; soliciting favor, 150–1; uses of, 147 as petitioner, 150–1 Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 148, 149, 152, 153, 157 Philosophical Letters, 140, 147, 151 Playes, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 148, 157 Plays, Never before Printed, 148, 149, 156 Poems, and Fancies, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 156, 161 political context of writings, 139, 147, 158–9, 168 power of language, 159–60 preoccupation with conversation, 140, 162 self-control, 155, 157, 159–60, 162 Sociable Letters, 15, 140, 142, 147, 148, 152, 159–60, 162–5, 172n2; and civility, 162–5; as conversation, 22, 140; destructive and civilizing language, 162; Letter 54, 162–4; meditations on conversational interactions, 162; one-sided conversational structure, 140, 162; rhetorical aggression and social order, 163–4 social status, 13, 147, 149–50, 159, 168, 183n9 space, 7–8, 11–12, 43, 138, 167, 169 textual persuasion, 140 as truth-teller, 157–8 The Worlds Olio, 138, 139, 149, 153, 156, Cavendish, William, Duke of Newcastle, 12, 113, 116–19, 120–1, 124, 125, 127, 139, 141, 142, 143, 147, 149, 150, 152, 156, 158, 162, 168, 179n1, 179n7, 180n9, 180n13, 182n2, 182n31, 183n7 Cecil, Sir Robert, 23, 35–6, 37

Index 209 Chalmers, Hero, 160 Chamberlain, John, 100 Charles I, King, 1, 6, 7, 14, 119, 120, 121, 125, 142, 171n5, 180n9, 180n12, 180n16 Charles II, King, 147, 152 Charleton, Walter, 139, 141, 184n17 Chedgzoy, Kate, 171n7 Cheyne, Charles, 182n31, 184n17 Cicero, 23 cinema, and female voices in, 123 civil behavior and social status, 2–3, 23–4, 27–8, 31, 154, 158–9 integration of language and behavior, 21–2 performance of gentility, 27–8 civil conversation, 3, 12–13, 28, 29, 89, 143, 162, 171n2 adaptability, 24, 25–6 and the dialogue, 8 features of, 20–1 games, 29 Guazzo’s definition of, 20–1, 24, 92, 130, 144 integration of language and behavior, 12–13, 20–2 moderation, 24, 25 power dynamics, 26, 40–1 rules of, 24–9, 128–9, 141 self-control, 24, 28, 29 social advancement, 27–8 social status, 12–13, 26–8 and space, 41 see also conversation Civil Wars female petitioners, 150 impact on conversational strategies, 14, 15, 117, 136, 139, 147, 155, 159–60, 168 politicization of conversation, 109, 114, 168 publication of private letters, 120 significance of textual conversation, 116 women’s role, 115–16, 125, 136 civility, 23–4, 154 in conversation, 21–2, 24 emergence of, 25

illusion of consensus, 160 Jonson, 143–6, 155, 160–1, 165 Margaret Cavendish, 15, 139, 141, 154–62, 163–5; as active and aggressive quality, 159–60, 163–4; centrality for, 156; as civilizing writer, 161–2; consistent emphasis on, 159; and paratextual rudeness, 156, 158; dedication to, 161; model of, 155–6; paradoxical construction of, 139, 154, 159–61, 164–5; significance for, 154–5; and truth, 158; wartime context, 158–160 linguistic control as, 160 meaning of, 154 self-control, 25, 159 social order, 24, 158–9 and women, 155 Clarke, Danielle, 32 class and civil behavior, 27–8, 154, 158 and conversation, 12–13, 23–4, 26, 27–8, 102, 114, 144 and letter writing, 26–7, 28, 172n7, 177n5 and women’s conversation, 31, 34, 167–8, 183n9 Cleaver, Robert, and A Godlie Forme of Householde Government, 43, 44, 46 Clifford, Anne, 35, 45, 49, 51, 53, 56, 57, 66, 100, 173n17, 180n11 Clifford, Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 174n9 closets, 40 as conversational space, 8, 11, 41, 45–6, 50–1 control of access to, 48–50 development of personal spaces, 44–5 fluidity of public/private boundaries, 13, 45–6, 173n2 as lockable space, 48, 123, 174n8, 180n12 multiple uses of, 45–6 in Pembroke’s Psalmes, 7, 14, 66, 73, 74–6, 78, 169, 176n18

210

Index

closets – continued physiological parallels, 45, 57, 73, 75, 174n6 and privacy, 44–5, 49–50, 173n3 in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, 13, 40, 51–9 women’s access to husbands’, 48–9, 174n7 and women’s spatial practice, 43–4, 48–50 Codrington, Robert, and The Second Part of Youths Behaviour, 31, 33, 129–30, 133 Coiro, Ann Baynes, 51 conduct manuals, 2, 9, 12, 20, 38, 65 correspondence between language and body, 21–2 flexibility of conversational practice, 34 and games, 29, 91–2, 94 Psalms as, 67–8 rhetorical training of women, 35 rules of conversation, 23, 24, 128–30, 141 self-control, 31–3, 131 women’s spatial boundaries, 43–4 Congreve, William, and The Way of the World, 115 conversation as civil ideal, 21 and civility, 24 and dialogue, 5 as embodied act, 2, 13, 20, 21–3 as gendered act, 2, 9, 13, 20, 29–38, 172n9 meaning of, 23 mediating relationships through, 2, 6, 25–8, 167 modern relevance of, 166 performative role of, 5, 11, 23, 37, 50–1, 130 power dynamics, 25–8, 40–1 relational nuances, 6 rules governing, 2, 21, 24–5, 128–9, 141 as social engagement, 2, 12, 19–20, 170 and space, 39, 40–1, 43 as strategic tool, 21, 24

textual conversation, 3–4; and the dialogue, 4–5 as transaction, 5, 40–1 turn-taking, 6, 33, 141 verbal and physical intimacy, 1–2, 19–20, 30–1, 32 and women, 2, 11–12, 13, 29–35, 39–40, 43–4, 170 written modes of, 2–3 see also civil conversation; games, conversational; letter writing; textual conversation Cotton, Nancy, 118 courtesy books, 2–3, 20, 24, 25 courtship games, 14 and conversational games, 94–5 in Love’s Labour’s Lost, 90, 96, 98, 99 in Love’s Victory, 90, 91, 104–5, 108 Cox, Virginia, 3, 4, 28, 173n19 Craveri, Benedetta, 115 criminal conversation, 20 Daniel, Samuel, 83 Day, Angel adaptability in letter writing, 26–7 brevity in letter writing, 25 closet space, 48, 173n3 The English Secretorie, 22, 25, 26–7, 28, 48, 173n3 epistolary conversation, 22 social status, 28, 151 Daybell, James, 27, 35, 172n3, 173n18, 173n20 De Certeau, Michel, 10–11, 42, 50 De Scudéry, Madeleine, 15 Della Casa, Giovanni alienating effect of silence, 33–4 Galateo, 2, 22, 28, 33–4, 181n26 Dering, Sir Edward, 48 Dering, Unton, 48, 49 dialogue and conversation, 5 and humanism, 4, 8, 12, 169, 170 as illustration of conversation, 3 modeling civil conversational interchange, 2, 8, 20–1, 22, 24 news pamphlets, 114, 121–2 spatial boundaries, 8, 169 and textual conversation, 4–5, 8

Index 211 and women, 3, 4–5, 12, 35, 170, 171n3, 173n19 discourse analysis, 3, 6 Dobranski, Stephen, 160 Dod, John, and A Godlie Forme of Householde Government, 43, 44, 46 Donne, John, 67, 80, 82, 88, 176n19 Drury, Anne Bacon, 45 Du Bosc, Jacques, and L’Honneste femme, 114 Duchêne, Roger, 91 Dudley, Katherine, Countess of Huntington, 68, 73 education, 4, 30, 35, 154, 157, 168, 170, 172n10 Elam, Keir, 6, 93 Elias, Norbert, 23, 25 Elizabeth I, Queen, 35, 36, 75, 81, 108, 168, 176n18 Elyot, Thomas The Boke Named the Governour, 30, 92 The Defense of Good Women, 5 education of boys, 30 games, 92 Erasmus adaptability in letter writing, 27 ars dictaminis, 28 brevity in letter writing, 25, 151 De civilitate morum puerilium, 21, 28 De conscribendis epistolis, 2, 25, 27; derides sycophancy, 152 definition of letter writing, 2 external decorum, 28 principles of epistolary decorum, 2 social status, 151 Evelyn, John, 141 Evelyn, Mary, 147, 183n8 Facebook, 2, 167 Faret, Nicholas, and L’Honneste homme, 114 feminist pragmatics, 43 Ferguson, Margaret, 168, 173n19 Ferry, Anne, 73 Findlay, Alison, 39–40, 43, 124, 129, 171n7, 181n25 Fish, Stanley, 146

Fiskin, Beth Wynne, 70 Fitzmaurice, James, 182n2 Fitzmaurice, Susan, 70, 152, 171n4, 183n12, 184n23, 183n13 games, conversational, 29, 89–90 boundaries and permeability of ludic space, 91, 169 The Civile Conversation, 20, 29, 89–90, 91, 92, 93–4, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100 courtship games, 14, 94–5; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 90, 96, 98, 99; Love’s Victory, 90, 91, 104–5, 108 cross-purposes, 94, 96, 177n6 in early modern England, 91–5 games handbooks, 94 language-games (Sprachspiel), 93–4, 107 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 12, 14, 90–1, 95–9, 108–9; circumstances of writing of, 108; courtship games, 96, 98, 99; female agency, 96, 97–9, 107; ludic context, 96, 99, 107; punishments and rewards, 98–9, 103 Love’s Victory, 7, 12, 14, 91, 99–109; circumstances of writing of, 108; courtship games, 90, 91, 104–5, 108; female agency, 102–3, 106–7; interconnection between games and play world, 104–6, 169; Love’s Labour’s Lost as influence on, 90–1, 100; ludic context, 101, 105, 107; as pastoral tragicomedy, 107; playing spaces, 101; punishments and rewards, 103, 104; Rustic as outsider, 101–2; Silvesta’s role, 105–6; Venus as ludic leader, 103–4, 105 political function of, 90, 92–5, 107–8, 108–9 punishments and rewards, 89, 95; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 91, 98–9, 103; Love’s Victory, 91, 103, 104 suspension of conventional hierarchies, 90 women’s authority in, 90, 91

212

Index

gender and conversation, 2, 9, 13, 20, 29–38, 172n9 and education, 4, 30, 35 ‘gendered literacy,’ 168 and voice, 66, 67 and women’s spatial boundaries, 9, 39–40, 43–4, 46–50, 168–9 Genette, Gérard, 54–5, 138 gentility performance of, 28 redefinition of, 27 and truth, 158–9 Gilby, Anthony, 67, 68, 69, 73 Glanville, Joseph, 141 Goffman, Erving, 50 Goldberg, Jonathan, 82 Golding, Arthur, 63, 66, 69, 74, 77 Gouge, William, and Of Domesticall Duties, 46 Guazzo, Stefano, 108, 146 behavior of a gentleman, 27 civil conversation, 20–1, 24, 27, 130 The Civile Conversation, 2, 4, 8, 20–1, 23, 29, 31, 45, 168, 169, 170; conversational dominance, 141; conversational games, 20, 29, 89–90, 91, 92, 93–4, 95, 97, 98, 99, 102; uncivil conversation, 144 civility, 158–9 integration of language and behavior, 19, 22 letter writing, 23 silence, 32–3 social status, 27, 31, 144, 158, 168 spatial context of conversation, 41, 45 women’s conversation, 31–3, 37, 173n4 Hanks, William F., 67 Hannay, Margaret, 65, 66, 68, 90, 176n18, 178n10, 178n11, 178n12 Harbage, Alfred, 183n12 Harvey, Elizabeth D., 67 Helgerson, Richard, 146 Henrietta Maria, Queen, 114

honnêteté, 114 The Kings Cabinet Opened, 1, 6, 9–10, 120, 171n5 military role of, 6–7, 9–10, 125 Poems Songs a Pastorall and a Play, 119, 124, 125, 181n19, 182n28 Herbert, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, 3, 4, 5, 167, 170 affinities with biblical Mary, 88 authorial and political agency, 64, 66, 67, 68, 85, 88 education, 4, 168 influence on Wroth, 90 intertextual conversation, 12 letter writing, 23; epistolary tactics, 35–6; strategic use of 37 Psalmes, 4, 13–14, 63, 65–81, 167; aggression in, 68–9; articulation of love of God, 78; blurred boundaries in, 65, 82; closet image, 7, 14, 73, 74–6, 78, 176n18; collaborative nature of, 82–3, 84; conversation as feature of, 64, 69–73; direct address to God, 69–71; God as active listener, 71–2; God as teacher, 73, 78; God’s speech in, 72; inner conflict within, 78; intertextual conversations, 12, 64, 78–9, 81; as inward conversation, 13–14, 64, 66, 73–5, 77–8, 88; motivation for writing, 83; non-gendered voice, 66; physiological imagery, 74–5; political and poetic voice in, 65–8, 88; political context, 63, 81, 168; political imagery, 75–6, 176n18; public praise of God, 79–81; relationship between God and psalmist, 68, 72–3; veiled narrative voice, 65–6 Sidney-Pembroke psalter, 63–4, 69, 80 social status, 13, 167, 168 space, 7, 8, 11–12, 43, 169 ‘To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Phillip Sidney,’ 12, 14, 64, 81–8; angels, 86–8; architectural imagery, 86; Christ’s side wounds, 85; fusion

Index 213 imagery, 82, 83, 88; longing for reunion with brother, 87–8; as one-sided conversation, 85–6; reproductive imagery, 84, 85; Sidney’s wounds, 84–5; significance of, 81–2 Herbert, William, 100 Herman, Vimala, 5, 7, 51 Hiscock, Andrew, 40 Hoby, Lady Margaret, 45, 46–7 Hodgson-Wright, Stephanie, 129 Honnêteté, 14 Caroline court culture, 114–15 The Concealed Fancies, 127, 129, 130, 131, 137 Hooke, Robert, 157 hospitality, 47, 53, 96, 138, 149–50 household distribution of keys, 48 thresholds, 46–7; threshold transactions, 47 gendered boundaries of, 43–4, 46 privacy, 45 see also closets humanism, 10 and conversation, 170 and the dialogue, 4, 8, 12, 169, 170 and education, 4, 9, 30, 154, 170 Hutson, Lorna, 5, 143, 146, 171n2 Huygens, Constantin, 141 intertextual conversations, 12, 67 Pembroke’s Psalmes, 64, 78–9, 81 Irigaray, Luce ‘amorous exchange,’ 64 angels, 86–7 An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 86, 88 innovative articulation, 65, 81, 83–4 Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, 65, 74, 88 merging of self and other, 64–5 multiple voices, 67 space of the womb, 74, 176n17 Speculum of the Other Woman, 65, 176n17 transformative conversation, 14, 64, 65, 88 isolation, and textual conversation, 166–7

James I, King, 92 108, 179n23 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 33 Jonson, Ben, 12, 100 civil conversation, 143–4, 146 civility, 154, 155 fame, 143, 144, 182n5 influence on Margaret Cavendish, 12, 15, 139, 141, 143, 165; as role model, 142; similarities between, 142–3, 149, 152, paratext, 12, 143–6; commanding language, 154; contradictory rhetoric, 154; as controlled conversational space, 141, 143, 146, 155; conversational strategies, 144–6; dedicatory epistles, 145–6; deference, 153–4, 160–1; distrust of readers, 143–4; expectations of readers, 146; manipulation, 144–5, 160–1, 183n6, 183n14; uses of, 147, 165; ‘virile style,’ 143 patronage, 143–6 relationship with Cavendish family, 142, 182n4 Keane, Webb, 10 Kennedy, Andrew, 5, 6 The Kings Cabinet Opened, 1, 6, 9–10, 120, 171n5 knowledge, and closet reading, 54 Knyvett, Katherine, 48, 49 Knyvett, Thomas, 48 Kuin, Roger, 120 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 83, 173n17, 180n11 language and the gendered body, 30–2 integration with behavior, 21–2 and space, 7–12, 39–44 Lanyer, Aemilia, and Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, 13, 40, 51–9 access to closets, 51–2 Christ’s body, 53 claims of authority, 55 closet reading, 52–3 closets in, 51–9 compensation for social disparity, 58

214

Index

Lanyer, Aemilia, and Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum – continued ‘A Description of Cookeham,’ 56–7, 58 effects of publication, 57–8 failure to secure patronage, 51, 55, 56, 58 hospitality, 53 imaginative enjoyment of patrons’ company, 56 keys, 51–2, 53–4, 174n9, 174n10 mirrors, 53, 174n14 paratext, 54–5 praise of patrons, 56 preoccupation with exclusive spaces, 52 reading and eroticized conversation, 52–4 social and spatial access, 51–2, 55, 57, 58 social status, 13, 51, 56, 57–8 text as a key to rereading of Christ, 53–4 Virtue, 51–7, 174n10 Laroche, Rebecca, 100 Lash, Scott, 150 Lawes, Henry, 139 Lazard, Madeline, 94–5 Lecercle, François, 90 Lefebvre, Henri, 10, 11, 39, 42 Lesser, Zachary, 4, 8 letter writing adaptability, 26–7 brevity, 25, 151 as conversation, 1, 2–3, 22–3, 29, 67, 136 conversational control, 140 corporeal imagining of, 22–3, 172n2 epistolary manuals, 2, 12, 23, 24, 94, 136, 172n7 Erasmus’ definition of, 2 Erasmus’ principles of epistolary decorum, 2 insecurity of, 27 messengers, 172n3 moderation, 25 performative role of, 23, 37 and physical intimacy, 2 power dynamics, 26–7

public context, 27, 120, 122 social advancement, 28 as ‘social buffer,’ 36 and social status, 26–7, 28, 151, 152, 172n7, 177n5 strategic use by women, 3, 35–7, 115–16, 170 and textual conversation, 6–7, 166 see also textual conversation Levinson, Stephen C., 40, 151 Lewis, C.S., 29 Lilley, Kate, 151 linguistic agency, and space, 9–11, 41–2 linguistic capital, 38, 184n18 linguistic competence, 13, 15, 26, 40–1, 129, 139, 147, 150, 169 linguistic pragmatics, 13, 40 ‘locutionary subjectivity’, 67 Loewenstein, Joseph, 143 Luckyj, Christina, 34, 179n23 Lyons, John, 67 magazine, 49, 125, 181n21 Magnusson, Lynne, 6, 11, 34, 42, 95, 167, 171n2, 171n4, 171n6 manipulation The Concealed Fancies, 115, 127–30, 131, 134, 137 in conversation, 3, 9, 13, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 167, 168 Jonson, 144–5, 160–1, 183n6, 183n14 Margaret Cavendish, 15, 139, 140–1, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 160–1, 165, 183n13 and pamphlet literature, 122 in the Psalms, 68–9 Marot, Clément, 64, 75 Marotti, Arthur, 92 Matoesian, Gregory M., 141 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 74, 81, 175n10, 176n15 Mazzio, Carla, 37, 141, 147–8 McClaren, Margaret Anne, 178n18 Mendelson, Sara, 140, 155 Middleton, Thomas, and The Changeling, 49, 174n8 Mildmay, Lady Grace, 30, 35, 173n19

Index 215 Miller, J. Hillis, 55 Miller, Naomi, 100, 108 Miller, Shannon, 142 Miller, Stephen, 166 Milling, Jane, 116, 180n15 mirrors, 122–3 in The Concealed Fancies, 123–4 in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, 53, 174n14 moderation and civility, 158–9, 163–4 in letter writing, 25 and rules of conversation, 13, 24, 25, 27, 28–9, 41, 158, 159 as silence, 32–4 and space, 172n13 and women’s conversation, 32, 34, 43–4 Montagu, Walter, and The Shepheards Paradise, 132 Montrose, Louis, 99 More, Sir Thomas, and Utopia 8 Newcastle, Duchess of, see Cavendish, Margaret news pamphlets, and dialogic structure of, 114, 121–2, 180n14 Orgel, Stephen, 92 Orlin, Lena Cowen, 48 pamphlet literature, 180n12 dialogic structure of, 114, 121–2, 180n14 paratext change in prefatory rhetoric, 141 The Concealed Fancies, 127 conversational features of, 5, 7, 9, 138 as conversational space, 7, 8, 11–12, 16, 43, 138 Jonson, 12, 143–6; commanding language, 154; contradictory rhetoric, 154; as controlled conversational space, 141, 143, 146, 155; conversational strategies, 144–6; dedicatory epistles, 145–6; deference, 153–4, 160–1; distrust of readers, 143–4;

expectations of readers, 146; manipulation, 144–5, 160–1, 183n6, 183n14; uses of, 147, 165; ‘virile style,’ 143, 155 Margaret Cavendish, 7, 15, 138–9, 143–54; ‘aggressive orality,’ 141, 147–8; anxiety within, 148; attacks critics, 149; commanding language, 151, 152, 153, 154; conditional clauses, 153; contradictory rhetoric, 154; as controlled conversational space, 8–9, 11–12, 16, 43, 138, 139, 141, 148; controlling readers’ interpretations, 148; deference, 152, 153–4, 160–1; excessive use of, 146–7; exclusive hospitality, 149–50; ideal audience, 149; manipulation, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 160–1; modal verbs, 153; patterns of request-making, 151–2; power of readers, 151; soliciting favour, 150–1; uses of, 147 Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, 51, 54–5 strategic potential of, 54–5 Parker, Patricia, 75, 143, 174n6, 177n8 Peck, Linda Levy, 124 Pembroke, Countess of, see Herbert, Mary Sidney Philips, Katherine, 179n4 Phillips, Edward, and The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, 29, 94, 96, 177n5, 177n6 power dynamics civil conversation, 26, 27 letter writing, 26–7 in verbal interchange, 11, 40–1 privacy closets, 45, 49–50, 57, 65, 73, 75, 173n3 development of personal spaces, 44–5 and letter writing, 27 Psalms characteristics of, 63 as conduct book, 67–8 conversational framework of, 5, 13, 63, 64, 67

216

Index

Psalms – continued as ‘dialogue-poems,’ 63 early modern Protestant descriptions of, 67–8 first-person pronoun, 63, 65, 66, 67 relationship between inward prayer and outward expression, 14, 65–6, 76–8 Sidney-Pembroke psalter, 63–4, 69, 80 voice and gender in, 66–7 vox cordis (voice of the heart), 76, 78 vox corporis (voice of the body), 76 see also Herbert, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke Purkiss, Diane, 47 Puttenham, George, and The Arte of English Poesie, 107 Reading, John, and Dauids Soliloquie, 76–7 Rees, Emma, 148 reputation, and women’s conversation, 2, 30–2 Rich, Barnabe, and My Ladies LookingGlasse, 44 Richards, Jennifer, 10, 24, 171n2 Rienstra, Debra, 175n5 Ringhieri, Innocentio, and Cento Givochi Liberali, et d’Ingegno, 94 Roberts, Sasha, 48, 52–3 Robinson, Benedict S., 4, 8 Robinson, Douglas, 43 Robson, Simon, and The Court of Civill Courtesie, 33 Rowley, William, and The Changeling, 49, 174n8 Rump, or An Exact Collection of the Choycest Poems and Songs Relating to the Late Times, 1, 12 Sagaser, Elizabeth Harris, 85, 176n20 salon and the Caroline court, 12, 14, 114–15, 132 as conversational space, 7, 8, 11, 14, 16, 43, 65, 90, 113, 136–7, 139, 169 significance for women, 3

Schalkwyk, David, 6, 93 Schneider, Gary, 22, 36 Schoenfeldt, Michael C., 175n10 self-control and civility, 25, 159 and conversation, 24, 28, 29, 31, 32 gendering of, 32–3 and silence, 33; alienating effect of, 33–4; as rhetorical tool, 34 and women’s conversation, 2, 9, 13, 32–3, 35, 36, 37, 131, 133, 134, 159–60 sexual intimacy, and conversation’s association with, 1–2, 19–20, 21, 23, 30–1, 32, 53, 64, 95, 134, 184n22 Shakespeare, William, 12 Cymbeline, 20 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 12, 14; circumstances of writing of, 108; conversational games, 90–1, 95–9, 108–9; courtship games, 90, 96, 98, 99; female agency, 96, 97–9, 107; influence on Love’s Victory, 90–1, 100; ludic context, 96, 99, 107; punishments and rewards, 98–9, 103; revival of, 100 Othello, 42, 167 Richard III, 19, 20, 21, 28, 37 Sonnets, 6, 57, 174n13 The Taming of the Shrew, 131–2 Shapin, Steven, 158, 160 Sidney, Philip, 12, 64, 155, 168, 178n12 Astrophil and Stella, 78–9 collaboration with sister, 82 Psalm translations, 63–4, 69, 74, 176n13 ‘To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Phillip Sidney,’ 12, 14, 64, 81–8 Sidney, Robert, 143 silence alienating effect of, 33–4 androgyny of, 33–4, 173n14 in conversational exchange, 6, 29, 33–4, 132, 149, 164, 176n20 and letter writing, 37 and men’s conversation, 33

Index 217 as rhetorical tool, 34 and women’s conversation, 10, 32–3, 43–4 Silverman, Kaja, 123 Smarr, Janet, 171n3 Smith, Bruce, 5 Smith, Joan, 47 Snook, Edith, 55, 67 social networking sites, 2, 167 social status and behavior, 27–8 and civility, 154, 158–9 and conversation, 2–3, 24, 27–8 and conversational decorum, 26–7 and letter writing, 28 and linguistic competence, 40–1, 150 and women’s conversational capital, 167–8 solipsism, and textual conversation, 166–7 Sorel, Charles, and La Maison des Jeux, 91, 92, 93, 95, 109, 177n3 space and agency, 7, 9–12, 41–3, 169 and conversation, 39, 40 and the dialogue, 8 didactic function of, 8 domestic thresholds, 46–7; threshold transactions, 47 feminist pragmatics, 43 gendering of, 7, 8–9, 43–4 interaction of person and place, 42 and language, 7–12, 39–44 and linguistic market, 40, 41–2 permeability of, 12–13, 45–6, 107–8, 169 and textual conversation, 7–9 women writers’ engagement with, 2, 3, 7, 8–9, 11–12, 39–40, 42–3, 169 women’s spatial boundaries, 2, 9, 43–4, 46 women’s spatial practice, 44, 46–51, 171n7 writing as spatial practice, 50–1 see also closets Stewart, Alan, 46, 174n7 Stuart, Arabella, 92–3

technology, and conversation, 2, 166 textual conversation, 3–4 and agency, 13, 167 as alternative site of social interaction for women, 15–16, 36–8 and the Civil Wars, 116 control afforded by, 9, 36, 167–9 and the dialogue, 4–5, 8 isolation, 166–7 letter writing, 6–7, 36–7 linguistic and social engagement, 11, 12, 43, 167, 170 and literary genre, 7, 168–9 meaning of, 3–4, 171n2 modern flourishing of, 166 one-sided, 4, 6, 140–1, 162, 165 as performative rhetorical practice, 7, 11, 23, 37, 43, 169–70 relationship between speaker and addressee, 6 solipsism, 166–7 and space, 7, 8–9, 11–12, 13, 43, 50, 169 and women, 3–4, 8, 15–16, 36–8, 170 see also conversation; letter writing Thorne, Alison, 10 transformative conversation Luce Irigaray and, 7, 10, 14, 64, 65, 88 trial records, 5, 47, 175n10 Trill, Suzanne, 66 Twitter, 167 Vives, Juan Luis, and The Instruction of a Christian Woman, 43–4 voice and gender, 66, 67 Wall, Wendy, 52, 58, 84–5, 174n10 Wallace, Howard Neil, 63 West, Rebecca, 167 Whitney, Isabella, 42 Wigley, Mark, 44, 46, 48, 174n7 Williams, Gweno, 129, 140 Wiseman, Susan, 121, 180n14 witchcraft, 47 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, and languagegames (Sprachspiel), 14, 90, 93–4, 107, 177n4

218

Index

women agency of, 9–10 anxieties over conversation of, 30–1 challenge of conversation for, 2 and civility, 155, 158–61 and conversation, 170 and the dialogue, 4–5 domestic thresholds, 46–7; threshold transactions, 47 epistolary tactics of, 35–7 experimentation with conversational strategies, 7 ‘gendered literacy,’ 168 gendering of conversation, 2, 9, 13, 15, 29–38 participation in social exchange, 34 rhetorical practices of, 10 rhetorical training of, 35 and self-control, 2, 9, 13, 32–4, 35, 36, 37, 125, 131, 133, 159–60; silence, 32–3 sexual associations of conversation, 2, 30–1, 32 social status and conversational capital, 167–8 space, 39–40, 42–3, 169 spatial boundaries, 7, 9, 43–4, 46 strategic use of letter writing, 36–7 textual conversation, 3–4, 15–16, 36–8, 170 writing, as spatial practice, 50, 171n7 Wroth, Lady Mary, 3, 5, 143, 145, 167 attention to location and setting, 42 conversational games, 7, 8, 14, 90 The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania, 42, 49, 100, 178n20, 179n22

courtly games and entertainments, 100, 107, 108, 178n16, 179n22 education, 4, 168 intertextual conversation, 12 Pembroke’s influence on, 14, 90, 91 Love’s Victory, 4, 7, 12, 14, 90, 99–109, 168, 169; circumstances of writing of, 108; conversational games, 90, 91, 99–102, 101; courtship games, 90, 91, 104–5, 108; dating of, 178n11; female agency, 102–3, 105–7; interconnection between games and play world, 104–6; Love’s Labour’s Lost as influence on, 90–1, 100; ludic context, 101, 105–7; as pastoral tragicomedy, 107; playing spaces, 14, 101; plot, 100–1; punishments and rewards, 103, 104; Rustic as outsider, 101–2; Silvesta’s role, 105–6; Venus as ludic sovereign, 103–4, 105, 106–7, 108, 179n23 Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, 100, 106, 178n20, 179n22 privacy of closet, 49 social status, 13, 167–8 space, 7, 8, 11, 14, 42–3, 49, 90, 107–8, 169, 170 Youths Behaviour, or Decency in Conversation Amongst Men, 21–2, 24, 25–6, 27–8 adaptability, 25–6 proofreading of mail, 172n5 spatial context of conversation, 41