Royalist Women Writers, 1650-1689 (Oxford English Monographs)

OXFORD ENGLISH MONOGRAPHS

General Editors CHRISTOPHER BUTLER HERMIONE LEE

KATHERINE DUNCAN-JONES A. D. NUTTALL PAUL STROHM

MALCOLM GODDEN FIONA STAFFORD

This page intentionally left blank

Royalist Women Writers 1650–1689 HERO CHALMERS

CLARENDON PRESS • OXFORD

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Hero Chalmers 2004 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–927327–8 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset in Sabon by Cambrian Typesetters, Frimley, Surrey Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk

For St e v e , Jo s e p h , a n d M i r i a m Wat e rs

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgements I have greatly appreciated the generosity of the following people in discussing the project and sharing information: Pippa Berry, Georgia Brown, Jim Fitzmaurice, Juliet Fleming, Laura Gowing, Paul Hartle, Susan James, Paulina Kewes, Kate Lilley, the late Jeremy Maule, David Norbrook, Bridget Orr, Nicole Pohl, Emma Rees, Julie Sanders, Nigel Smith, Sophie Tomlinson, and Sue Wiseman. Sophie Goldsworthy, Elizabeth Prochaska, and Frances Whistler at OUP have been as efficient and encouraging as any author could want. I should also like to thank the staff of the Bodleian Library, the British Library, and Cambridge University Library for their invaluable assistance. Shorter versions of some of the material on Cavendish appeared in two previous articles: ‘Dismantling the Myth of “Mad Madge”: The Cultural Context of Margaret Cavendish’s Authorial Self-Presentation’, Women’s Writing, 4/3 (1997), 323–39; ‘The Politics of Feminine Retreat in Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure’, Women’s Writing, 6/1 (1999), 81–94. I am grateful to the publishers of Women’s Writing for allowing me to re-use aspects of these articles. Finally, heartfelt thanks are due to my husband, Steve Waters, and to my mother, Doreen Chalmers, without whom this book would certainly not have been completed.

This page intentionally left blank

Contents List of illustrations Abbreviations

x xi

Introduction 1 ‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’: Margaret Cavendish and the Images of the Author

16

2 ‘Her Harmonious Numbers’: The Politics of Friendship in the Poems and Plays of Katherine Philips

56

3 ‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’: Cavendish, Philips, and the Potency of Feminized Retreat 105 4 ‘Secret Instructions’: Aphra Behn’s Negotiations of the Political Marketplace

149

Afterword

196

Bibliography

202

Index

221

List of Illustrations 1. Frontispiece of Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters (London, 1664). By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

53

2. Frontispiece of Margaret Cavendish’s Natures Pictures (London, 1656). By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

133

Abbreviations Works by Margaret Cavendish BW LWC

NP ODS PF PL PPO (1655) PPO (1663) Playes (1662) P and F SL WO

The Description of a New World Called the Blazing-World, 2nd edn. (London, 1668) The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe (London, 1667) Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (London, 1656) Orations of Divers Sorts (London, 1662) Philosophical Fancies (London, 1653) Philosophical Letters (London, 1664) Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London, 1655) Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 2nd edn. (London, 1663) Playes (London, 1662) Poems and Fancies (London, 1653) CCXI Sociable Letters (London, 1664) The Worlds Olio (London, 1655)

Works by Katherine Philips CWKP i

CWKP ii

CWKP iii

Katherine Philips, The Collected Works of Katherine Philips the Matchless Orinda, Volume I: the Poems, ed. Patrick Thomas (Stump Cross: Stump Cross Books, 1990) Katherine Philips, The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, Volume II: the Letters, ed. Patrick Thomas (Stump Cross: Stump Cross Books, 1992) Katherine Philips, The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, Volume III: the Translations, ed. Germaine Greer and Ruth Little (Stump Cross: Stump Cross Books, 1993)

Abbreviations

xii Works by Aphra Behn Poems (1684) Miscellany (1685)

Miscellany (1688)

Poems upon Several Occasions: with a Voyage to the Island of Love (London, 1684) Miscellany, Being a Collection of Poems by Several Hands Together with Reflections on Morality, or Seneca Unmasqued (London, 1685) A Miscellany of New Poems, bound with Lycidus; or, the Lover in Fashion (London, 1688)

Other Abbreviations DNB

ELR EMS HLQ Letters and Poems

N&Q PMLA SEL

Dictionary of National Biography, eds Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1885–1912) English Literary Renaissance English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 Huntington Library Quarterly Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable Princess, Margaret, Dutchess of Newcastle (London, 1676) Notes and Queries Proceedings of the Modern Language Association Studies in English Literature

Introduction 1653 constitutes a landmark in the history of Englishwomen’s writing. For, in that year, Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, published her first printed work, Poems and Fancies, and began an authorial career which was to break new ground on numerous fronts.1 First, she voiced an unprecedentedly bold promotion of herself as a female author. Secondly, she was the first Englishwoman to publish a large collection of secular texts, eagerly embracing the medium of print. Thirdly, her work spanned a wider variety of genres than any of her countrywomen to date, including a range of recognizably literary forms from verse to prose fiction, epistolary writing and plays. This study has its roots in the desire to investigate the historical and literary conditions which enabled such an occurrence and, specifically, in the realization of the vital role played by royalism in fostering Cavendish’s startling emergence. There was certainly a marked upturn in women’s printed publication during the 1640s and 1650s but the majority of texts emanate from the participation of dissenting women in sectarian religious activities such as preaching, prophesying, or producing spiritual autobiographies.2 Margaret Cavendish’s works clearly inaugurate the possibility of a very different model: the woman with a public reputation as an avowedly literary author moving beyond the

1 I have used the title by which Cavendish is most commonly known although her husband, the marquis of Newcastle, did not receive his dukedom until 1665, see Sara Mendelson, The Mental Worlds of Stuart Women: Three Studies (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 50. 2 See Patricia Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings, 1600–1700’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society, 1500–1800 (London: Methuen, 1985), 211–82 (fig. 7.1, 212, 213, 221–3, appendix 2, table 7.3, 269); Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–1688 (London: Virago, 1988), 26–45, 66–74; Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992); Keith Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present, 13 (1958), 42–62.

2

Introduction

notion of religion as a prime motivating force; the birth of the modern woman author. In order to demonstrate the importance of royalism in the inception of the model which persists in literary history from Cavendish onwards, this book pursues case studies of Cavendish and the two other female authors who most visibly achieve similarly prominent and sustained public literary profiles around the pivotal historical moment of the Restoration: Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn. In each case my explorations are informed by a recognition that becoming a widely known woman author means overcoming layers of resistance and that royalist affiliations are central to negotiating such resistance. Although investigating each author in turn permits a nuanced appreciation of the part played by differences of, say, rank, marital circumstances, means of publication, and so on, all three writers grapple in their various ways with the prevalence of assumptions that female authorship is incompatible with the feminine virtues of modesty and chastity which dominate contemporary strictures on women’s conduct. This recurrent motif in Renaissance and seventeenth-century attitudes to women’s writing regarded the exposure and dissemination of texts by women as implicitly connected to the scandalous publicization of the female body.3 Hence the small percentage of printed texts which were written by women and the overwhelming tendency of such texts to manifest an acute consciousness of the potential shame of publication.4 Margaret Ezell offers a salutary reminder that the reluctance to see one’s name or words in print ‘cannot be seen as a peculiarly female trait’.5 Indeed, men sometimes even register anxieties about cheapening themselves by printing their works in terms of the author as sexually shamed woman.6 3 Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings’, 212, 213, 216, 265; Angeline Goreau, The Whole Duty of a Woman: Female Writers in Seventeenth-Century England (Garden City, NY: Dial Press, 1985), 9–17; Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Surprising Fame: Renaissance Gender Ideologies and Women’s Lyric’, in Nancy K. Miller (ed.), The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 74–95 (76–7). 4 See Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings’, 216–17; Goreau, Whole Duty, 13–17; Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, 9. For percentages of women’s printed texts, see Crawford, appendix 2, fig. 7.2, 266. 5 Margaret J. M. Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 87, 65. 6 See Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1, 3, 169, 221.

Introduction

3

However, it must be acknowledged that, for men, such formulations can operate as playful rhetorical archness, whereas for women they embody expectations specific to their gender which impact materially on their lives. Cavendish and Behn present authorial images which are, in their different ways, innovatively disregarding of the idea that women’s publication is shameful. Meanwhile, their critics predictably reiterate the notion that they are infringing feminine propriety. For the poet, Robert Gould, Behn stands as living proof that the roles of ‘punk and Poetess’ are synonymous while John Stansby brands Cavendish as ‘Shame of her Sex, Welbeck’s illustrious whore’.7 In contrast, Katherine Philips cultivates an apparently more propitiatory approach to those who feel squeamish about women’s printed publication, professing reluctance to venture beyond manuscript.8 Yet, although this does enable her to preserve a more pristine image as a female author, ‘the matchless Orinda’, she is clearly as involved as Cavendish or Behn in attempting to build a public literary profile in a manner which far outstrips the efforts of any of their predecessors.9 As Chapter 2 shows, the remarkable extent of her manuscript circulation along with the printing of three individual poems and her previously performed play, Pompey (1663), lends her a public reputation even before the first printing of her collected verse in 1664. Although Peter Beal convincingly questions Germaine Greer’s suggestion that Philips initially promoted the release of this volume, he demonstrates that social and literary ambition rather than modest feminine avoidance of print per se 7 Robert Gould, Poems, ii (1709), 16, quoted in Mendelson, The Mental Worlds, 162. John Stansby, epitaph on the Duchess of Newcastle, Bodleian, MS Ashmole 36, fol. 186v, quoted in Mendelson, Mental Worlds, 60. Although Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 5–6, cautions that Gould also ‘bestowed warm praise’ on other women writers including Philips, I use his lines to illustrate the ready availability of this critical rhetoric. Nevertheless, my study goes on to dispute, as Hughes does, the notion of an ‘ “a priori” Restoration identification of authoress and whore’ (ibid. 1). 8 See Philips’s letter to ‘Poliarchus’—Sir Charles Cotterell, the master of ceremonies at Charles II’s court—(29 Jan. 1664), quoted in the preface to the posthumous edn. of her Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs Katherine Philips (London, 1667), A1r–A2v. See also editorial comments, a1r, A1r; dedication of her play Pompey, in Poems (London, 1667), Fff1r, Fff2r; Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus (London, 1705), esp. 230. 9 The epithet ‘the matchless Orinda’ is immortalized in the running title of her Poems (1667).

4

Introduction

were the reasons for her repudiating its publication.10 Beal, like Ezell, notes that the printing of Philips’s Poems (1664) risked infringing her painstakingly pursued insertion of herself within elite and ultimately courtly circles, owing to the social and textual vicissitudes of potentially unfettered printed circulation.11 Yet he acknowledges that her desire for literary and social recognition ‘led her to allow numbers of manuscript copies of her works to be made and circulated indiscriminately—almost as if, in a sense, they were print’.12 Philips, Behn, and Cavendish then negotiate the implicit moral objections to the exposure of women’s text in different ways. All three succeed in building sustained careers as publicly known literary authors in a manner unmatched by earlier women writers. A further significant aspect of their novelty lies in the way in which their works do not make use of overtly religious pretexts as the key means of justifying their authorship, a device which dominates earlier Renaissance and seventeenth-century women’s writing and continues into the work of many of their contemporaries.13 The notion that the author was simply acting in obedience to God’s commands could mitigate not only the potential shamefulness of certain types of women’s writing but also circumnavigate the fact that, merely in becoming authors, women challenged their lack of autonomy in relation to men. Legally speaking, the majority of women were femmes couvertes, the property of their husbands or fathers.14 Their assumption of 10 Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in SeventeenthCentury England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 162–5; Germaine Greer, SlipShod Sybils: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (London: Viking, 1995), 147–72. 11 Beal, In Praise of Scribes, 164, 165; Ezell, Patriarch’s Wife, 86. 12 Beal, In Praise of Scribes, 165. 13 See Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 87–122; Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings’, 221, 227; Margaret Patterson Hannay (ed.), Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, (Kent, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 4, 5; Elaine Hobby, ‘ “Discourse so Unsavoury”: Women’s Published Writings of the 1650s’, in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (eds.), Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740 (London: Batsford, 1992), 16–32 (23–4); Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, 27, 54–66; Mack, Visionary Women, 24–8, 32, 33; Mendelson, ‘Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs’, in Prior (ed.), Women in English Society, 181–210 (185). 14 T. E., The Lawes Resolutions of Women’s Rights; or, the Lawes Provision for Women (London, 1632), 6, 125; Roger Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America: A Comparative Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 162–4.

Introduction

5

authorship not only risked locating them in a more autonomous relationship to the marketplace (in cases where their texts were sold) but implied a claim to linguistic autonomy also at odds with their lack of legal subjecthood.15 The anxiety to reassure readers that they are not usurping masculine autonomy is apparent in the strategies adopted by a number of women in exposing their texts for public consumption. As some depict themselves as mere agents of the divine author so others devolve responsibility for publication, or even composition, onto husbands, fathers, or male editors of various kinds.16 Against a background of women’s authorial self-constructions which deny personal agency, the images presented by Cavendish, Philips, and Behn stand out since, despite their tonal differences, all three appear willing to lay claim to a far greater level of autonomy. As Philips writes in lines addressed to her Parliamentarian husband when his radical Puritan political opponents threaten to embarrass him by publishing her verses championing a royalist standpoint: ‘My love and life I must confesse are thine, | But not my errours, they are only mine.’17 In foregrounding the role of royalism in assisting Philips, along with Cavendish and Behn, to find fresh ways of negotiating entrenched resistances to women’s writing, this study aims to put women writers back on the map of seventeenth-century royalist literature. For even the recent efflorescence of compelling new studies specifically addressed to the topic of royalist literature has marginalized female authors and failed to recognize the degree to which women were shaping and participating in the kind of 15 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, with an introduction by Kenneth Minogue, Everyman Classics (London: J. M. Dent, 1987), part i, ch. 16, 84, 85, stresses the connection between linguistic self-determination and property-based legal autonomy at stake in the term ‘author’. 16 See e.g. Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse (1650), facs. repr. with an introduction by Josephine K. Piercy (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1965), A3v, A5v; ‘M.T. to the Reader’ in [Diego Ortunez de Calahorra], The First Part of the Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood, tr. M[argaret] T[yler] (London, 1578). For further similar examples, see Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, 66, 67, 89. 17 Philips, ‘To Antenor, on a paper of mine which J. Jones threatens to publish to his prejudice’, ll. 7–8, in The Collected Works of Katherine Philips the Matchless Orinda, i. The Poems, ed. Patrick Thomas (Stump Cross: Stump Cross Books, 1990) (hereafter CWKP i). All subsequent references to Philips’s poems are to this edn. For a further discussion of the background to this episode, see CWKP i. 321.

6

Introduction

royalist political coding which motivates a number of these studies.18 This is not to say that we must now transplant them naively from a category of ‘women’s writing’ to one of ‘political writing’; rather that we need to recognize the vital interplay between questions of gender and questions of political identity in their work. Where there have been attempts to understand the appeal of royalism to late seventeenth-century women writers, they have tended to produce overarching explanations which elide important distinctions. Hence my decision to focus in detail on three writers with the intention of doing justice not only to their literary subtleties but to the particularities of the different contexts within which the political dimension of their works needs to be understood. My insistence on the contrasts as well as the continuities between Cavendish, Philips, and Behn questions Carol Barash’s readiness to posit a royalist ‘tradition’ in her examination of late seventeenth-century women’s verse.19 Whilst she points to highly illuminating connections between the work of Katherine Philips and the later poets, Anne Killigrew, Jane Barker, and Anne Finch, this trio’s evident shared context as connected to the court of James II and his wife, Mary of Modena, appears to overdetermine her readings of earlier writers as part of a ‘tradition’.20 In further contrast to Barash’s approach, this present study begins from the premiss that an examination of the links between royalism and women’s writing in this period must give fuller recognition both to the significance of writing in genres outside verse and to the importance of Margaret Cavendish. 18 Raymond A. Anselment, Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988); Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (eds.), Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: the Drawn Sword (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writings: Royalist Literature, 1640–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) all contain little or nothing on royalist women writers. The notable exception is Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), with two pertinent essays: Robert C. Evans, ‘Paradox and Politics: Katherine Philips in the Interregnum’, 174–185, and Elizabeth Clarke, ‘The Garrisoned Muse: Women’s Use of the Religious Lyric in the Civil War Period’, 130–43. 19 Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 2. 20 For discussions of the links between Philips and these writers, see e.g. Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 15, 164–5, 182–5, 195–8, 260, 282–4.

Introduction

7

Although Cavendish is central to the accounts produced by Hilda Smith and Catherine Gallagher in exploring the nexus of royalism and women’s writing in the late seventeenth century their designation of the writers in question as ‘feminists’ seems too totalizing and anachronistic.21 It is Smith’s interest in feminism, which she defines as a critique of women’s systematic disadvantages as a ‘sociological group’, which leads her to put forward the overly generalized idea that the ‘political and religious conservatism’ of the writers she examines ‘perhaps made them especially aware of, and pleased to point out how sexually circumscribed were the glowing definitions of liberty which emerged from [the Civil War] period’.22 Meanwhile, Gallagher advances the more suggestive theory that monarchical absolutism provided a model of the authority of the individual subject which proved empowering for writers such as Cavendish and Astell.23 Such an explanation undoubtedly illuminates some of Cavendish’s texts and yet fails to take account of the multifarious specific strands which connect writing, royalism, and gender in her work. Nor does it account for the differences between what it means for, say, Philips (a coterie poet with a Puritan background writing in the 1650s) to be a royalist woman writer as opposed to, say, Behn (a professional poet and Tory propagandist working in the 1670s and 1680s). Yet, this book shares with Gallagher and Smith an interest in exploring how an undeniably reactionary and patriarchal ideology in royalism can, seemingly paradoxically, enhance female agency by creating opportunities for authorship and catalysing innovative approaches to the literary representation of gender. By anatomizing the instances of Cavendish, Philips, and Behn within their localized contexts it demonstrates the multi-faceted nature of pre- and post-Restoration royalist cultures which embrace the signifying power not only of Filmerian patriarchalism but of idealized images of femininity which function as more than merely cyphers for the three authors. The particular conditions of historical upheaval within which they operate open up the possibility for women’s 21 Hilda L. Smith, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Catherine Gallagher, ‘Embracing the Absolute: the Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England’, Genders, 1 (Spring 1988), 24–39 (1). 22 Hilda Smith, Reason’s Disciples, 4, 10. 23 Gallagher, ‘Embracing the Absolute’, 25.

8

Introduction

authorial self-assertion to become an embodiment of the aspirations of individual royalist men or male groupings. Where Earl Miner or, more recently, James Loxley, produce models of royalist literary and political culture as rooted in male homosociality, my analysis shows not only that individual women writers can have an important place amongst groups of their male peers but that literary enactments of female homosociality have a value for male and female royalist audiences alike.24 Carol Barash regards the belief in a divinely ordained monarchical power as the basis for forging notions of a ‘specifically female linguistic authority’ or ‘a myth about the divine origin of women’s separate poetic language’ (my emphasis) but this book stresses the links between the literary activities of the three women whose work it examines and that of their male royalist counterparts.25 In addition to uncovering hitherto neglected sources and analogues for texts by the three women, it argues for the perceived pertinence of their work amongst male contemporaries for whom supporting their endeavours could be an act of political self-definition. This process involves something more subtle than a simple quid pro quo whereby men tolerate writing by women if it voices their political views at a moment of ideological polarization. Similarly it is reductive to suggest that the expression of royalist sentiments by Cavendish, Philips, and Behn serves merely as a Trojan horse in which to conceal their authorial ambitions. To offer such an interpretation is to belittle the strength of their political commitment and to prioritize particular motivations in a way which denies the complex mixture of individual drives, historical circumstances, and coincidental opportunities which shapes their emergence as literary figures. Hence my efforts to provide a close examination of the interplay between apparent intention and historical influence in the case of each writer and to depart from a model in which a particular period of socio-political upheaval is seen to replicate a particular response in the work of different writers. A comparison between Cavendish, Philips, and Behn as royalist authors eloquently illustrates the need to acknowledge the potential diversity of the label ‘political writer’ for the period in question. 24 See Loxley, Royalism and Poetry; Earl Miner, The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). 25 Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1, 22.

Introduction

9

Although a certain amount of Margaret Cavendish’s writing engages political material, the transmission of a specific political message often appears subsidiary to the concerns of philosophical, rhetorical, or literary experimentation. Indeed, her propensity for dialogic forms can make it hard confidently to identify her own particular opinion—a fact which she explicitly uses in self-defence when countering criticisms of her book of orations: ‘I am as much an Enemy to Vice, as I am a Friend to Virtue . . . for surely the Wisest, and Eloquentest Orators, have not been Ashamed to Defend Vices . . . ? for my Orations for the most part are Declamations wherein I speak Pro and Con, and Determine nothing’.26 Nevertheless, Emma Rees has argued persuasively for a subtler recognition of the ways in which Cavendish’s manipulations of generic convention can, in themselves, be expressions of a royalist politics beyond the particular expression of localized opinions.27 While acknowledging that her work contains examples of other political viewpoints, then, my own main concern in this book is to show how her cultural and historical positioning as a royalist shapes and catalyses her emergence as a highly visible author.28 The impact of her royalist affiliations on her authorial emergence in the 1650s surfaces in the way in which her undeniable personal fascination with the idea of becoming a widely acclaimed author 26 Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters (1664), C2r. Indeed, in Margaret Cavendish, Political Writings, ed. Susan James, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. xxii, James contends that ‘by introducing sets of speeches, she both breaks the rules of formal rhetoric and introduces the thought that there are sometimes more than two sides to a question’. However, James (ibid., p. ix) concludes that, overall, Cavendish’s political philosophy is primarily concerned with how to preserve the stability of a monarchist state. 27 Emma L. E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 28 For a stimulating analysis of examples of non-royalist thinking in Cavendish’s texts, see Mihoko Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 182–202. Yet Suzuki’s case for Cavendish’s ‘ambiguous royalism’ (182) includes a recognition of her elusively dialectic rhetorical technique (188, 188 n. 23, 189). See also David Norbrook, ‘Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson: Identity, Ideology, and Politics’, In-Between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism, 9/1–2 (2000), 179–203 (190); Hilda Smith, ‘ “A General War Amongst the Men . . . But None Amongst the Women”: Political Differences between Margaret and William Cavendish’, in Howard Nenner (ed.), Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain: Essays Presented to Lois Green Schwoerer (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 143–60.

10

Introduction

coalesces with the need to respond to extreme status anxieties with regard to her family and social rank in the aftermath of the Civil War. These imperatives to maintain a highly visible and magnificent public profile find articulation, in part, through discursive and iconographical traditions of representing femininity valorized by contemporary royalism. In tracing the part played by such traditions in Cavendish’s fashioning of an authorial image, I chart fresh pathways of literary influence on her work. Chapter 3 returns to the significance of the motif of exile in some of her writings, but Chapter 1 also argues the importance of her role as the wife of an exiled royalist military commander in shaping the character and reception of her work.29 Although her flamboyant style of selfprojection and eager espousal of the printed medium contrast with Philips’s more muted approach, the first chapter demonstrates the catalytic influence on Cavendish of royalist literary networks, including the London literary circles which nurtured Philips. Where the literary and socio-political engagements of Cavendish’s immediate family (and especially of her husband) support her emergence as a public author, Katherine Philips’s authorial development occurs as a process of self-definition against the prevailing political and religious sympathies of her nearest relations. Brought up as a Puritan and married to a Parliamentarian colonel, Philips was drawn to royalism through friendships she made with other girls at Mrs Salmon’s school in Hackney. This, in turn, put her in touch with the 1650s circle of royalist literary production around Henry Lawes, former master of the King’s music.30 While Cavendish was certainly encouraged by Lawes’s milieu, Philips was taken to the heart of his coterie and it is coterie manuscript circulation which lies at the root of her emergence as a political author. For Cavendish, the support of her husband in a shared political project leads to his promoting the lavish printed publication of her texts which—despite the gesture of attempting partly to define a select readership by presenting copies to the two 29 Anna Battigelli’s contention in Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 5, that ‘In [Cavendish’s] hands her life story and her husband’s became iconic myths of the “exiled cavalier” ’ seems rather too broad, with exile as a less actively instrumental factor in her authorial emergence than I am arguing. Finally, Battigelli is most interested in exile as a habitual, critical ‘rhetorical stance’ for Cavendish (7). 30 See CWKP i. 1–3, 4, 5, 6.

Introduction

11

universities—marks a dramatic break with the more familiar manuscript mode of aristocratic female authorship exemplified by the earlier writings of her step-daughters.31 Meanwhile, the apparent circumscriptions of coterie manuscript circulation provide Philips with a way into politicized literary discourse as a woman. Yet the instance of her writings serves as a reminder of the far from ‘private’ character of seventeenth-century manuscript culture. Her texts are remarkably widely circulated and the so-called ‘Society’ of friendship which she cultivates through this mode of transmission crucially nurtures political as much as personal alliances and reflections. By the time her collected poems are printed in 1664 they are able to present her as a political writer who quickly dispatches any perceived sense of indecorum in her being also a woman. Opening with lines written in condemnation of the execution of Charles I, the volume determinedly seeks to ‘excuse the breach of nature’s lawes’ which may be suggested in a female author’s approaching matters of ‘state’ by asserting that ‘Silence were now a Sin’.32 The political nature of the first group of poems which follows is self-evident as they celebrate the Restoration or address key figures in the royal family. Yet, the main body of succeeding poems hold far subtler political implications and it is these which Chapter 2 seeks to expose by situating their dominant theme of friendship within the context of 1650s royalism and, in particular, the friendship writings of Philips’s immediate circle. As in the examination of Cavendish’s rhetoric of female heroism in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 shows how Philips’s rise as an author is assisted by the fact that her gender makes her especially well-placed to articulate values or ideals which are seen to have specific pertinence to Interregnum royalists of both sexes. It further demonstrates that, although the Restoration alters the meanings of friendship in Philips’s work, they remain highly politically significant in her renderings of Corneille’s drama and shape perceptions of her worth as a translator. While the first two chapters of this study show Cavendish and Philips operating very differently as political writers, Chapter 3 31 Ezell, Patriarch’s Wife, 62, points out that women’s MS writing far outweighed their printed output in the period. 32 Philips, ‘Upon the double murther of K. Charles, in answer to a libellous rime made by V.P.’, ll. 6, 1, 7.

Introduction

12

points out their shared concern with feminized spaces of retreat or interiority, arguing that these participate in the Interregnum royalist impetus to represent the space of retirement or inwardness as the actual centre of power. Here again, idealized notions of the feminine are shown as significant for male royalists too, in contrast to James Loxley’s reading of royalist verse as primarily concerned with the reassertion of a militaristically conceived masculinity. Philips’s verse develops the notion found elsewhere in contemporary royalist writing that political agency may exist apart from its conventional military or governmental expressions and underlines the fact that this constitutes more than a simple strategy of quietistic evasion. The borrowing from her verses to be found in the manuscript writings of imprisoned Restoration Puritan, Robert Overton, attests to the resonance of these ideas beyond the Interregnum royalist context of their inception. Although Cavendish’s explorations of empowerment through retreat forge far fewer direct links with the wider political dilemmas of her contemporaries they provide a central catalyst to her fantasies of enhanced female agency. Although this can entail the representation of feminized withdrawal as a means of sublimating thwarted female ambitions in the realm of conventional political action, it also enables her marked transformations of communal female retirement as a dramatic motif drawing on the political dynamics of closet drama. In suggesting that there are places in Cavendish’s work where the model of royalist exile can facilitate ideas of agency—even collective agency—through retreat, Chapter 3 diverges from Anna Battigelli’s contention that exile leads Cavendish to figure her texts as the isolationist ‘exiles of the mind’.33 It also complements Emma Rees’s highly illuminating analysis of the political implications of structure and especially genre in Cavendish’s work by questioning the notion that Cavendish’s work expresses the ‘powerlessness’ associated with exile.34 Chapters 1–3, then, show how (even after the Restoration) the experience of royalist exile and defeat are central to the legitimation of Cavendish’s and Philips’s authorial voices as women writers and highly influential in their representations of gender 33 34

Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind, 9. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile, 5. See also 26–7.

Introduction

13

relations. However, for Behn, as a pro-Stuart writer of the 1670s and 1680s, the notion of exile is no longer available in the same way as an idealized alternative to the material realm of political machination, just as the paradoxical freedoms discovered by Cavendish in closet drama give way to the public, performative nature of the restored theatre. Where Behn does use the motif of exile in her plays, it releases neither the uncompromisingly heroic associations mobilized by Cavendish nor the idealizations of retreat promulgated by her as by Philips. Instead, Behn’s figurations of the Interregnum period become a dark mirror of the shifts and compromises which she detects in pro-Stuart politics from the 1650s through to the 1680s. In one sense, writing after the Restoration means that Behn is able to be more overt in her expression of pro-Stuart sentiments (as Philips was in the occasional poems which open her printed volume of 1664 as compared to the poems it contains which were composed during the 1650s). Yet the unsurprisingly acute political sensitivities of the restored monarchist regime and the political vicissitudes of post-Restoration decades—especially the late 1670s and 1680s in the aftermath of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis—necessitate some continuation of the political coding which characterizes royalist literature pre-1660. In turning to examine Behn’s plays, Chapter 4 investigates in particular the coding of political meaning through the medium of gender relations. Such a literary strategy evidently has broad links with the manner in which Philips’s verse generates its political meanings. In Philips’s case though, the marginalized condition of royalists in the 1650s paves the way for her male royalist readers to identify with the political resonance of the qualities embodied by the feminine in her verse. With the royalist resumption of traditional externalized forms of power in 1660, however, there is a marked move towards the reinstatement of separate spheres of male and female political agency. The model of agency through retreat which enables some conceptualization of a parity of political engagement for royalist men and women in the 1650s is no longer to the fore and women remain excluded from the public offices regained by their male counterparts. It is against this background that Behn helps to forge the notion that women’s distinct location within the economy of heterosexual relations may, in itself, articulate a politics.

14

Introduction

Drawing on the political charge acquired by erotic freedom in Tory celebrations of the restored theatre—and especially on their politicization of the public figure of the actress—Behn and her panegyrists construct an empowering authorial image in which feminine erotic potency and Stuart loyalism are intimately connected. The eroticization of Tory femininity in the climate of a newly libertine court culture and theatre allows fresh inflections of the politicized rhetoric of female heroism at work in Cavendish’s authorial image, enabling Behn to circumnavigate the habitual equation between female authorship and unchastity. Nevertheless, where I have suggested that an understanding of the relations between royalism and the feminine in Philips’s Interregnum verse can elicit a response of identification from politically sympathetic male (and female) contemporaries, Behn’s eroticized authorial image invites male readers and audiences to express their political recognition through the more gender-polarized response of desire. In Behn’s pindaric odes in particular, we see her registering the limitations of the eroticized authorial image and seeking to assert her agency as a political writer distinct from the limitations of this construction. In her plays too she interrogates the idea that sexual libertinism can provide an equally satisfactory expression of pro-Stuart loyalties for men and women alike. She puts the spotlight on the economic necessities constraining women and her plays expose the manner in which economic imperatives governing both male and female conduct undermine the idealistic rhetorics of Tory loyalty. Although she draws on the contemporary Tory association of Whiggism with the excessive privileging of the mercantile, she makes particular use of the female characters in her plays as victims and agents of an economic necessity which is no respecter of party boundaries. Unlike Cavendish and Philips then, Behn’s status as a commercial author leads her to attend far more concertedly to the interface between political and economic concerns which is also foregrounded in the rhetoric of party oppositions which characterizes her period. In addition, her engagement with the marketplaces of print and the theatre encourages her to become a far more selfconscious political writer than either Philips or Cavendish, drawn closer to propaganda but also using her innovative prose fictions as a space to explore the political leverage available to the writer

Introduction

15

through control over literary representation. Nevertheless, if Behn’s writings are markedly more self-reflexive in their scrutiny of the literary mechanisms of political persuasion, Philips and Cavendish are certainly as self-conscious in their creation of politically inflected authorial personae as the next two chapters indicate.

1

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’: Margaret Cavendish and the Images of the Author ‘For all I desire, is Fame, and Fame is nothing but a great noise, and noise lives most in a Multitude; wherefore I wish my Book may set a worke every Tongue’.1 Ever since the seventeenth century, such examples of Cavendish’s unprecedentedly self-assertive stance as a woman writer have been explained by critics as the result of her supposed psychological eccentricity. Pepys admits to having ‘stayed at home reading the ridiculous history of my Lord Newcastle, wrote by his wife, which shows her to be a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman’.2 Another contemporary, Dorothy Osborne, instructs William Temple that he ‘need not send me my Lady Newcastle’s book at all, for I have seen it, and am satisfied there are many soberer people in Bedlam’.3 A significant portion of twentiethcentury criticism is pervaded by a similar sense of the centrality of Cavendish’s putative mental irregularities. For Jean Gagen, Cavendish is an ‘odd but lovable author’ whose reiterated desire to achieve ‘fame’ through publication registers a ‘neurotic pride’ arising out of her professed shyness.4 Meanwhile, Gilbert and Gubar construe her as a sort of paradigmatic madwoman in the attic of 1

Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies (London, 1653), A3r (hereafter P and

F). 2 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (London: G. Bell, 1970–83), ix. 123 (18 Mar. 1668). 3 Dorothy Osborne, The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple, 1652–1654, ed. Kingsley Hart (London: Folio Society, 1968), 58. 4 Jean Gagen, ‘Honor and Fame in the Works of the Duchess of Newcastle’, Studies in Philology, 56 (1959), 519–38 (537, 538). See also Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989), 56.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

17

literary history, claiming that ‘finally the contradictions between her attitude toward her gender and her sense of her own vocation seem really to have made her in some sense “mad” ’.5 This chapter challenges such approaches by arguing that her unusually forthright presentation of herself as a female author is not the product of psychological factors but of the cultural and historical conditions of Interregnum royalism. This begins to become apparent if we elaborate her connections with one of the most important royalist literary networks of her day.

cavendish and the henry lawes circle The literary network which most immediately impinged on Margaret Cavendish was that spearheaded by her husband, William, and his daughters from his first marriage, Elizabeth and Jane. Chapter 3 explores relationships between Margaret Cavendish’s texts and writings by William and his daughters. Yet, while the support of her husband and the literary efforts of her step-daughters must surely have spurred her to compete as a woman author I wish to argue for the importance of the additional influence of literary networks beyond the Cavendish family. One of these comprises Oxford University poets whose impact is most evident in Cavendish’s heroic self-representations, as discussed later in this chapter. The other is the Henry Lawes circle which appears to have played a significant role in Cavendish’s bold decision to print her works at all. From 1630 onwards Henry Lawes occupied a post as servant to Charles I in his private, and ultimately also public, music.6 During the Commonwealth Lawes held music-meetings in his London home which served as a place for royalists to gather.7 As an 5 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 63. See also Bridget MacCarthy, Women Writers: Their Contribution to the English Novel (Cork: Cork University Press, 1944), 66; Hilda L. Smith, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 78. 6 For Lawes’s career, see Willa McClung Evans, Henry Lawes: Musician and Friend of Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941). 7 Patrick Thomas, Katherine Philips (‘Orinda’) (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988), 9–10.

18

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

offshoot of these activities he published three books of Ayres, and Dialogues (1653, 1655, 1658). The verse which he set to music in these texts came from the pens of an array of royalist figures including, in the first volume, Margaret Cavendish’s late brother, Sir Charles Lucas, who had been killed at the siege of Colchester in 1648.8 The barely disguised royalist sentiments of Lucas’s poem ‘Love and Loyalty’ set the tone for a number of the contributions. Inviting ‘Lucasta’ to join him in ‘this Arbour’, Lucas asserts: This Evening’s worth Ten Thousand yeere, Then let’s resolve since thou must go, We’l meet again to morrow here, Would Kings and Queens might do so too.9

As she mentions in her autobiography, ‘A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life’, Cavendish herself made several visits to Lawes’s house during her trip to London to petition Parliament for her husband’s sequestered estates between November 1651 and March 1653.10 She may have had a particular entrée through her husband, for Lawes had been a music teacher in the Egerton family into which her step-daughter, Elizabeth Cavendish, had married to become the wife of John Egerton, Viscount Brackley.11 In 1634 the young John Egerton had acted the role of the Elder Brother alongside Lawes as the Attendant Spirit in Milton’s Comus.12 A further possible connection between Lawes and Margaret Cavendish exists in the patronage of her sister Elizabeth’s husband, Sir William Walter, for another former court musician, John Wilson, during the 1640s.13 Wilson’s admiring verses ‘To my beloved Friend and 8 Kathleen Jones, A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673 (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), 70. 9 Henry Lawes, Select Musicall Ayres, and Dialogues (London, 1653), 25. 10 Margaret Cavendish, ‘A True Relation’, in Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (London, 1656), 379–82 (hereafter NP). See also Margaret Cavendish, The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe (London, 1667), 70–4 (hereafter LWC). Douglas Grant, Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957), 108–32, establishes the dates of this visit. 11 Evans, Henry Lawes, 172 n. 2 also remarks on this connection between Cavendish and Lawes. 12 John Milton, The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1968), 168. 13 DNB indicates that Wilson entered Sir William’s household in 1646. Sir William had married Elizabeth Lucas in 1632, see Grant, Margaret the First, 40.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

19

Fellow, Mr. HENRY LAWES’ preface Lawes’s Second Book of Ayres, and Dialogues.14 The respectful public exposure accorded to the artistic endeavours of women in Lawes’s circle must surely have helped galvanize Cavendish’s publication. Arguing that Cavendish’s writing ‘was both fostered by and participates in, the ongoing theatrical culture of the Interregnum’, Sophie Tomlinson remarks on her attendance at Lawes’s music-meetings.15 Alice Egerton, Lawes’s pupil, had sung with him in Comus and continued to perform with him in a relatively public setting many years later as indicated in manuscript verses entitled, ‘A Hymenall Song. On a Cellebration of the Nuptials of the Right Hoble John, Lord Brackley, and his virtuous Lady, After the Birth of their First Son; performed by the Lady Alice Egerton, his Lordship’s sister; and Henry Lawes, an Humble Servant to the Hoble family’.16 It is very possible that the duo sang together again at the same couple’s tenth wedding anniversary celebrations on 22 July 1652 as John Berkenhead’s lines for the occasion are set by Lawes ‘for 2 voices’.17 Cavendish was then in England and may conceivably have been present. The climate of support for female musical achievement propagated by Lawes is apparent in his dedication of the first volume of Ayres, and Dialogues to his two most treasured pupils, Mary, Lady Herbert of Cherbury, and Alice, Countess of Carbury (both née Egerton) (a2r). The second volume of Ayres, and Dialogues also has a female dedicatee in Lady Mary Dering, wife to Sir Edward, who is praised for her musical settings of some of her husband’s verses which feature in the text (a2r).18 Lawes’s dedication compliments Lady Dering on her ‘performance’ of ‘those Songs which fill this Book’ (a2r). The volume’s commendatory verses to Lawes from various royalist luminaries open with pieces by the poet Katherine Philips Henry Lawes, Second Book of Ayres, and Dialogues (London, 1655), b2r. Sophie Tomlinson, ‘Theatrical Women: The Female Actor in English Theatre and Drama, 1603–1670’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1996), 236. 16 Reprinted in Evans, Henry Lawes, 172–3. 17 Ibid. 191, suggests that Lawes and Alice Egerton performed music for these celebrations together. Berkenhead’s lines are reprinted in Lawes, Ayres, and Dialogues (1653), 33, as ‘An Anniversary on the Nuptials of John Earle of Bridgewater’. 18 For Mary Deering’s compositions, see Lawes, Ayres, and Dialogues (1655), 24, 25 (mispaginated 45). Evans, Henry Lawes, 190, asserts that Lawes gave Deering music lessons during 1649. 14 15

20

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

and one of Lawes’s pupils, Mary Knight. Knight’s importance for the Lawes circle is apparent in Willa McClung Evans’s discovery that contemporary accounts suggest she was probably the performer of Lawes’s most acclaimed piece, the Ariadne, notably the first song in the first volume of Ayres, and Dialogues.19 John Playford’s Select Ayres . . . the Second Book features rapturous verses ‘Upon the Hearing Mrs. MARY KNIGHT Sing’.20 The significance of women’s contribution in Lawes’s circle is further suggested by his prefatory stress on having ‘Printed the Greek in a Roman Character, for the ease of Musitians of both Sexes’.21 It seems likely that Cavendish was inspired by the fact that Lawes and his circle were nurturing the poetic efforts of Katherine Philips who had been active in their milieu since the early 1650s.22 So far, it is impossible to say whether Cavendish ever met Philips or even whether Philips attended Lawes’s music-meetings in person. Cavendish may have heard of Philips from figures in the latter’s circle who, in 1650, fled to Antwerp where the Newcastles were living in exile.23 Philips’s first printed poem, her elegy for royalist, William Cartwright, certainly appeared during the year in which Cavendish began her Interregnum visit to London, heralding a list of commendatory verses by Lawes and others in their circle in the highprofile edition of Cartwright’s works.24 Philips’s verse was apparently also circulating in manuscript and, as an avowedly royalist woman poet cherished by a group of like-minded male contemporaries, she is likely to have captured Cavendish’s imagination.25 Cavendish’s contact with Lawes and his circle provides one convincing explanation of her particular decision to begin printing her works during her petitioning visit to London, despite already having begun to write some three years earlier.26 It seems likely that she became energized not only by the support for female singers, composers, and poets which she encountered amongst this 19 20

Evans, Henry Lawes, 214; Lawes, Ayres, and Dialogues (1653), 1. John Playford, Select Ayres and Dialogues the Second Book (London, 1669), 21 Lawes, Ayres, and Dialogues (1655), a2v. 22 See below, Ch. 2. 29. 23 See CWKP i. 16. Philips’s poem, ‘To the Queen of inconstancie, Regina, in Antwerp’ provides specific evidence that another of her acquaintances was in the Dutch city during the early 1650s when the poem appears to have been written, see 24 See below, Ch. 3. CWKP i. 349. 25 For further discussion of all these aspects of Philips’s work, see below, Ch. 2. 26 See Margaret Cavendish, The Worlds Olio (London, 1655), A3v (hereafter WO).

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

21

royalist coterie but by Lawes’s model of disseminating texts as a gesture of political opposition on the part of dispossessed royalists. Her express claim that she is in a hurry to get her work published owing to her ‘desire (to have those Works Printed in England, which I wrote in England, before I leave England)’, reinforces the notion that her texts represent a form of political resistance in the teeth of royalist exile.27 Such a perspective is enhanced when one recognizes the significance of her printed publications as acts of defiance on behalf of a politically excluded husband.

Marriage to Newcastle On the last page of her first published work, Poems and Fancies (1653), Margaret Cavendish claims: ‘A Poet I am neither borne, nor bred, | But to a witty Poet married’ (238 [mispaginated 214]). She goes on to describe her husband’s brain as the garden from which she gathers her ‘Posie up in Verse’, concluding; ‘Thus I, that have no Garden of mine owne, | There gather Flowers that are newly blowne’ (ibid.)28 Cavendish’s emphasis on the centrality of the role played by her husband in the authorial process may be seen as a gesture of self-effacement akin to that frequently discernible in the writings of her female predecessors and contemporaries.29 Yet, despite Emma Rees’s contention that Cavendish is ‘acutely aware of the potency of the topos of humility or modesty’ in contrast to her husband’s far bolder prefatory tone, her invocation of William’s sanction plays a key part in enabling the unprecedentedly selfaffirming rhetoric of feminine authorship in which she frankly and repeatedly states her zeal to win public acclaim through printing her works: ‘my Ambition is such, as I would either be a World, or nothing’ (P and F A6r).30 In order to understand this phenomenon it is 27 Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical Fancies (London, 1653), B6r–B6v (hereafter PF). 28 See also WO A2r, E2r, H2r; Margaret Cavendish, Orations of Divers Sorts (London, 1662), a1r; Margaret Cavendish, Playes (London, 1662), A3r; Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical Letters (London, 1664), a1r (hereafter respectively ODS, 29 See above, Introduction. Playes (1662), PL). 30 See also, e.g. Margaret Cavendish, The Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London, 1655), B1r, B3r (hereafter PPO (1655)); P and F A4r–A4v; PF A2r; WO A1v, 135–6; NP c1r; PL b2r. Emma Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 31. For a close textual

22

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

necessary to consider the particular historical events which impinged upon her marriage. When he began courting his future wife in Paris, in 1645, William Cavendish had been labelled a ‘Delinquent’ and a ‘Traitor’ by Parliament and discredited in the eyes of many of his most illustrious royalist contemporaries who looked unfavourably upon his defeat at Marston Moor and subsequent summary flight. Despite his former position as commander of the King’s forces in the north of England, his influence continued to fade from this point onwards and he was forced into political and military retirement.31 In such circumstances, Margaret Cavendish’s legal designation as a femme couverte, effectively the property of her husband, provided her with a licence positively to embrace the printed publication of her texts. In view of her husband’s ignoble silencing and exclusion from public affairs, she, as the legal function of his identity, might serve as his surrogate. The public dissemination of her texts, containing words avowedly owned and sanctioned by him, could be regarded as a symbolic challenge to his disenfranchisement. Her own martial metaphor of her brain as ‘a Magazine’ storing up her husband’s ‘wise discourse’ implicitly links the printing of her texts with a resistance to the muzzling of her husband precipitated by military events (PF A4v). Cavendish’s experiences as a petitioner may be seen to have encouraged her to use the notion that she was a spokesperson for her exiled husband as a means of finding a voice in print. It seems noteworthy that her first works were printed in London during the visit when she not only encountered Henry Lawes and his circle but petitioned Parliament for William Cavendish’s sequestered estates. The memoirs of Margaret Cavendish’s contemporary, Lady Anne Fanshawe, provide a parallel example of a royalist woman for whom being sent back to London alone to try and secure funds on behalf of her husband offers an enabling reconciliation between analysis of Cavendish’s troping of conjugal reciprocity as a legitimation of singular authorship, see Kate Lilley, ‘ “Margaret Newcastle” and the Rhetoric of Conjugality’, in Stephen Clucas (ed.), A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 19–39. 31 See NP 379; LWC 71, 55; William Cavendish, The Phanseys of William Cavendish, ed. Douglas Grant (London: Nonesuch Press, 1956), pp. x–xi; Sara Mendelson, The Mental Worlds of Stuart Women: Three Studies (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 19, 27, 39–40.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

23

wifely obedience and entry into realms of public action conventionally unavailable to women.32 As Lady Fanshawe remarks to her children for whom the memoirs are written, ‘This was the first time that I had taken any journy without your father, and the first manage of business hee ever put into my hand.’33 Her role in relation to financial matters serves as the model for more strikingly unorthodox activities mediated as acts of service to her embattled husband: crossing London alone at night to visit him in prison, dressing up as a boy in order to join him as their ship is menaced by a Turkish galley, impersonating a merchant’s wife in order to obtain a false passport.34 Whilst printing her memoirs does not figure amongst Anne Fanshawe’s unusual exploits, she does, like Cavendish, seek to legitimate writing at all by stressing the idea that she is speaking for her husband.35 Cavendish seems to have been content to exploit her petitioning function as public representative of her disenfranchised husband as one means of finding a voice at the level of printed publication. However, it is important to acknowledge that she depicts herself as highly unwilling to speak for her husband when she actually stands before the Parliamentary committee as a petitioner. Her difference of approach in each case may, in part, be explained by the fact that petitioning, unlike publishing, required submission to the dictates of her political enemies.36 It is also important to recognize that petitioning necessitated a direct intervention in the disposal of her husband’s property which might render it less acceptable than the more symbolic act of representation which she could perform for him in printing her works. The petitioning procedure depended upon her claiming a share of his property in her own right: ‘a part of my Lords Estate, as wives had allowed them’, or, ‘some subsistance for my self’ (NP 379; LWC 70). She is keen to stress her reluctance to appropriate the greater degree of autonomy attendant 32 The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Fanshawe’s MS memoirs, dated 1676, were first printed in full in 1829, see The Memoirs of . . . Lady Fanshawe, 91–2. 33 Ibid. 119. 34 Ibid. 134–5, 127–8, 138. 35 Mary Beth Rose, ‘Gender, Genre and History: Seventeenth-Century Women and the Art of Autobiography’, in Mary Beth Rose (ed.), Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 245–78 (254–9), points out the importance of Fanshawe’s emphasis on wifely obedience as an authorizing strategy but does not discuss the 36 See her comments, NP 381. significance of financial petitioning.

24

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

upon such a claim, implicitly indicating her wish to remain within the traditional legal confines of her marital status. Describing her refusal to speak out for her own rights in front of the parliamentary committee, she states that ‘I desired my Brother the Lord Lucas, to claim, in my behalf’ (LWC 71).37 She is severely critical of women who take advantage of the legal transformations resulting from the political reversal of royalist fortunes in order eagerly to embrace a more autonomous role, becoming their own ‘Pleaders, Atturneys Petitioners and the like’ (NP 380). She deliberately contrasts those women petitioners who ‘had nothing to lose but made it their trade to solicite’, with those whose petitioning activities are portrayed as an extension of dutiful subservience: ‘Noble, Vertuous, Discreet, and worthy Persons whom necessity did inforce to submit, comply and follow their own suites’ (NP 380). Her guarded approach to women ‘Petitioners’ may also stem from the fact that the term potentially associated her fellow royalist exiles with their dissenting female opponents who banded together on various occasions to lodge mass petitions agitating for political reform.38 Whatever the extent of the catalytic influence of Cavendish’s petitioning experiences, the notion that it is her wifely duty to voice the concerns of her suppressed husband clearly operates in her texts not only at the level of publication as a symbolic gesture, but also more overtly in her texts themselves. In The Worlds Olio, for example, she asserts that: It is justice to a mans self; and no vain ostentation or bragging, to write or speak truly of his own good service to his king and country . . . For though fame is not alwaies a true Recorder, yet it is a loud reporter, which is a more certain reward to his merits, then from Kings and States: For Kings and States most commonly receive the service, and forget the reward (1)

37 38

NP 379. See Patricia Higgins, ‘The Reactions of Women, with Special Reference to Women Petitioners’, in Brian Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 173–222. Mihoko Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 192, suggests that Cavendish’s play, Bell in Campo, appropriates some of the rhetoric of Leveller women’s petitions in the demands for social change put forward by its army of women at the end of the play, but acknowledges, 192 n. 30, that the final settlement they are granted does little to alter the terms of ‘women’s participation in the polity’.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

25

The idea that she is articulating her husband’s grievances is, of course, most evident in her biography of him. For if the Restoration had removed the parliamentary disavowal of Newcastle’s status, it had certainly not returned his authority in royal circles. His short book of advice sent to the King in 1660 had been ignored and after a brief stay in London on their return from the continent in 1660, William and Margaret Cavendish went to live a retired life rebuilding their battered estates in the country.39 The creation of a dukedom for Newcastle in 1665 brought no change in his relationship with the crown.40 Two years later he published an English sequel to his French treatise on the training of horses, reiterating all his former crown appointments on the titlepage and containing another panegyrical dedication to the monarch.41 Margaret’s biography of her husband, also published in 1667, could afford to be less oblique about the hardships which she alleged that Newcastle had suffered in his unswerving devotion to both Charles I and Charles II. At times the text takes on the format of an account book, setting out the money allegedly owed to Newcastle by his Stuart masters.42 Even where she was not writing about him after the Restoration, Cavendish could appeal to the idea that she was somehow writing for him, fulfilling a wifely duty to be his representative in public since the aftermath of the upheavals of the past two decades was still shackling him to private business which left no time for him to voice his own views in public. In her preface to the second edition of Philosophical and Physical Opinions, she claims: for Your Lordship . . . hath as Deep Conceptions and Subtil Observation in Natural Philosophy, and as Curious Fancies and Clear Distinguishing in Poetry, and as much Ingenuity to Arts as Speculation into Sciences, yet you are in a manner forced, to lay them by, since your Return into your Native Country, imploying your Thoughts and Actions in helping to Repair your ruined Estate . . . But though Your Lordship hath many Troubles, great Cares, and much Business in your particular Affairs, yet you are pleased to 39 See LWC 88. For William Cavendish’s advice to the King, see Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Clarendon 109. 40 Mendelson, Mental Worlds, 39–42, 50. 41 William Cavendish, Methode et Invention Nouvelle de Dresser Les Chevaux (Antwerp, 1658); William Cavendish, A New Method and Extraordinary Invention to Dress Horses (London, 1667), A2r–A2v. 42 See e.g. LWC 97–8.

26

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

Peruse my Works, and Approve of them so well, as to give me Leave to Publish them.43

Cavendish’s marital circumstances and her figuration of their links with her publication not only assist her in reconciling an unusually self-promoting authorial voice with the dictates of wifely obedience. They also aid her circumnavigation of the perceived unchastity of women’s publication by helping to create a climate amenable to the notion of chaste feminine self-display. The definition of the wife as the property of her husband, evoked by Cavendish in her representation of her authorial activities, is fundamental to the idea that wifely duty entails public selfdisplay in order to affirm the husband’s social status. Emphasizing that a husband necessarily owns all his wife’s possessions, The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights (1632), asserts: ‘a wife how galant soever she be, glistereth but in the riches of her husband’.44 Ann Rosalind Jones has identified dutiful wifely self-display as a recurrent notion in Renaissance conduct manuals concerned with the consolidation of an aristocratic class identity.45 Margaret Cavendish’s subscription to such a matrimonial ideal is evident in her autobiography where she claims to, ‘abate nothing of the qualitie of his Wife, for if Honour be the marke of Merit, and his Masters Royall favour . . . it were a baseness for me to neglect the Ceremony thereof’ (NP 389–90). Her stance here is illustrated by her habit, during the period of exile with her royalist husband, of taking of ‘a Tour’ in his coach through the streets of Antwerp, ‘where all the chief of the Town goe to see and to be seen, likewise all strangers of what quallity soever, as all great Princes or Queens that make any short stay’ (NP 385–6).46 The extent to which Cavendish’s public appearance is connected to her husband’s status is suggested by his purchase of a new coach in which she might take the ‘Tour’.47 43 Margaret Cavendish, The Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 2nd edn. (London, 1663), unsigned (hereafter referred to as PPO (1663)). 44 T.E., The Lawes Resolutions of Women’s Rights; or, the Lawes Provision for Women (London, 1632), 129–30. 45 Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women’s Lyric’, in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (eds.), The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality 46 See also LWC 65. (London: Methuen, 1987), 39–72 (53). 47 Grant, Margaret the First, 135.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

27

She is careful to place her public self-display firmly within the framework of wifely obedience, reiterating her love for the retired life while adding, ‘but I hold necessary sometimes to appear abroad’ (NP 386). Although she acknowledges the necessity to appear publicly for her husband’s sake, she denies a concern for any gaze but his. Describing her stay in London as a petitioner for her husband’s sequestered estates, she claims that, ‘seldom did I dress my self, as taking no delight to adorn my self, since he I onely desired to please was absent’ (NP 382).48 In her biography of her husband, published in the year of her infamously flamboyant London appearances at the theatre, at court, in Hyde Park, and around the town, she states that, ‘Since I have been your Lordships Wife, I have lived for the most part a strict and retired Life’, merely admitting that, ‘I . . . sometimes shew my self at your Lordships Command in Publick places or Assemblies’ (LWC b1r).49 Similarly, on the issue of publication, she confides that ‘If I had never married the person I have, I do beleeve I should never have writ so, as to have adventured to divulge my works’ (WO E3v). It is her husband’s ‘Approvement’ which makes her ‘confident and resolute to put them to the Press, and so to Publik view’ (ODS a1r). Her unabashed espousal of printed publication may be viewed in the context of an ideal of wifely self-display rendered all the more pertinent by the Cavendishes’ need to affirm their aristocratic status in the aftermath of the Civil War. A brief examination of William Cavendish’s reaction to his predicament testifies to the significance of display in the attempt to resist the erosion of the habitual privileges and stability of noble rank. In his determined effort to maintain a standard of living commensurate with better days under Charles I, Cavendish reflects the advice of a range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentators for whom visibility and magnificence were highly important marks of true nobility and power.50 Margaret Cavendish herself suggests the 48 49

See also NP 390. For descriptions of the London appearances, see Pepys, Diary, viii. 163–4 (11 Apr. 1667), 185–7 (25 Apr. 1667), 196, 197 (1 May 1667), 243 (30 May 1667), 209 (10 May 1667). 50 See e.g. Hobbes, Leviathan, with an introduction by Kenneth Minogue (London, J. M. Dent, 1987), part i, ch. 10, 46; Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Edward Dacres (London, 1640), 181; the Renaissance humanist’s ideas are outlined by Quentin Skinner in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, i. The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 132, 229, 230.

28

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

connection between genuine social superiority and liberality of lifestyle in her autobiography where she compensates for her father’s lack of a peerage by adding that ‘there were few Peers who had much greater Estates, or lived more noble therewith’ (NP 368). Although he ran into huge debt, her husband borrowed money constantly in order to preserve the lifestyle of a wealthy aristocrat. On settling in Antwerp, he rented Rubens’s luxurious former home from the artist’s widow. There he spent large sums on buying horses and practising the art of ‘manage’, or training of these animals.51 The publication in French of his treatise on the art of horsemanship in 1658 cost him £1,300 of borrowed money.52 The lavish volume, with its dedication to Charles II, provided Newcastle with the opportunity for an ostentatious display of public loyalty to the monarch who had come to ignore him. The printing of his wife’s works may be seen to have contributed to the Newcastle project of refusing oblivion and sustaining the impression of noble largesse. His financing of their publication served as another chance to display his continuing refusal to capitulate to ignoble penny-pinching. The folio formats and exceptionally large type size of the majority of Cavendish’s volumes loudly proclaims the Newcastles’ elevated rank. The potential impropriety of Cavendish’s unapologetic approach to printing her texts is mitigated by the historically heightened notion that an aristocratic wife should participate in establishing her husband’s social status through self-display. However, the valorization of feminine display which underpins her attitude to publication depends not only on her marital circumstances but on the more general displacement of the royalist aristocracy and suppression of royalist culture.

royalism and feminine display The notion of wifely display as a means of maintaining the husband’s social status constitutes one aspect of a wider traditional 51

LWC 65–7; Grant, Margaret the First, 102; Mendelson, Mental Worlds, 25,

31. 52 For evidence of Cavendish’s borrowing in order to print this work, see his letter to Secretary Nicholas (15 Feb. 1656) repr. in Margaret Cavendish, The Life of William Cavendish, ed. C. H. Firth (London: George Routledge, 1906), 206.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

29

connection between feminine display and the maintenance of aristocratic authority.53 During ‘A Dialogue betwixt a great Lady, and her Maid of Honour’, in Cavendish’s Natures Pictures, the lady parries the world’s charges that she is ‘vain in making Shews of State’ by asserting that ‘this World . . . is like a Pageant, or Masquing Scenes; and when Great Kings neglect their Ceremonies, their State goes down; And with their State they lose their Kingly Crown’ (172). The link between feminine display and the reinforcement of social hierarchy is echoed by her husband, in his book of advice sent to the King in 1660. In a section entitled, ‘For Seremony, and Order’, he insists that: to make no Difference between great Ladys, & Citizens wifes in aparell is abhominable . . . for sertenly Degrees of Aparell, to several Conditions, & Callings, is of Great Consequence, to the peace of the kingdome, for when lower Degrees strives to out brave Higher Degrees, itt breeds Envie in the better sorte & pride in the Meaner, sorte & a contempt, by the vulgar of the Nobility,—which breeds Faction, & Disorder, which are the Causes of a Civill war.54

Newcastle’s comments illustrate the manner in which the political connotations associated with ideals of feminine dress and appearance are foregrounded by the climate of social disruption during which Cavendish wrote much of her work. Similarly, Francis Lenton’s poem, ‘Beauties Eclyps’d’, printed in the first volume of Lawes’s Ayres, and Dialogues, connects the political misfortunes of the royal couple with the diminution of the glorious female display characteristic of the Caroline court: Ladies who gild the glitt’ring Noon, And by reflection mend its Ray, Whose lustre makes the sprightfull Sun To dance as on an Easter Day: What are ye? what are ye? now the Queen’s a-way? . . . . . . . . Honour and Beauty are but Dreams, Since Charles & Mary lost their Beams.55

53 54 55

Jones, ‘Net and Bridles’, 43, 53. Bodleian, MS Clarendon 109, fos. 53–4. Lawes, Ayres, and Dialogues (1653), 35.

30

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

Lenton’s verses gain added symbolic weight when viewed as an elegiac companion piece to his earlier, Great Britains Beauties which celebrated the magnificence of the women displayed in the masque Luminalia performed at court before the onset of Civil War displaced the royal household.56 The significance of feminine display during the Interregnum as a challenge to the suppression of royalism is apparent in John Cleveland’s poem, ‘An intertainment at Cotswold’, with its particular reminiscence of the female theatricals familiar to the Caroline court.57 Set amongst an overtly royalist and Anglican collection of verses, the poem exhorts: Trudge hence ye tender flocks, some gloomy grove Must be this days refreshment, now remove Your selves ye must; your walks must be resign’d Unto a matchlesse troup of female kind, Whose beauty, should the flat-nos’d Satyrs spy, They would not live, but languish, and so die.58

His contention that the ‘intertainment’ will ‘cheat the tedious cold December night’ suggests its power to counteract the depradations of the cavalier winter. The status of feminine display as a mark of socio-political affiliation in Cavendish’s texts is particularly evident in her autobiography. The text’s preoccupation with the importance of female costume constitutes one aspect of Cavendish’s anxiety to prove the aristocratic status of her own and her husband’s families, jeopardized ‘by these unhappy Warrs’ (NP 376 [mispaginated 377]). Describing her childhood, she writes: ‘As for our garments, my Mother did not only delight to see us neat and cleanly, fine and gay, but rich and costly’ (NP 369). She defends her own ‘prodigall’ tendencies by claiming that ‘the world is given, or apt to honour the outside more than the inside, worship show more then substance; and I am so vain, if it be a Vanity, as to endeavour to be worshipt, rather than not to be regarded’ (NP 390). Her propensity for ‘singularity’, especially in ‘fine dressing and fashions’, declares her aristocratic affiliations (NP 387). Cavendish’s wish to achieve singularity through the display of 56 Francis Lenton, Great Britains Beauties, or, the Female Glory (London, 1638); Luminalia (London, 1638). 57 For a further discussion of this theatrical culture, see below, Ch. 3. 58 John Cleveland, John Cleaveland Revived (London, 1659), 38.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

31

‘fine dressing’ offers an analogy with her yearning to acquire a unique fame by means of displaying her texts. The potential immodesty of her authorial ambitions is palliated by their association with a model of feminine conduct intimately linked to the affirmation of the authority of her social group which has been threatened by recent political events. The case in favour of her female authorship is also strengthened by the implicit association of moral objections to women’s publication with anti- or sub-aristocratic prescriptions for feminine conduct. In her examination of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature of feminine conduct, Ann Rosalind Jones has clearly charted the marked oppositions between aristocratic and what she terms ‘Protestant and rising-class’ ideologies in this sphere. Axiomatic to sub-aristocratic ideals is the notion that women should be silently and chastely enclosed in the privacy of the home cultivating domestic skills. Such practical virtues are expounded in deliberate contrast to the ‘leisure and display’ associated with aristocratic models of feminine conduct.59 Anticipating criticisms of her authorial activities, Cavendish conjectures that men will ‘say to me, as to the Lady that wrote the Romancy’ (Mary Wroth), Work Lady, work, let writing Books alone, For surely wiser Women nere wrote one.60

However, her repeated characterization of writing as a ‘harmless’ pastime which avoids the moral pitfalls of a feminine lack of occupation attempts to refute the notion that domestic commitment is the only sure safeguard against feminine immorality.61 The liberty of the sedentary contemplative life which she favours differs markedly from the devotion to domestic duty recommended in literature defining the appropriate conduct of women of the lower orders.62 Above all, her retirement allows her the time and space to 59 60

Jones, ‘Nets and Bridles’, 61, 52–4. P and F A3v. The lines are repeated in Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters (London, 1664), b1r (hereafter SL). They are taken from verses sent to Mary Wroth by Edward Denny attacking her for publishing Urania, see ‘To Pamphilia from the father-in-law of Seralius’, quoted in Josephine Roberts, ‘An Unpublished Literary Quarrel Concerning the Suppression of Mary Wroth’s Urania (1622)’, N&Q 22 (1977), 532–5 (534). 61 See e.g. P and F A3v, A4v, A5r, Aa1v; PF, A4r, 90; ODS, a2r; PPO, b1v. 62 See e.g. SL 56–8.

32

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

write. Even the ‘Bashfulness’ which she alleges encourages her to adopt a retired life, becomes linked to her aristocratic status and ideals, including the desire for fame. Despite the superficial resemblance between her ‘Bashfulness’ and the withdrawing modesty (or ‘rusticke shamefastnesse’, as one commentator satirically calls it) commended to women of the lower orders, she goes on to maintain that, Those that are bashfull are not only Judicious and Ingenious, as Witty and Wise, but most commonly have . . . noble and generous Dispositions, valiant and couragious Spirits, honest and temperate Lives . . . This Bashfulness proceeds from a noble Ambition, or a pious Intention, either to get Fame, or an example to Humility. (WO, 88)63

In Poems and Fancies, she does go so far as to defend herself against potential charges that she is neglecting her domestic duties because of her writing, by reminding the reader that her exiled and childless state deprives her of the opportunity of such ‘Industry’ (A7r). Nevertheless, in the later Sociable Letters, though she piously insists that she is ‘Ignorant in Gaming, Dancing, and Revelling’, she openly admits that she is as ‘Ignorant’ of ‘Needleworks, Spinning-works, Preserving-works . . . Cooking-works . . . and the like’, and that, ‘my Scribling takes away the most part of my Time’ (b1r–b1v). The extent to which her inability or neglect for domestic tasks may be associated with a commendable aristocratic leisureliness is exemplified in her preface to the revized 1663 edition of Philosophical and Physical Opinions. Here Cavendish reduces her potential domestic transgressions by aestheticizing them as the vagaries of a pastoral realm nostalgically redolent of the leisured world of cavalier poetry and drama and of their production. Addressing her husband, she claims that: Since your Return from a long Banishment into your Native Country, retiring to a Shepheard’s Life, I your Shepheardess was resolved, to imploy all my Thoughts and Industry in good Huswifry, knowing your Lordship

63 For ‘rusticke shamefastnesse’, see Jacques Du Bosc, The Compleat Woman, tr. N.N. (1639), facs. repr. (Amsterdam and New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), [122] (mispaginated 56). For discussions of the serious recommendation of ‘shamefastnes’, see Suzanne Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982), 142; Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 43–4. For Cavendish’s bashfulness, see also NP 373–4, 375, 381–2.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

33

had great Debts after your great Losses, and though I am as Industrious and Carefull to serve your Lordship in such imployments, which belong to a Wife, as Houshold affairs, as ever I can . . . yet I cannot for my Life be so good a Huswife, as to quit Writing, to follow my Sheep so Carefully, but that they will go Astray some times (PPO (1663), unsigned)

Her tendency to parody the notion of feminine domestic drudgery emulates the tone of contemporary commentators on the appropriate behaviour of aristocratic women. In The Compleat Woman (1639), translated from the French of Jacques Du Bosc, for instance, the author writes: They may not then imagine, that speaking of this Compleat Woman, whose image we set forth; we intend to paint you a Mother of a family, who can command her servants, and who hath the care to comb and dresse her children. Though we blame it not, yet we must confesse, that Musick, History, Philosophy, and other such like exercises are more accommodate to our purpose, then those of huswivery.64

It is sheer ‘torment’, he alleges, to have to listen to women who can only ‘entertaine you . . . with the number of their Ducks and Geese’.65 Du Bosc tellingly sets such negative images of femininity against an affirmation of female display: the innocent curiosity of many Women, who cloath themselves according to the decency of their condition. Their sexe is curious in their ornaments, and naturally given to sumptuous apparell, insomuch as even you shall see many most chast Women, who yet dresse themselves with extreame industry.66

Du Bosc’s prejudices are shared by Lady Emilia in Castiglione’s Courtyer when she scathingly comments that if Lord Gaspar tries to describe a ‘gentilwoman of the Court’, he will present one ‘that can do nought elles but looke to the kitchin and spinn’.67 While such satirical thrusts are aimed at defending the aristocratic emphasis on sociable feminine wit and elegance, Cavendish’s own ironic slant on sub-aristocratic ideals of feminine domesticity is, of course, more concerned with defending women’s authorship. Following on from further illustrations of her incapacity for 64 65 67

Du Bosc, The Compleat Woman, 92 (mispaginated 26). 66 Ibid. 98 (mispaginated 32). Ibid. 91 (mispaginated 25). Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtyer, tr. Thomas Hoby (London, 1561), Aa3v.

34

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

domestic work in Sociable Letters, she issues a cunning challenge to those who advocate domestic commitment as the safeguard for feminine morals. Although she is unable to spin, she claims that, if I had been as Long Absent from my Lord as Penelope was from . . . Ulysses, I could have never Employed my Time as she did, for her work only Employed her Hands, and Eyes, her Ears were left open to Loves Pleadings, and her Tongue was at liberty to give her Suters Answers, whereas my Work Employes all the Faculties and Powers of my Soul, Mind and Spirits, as well as my Eyes, and Hands, and my Thoughts are so Busie in my Brain, as they neither Regard, nor take Notice what Enters through the Ears. (SL 314–15)

Whilst Poems and Fancies also declares that Cavendish has ‘no skill’ in ‘Spinning’ (an art ‘more proper to our Sexe’ than writing), she nevertheless begins the work by offering a conciliatory analogy between the domestic task of spinning and the creation of her text (A2r). She soon shifts the emphasis from spinning to fine dressing, however, comparing the fanciful art of poetry to the alleged feminine fondness for self-display and decoration. In her dedication to Charles Cavendish, she admits that the volume may be ‘a Course peice [sic]; yet I had rather my Name should go meanly clad, then dye with cold; but if the Sute be trimmed with your Favour, shee may make such a shew, and appeare so lovely, as to wed to a Vulgar Fame’ (A2v). The image of a gaudy bride and improper connotations of a ‘Vulgar Fame’ may be seen to poke fun at antiaristocratic equations of feminine finery with loose morality.68 An aristocratic concern to counteract unworthy oblivion through display overrides the pursuit of domestic industry in this metaphor for publication. In keeping with her tone in these remarks, Cavendish goes on openly to associate her writing and publication with the ‘Vanity . . . so naturall to our Sex’ (A3r). In the same breath, however, she defends herself from suspicions of unchaste conduct by insisting that her pursuits are ‘free from all dishonesty’, and no ‘dishonour’ to her fellow women (ibid.). In order further to understand how her uncompromising statements of self-promotion may be reconciled to such protestations of modesty, it is necessary 68 See e.g. John Batchiler, The Virgins Pattern (London, 1661), 29; John Brinsley, A Looking-Glasse for Good Women (London, 1645), 12–13; Gervase Markham, The English Huswife (London, 1615), 3–4, quoted in Jones, ‘Nets and Bridles’, 62–3. See also Jones, ‘Nets and Bridles’, 55, 57, 58.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

35

to recognize that her authorial stance exploits politically charged ideals not only of feminine behaviour but also of masculine conduct towards women. In confessing to the venial sin of feminine vanity, Cavendish reassuringly flatters traditional beliefs in inherent feminine weakness which requires masculine indulgence and protection. In a passage on ‘Civility from Men due to Women’, in The Worlds Olio, she writes: Men of Noble Natures are willing to help the Weak, and therefore ought to give our Sex Confidence by their Praises, and therefore should be civil to Women, in having as tender a Regard to them as to Children; for though Women be not so Innocent, yet they are as Powerless; and it is the part of the Noble Heroick Nature to strive to oblige the Weak. (81–2)69

The prefatory comments of Cavendish’s husband render more explicit the link between the duties of masculine chivalry and a defence of her authorial activities. Addressing her putative audience of male scholars in The Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), for example, William Cavendish chides those who have doubted that his wife wrote her previous works. ‘You should rather incourage her’, he states, then by false suppositions to let her see the world is so ill natured, as to beleeve falshoods before truths. But here’s the crime, a Lady writes them, and to intrench so much upon the male prerogative, is not to be forgiven; but I know Gown-men will be more Civil to her, because she is of the Gown too, and therefore I am confident you will defend her. (A3r)70

Such remarks appeal to a spirit of toleration founded on a shared sense of the stability of masculine superiority and domination. The knowing complicity of his wife’s masculine audience is further solicited as he pleads that they excuse any errors in the text, demanding, ‘no mercy Gentlemen?’, or addresses exaggerated encomiums to his wife, placing her above Chaucer, Spenser, Jonson, and the classical poets, philosophers, and rhetoricians.71 The political significance of masculine courtesy to women during the Commonwealth period in which Cavendish wrote most of her work and published her earlier texts, depended on its close 70 See also NP b2r–b2v. See also WO 71; SL 97. PPO (1655), A2v, A1r; ‘TO THE LADY NEWCASTLE, On her Booke of POEMS’, in P and F, unsigned; NP b2v. 69 71

36

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

association with the Caroline court. The chivalrous elevation of women was an ideal nurtured by the Platonic love fashions which had been encouraged by Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria, during the 1630s.72 According to the various Platonic love codes, women were worthy of masculine homage since they could lead men to moral or spiritual perfection.73 While Cavendish’s works occasionally satirize debased Platonic love as a cloak for adulterous feminine behaviour, she is happy to exploit the ideals of masculine gallantry which it fosters.74 Her ‘Oration for the Liberty of Women’ epitomizes the Neoplatonic perspective on the demands of masculine chivalry. ‘Can Men’, asks a male speaker, think any Fortune Better, than when they can Serve them [women] . . . for can there be . . . any Object Brighter than their Beauties, or any Society more Divine than theirs? . . . these Celestial Creatures . . . ought to be your Goddesses on Earth, for Nature made them to be Beloved, Admired, Desir’d, Ador’d, and Worshipp’d, Sued and Praised to by our Sex. (ODS 224)

Even in an apparently conservative discussion of the propriety of women’s domestic role, the Neoplatonic imagery of masculine adoration undercuts Cavendish’s ostensible consignment of women to household drudgery. Superficially defending the idea that women’s innate inferiority renders them suited to domestic duties, she compares them to the moon, possessing no ‘light of Understanding’ except from men, the sun (WO A4v). To the reader familiar with the milieu of the Caroline court, however, her metaphor begs alternative associations with the Platonic model in which women are the source of all illumination.75 Given the centrality of masculine courtesy in the culture of the Caroline court, the invocation of a chivalrous masculine spirit by both Cavendish and her husband indirectly challenges her male readers to maintain their aristocratic royalist credentials by courteously endorsing her authorial endeavours. William Cavendish’s perception of a link between the maintenance of noble status and 72 Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 18–19. 73 Ibid. 16–17, 27–8. 74 For examples of anti-Platonic satire in her work, see WO 72, 211; PL 219. 75 See e.g. Castiglione, The Courtyer, Bb2v; Nicolas Faret, The Honest Man; or, the Art to Please in Court, tr. Edward Grimeston (London, 1632), 341–4; Francis Lenton, ‘Beauties Eclips’d’, in Lawes, Ayres, and Dialogues (1653), 35.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

37

the courteous treatment of women is affirmed by his comments in a letter of advice to the young Prince of Wales, written on the occasion of being made his governor in 1637. Included amongst his answers to the question, ‘What preserves you Kings more than ceremony [?]’, is the assertion that, ‘To women you cannot be too civil, especially to great ones . . . Certainly, sir, you cannot lose by courtesy.’76 The sense that he is adhering to traditional cavalier values in encouraging his wife’s publications is reinforced by the portrayal of his chivalrous approach as a matter of personal honour. He has been goaded to come to her defence by ‘the infidelity of some people’ in questioning her authorship, a slander which he cannot, ‘as a man of Honour’, allow (PPO (1655), A2v). His remarks constitute an implicit invitation to his wife’s male readers to prove their own honourable status by joining him in her defence. Margaret Cavendish herself emphasizes the connection between honour and masculine chivalry, when she insists that: ‘It is more honour for a Man to be led Captive by a Woman, than to contend by resistance; for a Man can receive no dishonour to be taken Prisoner by the Effeminat Sex’ (WO 71). The Cavendishes’ deferentially chivalrous approach to women may well have begun to seem outmoded in the libertine climate of the Restoration court. However, since the new Stuart regime had ignored them, it is possible to explain their continued advocacy of currently undervalued ideals as a deliberate gesture of loyalty to the mores of a bygone era. While Cavendish’s admission of vanity may be accommodated within an ethos of chivalrous masculine indulgence towards women, her more outspoken claim to seek ‘fame’ through printing her works also depends on other cultural and historical factors which promote the possibility and desirability of chaste feminine display.

the meanings of fame From her earliest writings Cavendish exhibits a fascination with fame. A whole sheaf of short essays on the topic opens The Worlds 76 Margaret Cavendish, The Life of William Cavendish, ed. C. H. Firth (London: George Routledge, 1906), appendix II, 186.

38

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

Olio: ‘What the desire of Fame proceedes from’, ‘The Reward of Fame’, ‘Of Fame, and Infamy’, and so on, culminating in ‘Why men write Bookes’, which alleges that ‘Some say men write bookes, not so much to benefit the world, as out of love to Fame’ (1, 2, 3–4). The link between authorship and fame becomes a more personalized concern in a number of her prefaces which pursue a particular preoccupation with the desire to foster and embody a heroic image of female fame. Her epistle ‘To all Writing Ladies’ in Poems and Fancies asserts that There will be many Heroick Women in some Ages, in others very Propheticall; in some Ages very pious and devout. . . . But this Age hath produced many effeminate Writers, as well as Preachers, and many effeminate Rulers, as well as Actors. And if it be an Age when effeminate spirits rule, as most visible they doe in every Kingdome, let us take the advantage, and make the best of our time, for feare their reigne should not last long; whether it be in the Amazonian Government, or in the Politick Commonwealth, or in flourishing Monarchy, or in Schooles of Divinity, or in Lectures of Philosophy, or in witty Poetry, or any thing that may bring honour to our Sex; for they are poore dejected spirits, that are not ambitious of Fame. (Aa1v)

‘AN EPISTLE To my Readers’ in Natures Pictures echoes such sentiments but exhibits greater anxiety as to the scope of women’s opportunities and the author’s own chances of achieving heroic fame as a woman: I dare not examin the former times, for fear I should meet with such of my Sex, that have out-done all the glory I can aime at, or hope to attaine; for I confess my Ambition is restless, and not ordinary; because it would have an extraordinary fame; And since all heroick Actions, publick Imployments, powerfull Governments, and eloquent Pleadings are denyed our Sex in this age, or at least would be condemned for want of custome, is the cause I write so much . . . (c1r)

As other critics have noticed, Cavendish’s repeated claim to seek fame through printing her works presents an apparent paradox. In openly pursuing fame (in the sense of public acclaim), she manifests a desire for publicity which is notionally at odds with the predominant contemporary sense of feminine fame as physical chastity.77 77 See Gagen, ‘Honor and Fame’, 520; Elaine Hobby, ‘The Fame of the Honest Margaret Cavendish’, MA thesis (Essex, 1979), 16, 17, 24, 32, 37. Susan James, in Margaret Cavendish, Political Writings, ed. Susan James, Cambridge Texts in the

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

39

Yet, the potential immodesty of her longing for fame (which she likens to a ‘great noise’) becomes tempered by its location in the context of the silencing of royalism: ‘I am one of those that had rather dam up a Head, than to be buried under foot; and wish my Brains could have melted better Metal, to have made my Book as a Bell, to sound clear and loud . . . for fame is nothing but a Noyse’ (P and F A3r; WO 135–6). In claiming that her ‘Ambition is . . . not ordinary; because it would have an extraordinary fame’, she invokes an established notion that social superiority can prove itself through an innate longing for glory (NP c1r).78 However ‘ordinary’ the circumstances to which the royalists had been reduced, their undampened urge for fame could testify to their basic right to an ‘extraordinary’ social status. Cavendish is able to voice the desire for glory on behalf of her husband and other royalists who have been disbarred from the heroic actions or public statements which might otherwise testify to their noble yearnings for an honourable fame. The immediate socio-political significance of attitudes to fame is evident in her claim that all ‘honourable fames’ are disturbed and obstructed by ‘the ignorant and malicious’, the ‘mechanick souls’ of ‘this present age which is very censorious’ (PPO (1655), B1v). Elsewhere, she asserts that she has not ‘broken the Chaines of Modesty, or behav’d my selfe in dishonourable and loose carriage, or . . . run the wayes of Vice’, but goes on to suggest that honour is governed by political ideals as well as gendered ones. Stating that she ‘had rather venture an indiscretion, then loose the hopes of a Fame’, she proceeds to summarize the ‘Vices’ which constitute ‘a shame’ and of which her book is, of course, entirely free. Her virtuous longing for fame is contrasted with a list of shameful deeds worthy of their protagonists’ ejection from ‘all Civill society’. The most heinous of these are deemed to be the politically resonant transgressions of denying ‘the Principles of . . . Religion’ and flouting ‘the Lawes of a well-governed Kingdome’. Only at the end of History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. xviii, notes the distinction between the way in which Cavendish reiterates gendered notions of honour in some of her texts but defends authorship as a fit arena for female fame. 78 See also e.g. Skinner, The Foundations, 134, on Renaissance humanist ideals; Castiglione, The Courtyer, H3r; Faret, The Honest Man, 14–15; Hobbes, Leviathan, part i, ch. 10, 46–7.

40

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

her list does she mention the sin of feminine prostitution (P and F A4r–A4v). The mitigating location of Cavendish’s personal desire for fame within the wider context of suppressed royalist ideals is reinforced by her appeal to the representational tradition of the femme forte or heroic woman, nourished in both French and English court circles. During the regency of Anne of Austria in France from 1643 to 1652, a literary and iconographic movement developed which celebrated the femme forte. Although the culture of female heroism tended to represent mainly historical and biblical figures, Anne’s role in government and the military roles assumed by women like Anne Marie d’Orléans (‘La Grande Mademoiselle’) who fought in the Fronde, were a major catalyst to it.79 Cavendish, who was with the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria in Paris at the time of Anne’s regency, would have had ample chance to come into contact with the ideal of the femme forte. It is very possible that she read The Gallery of Heroick Women, a translation by the Roman Catholic royalist John Paulet, fifth marquis of Winchester, of Pierre Le Moyne’s Gallerie des femmes fortes, a central text in the dissemination of the ideal of the heroic woman.80 Although Le Moyne’s Gallerie was first published in 1647, its English translation appeared in 1652 while Cavendish was in London. The frontispiece of The Gallery suggestively connects female heroism with reading, writing, and oratory. A central statue of Anne of Austria stands surrounded by statues of other famous women, many with books or scrolls as one woman inscribes the base of Anne’s statue advised by another with a book (possibly The Gallery itself) in her hand. The Gallery’s lexicon of feminine heroism is recalled in Cavendish’s writings. For example, 79 For a detailed examination of the culture of the femme forte, see Ian Walter Maclean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature 1610–1652 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 64–87. See also Jones, A Glorious Fame, 56–7; Carola Oman, Henrietta Maria, 3rd edn. (London: White Lion, 1976), 229. For a discussion of these aspects of the French context (and of Henrietta Maria’s role in propagating them) as backgrounds chiefly to Cavendish’s play, Bell in Campo, see Sophie Tomlinson, ‘ “My Brain the Stage”: Margaret Cavendish and the Fantasy of Female Performance’, in Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (eds.), Women, Texts and Histories, 1575–1750 (London: Routledge, 1992), 134–63 (147–9). Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 35–7, is more concerned to portray Cavendish’s preoccupation with female heroism as a conduit for the transmission of French models of ‘women’s political community’ (35) centred around a female monarch. 80 For Paulet, see DNB.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

41

the female army in her play Bell in Campo is referred to as a band of ‘Heroickesses’ perhaps recalling Le Moyne’s term ‘Heroesses’.81 Use of the term ‘Heroick’ as a synonym for cavalier in Aphra Behn’s post-Restoration satire on the Rump Parliament, The Roundheads (1682), helps to suggest the possible political weight behind the title and central concept of Winchester’s translation in Interregnum England.82 The notion that his text is somehow embodying a topical spirit of royalist resistance is further implied by his informing his female dedicatees that ‘some worthy Person of our Countrey . . . taking notice of your Vertuous Carriages and improved Actions in this land of trial, may hereafter erect a new Gallery, in which your Statues and Names will remain a Spectacle of Honour and Imitation to Posterity’.83 Contemporary English works such as Thomas Heywood’s The Generall History of Women also manifest an interest in ‘female fortitude’ and recount the lives of ‘Heroick and Illustrious women’.84 George Rivers’s The Heroinae repeatedly and explicitly dwells on the ‘fame’ that attends the heroic actions of his catalogue of women turning his dedicatee, Lady Dorothy Sydney, into ‘the true Heroine’ from whose favour he too will ‘receive Fame’.85 Cavendish certainly encountered women who presented themselves in the quasi-masculine martial vein which constituted one important aspect of the depiction of the femme forte. She can hardly have failed to come across the notorious Queen Christina of Sweden during the latter’s fairly lengthy stay in the Newcastles’ 81 The First Part of Bell in Campo, in Playes (1662), 588; Pierre Le Moyne, The Gallery of Heroick Women, tr. the marquis of Winchester (London, 1652), a2v, b1r. 82 Aphra Behn, The Roundheads; or, the Good Old Cause (London, 1682), 5. 83 Le Moyne, The Gallery, a2v. Winchester’s tr. receives fulsome praise from royalist writer, James Howell, in lines ‘Upon the most Noble Work of the Lo. Mar. of Winchester, By rendring the French Gallery of Ladies into English’, in [Howell], Poems On Several Choices and Various Subjects (London, 1663), 84. 84 Thomas Heywood, The Generall History of Women (London, 1657), A3v, A3r. For an earlier version of Heywood’s work, see his Gynaikeon (London, 1639); Samuel Torshell, The Womans Glorie, 2nd edn. (London, 1650), 77–83. Thomas Barlow, of Queen’s College, Oxford, writes to Margaret Cavendish of ‘a Manuscript Author in Bodlies Library, who endeavors to shew, That Women Excell Men’, referring to this text in another letter as ‘Women’s Worth, a Treatise proving by sundry reasons that Women excell Men’, see Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable Princess, Margaret, Dutchess of Newcastle (London, 1676), 69, 70–1 (21 May 1663; 3 Sept. 1656) (hereafter Letters and Poems). 85 George Rivers, The Heroinae (1639), A2r, 10, 41, 64, 110, 122, 137.

42

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

adopted city, Antwerp, in 1654.86 At the outset of the Civil War, as Sophie Tomlinson has pointed out, Henrietta Maria had already begun realizing in actuality the dramatic role of ‘decorous’ feminine heroism which, from the mid-1630s onwards, had begun to appear in English court masques and other Caroline drama.87 Her continued adoption of a martial persona is apparent in her styling herself ‘her she-majesty Generalissima’ in a letter to Charles which described her march south in 1643 at the head of a military escort made up of troops from the army of William Cavendish. The future Margaret Cavendish was with her family in Oxford when the Queen made her subsequent triumphal entry into that city.88 Such heroic images of the Queen certainly seem to have caught the imagination of Cavendish’s step-daughters, Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, who deploy it as part of the counter-revolutionary rhetoric of their manuscript poem ‘On her most sacred Majestie’: Your Eye if looke, it doth an Army pay And doe as Generall, you doe lead the way Mary of Henry fourth of France then name Great conquests getts; Armyes of Rebells tames.89

The marquis of Winchester claims to have planned to dedicate his Gallery of Heroick Women to the English queen, but was forced by her exile to honour the generality of English ladies instead.90 The model of the femme forte as it resonates through French and English aristocratic culture has a vital role to play in Cavendish’s manner of presenting herself as an author both in the direct prefatory statements considered earlier and in her predeliction for exemplary figures of heroic femininity in her fiction and drama. Her representation of such characters draws on the stock romance figure of the warrior heroine, typified in its earlier manifestations by Spenser’s Britomart and persisting into the French heroic 86 See Jones, A Glorious Fame, 102; Tomlinson, ‘ “My Brain the Stage” ’, 147–9. For further allusions to the martial self-presentation of Queen Christina, see A Relation of the Life of Queen Christina of Sweden (London, 1656), 41–2. 87 Tomlinson, ‘ “My Brain the Stage” ’, 148. 88 Oman, Henrietta Maria, 149, 150; NP 373. 89 Bodleian Library, Oxford, Rawlinson MS Poet. 16, p. 9. 90 Le Moyne, The Gallery, a2r. According to DNB the marquis of Winchester’s country seat, Basing House in Hampshire, became a resort for the Queen’s friends in the south-west of England at the outbreak of the Civil War.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

43

romances of the seventeenth century.91 Yet, by making cross-dressing women warriors the central figures of the romance-type plots of her fiction and drama, Cavendish deliberately foregrounds what is conventionally only one strand or episode in romance narrative. Moreover, whilst existing fiction and drama very frequently present love for a man as the catalyst for a woman’s disguising herself as a pretty youth or the solvent which evaporates her abnormal male-clad, militaristic conduct, the love-plots associated with Cavendish’s female warriors are rapidly displaced by an independent absorption with the habitually masculine concerns of military and political business.92 In Cavendish’s play, Loves Adventures (printed in Playes (1662)) Lady Orphant’s dressing up as her foster-father’s son in order to pursue her beloved Lord Singularity initially leads to her becoming his page. Yet, the strong echoes of the Orsino/Viola/Olivia wooing triangle from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night soon give way to more remarkable scenes in which Lady Orphant (quite unlike the physically timorous Viola) fights bravely against the Turks and addresses a council of war as if she were ‘an old experienced souldier’ (50, 56). Cavendish’s own refocusing of the emphasis on love in romance cross-dressing plots to explore a more self-sufficient version of female heroic achievement has a metatextual counterpart in her story, Assaulted and Pursued Chastity. Here the heroine rejects the romances offered to her by her would-be seducer’s aunt, recognizing that they are simply calculated to ‘beget wanton desires, and amorous affections’ (NP 224). Instead she selects ‘Mathematicall’ texts and works of ‘Architecture, Navigation, Fortification, Waterworks, Fire-works, all engines, instruments, wheeles, and many 91 For a discussion of Britomart and her antecedents in the Italian romance tradition, see Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, iii, ed. Frederick Morgan Padelford (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1934), 332. For French romance, see Maclean, Woman Triumphant, 168, 206–7. 92 For examples of plays beyond the Shakespearean canon in which the motive of heterosexual love dominates any of the heroine’s pretensions to masculine conduct, see Lodwick Carlell, Arviragus and Philicia (London, 1639); Aston Cockayn, The Obstinate Lady (London, 1657); John Fletcher, Loves Cure and Philaster, in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies (1647); John Suckling, Brennoralt (London, 1646). See also Karen Raber’s comments on the contrast between Thomas Killigrew’s slant on women warriors and that of Cavendish, in Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 2001), 197.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

44

such like’—precisely the kind of reading matter which helps to train her in the conventionally masculine skills which she practises during her subsequent military career in male guise (NP 225, 260). Although she ultimately dons women’s clothes once more in order to marry a prince, their union is triggered by her military victory over him which allows her to negotiate an amicable nuptial settlement whereby she retains political power over the kingdom even though he has marital control. Here, as elsewhere, the figure of the martial heroic woman allows Cavendish to reject a biologically deterministic notion of gendered identity which emerges as an externally imposed construct. The story concludes with the heroine’s assertion that, ‘with my Masculine Cloaths I have laid by my Masculine Spirit; yet not so by, but I shall take it up again, if it be to serve the Queen and Kingdome, to whom I owe my Life’ (NP 270). The gender fluidity suggested by this statement is reinforced by the fact that Cavendish refers to her heroine, like Lady Orphant in Loves Adventures, as ‘he’ while they are in their masculine disguises.93 Although Cavendish’s play, The Lady Contemplation (also printed in Playes (1662)) frames its representation of female heroism as the internalized fantasy of the titular heroine, here too the figure of the femme forte acts as a powerful exemplum of expanded possibilities for women as Lady Contemplation imagines that her husband is a wounded military commander from whom she takes over to lead an army into battle. The battlefield oration in which she defends her ‘ambition’ as a woman and women’s capacity for success ‘in all publick Affairs’ is redolent of Cavendish’s prefatory deployments of a heroic ideal of female public agency as the basis of her defence of her own authorial activities (221). Indeed, her martial heroine’s very acts of battlefield oration provide a platform for public eloquence which may be seen to reinforce Cavendish’s own authority to become a public voice through printing her works. The analogy between the warrior heroine’s articulation of her ambitions and Cavendish’s own statements of authorial aspiration is even stronger in her play, Bell in Campo, in which Lady Victoria insists on raising a female army to support the wartime efforts of her husband, a military commander. As in Cavendish’s prefaces to 93

See e.g. NP 234, 253, 255, 256; Loves Adventures, in Playes (1662), 51.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

45

Poems and Fancies and Natures Pictures she ponders a range of possible ‘publick Imployments’ in which women might triumph heroically as ‘Souldiers, Privy Counsellors, Rulers and Commanders, Navigators and Architectors, . . . learned Scholars both in Arts and Sciences’ (588). The inspiration offered by the literary tradition of the femme forte is indicated by Lady Victoria’s insistence that when her army marches it must sing of the ‘heroical actions done in former times by heroical women’ (590). Her driving motivation, like Cavendish’s as an author, is to win ‘everlasting Fame’: ‘shall only men live by Fame, and women dy in Oblivion?’, she demands (609).94 Although, as Sophie Tomlinson has pointed out, Lady Victoria’s heroic actions and high aspirations ultimately win only limited (purely domestic) social concessions from the men, Bell in Campo offers at least a glimpse of the way in which heroic images of femininity might be attractive to men.95 Naturally, this can operate at an aesthetic level as suggested in the Lady Contemplation’s lovingly detailed description of her martial outfit suggestive of existing iconographic representations of the femme forte: ‘I had a Masculine Suit, and over that a cloth of silver Coat, made close to my waist . . . and those Arms I wore being all gilt, were Back, Brest, Gorget, Pot and Gantlet . . . In my hand I carried a Sword . . . and on my Head-piece wore a great Plume of Feathers’ (222). Nevertheless, male appreciation of female heroism extends beyond the aesthetic alone. When Lady Victoria in Bell in Campo sends a bombastic messenger to castigate the men for being insufficiently grateful that the female army has won the day for them, the initial response appears indulgent if rather patronizing: ‘the men could not chose [sic] but smile at the womens high and mighty words’ (612). Yet, the final male verdict implies a more genuine pride in female heroic action: ‘so well pleased the men were with the women’s gallant actions, that every man was proud that had but a Female acquaintance in the Female Army’ (ibid.). As Tomlinson argues, for contemporaneous readers, Lady Victoria could readily echo Queen Henrietta Maria—an observation which reminds us that, for male and female royalists alike, all Cavendish’s representations of female heroism and self-identifications with 94 95

See also The First Part of Bell in Campo, in Playes (1662), 580. Tomlinson, ‘ “My Brain the Stage” ’, 149–50.

46

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

images of heroic femininity had a political dimension to them.96 After all, the heroic rhetoric of her prefaces to Poems and Fancies and Natures Pictures, like the martial heroines of her fiction and drama, were penned during the 1650s when the need to reassert the semiotics of royalism was most pressing. The concept of Henrietta Maria as the model femme forte and the political resonances of such an image for royalists in the Civil War period may be detected in a wider range of literary sources than has generally been acknowledged so far. In considering Cavendish’s familiarity (and that of her readers) with such ideas, it proves particularly fruitful to examine texts by a group of writers, educated, like the marquis of Winchester (English translator of The Gallery of Heroick Women) at the University of Oxford. There is considerable evidence that Cavendish was influenced by these Oxford poets in embracing the politically inflected ideal of heroic femininity. The single Oxford literary figure most clearly linked to Cavendish is Jasper Mayne who took his BA at Christ Church in 1628 and remained there, ultimately becoming a doctor of divinity in 1646.97 Cavendish may have seen him preach to the court in Oxford when she was living there with her family in the early years of the Civil War, before which he had served for several years as her future husband’s chaplain at Welbeck. Ejected by Parliament from his place at Christ Church in 1648, he became chaplain to the earl of Devonshire, William Cavendish’s cousin and namesake in 1656, rubbing shoulders with another Cavendish protégé, Thomas Hobbes, who was also resident in the Devonshire household. It was to the duke of Newcastle himself that Mayne had dedicated his 1638 translation of Lucian’s Dialogues, finally printed in 1664, whose influence undoubtedly emerges in Margaret Cavendish’s fantasy voyage, Blazing World.98 Further evidence of Margaret Cavendish’s connections with Mayne via the patronage of her husband and his cousin appears in Mayne’s correspondence with her after the Restoration in his new capacity as canon of Christ Church. His letters show that she sent books to the Christ Church 96 97

Tomlinson, ‘ “My Brain the Stage” ’, 148. For the details of Mayne’s career, see DNB; Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer and Romantic (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), 68, 258. 98 Jasper Mayne, Part of Lucian made English from the Original (Oxford, 1664).

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

47

library through him, entrusted him with finding someone to translate some of her works into Latin, and sent him a copy of her first volume of plays.99 The gift of her plays is particularly significant since Mayne’s own drama appears to have influenced not only Cavendish’s dramatic writing but her heroic mode of self-presentation. The plot of Mayne’s The Amorous Warre in which women forbidden by their menfolk to accompany them to battle disguise themselves as Amazons and offer military assistance has close parallels to Cavendish’s Bell in Campo. Meanwhile, Mayne’s celebration of female heroism provides another source for Cavendish’s authorial rhetoric of heroic fame. His stage directions repeatedly underline the aesthetic appeal of the women’s martial disguises.100 The nobility of the ‘Amazon’ army is discussed in terms redolent of the femme forte. Their leader is spurred by the imperatives of fame as she warns them that a failure to ‘carry | Deeds worthy of our Name home with us’ will ‘Be our reproach in History’.101 The Prince pays tribute to them as ‘warlike Goddesses . . . | Each of you an Armed Pallas’.102 Politically, the heroic stance of the women is associated with the maintenance of monarchy since their Princess claims that, if they return defeated, the ‘Citizens’ will ‘mutiny’ and ‘turne our Monarchy into a Many- | Headed Democracy’.103 Another potential encouragement to Cavendish’s ethic of heroic femininity may be found in the plays of Mayne’s close friend and fellow Christ Church poet, William Cartwright, a notable figure amongst royalists in Oxford during Cavendish’s stay there at the start of the revolution. Chosen to preach the victory sermon on the King’s return to Oxford after the battle of Edgehill in 1642, he died on 29 November the following year in an epidemic of disease and was mourned by the monarch himself.104 Humphrey Moseley’s 1651 edition of Cartwright’s plays and poems was, as I have already suggested, heavily implicated with the Henry Lawes circle significant to Cavendish during her petitioning visit to London.

99 100 101

Letters and Poems, 93 (20 May 1663); 96 (21 Apr. 1664); 82–3 (6 May 1662). Jasper Mayne, The Amorous Warre (London, 1648), 18, 32, 79. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. Ibid. 33. 104 William Cartwright, The Plays and Poems of William Cartwright, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951), 15, 16, 20, 21.

48

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

Cartwright’s play, The Royal Slave, must surely have occupied an important place in the collective memory of the entourage of Henrietta Maria to whom Cavendish became a Maid of honour during her time in Oxford. The play had been the climax of the entertainments offered to the King and Queen on their visit to Oxford in 1636.105 So successful had it been with the Queen that she had requested a repeat performance before the court in London.106 Although Cartwright’s plays circulated widely in manuscript the continuing popularity of The Royal Slave is manifested in its being the only one to appear in any edition before 1651, being printed twice at Oxford in 1639 and 1640.107 The heroic posture of Queen Atossa and her ladies in The Royal Slave certainly shares resonances with Cavendish’s own writings. As in Mayne’s Amorous Warre (which may have drawn on The Royal Slave) the women decide they must become an autonomous martial force along the lines of Lady Victoria’s female army in Cavendish’s Bell in Campo.108 Like Mayne, Cartwright lends dignity to the rhetoric of female fame crucial to Cavendish.109 Rallying her troops, Atossa asserts: If we avert the ryot, and become Our own defence, the Honour, as the Action, Will be entirely ours: which may be done Only by flying to Arsamnes Castle. A thing so easy, that ‘twill only be To take the Ayre for fame . . . . . . the Action Will make our Tombes not need an Epitaph, When we shall live still fresh in History. (1064–1075)110 105 106 107 108

Cartwright, The Plays and Poems of William Cartwright, 12–13. Ibid. 171, 180. Ibid. 165. For the MS circulation of Cartwright’s plays, see CWKP i. 4. The Royal Slave, 1064–6, in Cartwright, Plays and Poems. See also ll. 1237, 1242. 2, 1497–8 (all subsequent references to Cartwright’s plays will be to this edn.). 109 Such gravitas contrasts with his portrayal of the martial cross-dressing heroine in his play, The Lady Errant, who (despite effectively defending a group of men from their rebellious womenfolk) emerges in a jovially satirical light as a comic roaring girl. 110 See also The Royal Slave, 1260–2. Cartwright’s The Siege; or, Love’s Convert also interestingly examines the ideal of the femme forte. G. Blakemore Evans, in Cartwright, Plays and Poems, 356, surmises from allusions in a commendatory poem that the play was either performed or circulated widely before its eventual first publication in 1651.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

49

Drama was not the only medium in which Cartwright, Mayne, and their circle celebrated female excellence or sought to win female approval from Henrietta Maria. These concerns are also evident in their contributions to the volumes of panegyric on the King and Queen which issued from Oxford University during the 1630s and early 1640s. These too may be seen to have contributed to Cavendish’s sense of the potential welcome which heroically presented female endeavour might receive amongst royalists. The particular concern to catch the attention of Henrietta Maria in the Oxford volumes emerges in their consistent adoption of English alongside the traditional academic languages from 1633 onwards.111 As Raymond Anselment indicates, Christ Church poets predominate amongst those contributing English verse, with Mayne and Cartwright amongst the four pioneers in 1633 and conspicuous contributors thereafter.112 Whilst the Oxford panegyrics on Henrietta Maria focus mostly on her child-bearing feats in providing heirs for Charles, a number of verses praise her ‘Heroick’ virtues.113 William Towers of Christ Church exclaims: . . . thus fame May to our Chronicle adopt your Name, Your single Name, which, though Alone, can give Annalls to th’Book, and make all stories live.114

However, it is the panegyrics commemorating the Queen’s return in 1643 from her mission to gain arms and money on the continent which most exploit this image of female fortitude.115 Here, the Queen is depicted in images redolent of the female heroism in Cartwright’s Royal Slave or Mayne’s Amorous Warre:

111 For the connection between the use of English and the desire to address Henrietta Maria, see Raymond Anselment, ‘The Oxford University Poets and Caroline Panegyric’, John Donne Journal, 3/2 (1984), 181–201 (182); Alberta Turner, ‘Queen Henrietta Maria and the University Poets’, N&Q 193 (1948), 112 Anselment, ‘Oxford University Poets’, 184. 270–2. 113 See verses addressed to the Queen by T. Hervey and William Joyner in Horti Carolini Rosa Altera (Oxford, 1640), cc1r, e1r. 114 Musarum Oxoniensium Charisteria (Oxford, 1638), c3v. 115 See Musarum Oxoniensium Epibateria (Oxford, 1643). Some of the verses in Latin also cast Henrietta Maria in the mould of femme forte. e.g. Thomas Reade, A4r, addresses her as ‘Armata Pallas’; John Beesley, C2r, compares her to Camilla and Zenobia; and George Wake, A4v, twice dubs her ‘Heroina’.

50

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’ Shee has an Army; blush the Irish crue. These the Queene’s Army truly make, not you, Each Maid of Honour’s Fanne’s become a shield Indeed no honour like to that o’th field.116

The heroic endeavours of the Queen and her ladies are set against the disruptive public activities of female political opponents: ‘Your Maids of honour with their glorious sight | Millions of Preaching Citty-dames will fright’.117 As in earlier volumes, public ‘fame’ is seen as the just reward of Henrietta Maria’s actions: ‘Newes of your Victories, like Pages, came, | Before your Person, to proclaim your fame’.118 Such representations may very well have caught the eye and imagination of the young Margaret Lucas who was in Oxford at the time of the Queen’s return there and of the publication of this volume. The quasi-martial heroism attributed to the maids of honour may have helped encourage her ambitions to serve the Queen and coloured her self-representations when she came to publish as a former maid of honour.119 The notion that Cavendish’s heroic female protagonists and depictions of herself as an author draw on the celebrations of Henrietta Maria and her ladies in the Oxford panegyrics is suggestively complemented by post-Restoration tributes to her writing from two of the Christ Church contributors. Two letters from Jasper Mayne play up to Cavendish’s potential identification with the Queen in her authorial activities: For I do assure your Excellency, I look upon Welbek, as long as you are there . . . as a perfect Court of Wit and Learning, where you have all the Muses for your Maids of Honour; and the best Philosophers, Statesmen, Orators, and Historians for your Counsellors: And all these for the Glory of your Sex, created from your self.120

Elsewhere he once again speaks of her choosing ‘all the Muses to be your Maids of Honour’.121 A more outspoken letter from Richard Stevenson, in Musarum Oxoniensium Epibateria, [2]C4r. 118 Ibid. John Dale, in Musarum Oxoniensium Epibateria [2]C3v. The volume’s lines from Cartwright, ‘On the Queens Return from the Low Countries’, [2]D1r–[2]D1v, record the particular incidence of heroism shown by Henrietta Maria when she escaped enemy fire during her landing at Bridlington on her return, an episode about which Cavendish herself also later wrote in LWC 23, since her husband escorted the Queen on that occasion. 120 Letters and Poems, 96–7 (21 Apr. 1664). 121 Ibid. 83 (6 May 1662). 116 117 119

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

51

Thomas Lockey contains a general evocation of the ideal of the femme forte but may imply a recollection specifically of Henrietta Maria’s achievements for her country in 1643. Championing Cavendish’s writing as a heroic blow for women against those who would decry and restrict their capacity for knowledge, Lockey claims that, ‘herein your Excellency hath shew’d great Courage in breaking through that Obstruction, and by a Female and unusual Chevalry have rescued your whole Nation and Sex from the oppression and injury in this point’.122 Henrietta Maria’s enactment of the role of heroic woman and its association with the defence of embattled monarchies in both France and England must surely have endeared Cavendish’s displaced royalist contemporaries to a persona with which they were already familiar through the medium of court theatricals. In nurturing such a persona as an author, Cavendish could circumnavigate the perceived immodesty of feminine publicity since contemporary conceptions of the heroic woman valorized her right to fame through courageous deeds without compromising her chastity. Tasso’s claim that heroic women should be exempt from the conventional demands of chastity was overturned in favour of a representation which enabled heroines to be at once chaste and famous.123 Surviving contemporary responses to Cavendish’s writing confirm the suggestion that her longing to achieve a ‘glorious fame’ through publication or her encouragement to ‘Writing Ladies’ to emulate the ‘many Heroick Women in some Ages’, could be perceived as evoking a commendable spirit of heroic femininity (P and F Aa1v). Invoking Le Moyne’s central text, Walter Charleton proclaims that, ‘your Grace’s Statue ought to be placed alone, at the upper end, in the Gallery of Heroic Women, and upon a Pedestal more advanced then the rest . . . you are the First great Lady, that ever Wrote so much and so much of your own’.124 The political resonances of a heroic portrayal of Cavendish are evident in David Lloyd’s placing his encomium of her in the context of his 122 123 124

Ibid. 134 (20 May 1663). Maclean, Woman Triumphant, 83–5. Letters and Poems, 117–18 (7 May 1667). See also Charles Cheyne’s insistence on her everlasting ‘Fame’ and Joseph Glanvill’s description of her as ‘the nearest Relation to an Heroine’, in Letters and Poems, 79 (4 Sept. 1662); 104 (25 Aug. [no year given]).

52

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

Memoires (1668), a series of biographies of royalists focusing on their contributions during the Civil War. Remarking on the death of her brother-in-law, Charles Cavendish, Lloyd adds, ‘if he can die that lives in so Honourable a Monument as the Works of his dearest Sister, the Heroick Princess, the Dutchess of Newcastles [sic]’.125 Other comments on Cavendish by her contemporaries appear to allude to the iconography of feminine heroism. ‘Indeed’, write the master and fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, ‘we who wonder that the Antients should adore the same tutelar Godess both of Arts and Arms, what shall we think of your Excellency, who are both a Minerva and an Athens to your self’.126 In Le Moyne’s Gallery, Joan of Flanders, countess of Montfort, is described as possessing, ‘a certain Air like that of Minerva, drawn by the antient Painter, who was armed and yet appeared a Virgin’.127 Ian Maclean points out that the iconological depiction of fortitudo or virtus, ‘is sometimes confused with the emblematic or mythical representation of Minerva (Pallas armata)’ and that ‘it seems to have been fashionable among ladies of the grande noblesse in the 1640s to be painted as fortitudo or Pallas armata’.128 One is reminded of the depiction of Cavendish in one of the engravings which she used as frontispiece. Here, although Cavendish is not armed, the Antwerp artist, Abraham van Diepenbeke, portrays her wearing a toga and standing in a niche supported by Apollo and Minerva (see Fig. 1).129 This engraving certainly recalls the bedraped heroines of The Gallery. Cavendish’s post-Restoration panegyrists may still praise her as a femme forte but, with the reinstatement of the King and his party, her more aggressive style of feminine self-publicization 125 126

David Lloyd, Memoires (London, 1668), 672. Letters and Poems, 11 (2 Feb. 1663). See also 88, from Robert Creyghton (2 Dec. 1653). Whilst Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, 196, suggests that the remarks in the letter quoted come across as satirical, she concedes the impossibility of finally adjudicating whether ‘the satiric effect is intentional or unintentional’, 196 n. 38. My contextualization of such panegyric rhetoric argues the clear presence of a historical and discursive framework in which it could be intended and received as genuine praise. 127 Le Moyne, The Gallery, i. 124. 128 Maclean, Woman Triumphant, 213, 214. 129 James Fitzmaurice, ‘Front Matter and the Physical Make-Up of Natures Pictures’, Women’s Writing, 4/3 (1997), 353–67 (354) points out that not all copies of particular texts by Cavendish have the same frontispiece (or indeed any at all) and that there appears to be no obvious pattern to these choices.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

F i g . 1. One of the engravings used by Cavendish as a frontispiece, representing her in heroic mode.

53

54

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

ceases to be as immediately excusable as a gesture or emblem of suppressed royalist resistance. The resulting increase in the necessity to defend herself against conventional charges of immodesty is reflected in her more frequent and lengthy invocation of her husband’s sanction for publication.130 The omission of her autobiography from the second edition of Natures Pictures (1671) may also be explained in terms of the absence of the original mitigating political context for her extreme declarations of a desire for singularity. In Philosophical Letters (1664), she talks not about a grand desire for fame but apologizes for the ‘Self-conceit’ which ‘perswaded’ her to publish her earlier scientific works perhaps before she ought to have done (h2r).131 Where she does allude to the desire for fame, in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, she distances it from herself by using the ideals of heroic glory merely as an analogy for a personal yearning after ‘the Truth of Nature’ for which she is as ‘ambitious . . . as an Honourable Dueller is of gaining fame and repute’ (b3v). Yet, while the re-establishment of the monarchy and its supporters necessitates some modulations in Cavendish’s rhetoric of fame, it is not altogether extinguished. Her assertion, in The Life of . . . William Cavendishe, that the ‘Censures of this Age’ indicate that the ‘Actions’ of herself and her husband ‘are more then ordinary’, suggests that the new royalist order, like its opponents before it, fails to recognize the value of truly ‘Heroick Actions’ motivated and rewarded by honourable ‘Fames’ (b1r–b1v). Cavendish attempts to justify her continued (if less vociferous) adherence to the creed of fame by placing it in the context of a respect for ideals considered outmoded in the climate of the new court which has rejected Newcastle and herself. Even her pointed acclamations of her husband’s devotion to ‘the . . . Noble and Heroick Art of Horsemanship and Weapons’ register a defiance of the devaluation of such skills under the regime of the new king to whom Newcastle taught his equestrian skills.132 130 See e.g. Playes (1662), A3r; ODS a1r–a1v; PPO (1663), unsigned; OEP a3r–a3v. 131 See also PL b2r. 132 Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 2nd edn. (London, 1668), a3r. See also The Description of a New World Called the BlazingWorld, 2nd edn. (London, 1668), 109. William Cavendish, A New Method, c2r, reminds Charles II that, as his governor, he was the first to teach him to ride.

‘The Gallery of Heroick Women’

55

The ‘heroick’ image is fundamental to the way in which Margaret Cavendish situates herself (and is situated by others) in relation to royalist literary production, royalist readers, and royalist iconography. The next chapter goes on to show how Katherine Philips’s apparently much gentler, less outspoken style of authorial self-projection can function as an equally politicized discourse at the very heart of the same royalist literary circles which inspired Cavendish.

2

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’: The Politics of Friendship in the Poems and Plays of Katherine Philips A considerable body of critical work on Katherine Philips’s verse examines its approach to loving friendship between women while a handful of other commentators begin to adumbrate the political concerns of her poetry. Yet, few critics have managed successfully to chart the interplay between these aspects of her work. Elaine Hobby touches on some possible hidden political meanings in Philips’s verse but is predominantly concerned with what she regards as the analogous, but distinct, coding of a ‘lesbian erotic’.1 Other readings ignore the political dimension or regard Philips’s deployment of poetic conventions used by her cavalier contemporaries only as a means of rendering a lesbian agenda acceptable.2 1 Elaine Hobby, ‘Katherine Philips: Seventeenth-Century Lesbian Poet’, in Elaine Hobby and Chris White (eds.), What Lesbians Do in Books (London: Women’s Press, 1991), 183–204 (189, 190–2). See also Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–1688 (London: Virago, 1988), 128–40. 2 Harriette Andreadis, ‘The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632–1664’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 15/1 (1989), 34–60 (37, 50, 55); Lydia Hamessley, ‘Henry Lawes’s Settings of Katherine Philips’s Friendship Poems in his Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues (1655): A Musical Misreading’, in Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (eds.), Queering the Pitch: the New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 115–38 (124); Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Women’s Press, 1981); Arlene Stiebel, ‘Not since Sappho: The Erotic in the Poems of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn’, in Claude J. Summers (ed.), Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context, a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality, 23/1–2 (1992), 153–64.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

57

Kate Lilley’s more nuanced and politically conscious argument for the recognition of a lesbian dimension in Philips’s love elegies to women points to the elusiveness of both sexual and political meanings in her verse.3 Meanwhile, James Loxley tends to separate Philips’s public, political voice from the supposedly private voice of many of her friendship poems.4 Even in attempting to do justice to the subtle interrelationship of preoccupations which characterize Philips’s poems, the practicalities of critical argument tend to mean that one or other strand must be given governing emphasis, with the risk that politically oriented readings might appear to elide the homoerotic possibilities of Philips’s œuvre. Hence, despite providing the only sustained account of the political dimension of Philips’s writing so far, Carol Barash has been criticized for reading her poems as ‘more political than erotic, more public than private’.5 However, Barash’s work crucially recognizes that the depiction of (women’s) friendship and the registering of royalist political allegiances are invariably connected in Philips’s verse.6 This chapter shares Barash’s basic premiss that royalism and 3 Kate Lilley, ‘ “Dear Object”: Katherine Philips’s Love Elegies and their Readers’, in Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman (eds.), Women Writing, 1550–1750, a special issue of Meridian, the La Trobe University English Review, 18/1 (2001), 163–78. See also Ros Ballaster, ‘Restoring the Renaissance: Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips’, in Gordon McMullan (ed.), Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580–1690 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 234–52. 4 James Loxley, ‘Unfettered Organs: The Polemical Voices of Katherine Philips’, in Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (eds.), ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 230–48. For a preliminary survey of the political resonances of some of Philips’s poetic vocabulary, see Robert C. Evans, ‘Paradox and Politics: Katherine Philips in the Interregnum’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 174–85. 5 Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Lilley, ‘ “Dear Object” ’, 166. 6 Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 55, 75. Tomlinson, ‘Theatrical Women: The Female Actor in English Theatre and Drama, 1603–1670’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1996), 281, and S. Hester E. Jones, ‘Some Literary Treatments of Friendship: Katherine Philips to Alexander Pope’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1993), 20, characterize Philips’s friendship writing as attempting to transcend political divisions rather than identifying itself in a partisan fashion. Meanwhile, though Earl Miner, The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) understands the ideological importance of friendship in royalist literature he appears reluctant to offer Philips any prominence. He briefly acknowledges that her poems share the theme of friendship with some of her male royalist contemporaries but dismisses them as ‘thin-blooded’ (302), asserting that she ‘expresses no fervent Royalism’ (301).

58

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

friendship are vitally interconnected in Philips’s poetry but contends that the politics of friendship in her texts cannot be fully appreciated without a more detailed investigation of the relations between her own friendship writings and those of others in her circle. It also attempts to emphasize the degree to which a number of her contemporaries were aware of the political implications of her writing and to enhance our understanding of the reasons why her fellow royalists valued women’s friendship and promoted the voice of a female poet writing on friendship.7 Kate Lilley has argued that the presence of a ‘degree of [homoerotic] affect’ in Philips’s poems engendered ‘a certain amount of homosexual panic . . . among her contemporary readers’.8 Yet, while endorsing her wariness of ‘ “straightening” ’ readings of Philips, this chapter seeks to balance Lilley’s notion of a homophobically suspicious reception with a recognition of the political investment of Philips and her fellow royalists in the ideals of friendship, including friendship between women, by further exposing the royalist coding inherent in her poems.9 In doing so it departs from Barash’s central idea that, during the 1650s, Philips’s poems about love between ‘Lucasia’ (her friend, Anne Owen) and ‘Orinda’ (Philips’s own literary persona) figure a mutual longing for the absent King, whereas the Restoration releases a latent sexual threat in such poems because the women’s desire for one another can no longer be ‘veiled’ as royalist longing for the exiled monarch.10 Instead it provides alternative contexts for understanding the political impact of Philips’s Interregnum friendship poetry and suggests that, whilst the Restoration subtly alters the political meanings of friendship, they remain significant in Philips’s renderings of Corneille’s drama and shape perceptions of her worth as a translator.

7 My argument here is completely at odds with the contention that, as a woman, Philips was ‘not really to be taken too seriously, particularly in matters of friendship and love’, in Hamessley, ‘Henry Lawes’s Settings’, 124. 8 Lilley, ‘ “Dear Object” ’, 173. 9 Ibid. 177 n. 14. 10 Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 91–3. Barash (e.g. 56) and others have sought to probe the faultlines between what they regard as the more public and more intimate facets of Philips’s verse by trying to delineate between Philips and her coterie pseudonym, ‘Orinda’. However, the attempt to establish such a division risks tendentiousness, given the ever-present difficulty of isolating an unmediated autobiographical subject from a projected persona in the case of any poet, see Lilley, ‘ “Dear Object” ’, 166 and 175–6 n. 9.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

59

friendship as royalist coding in philips’s circle Katherine Philips’s marriage to Colonel James Philips meant that she spent the majority of her adult life in the period up to the Restoration in the Welsh town of Cardigan, with occasional visits to London for her husband to sit in Parliament.11 Yet, her schooltime friendships with Mary Aubrey (cousin to John Aubrey and daughter of a leading Welsh cavalier) and with Mary Harvey gained her an entrée to the London-based royalist literary and musical circle around Henry Lawes. Harvey was a music student of Lawes and it was probably through her and the man she later married, Sir Edward Dering, that Philips struck up this all-important connection.12 The two poems of Philips’s, apart from her elegy for William Cartwright, to be printed before the first edition of her collected verse in 1664 appear in Lawes’s Second Book of Ayres, and Dialogues (1655) which boasts as its contributors a lengthy roll-call of royalist luminaries.13 Those to whom she addresses her verse (which was evidently in manuscript circulation during the 1650s) include a number of cavalier figures associated with Lawes: John Jeffreys, Francis Finch, John Berkenhead, Henry Vaughan, and Sir Edward Dering.14 Each of these men contributes to the host of royalist commendatory verses, including Philips’s own, which preface the posthumous edition of Cartwright’s plays and poems printed in 1651.15 11 12 13

CWKP i. 5, 6. Ibid. 2, 3. For Lawes and his circle, see above, Ch. 1. The poems in question are ‘To the truly noble Mr Henry Lawes’ and ‘Friendship’s Mysterys, to my dearest Lucasia (set by Mr H. Lawes)’. 14 For recent studies which demonstrate the extent of Philips’s manuscript circulation, see Patricia M. Sant and James N. Brown, ‘Two Unpublished Poems by Katherine Philips’, ELR 24/1 (1994), 211–28 (216–17); Elizabeth Hageman and Andrea Sununu, ‘New Manuscript Texts of Katherine Philips, the “Matchless Orinda” ’, EMS 4 (1993), 174–219, conclude (214); Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 147. Philips built up her own MS collection of most of the poems she wrote before 1660, now in the National Library of Wales as MS 775, see CWKP i. 41–2. Where no other evidence is available to date her individual poems to the 1650s, I have used their presence in this MS as confirmation that they are Interregnum pieces since it excludes any of her post-Restoration pieces. 15 William Cartwright, Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with Other Poems (London, 1651).

60

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

Philips’s verse posits her relations (in the person of Orinda) with these men and with the two royalist women who dominate her poems from the 1650s, ‘Rosania’ (Mary Aubrey) and ‘Lucasia’ (Anne Owen), in terms of a ‘society’ of friendship.16 The exclusively royalist membership of this ‘society’ signals its affiliations with politically coded understandings of the word friendship amongst contemporary royalists.17 Even Philips’s gesture of naming (albeit pseudonymously) all her ‘friends’ together in one manuscript collection serves to constitute what Barash calls a ‘community’ of royalists despite any literal geographical distance which may separate them.18 Her strategy is in tune with that of another manuscript collection of poems and plays, by Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, Margaret Cavendish’s stepdaughters, composed during the 1640s.19 Margaret Ezell regards the Cavendish and Brackley manuscript as consonant with Earl Miner’s notion that assertions of friendship in royalist literature act as a means of challenging the depradations of the ‘Cavalier Winter’.20 ‘The poems . . . of these royalist women’, asserts Ezell, ‘act as reaffirming bonds between members of a threatened society. . . . The contents of this volume offer a link between brothers absent at the wars and sisters defending the home, between likeminded friends, and between subjects and monarchs’.21 The fact that the ‘absence of deare friends’ on which the manuscript focuses is evidently the result of Civil War strife reinforces the reader’s sense that the constantly reiterated word, ‘friends’, 16 For this label see Philips, ‘To the excellent Mrs A.O. upon her receiving the name of Lucasia, and adoption into our society’, dated 29 Dec. 1651. Sir Edward Dering also uses this term to describe Philips’s ‘friendship’ coterie in a letter to Anne Owen (7 Feb. 1665) after Philips’s death, see CWKP i. 11. 17 For a general discussion of the significance of friendship in royalist literature of this period, see Miner, Cavalier Mode, 250–305. 18 Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 62. 19 Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 16. The fact that Jane Cavendish’s sister appears as Elizabeth Brackley in the MS strongly suggests a date between 1642 and 1649 since she became Lady Brackley in 1642 but took the title, the countess of Bridgewater, in 1649, see ‘The Concealed Fansyes: A Play by Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley’, ed. Nathan Comfort Starr, PMLA 46 (1931), 802–38 (836). Ibid. 836 also points out that the siege in Act III of The Concealed Fansyes appears to reflect events experienced by the sisters at their father’s home, Welbeck Abbey in 1644–5. 20 Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘ “To Be Your Daughter in Your Pen”: The Social Functions of Literature in the Writings of Lady Elizabeth Brackley and Lady Jane 21 Ibid. Cavendish’, HLQ 51 (1988), 281–96 (287).

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

61

means royalist political allies.22 In lines ‘On my sweete brother Charles’, the bonds of friendship are topically linked to military courage against the enemy with Charles possessing ‘courage such, that if your friend bid goe | Like lightninge, will you charge upon his foe’.23 Friendship appears to mean something very close to loyalty to the King’s cause in verses addressed to the sisters’s absent father, William Cavendish: ‘For friendship all that knows you will this owne | That you for trueth of friend doth stand alone’.24 A number of collections of cavalier poetry may be seen to share Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s tactic of asserting royalist bonds by symbolically gathering together ‘friends’ in the space of one text.25 Even after the Restoration David Lloyd saw fit to image his volume of biographies of royalists in terms redolent of the reconstitution of the regicidally dismembered body politic through the textual assembling of ‘friends’.26 It will please the survivors of the Civil War, he suggests, ‘to see the Kings friends in a body in an History’.27 22 The phrase ‘absence of deare friends’ occurs in ‘Loves Torture’, on p. 12 of the MS. For other uses of the word ‘friend’, see e.g. the two poems both entitled ‘On a Noble Lady’, p. 18; ‘On a worthy friend’, p. 22; ‘On my Sister Brackley’, p. 28; ‘On my Noble Grandfather, Sr Charles Cavendysh’, p. 30; ‘On my sweete Sister the Lady Harpur’, p. 32; ‘On my Worthy freind Mr Richard Pypes’, p. 44; ‘On my worthy freind Mr Hailewood’, p. 44. 23 Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 16, p. 2. See also ‘On my good & true friend Mr Henry Ogle’, p. 34. 24 ‘A recruted joy upon a Letter from you Lo: pp’, p. 28. 25 See e.g. Robert Herrick, ‘To his Friend, on the untuneable Times’, ‘To his honoured and most ingenious friend Mr. Charles Cotton’, ‘To his learned friend M. Jo. Harmar, Phisitian to the Colledge of Westminster’, in Hesperides (1648), facs. repr. (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969), 94, 352, 357; Henry Vaughan, ‘To His Friend’, ‘To His Retired Friend, an Invitation to Brecknock’, ‘To my Learned Friend, Mr T. Powell, Upon His Translation of Malvezzi’s Christian Politician’, ‘To my Worthy Friend, Master T. Lewes’ (all from Olor Iscanus (1651)), in Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, repr. with revisions, 1983), 75, 77, 93, 94. (All subsequent references to Herrick and Vaughan’s poems are taken from these edns.) See also Timothy Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs and Literary Culture (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), 178, where he suggests that Sir John Mennes’s poem, ‘To Parson Weeks. An Invitation to London’, printed in Musarum Deliciae (London, 1655), 2, overcomes the separation of the two royalists ‘by enacting the meeting that it attempts to arrange’. 26 See also Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 77, who observes that, ‘in the 1650s manuscript [by Philips] . . . women’s friendship . . . seems to represent both the integrity of the royalist community in exile, and even at times the body of its dismembered and absent monarchs’. 27 David Lloyd, Memoires (London, 1668), B2r.

62

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

Whilst Philips’s politically charged textual practice of collecting together royalist ‘friends’ runs parallel to that of other like-minded contemporary literature, the political subtexts of her friendship poems have a more direct relationship with writings immediately connected to her. During the 1650s both Francis Finch and Jeremy Taylor addressed prose texts on friendship to Philips in response to requests from her.28 The dedication of Finch’s Friendship, dated 30 March 1654, addresses Anne Owen, but the main text, dated 30 October 1653, makes clear that the work was initially conceived as a response to the joint promptings of ‘Lucasia-Orinda’, a composite identity for Owen and Philips.29 It appears that Philips and Finch first encountered one another through Henry Lawes’s circle although it may be that they also saw each other in Wales.30 The title of Taylor’s A Discourse of the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship . . . Written in Answer to a Letter from the Most Ingenious and Vertuous M.K.P. makes clear from the outset Philips’s role as a catalyst to his composition. Philips and Taylor may have come into contact through Alice, countess of Carbery (née Egerton) who, like Philips’s friend Mary Dering (née Harvey), had once been a music pupil of Henry Lawes. When the newly married countess came to live at her husband’s Welsh estate, Golden Grove, Philips wrote verses to welcome her.31 Taylor’s patron during the Interregnum was the Earl of Carbery, the countess’s husband.32 Patrick Thomas has pointed out that the mutual exchanges of compliment in Philips’s circle, such as those which she conducts with Finch and Taylor, emulate the social niceties of French préciosité.33 Nevertheless, the markedly political overtones of Finch and Taylor’s texts render them something more than simple acts of politesse. Meanwhile, a comparison with Philips’s verse shows her shaping and participating in their politicized concepts of friendship, perhaps even deliberately having solicited their texts to offer the opportunity for political comment. 28 Francis Finch, Friendship ([London], 1654); Jeremy Taylor, A Discourse of the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship . . . Written in answer to a Letter from the most ingenious and vertuous M.K.P. (London, 1657). 29 Finch, Friendship, A2r, A3r, 1, 34. 30 See CWKP ii. 160, 161. 31 See Philips, ‘To the Right Honobl. Alice, Countess of Carberry, on her enriching Wales with her presence’. The Countess first came to Golden Grove in 1652, see CWKP i. 331. 32 See C. J. Stranks, The Life and Writings of Jeremy Taylor (London: SPCK, 33 CWKP i. 333–4. 1952), 68–9.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

63

The fact that both Finch and Taylor devote space to weighing up the competing demands of friendship and marriage suggests that they are not only addressing Philips’s private predicament but the key political dilemma at the heart of her personal life: the conflicting royalist and parliamentarian allegiances espoused by herself and her husband. If friendship stands for the royalist ties dear to Philips then Finch’s assertion that, allowing for ‘the legal and ordinary Union’ represented by marriage, friendship must always hold sway, sends a bold political signal to her.34 Poems by Philips which date from the 1650s, whether they anticipate or succeed Finch’s text, certainly concur with his views on this matter.35 Taylor takes a far more cautious stance, anxious to assert the primacy of marital bonds over friendship.36 Nevertheless, he goes on to offer a concession which may speak feelingly to Philips’s condition: there may be some allay in this [marriage] as in other lesser friendships by the incapacity of the persons: if I have not chosen my friend wisely or fortunately, he cannot be the correlative in the best Union . . . When one is useless or unapt for the braveries of the princely friendship, they must love ever, and pray ever, and long till the other be perfected and made fit . . . A Husband and a Wife are the best of friends, but they cannot always signifie all that to each other which their friendships would . . . Other friendships are . . . marriages too.37

Although Kate Lilley reads Taylor’s figurations of female jealousy as ‘veiled chastisement’ of Philips’s focus on friendship between women, the concessions he offers in the above passage suggest a more open approach.38 After all, the fact that his text does not directly discuss friendship between women cannot, as Lilley implies, prove that he is hostile to Philips’s representations of it and he, along with Finch, shares far more in common with Philips’s own treatments of all manner of friendship than Lilley’s reading would allow. For all three the nexus of friendship and royalism is a governing preoccupation. The politically sensitive nature of Finch’s text may be indicated in its severely limited private printing, although he cautiously maintains 34 35 36

Finch, Friendship, 8. See e.g. Philips, ‘Friendship’, 29–36; ‘A Friend’, 13–18. Taylor, A Discourse, 72. Finch, Friendship, 19, does record the view that friendship should not supersede matrimony but attributes it to ‘some . . . severe’ 37 Taylor, A Discourse, 72–4. commentators. 38 Lilley, ‘ “Dear Object” ’, 170.

64

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

that this is simply a result of its being a ‘Trifle’ not ‘fitted to the Pallat of the Time’, as he meaningfully puts it.39 Taylor is also anxious to control the transmission of his text, concluding with the postscript: ‘If you shall think it fit that these papers pass further then your own eye and Closet. I desire they be consign’d into the hands of my worthy friend Dr. Wedderburne.’40 Both Finch and Taylor’s works implicitly connect friendship with royalism. Discussing the manner in which friendship fosters sympathy, Taylor writes, ‘I shed a tear when I am told that a brave King was misunderstood, then slandered, then imprisoned, and then put to death by evil men.’41 The exigencies of royalist defeat are also hinted at in his assertion that ‘some men will perish before they will . . . petition for themselves to some certain persons; but they account it noble to doe it for their friend’ (my emphasis).42 Given such remarks his contention that, ‘it is a precept of Christian charity, to lay down our lives for our Brethren, that is, those who were combined in a cause of Religion, who were united with the same hopes, and imparted to each other ready assistances, and grew dear by common sufferings’ sounds like a eulogy of the royalist defence of Anglican orthodoxy.43 Nevertheless, he does offset this with the studied neutrality of his claim that loyal friendship means readiness to ‘die for a Prince, for the republick or to save an Army as David expos’d himself to combat with the Philistin for the redemption of the host of Israel’.44 Finch, for his part, evokes the Christ-like image of Charles I on the frontispiece of Eikon Basilike (1649) when he claims that a monarch’s incapacity to forge friendships with his subjects as equals ‘is the sharpest Thorn in a Kings Crown’.45 However, he goes on to make the pointed suggestion that ‘Some one King may be there is of so extraordinary a Genius, as by unvailing much of his Majesty, and descending in an addresse and converse more familiar & obliging, may arrive at the felicity of Friendship: but I 39 Finch, Friendship, A2r. Only one copy survives in the library of Christ Church College, Oxford. 40 Taylor, A Discourse, 102. Stranks, Jeremy Taylor, 176–7, says that Wedderburne began his career as professor of philosophy at St Andrews ‘but afterwards gained a great fortune as a doctor of medicine’ and that he was ‘a staunch Royalist and well known to all the King’s friends’. 41 Taylor, A Discourse, 13–14. 42 Ibid. 49. 43 Ibid. 43. 44 Ibid. 45. 45 Finch, Friendship, 7.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

65

must not name him, lest Historians explode the Narration (as fabulous) and Politicians Him.’46 A sustained passage towards the end of Finch’s text goes on to place friendship explicitly in the context of the religious and political debates of the English Civil War: ’Tis not the Open enemies of Friendship and Religion that have brought them into Question and Contempt, but the pretended Professours, through whose sides they are wounded. It hath been the ill Logick of many ages, and we have had sad Examples of it in this Nation, to transferre the Crimes of Persons upon the function, place, office, and calling, from hence it is that all Accusations against Bishops and Kings are urged to the abolition of Episcopacy and Monarchy. Now though this be a very irrationall way of argument, yet when made use of against Friendship and Religion it is farre more absurd: For those men upon whose account Episcopacy and Monarchy are condemned, are really Bishops and Kings; but they through whose default Friendship and Religion are calumniated, are neither Religious nor Friends, but onely Hypocriticall Pretenders.47

Although these comments acknowledge the opinion that individual bishops and kings may have behaved poorly, they evidently place Finch himself on the side of the defenders of monarchy and episcopacy. Those who attack these institutions are implicitly identified with those (significantly labelled ‘Pretenders’) who attack friendship and religion.48 The ideas of Philips, Finch, and Taylor intersect specifically in the conception of friendship, identified with royalism, as representative of religious cohesion and also of social stability.49 The wider resonance of Philips’s calling her circle a ‘society’ are highlighted by Taylor’s repeated associations between friendship and ‘society’: ‘there is no society, and there is no relation that is worthy, but it is made so by the communications of friendship . . . For friendship . . . signifies as much as Unity can mean . . . and every society is the Mother or the Daughter of friendship’.50 Finch too echoes this Aristotelian notion of friendship as the foundation for civic unity, 46 49

47 Ibid. 28. 48 See also ibid. 23–4, 28–9. Ibid. Thomas in CWKP i. 12, 356, 366, briefly notes the relationship between friendship and ‘a cohesive social system’ in Philips’s verse but does not develop his observations at any length or pursue a connection with Finch and Taylor in this regard. 50 Taylor, A Discourse, 55. For other examples of Taylor connecting friendship and society, see A Discourse, 4, 5, 9, 16.

66

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

insisting that ‘Friendship hath an Uniting quality’ since man is ‘naturally a Sociable Creature’.51 Even before Finch composed his treatise, Philips was beginning to outline in her verse the ideas later used by him as by Taylor. In ‘L’amitié: To Mrs M. Awbrey’, dated 6 April 1651, she stresses the unity which friendship can bring as an alternative to the social dissolution promoted by civil strife: United thus, what horrour can appeare Worthy our sorrow, anger, or our feare? Let the dull world alone to talk and fight, And with their vast ambitions nature fright; Let them despise so inocent a flame, While Envy, pride and faction play their game: But we by Love sublim’d so high shall rise, To pitty Kings, and Conquerors despise, Since we that sacred union have engrost, Which they and all the sullen world have lost. (13–22)

Her lines ‘To the excellent Mrs A.O. upon her receiving the name of Lucasia, and adoption into our society’, dated 29 December 1651, anticipate the identification of friendship with the religious bonds which unite members of the true church. The ‘society’ is characterized as ‘a Temple of divinity’ (20) perfected by the admission of Lucasia which Orinda hails with the claim that ‘faith hath now | No greater blessing to bestow’ (1–2). Although the cluster of other poems by Philips which share the concerns articulated by Finch and Taylor all appear in her autograph manuscript from the 1650s it remains harder to date them precisely. Whilst this renders it difficult to assess whether Philips is emulating or influencing Finch and Taylor, they all undoubtedly portray the political implications of friendship in very similar ways. In ‘Friendship’s Mysterys, to my dearest Lucasia’ friendship is equated with religion as a counterweight to civil dissent and conflict. Reflecting that ‘miracles men’s faith do move’ (2), Orinda exhorts Lucasia, ‘To the dull angry world let’s prove | There’s a religion in our Love’ (4–5). The same opposition is suggested by the opening lines of ‘Friendship’: ‘Let the dull brutish world that know not love | Continue haeretiques’ (1–2). The poem goes on to depict 51 Finch, Friendship, 49. For the Aristotelian origins of this concept, see Miner, Cavalier Mode, 290–1.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

67

friendship as the force which promotes earthly and heavenly coherence, stressing, as Taylor does, the importance of sympathy: Nature subsists by Love, and they ty Things to their causes but by Sympathy. Love chaines the differing Elements in one Great harmony, link’d to the heavenly throne; And as on Earth, so the blest quire above Of Saints and Angells are maintain’d by love. (5–10)52

This model is reiterated in ‘L’accord du bien’: Thus all things unto peace do tend; Even discords have it for their end. The cause why Elements do fight, Is but their instinct to Unite. (9–12)53

The vocabulary of social stability used by Finch and Taylor resurfaces elsewhere in Philips’s contention that ‘Content’ is best achieved between friends ‘For they’ve both Union and society’.54 The royalist pedigree of the notion of friendship as the foundation of civilized society emerges in the fact that one of Philips’s letters on this topic reworks a speech from William Cartwright’s play, The Lady Errant. The first passage is from Philips’s letter, the second from Cartwright: And thus it is that the thing call’d Friendship, without which the whole Earth would be but a Desart, and Man still alone, tho’ in Company, grows sick and languishes, and Love once sick, how quickly will it die? O my Olyndus, were there not that thing That we call Friend, Earth would one Desart be, And Men Alone still, though in Company.55

Since Francis Finch appears as one of Philips’s fellow contributors amongst the commendatory verses prefacing Cartwright’s posthumous volume of plays and poems in 1651, he too would have been 52 See Taylor, A Discourse, 13. Philips also places a premium on ‘Sympathy’ in friendship in ‘A Friend’, 25. 53 See also Philips, ‘A Friend’, 1–6. 54 Philips, ‘Content, to my dearest Lucasia’, 60. See also ‘To my Lucasia’, 1–18. 55 CWKP ii. 44 (30 July 1662). Cartwright, The Lady Errant, 371–3, in The Plays and Poems of William Cartwright, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951). All subsequent references to Cartwright’s plays and poems will be to this edn.

68

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

familiar with the latter’s work. Finch and Philips’s writings on friendship also find a resonance in lines by another of Cartwright’s eulogists, Philips’s literary acquaintance, Henry Vaughan. Translating Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy in his Olor Iscanus (1651), Vaughan urges that ‘Love’ (also identified as ‘friendship’ in the poem) ‘which rules Heaven, Land, and Sea, | Chains, keeps, orders as we see’, promoting a ‘social faith’ which ‘Keeps Kings and People with increase’.56 One further important issue defines the territory of politicized friendship shared by Philips, Finch, and Taylor. For all three the status of friendship as a form of political bonding is underlined by its connection with the keeping of secrets whose violation is depicted as a form of treason. Such an association bears out Lois Potter’s thesis on the centrality of notions of secrecy in binding Interregnum royalists.57 Contending that ‘Friendship is Secret’, Finch claims: He that betrayes the Secrets of his friend intrusted to him is doubly guilty, and by adding Fraud to his Violence, and breach of the greatest trust to his Robbery, has withall done execution upon himself too, and lives branded and infamous to that degree, that the Gallows, which his Desperation of so much Mercy may in time make him find way to, be thought a Pardon.58

Similarly, Taylor suggests that friendship cannot endure ‘the revealing of a secret . . . secrecy is the chastity of friendship, and the publication of it is a prostitution and direct debauchery’.59 Philips shares the evidently political emphasis on secrecy in friendship: Friendship doth carry more then common trust And treachery is here the greatest Sin: Secrets deposed then none ever must Presume to open, but who put them in.60 56 Vaughan, ‘Translation of Boethius Consolation of Philosophy II viii’, 14–15, 19, 23, 27. 57 See Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writings: Royalist Literature, 1640–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 58 Finch, Friendship, 9–10. Finch also suggests, 4, that ‘God manifested his friendship to Abraham by the “Communication of secrets and counsels” concerning the imminent destruction of Sodom’. 59 Taylor, A Discourse, 93. See also Henry Vaughan, ‘To his Learned Friend and Loyal Fellow-Prisoner, Thomas Powell of Cantref, Doctor of Divinity’, 29–36, which urges that the mingling of the souls of the two embattled political allies in ‘friendship’ should take place ‘secretly’. 60 Philips, ‘A Friend’, 37–40. Thomas, in CWKP i. 366, notes the parallel with Finch here.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

69

As Taylor’s metaphors of ‘chastity’ and ‘prostitution’ remind us, the keeping and betrayal of secrets also has a particular gendered significance in a culture which often enjoins women to privacy and equates feminine publicity with physical unchastity. Thus a politicized discourse of friendship which places a premium on secrecy may also serve Philips’s desire to counter the notion that her writings are an unfeminine act of self-disclosure (Taylor significantly refers to the ‘publication’ of a secret). Elsewhere in Philips’s verse references to secret ‘vows’ and the ‘private cabinet’ of Orinda’s heart combine political overtones with the privileging of interiority designed to parry hostility to feminine publicity. In lines composed well before Finch and Taylor’s works on friendship Philips depicts Orinda and Rosania’s minds as being as close As Love, or vows, or secrets can endeare. I have no thought but what’s to thee reveal’d, Nor thou desire that is from me conceal’d. Thy heart locks up my secrets richly set, And my brest is thy private cabinet.61

Taylor may recall these verses in allowing to Philips that women can ‘retain a secret as faithfully’ as men.62 The political significance of the locked cabinet to which Philips alludes in her poem is heightened by the publication of Charles I’s private correspondence by his opponents as The King’s Cabinet Opened (1645).63 James Howell also connects this incident with the idea of friendship as a means of communicating political secrets.64 In the context of a general consideration of letters as a 61 Philips, ‘L’amitié: to Mrs M. Awbrey. 6t Aprill 1651’, 6–10. All the printed edns. of Philips’s work have ‘Friendship’ instead of ‘secrets’ in l. 6, as does the MS of Philips’s poems in the hand of her friend, Sir Edward Dering, Misc *HRC 151 Philips MS 14, 937 at the University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. However, all versions of the poem agree on ‘secrets’ in l. 10. For more on the Dering MS, see CWKP i. 44–5. 62 Taylor, A Discourse, 88. 63 See Potter, Secret Rites, 58, 61. For an example of the royalist shock occasioned by this violation of secrecy, see ‘The King’s Cabinet Opened’, in Martin Lluellin, Men-Miracles. With Other Poems (Oxford, 1646), 101: ‘Who now have waded through all Publicke aw, | Will breake through Secrets, and prophane the Law’. 64 Cecile Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in SeventeenthCentury England (Charlottesville, Va., and London: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 15–17, discusses 17th-cent. cabinet literature and the notion of cabinets as ‘repositories of secrets’ (15).

70

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

medium of friendship, he alleges that, ‘They can the Cabinets of Kings unscrue, | And hardest intricacies of State unclue’.65 His allusion to The King’s Cabinet Opened stresses the need for friends to protect political secrets.66 Philips’s representation of the imperatives of secrecy amongst friends as analogous to the necessity of political discretion may, once again, have been influenced by Cartwright. One of the sources of Anne Owen’s pseudonym, Leucasia in William Cartwright’s The Siege, praises the loyalty of her friend and attendant, Euthalpe, asserting: Sir, she hath been my Cabinet, my Tablet In which I’ve writ my weightiest secrets; still As faithful, and as silent too, as that. (2349–51)

Similarly, her namesake, Lucasia, in The Lady-Errant insists, . . . ’tis more Injustice To betray secret Love, than to make known Counsels of State. Cupid hath his Cabinet, To which, if any prove unfaithfull, he Straight wounds him . . . (1901–5)

In tracing the overlaps between Philips’s politicized discourse of friendship and those of Finch and Taylor I am suggesting that Philips was entirely conscious of the royalist import of the writing on friendship which she fostered. This notion is reinforced when we examine the two poems which she wrote in Francis Finch’s honour. ‘To the noble Palaemon on his incomparable discourse of Friendship’ lauds Finch’s text for having presented an alternative to military and political strife. Without his intervention, ‘the Politician still had laugh’d’ (11) and We had been still undone, wrapt in disguise, Secure, not happy; cunning, but not wise; War had been our design, int’rest our trade, We had not dwelt in safety but in shade. (1–4)

If ‘all mankind thy conqu’ring truths might heare’, speculates Philips, ‘Nations and people would let fall their armes’ (22, 25). 65 James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae: Familiar Letters Domestic and Forren, 3rd edn. (London, 1655), I. A5r. 66 For a further discussion of the political connotations of the term ‘cabinet’ in writing by Philips and other royalists, see below, Ch. 3.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

71

The decisively royalist tenor of the peace and social harmony which she considers that Finch can propagate is apparent in her contention that he has ‘rescu’d’ friendship (16), Unvayled her face, and then restor’d her Crown: By so august an action to convince, ’Tis greater to support then be a Prince. (18–20)

In addition to offering a possible pun glancingly portraying the restored Charles II as Emperor Augustus, these lines recall Finch’s own cryptic remarks about the ‘one King’ who might by ‘unvailing much of his Majesty’ (my emphasis) enjoy ‘the felicity of Friendship’.67 They also pick up on his assertion that ‘Love is the Crown and Perfection of all our Passions, and Friendship of our Love’ (my emphasis).68 ‘On Mr Francis Finch (the excellent Palemon)’ contains fewer political clues although the claim that ‘ ’Twas he that rescu’d gasping friendship when | The bell toll’d for her funerall with men’ captures the intensity of Philips’s sense of the need to promote friendship as a response to the fatal divisions caused by the Civil War (49–50). A manuscript variant found in what may well be a copy of an early version of the poem made by Nicholas Crouch, fellow of Balliol College Oxford, for his notebook has ‘sacred friendship’ instead of ‘gasping friendship’, suggesting the religious status of friendship stressed by Finch in his treatise.69 The existence of the Crouch manuscript, which contains copies of at least two other poems by Philips as well as a key to several of the main pseudonyms used in her ‘society’, indicates that Finch (or one of his associates in Philips’s circle) evidently considered her eulogy to him to be of more than merely ephemeral significance. Patricia M. Sant and James N. Brown point out that, as a one-time gentleman commoner of Balliol, Finch is likely to have known Crouch who, they suggest, had perceptible royalist leanings.70 If Finch did not pass on Philips’s poems to Crouch then, as Sant and Brown suggest, Berkenhead, Jeffreys, Lawes, or Dering were all 67 69

68 Ibid. 4. Finch, Friendship, 7. This version bears the title, ‘In nobilem Palaemonem’. For a discussion of this MS, see Sant and Brown, ‘Two Unpublished Poems’, 216–17. They also note, 217, the extra intensifying couplet in the Crouch version which follows the lines I have quoted above: ‘He to her dying groans did life afford | And to her own vast 70 Ibid. 215. eminence restor’d’.

72

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

familiar enough in Oxford circles to have done so themselves.71 In order to understand why they might have bothered to do so we need to explore the reasons behind the privileging of women in relation to royalist discourses of friendship.

women as exemplars of politicized friendship Francis Finch and Jeremy Taylor’s claims that they are merely writing their treatises on friendship to indulge a lady’s request may serve as a useful pretext for politically charged comment but their dedications to Orinda and Lucasia must also be understood in themselves as gestures of political affiliation. To explain the political investment of Philips’s contemporaries in the idea of women as guardians of friendship we must begin by recognizing the importance of specifically Platonic friendship for Interregnum royalists and their privileging of women as exponents of such Platonic relationships. A notion of friendship or love which placed a premium on the conjunction of souls irrespective of physical separation was evidently highly amenable to royalists separated by imprisonment, exile, or death.72 The notion that Platonic friendship transcends death may account for Katherine Philips’s otherwise puzzling description of William Cartwright as ‘my much valued Friend’ in the title of her commendatory poem as it appears in the posthumous edition of his works.73 Since Cartwright died in 1643 when Philips was only 11 she cannot have been his friend in the most obvious sense. Unless the phrase is an interpolation by someone else who made an error, it seems plausible to interpret the term 71 Ibid. 216. Sant and Brown also suggest Jeremy Taylor but it seems less clear that he was in contact with Philips during the early part of the 1650s when she and Finch were exchanging texts. Unlike the other men mentioned here, Taylor did not contribute with Philips to commendatory verses prefacing William Cartwright’s Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with Other Poems (London, 1651) nor does he ever appear as a recipient of any poem by Philips as the others do. 72 See e.g. William Cartwright, ‘On Mrs Abigall Long, who dyed of two Impostumes’, 75–80; ‘La belle confidente’, in Thomas Stanley, Poems and Translations (London, 1647), 27; Henry Vaughan, ‘To my Ingenuous Friend, R.W.’, 17–28. 73 Philips, ‘To the Memory of the most Ingenious and Vertuous Gentleman Mr WIL: CARTWRIGHT my much valued Friend’, in Cartwright, Comedies, TragiComedies, with Other Poems, a6v.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

73

‘friend’ here as signifying royalist bonds deemed invulnerable to the ravages of mortality.74 A variety of royalists expound the idea that physical separation is no barrier to the politically salient ties of friendship. Conjecturing that souls may mingle outside the confines of separated bodies, Abraham Cowley’s poem, ‘Friendship in Absence’, goes on to proclaim that ’Twere an ill World, I’ll swear, for every friend, If Distance could their Union end. But Love it self does far advance Above the power of Time and Space, It scorns such outward Circumstance, His Times for ever, every where his Place.75

His lines are in keeping with Philips’s ‘A Friend’ in which the reader is assured that: Absence doth not from Friendship’s rites excuse They who preserve each other’s heart and fame, Parting can ne’re divide; it may diffuse . . . (79–81)

Similarly, in ‘A Dialogue between Lucasia and Orinda’, Lucasia, asking ‘and can we part?’, is greeted with the response: ‘Our bodyes must’, whereupon she retorts, . . . but never we: Our soules, without the help of sense, By wayes more noble and more free Can meet, and hold intelligence. (4–8)76 74 Noting the anomaly here, Patrick Thomas in CWKP i. 357 suggests that the phrase ‘may have been intended . . . to refer to [Philips’s] love of Cartwright’s writings’ but it seems unlikely to me, given the context, that it does not contain certain political implications too. See also Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 63. 75 ‘Friendship in Absence’, in Abraham Cowley, Poems (London, 1656), 11. See also the following which, although they do not make explicit the notion that true friendship is founded on a union between souls, celebrate its power to transcend separation: Richard Lovelace, ‘The Triumphs of PHILAMORE and AMORET. To the Noblest of our Youth and Best of Friends, CHARLES COTTON’, in Lucasta. Posthume Poems of Richard Lovelace (London, 1659), 49–50; Francis Finch, ‘Parting’, in Henry Lawes, Ayres, and Dialogues (London, 1655), 27 (mispaginated 47); Taylor, A Discourse, 81–2. 76 This poem does not appear in Philips’s autograph MS but the fact that it is described as having been ‘Set by Mr H. Lawes’ indicates a date from the 1650s when Philips was associated with the Lawes circle. Lawes died in 1662, see Willa McClung Evans, Henry Lawes: Musician and Friend of Poets (Oxford: Oxford

74

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

In order to understand the political resonances of such poems for Philips’s royalist contemporaries during the 1650s, however, we need to bear in mind not only the special significance of Platonic friendship during the Interregnum but the fact that women have privileged associations with Platonic love and friendship in mid-seventeenth-century royalist culture. An examination of these associations helps us to explain why Philips’s male royalist contemporaries had a political investment in fostering her and her poetry of (women’s) friendship. One important context here is that of the salons of the French précieuses in which women were seen as authoritative in discussions concerning the predominant subject of Platonic affection.77 Whilst not literally a salon, the so-called ‘society’ of friendship promulgated by Philips’s verse offers a notional recreation of the French précieux culture with its model of a mixed, but femaledominated coterie known by pastoral pseudonyms and preoccupied with issues of Platonic love.78 Philips certainly seems to have been aware of the tradition of romances generated in French précieux culture and so beloved of English royalists. In responding to Francis Finch’s dedication of his Friendship to her, she gives him the pseudonym ‘Palemon’, the name of a character in Honoré D’Urfé’s L’Astrée, the romance central to précieux culture in its codification of Platonic love ideals.79 With France as the centre of University Press, 1941), 229. For more poems with similar sentiments, see Philips, ‘To Mrs. Mary Awbrey at Parting’, Friendship in Embleme, or the Seale, to my dearest Lucasia’; ‘TO LUCASTA, Going beyond the Seas’, in Richard Lovelace, Lucasta (London, 1649), 2; Henry Vaughan, ‘To Amoret, of the Difference ‘Twixt Him, and Other Lovers and what True Love is’, 15–28. 77 For discussions of précieux culture, see Jean Gagen, The New Woman: Her Emergence in English Drama, 1600–1730 (New York: Twayne, 1954), 86, 87; Ian Walter Maclean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature 1610–1652 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 152–4; Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 14–15. 78 In CWKP i. 7–10, Thomas discusses the relationship (and its political resonances) of Philips’s verse and social milieu with préciosité. However, he does not remark on the specifically feminocentric character of précieux culture or the particular implications of this for Philips’s reception. 79 For L’Astrée and préciosité, see Veevers, Images of Love and Religion, 16–17. See also Philips’s poem, ‘A Pastoral of Mons. Scudery’s In ye first volume of Amalhide—Englished’, which translates a poem from Scudery’s romance Amalhide, ou L’Esclave Reine (Paris, 1660), see Katherine Philips, The Collected Works of Katherine Philips the Matchless Orinda, iii. The Translations, ed. Germaine Greer and Ruth Little (Stump Cross: Stump Cross Books, 1993), 102 (hereafter CWKP iii).

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

75

cavalier exile, emulation of French high culture in the 1640s and 1650s could hardly fail to become a gesture of political affiliation in which both Philips and her admirers participated. However, even before the Civil War, Henrietta Maria had popularized her own brand of préciosité at the English court.80 Hence the echoing of précieux ideas in Philips’s Interregnum royalist circle might also be regarded as a gesture of loyalty to the now disbanded Stuart regime.81 As Erica Veevers demonstrates, the type of préciosité which flourished under Henrietta Maria from around 1630 drew on the so-called honnête ideals of behaviour promulgated in the religious context of ‘the Devout Humanism of St François de Sales’.82 Whilst it was seen as desirable for men as well as women to embrace honnêteté, its advocates regarded women’s exemplary conduct as paramount in ‘improving the manners and morals of society’ and promoting harmony in social relations.83 Examining the ways in which honnêteté extended possible models of women’s conduct, Veevers notes that ‘friendship and honour (so important in romance literature between men)’ now became a concern between women in the cavalier drama of the late 1620s and 1630s.84 Sophie Tomlinson convincingly concludes that it was ‘this sort of feminism’ borne of ‘préciosité and honnêteté’ which ‘provides a context for the enthusiastic reception of Philips’s literary talent among Royalist writers, aristocrats and gentry’.85 Nevertheless, a use of the general term ‘feminism’ should not be allowed to obscure the fact that it is specifically the honnête elevation of women’s friendship which provides the dominant influence in fostering Philips’s verse. Nor should we fail to consider the heightened political significance which attached to such an elevation in the 1650s. A key text in the promotion of honnêteté was Jacques Du Bosc’s L’Honneste Femme (1632), printed in English translation as The Compleat Woman (1639). In a chapter entitled ‘Of Amity’ Du Bosc insists: 80 For a detailed discussion of the differences between Henrietta Maria’s préciosité and that of the French salons, see Veevers, Images of Love and Religion, 2, 3, 20–1. 81 See Thomas’s comments on the political significance of English préciosité in this period, CWKP i. 7–8. 82 Veevers, Images of Love and Religion, 2, 3, 21–2. 83 Ibid. 21, 22. See also 3, 6–7. 84 Ibid. 67. 85 Tomlinson, ‘Theatrical Women’, 284, 285.

76

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

Since there is no sweetnesse in life, without Amity, and that without it, the greatest prosperity is but irkesome, as its least affliction is intollerable to us. There is no reason I should forget this divine quality, wherein women have made themselves so recommendable at all times. There is no sense I should leave out this goodly vertue, whereto they have even set up Altars amongst the savagest Nations, and which exerciseth an absolute power upon hearts in all places, where there is any sense and knowledge. There is no need then of much proofes to make it known, that Amity is necessary in the world . . .86

Although he goes on to consider its dangers, this initial account of friendship not only presents women as its chief exponents but portrays it as a religious and fundamentally civilizing influence in a manner which anticipates the politically inflected approaches taken by Finch, Taylor, and Philips during the Interregnum. Indeed this passage may have acquired an added political relevance for royalist readers when the text was reprinted in another translation under the title The Accomplish’d Woman in 1656. The date of this republication suggests the importance attached to recalling the feminocentric culture of the Caroline court during the Interregnum. Its translator was Walter Montagu, whose pastoral drama The Shepheard’s Paradise, performed at court in 1633, had also promoted women as arbiters and exemplars of Platonic affection.87 This is apparent not only in its subject matter but also in the fact that it was one of a number of court entertainments in this period acted exclusively by the Queen and her ladies, who played all the roles irrespective of gender.88 Like Montague’s translation from Du Bosc, The Shepheard’s Paradise remained unprinted until the 1650s eventually appearing in 1659.89 As a woman writing about friendship in general and about her particular friendships with other women, Philips was embodying interconnected honnête ideals of femininity and friendship, both of 86 Jacques Du Bosc, The Compleat Woman, tr. N.N. (1639) facs. repr. (Amsterdam and New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), 73. 87 For performance details, see Alfred Harbage, Cavalier Drama: An Historical Supplement to the Study of the Elizabethan and Restoration Stage (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 13–14. 88 See below, Ch. 3. 89 For a further discussion of the play and its importance in the Interregnum, see below, Ch. 3. Veevers, Images of Love and Religion, 28, plausibly suggests that Montague’s tr. of Du Bosc may have been completed around the time he was working on The Shepheard’s Paradise, thereby stressing their shared ideas.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

77

which carried an added political weight for Interregnum royalists. Her poetic expressions of Platonic love or friendship between women may be seen to evoke all-female court performances. In fostering Philips and her poetry of friendship (including friendship between women), then, male royalists are engaged in an act of political self-definition. They emulate the privileging of women in the realm of Platonic affection which characterizes the French salon world pertinent to English exile or the Caroline court culture disbanded by the Civil War. Philips’s own poem, variously known as ‘For the Queen of Hearts’ or ‘For Regina’, puns on the name of her friend, Regina Collier, to emphasize the manner in which homage to a gracious woman may be equated with homage to Henrietta Maria and thus become a badge of royalist loyalty in troubled times. Urging Regina to accept a suit she’s rejected, Orinda exhorts her: Redeem the poison’d age let it be seen There’s no such friendship as to serve a Queen But you I see are lately Roundhead growne, And whom you vanquish you insult upon. (17–20)

The way in which a celebration of friendship between women can become a loyal reconstruction of the defunct Stuart court is apparent in Richard Flecknoe’s letter to a female patron describing his latest project for The Temple of Frendship, a play about an Amazon commonwealth. The passage deals with ‘Frendship’ (sic) in a manner redolent of the politicized conceptions discussed earlier, describing it as ‘our second Religion, and so main a part of our first’. This being the case, claims Flecknoe: I have design’d to present it so beautiful to the Eye, as all should be ravisht with its Love and Admiration. To that end I have personated it in the loveliest sex, and that betwixt persons of the same sex too . . . For representing it by Ladies, after the like example of the Queen and her Ladies here formerly . . . I thought none reasonably could take exceptions.90

Whilst less obviously connected to the Caroline court, male gestures of support for Philips and for her friendships with women 90 Richard Flecknoe, A Relation of Ten Years Travell in Europe, Asia, Affrique, and America (London, [1656]), 147. The printed version of the letter, entitled ‘To the Lady—’, is undated but its contents point to the period after 1642 when the old court moved to Oxford.

78

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

should be understood as analogous acts of political self-fashioning. Francis Finch’s treatise on friendship makes Philips his joint dedicatee with Anne Owen, addressing them compositely as ‘Lucasia-Orinda’ in a gesture which epitomizes his celebration of the two women’s friendship as the apogee of the politicized concept of unity advocated by his text.91 Finch’s use of the two women to embody an abstract ideal to which disempowered royalists aspire constitutes a variation on the coding process involved in Lovelace’s addresses to Lucasta (chaste light) or Althea (truth).92 Sir Edward Dering even ventriloquizes Orinda’s love for her friend Rosania in a poem which represents the two women’s affection as a stable substitute for the fluctuating fortunes of the monarch: . . . Then I am happier then the King; No doubtfull voyage doth my treasure bring: The fleet I traffique with doth dread no harmes, Sailes in my sight, and anchors in mine armes.93

The notion that friendship is a crucial force for socio-political cohesion and one in which women excel is apparent in the special role allotted females in the politicized discourse of harmony operating around the royalist musician, Henry Lawes. Unsurprisingly, of course, metaphors of musical harmony or discord are often used in writing about civil strife whether from a royalist or 91 Finch, Friendship. Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 92–3, also considers ‘the fused “Orinda-Lucasia” of Finch’s dedication’ as a ‘political emblem’ but tends to regard it as a ‘beloved object’ somehow representative of the absent monarch. 92 Whilst Lovelace most often addresses Lucasta, his Lucasta (London, 1649) also contains verses ‘TO ALTHEA From Prison’, 97–8. See Raymond Anselment, Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 99, on Lovelace and Lucasta. Potter, Secret Rites, 134, also discusses the symbolism of the names Lucasta and Althea. Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 71–2, suggests that the name Lucasia in Philips’s poems derives from the Lucasta of Lovelace’s verse, contending that Philips’s early poems offer a redefinition of honour which challenges the ‘militaristic inscription of love and honour’ in Lovelace’s volume. However, the plays of William Cartwright seem to offer a more immediate provenance for the name Lucasia. 93 Dering’s poem is to be found in his own MS of Philips’s poems, appearing there as part of Philips’s ‘To the noble Silvander on his dreame and navy, personating Orinda preferring Rosania before Salomons traffique to Ophir in these verses’. Philips’s poem appears in her autograph MS but without Dering’s lines and with the title, ‘To the truly noble Sir Ed: Dering (the worthy Silvander) on his dream, and navy’, see CWKP i. 268–9, 332–3.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

79

Parliamentarian point of view.94 Yet, whilst not exclusive to the King’s supporters, such metaphors certainly provided a long-standing embodiment of royalist aspirations and Henry Lawes as a royalist musician naturally became a key focus for their articulation.95 Comparing him to both Orpheus and Aesculapius, Horatio Moore praises his ideal marriage of ‘Harmony and wit’ asserting: ‘Thou like some Mighty Monarch dost controul, | Dispence, Rule, Work, and Reign o’re all the Soul’.96 Lawes’s surname offers a potential pun which ideally links his musical skill with the power to propagate social stability, as underlined in Aurelian Townshend’s verses addressed to Lawes and his brother William after the latter’s death in 1645: ‘In a False Time true Servants to the Crowne: | Lawes of themselves, needing no more direction’.97 Philips, like her fellow panegyrists, links Lawes’s command of harmony with the topical question of civil order: So harmony, on this score now, that then, Yet still is all that takes and governs men. Beauty is but Composure, and we find Content is but the Concord of the mind, Friendship the Unison of well-tun’d hearts, Honour’s the Chorus of the noblest parts, 94 See Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 281. 95 For examples of royalist poems which deploy metaphors of musical harmony and discord, see Herrick, ‘To his Friend, on the untuneable Times’; John Pinchbacke, ‘Another upon the POEMS’, in Lovelace, Lucasta (1649), a5r, a5v; ‘On New-years day 1640. TO the KING’, in Sir John Suckling, Fragmenta Aurea (London, 1646), 4; Abraham Wright’s preface to Parnassus Biceps. Or Severall Choice Pieces of Poetry Composed by the Best Wits that were in Both the Universities Before Their Dissolution (London, 1656), A8v. 96 Horatio Moore, ‘To his Honoured Friend Mr. HENRY LAWES, Upon his Annual Book of AYRES’, in Henry Lawes, Ayres, and Dialogues (London, 1658), [A3r], [A3v]. See also John Berkenhead, ‘To the great Master of his Art my honoured F. Mr. HENRY LAWES on his Book of AYRES’, in Ayres, and Dialogues (1658), [A5v], [A6r]. 97 Aurelian Townshend, ‘To the Incomparable Brothers, Mr. Henry, and Mr. William Lawes’, in Henry Lawes, Choice Psalmes (1648), repr. in Willa McClung Evans, Henry Lawes, 179. For a similarly politically inflected pun on Lawes’s name, see Lloyd, Memoires, 622. For further examples of commendatory verses which portray Lawes’s musical skills in opposition to the upheavals of the times, see John Phillips, ‘To my Honour’d Friend, Mr. Henry Lawes, upon his Book of Ayres’, in Henry Lawes, Ayres and Dialogues (London, 1653), I. A2r; Mary Knight, ‘To her most honoured Master, Mr. HENRY LAWES, On his Second Book of Ayres’, in Lawes, Ayres, and Dialogues (1655), [b1v].

80

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’ And all the world on which we can reflect, Musique to th’Eare, or to the intellect.98

In a milieu in which musical harmony is consistently presented as a catalyst to, or cypher for, royalist notions of proper political order, the repeated perception of women as the consummate agents of such harmony lends them important symbolic political force. The previous chapter has already discussed the promotion of female singers in Henry Lawes’s circle. An engraving used as the frontispiece for Lawes’s Treasury of Musick (1669) testifies to a perceived symbolic link between women and music.99 Women’s supremacy as propagators of harmony is expounded by Philips’s literary model, William Cartwright. His play, The Lady-Errant, contrasts a group of ‘busie factious Ladies’ who foment disruptive moves to establish a female commonwealth with Princess Lucasia and her waiting-woman, Eumela, who resist the women’s attempt at revolution. Given this, it seems significant that both Lucasia and Eumela are featured singing sweetly to a lute during the course of the drama.100 Another Leucasia, trying to dissolve enmity in Cartwright’s The Siege, becomes the central spokesperson for the doctrine of Platonic love imaged as musical harmony.101 Philips perhaps chose the pseudonym, Lucasia, for Anne Owen, not just because both Cartwright’s Lucasias embody ideals of feminine friendship but because his associations of the name with harmony particularly suited a woman who may herself have been known for 98 Philips, ‘To the truly noble Mr Henry Lawes’, 7–14. See also Philips, ‘To Mr. Henry Vaughan, Silurist, on his Poems’, 34–6, ‘On Mr Francis Finch (the excellent Palemon)’, 41–4; ‘L’accord du bien’, 1–8, 13–20; ‘To my Lucasia’, 1–9; ‘A Friend’, 1–6. 99 See Tomlinson, ‘Theatrical Women’, 236 and 236 n. 58. Tomlinson points out that this illustration also appears in an earlier collection of Select Ayres and Dialogues (1659), published by John Playford. 100 Cartwright, The Lady-Errant, 327–40, 1034–59. 101 See Cartwright, The Siege, 1387–91. See also Cartwright, ‘On Mrs Abigall Long, who dyed of two Impostumes’, 17–20, ‘To the Memory of the most vertuous Mrs Ursula Sadleir, who dyed of a Feaver’, 28; Thomas Stanley, ‘A Platonick Discourse Upon LOVE. Written in Italian by John Picus MIRANDULA’ (with a separate title-page dated 1651), in Stanley, Poems (London, 1652), 230. Sophie Tomlinson, ‘Theatrical Vibrancy on the Caroline Court Stage: Tempe Restored and The Shepherd’s Paradise’, in Clare McManus (ed.), Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 186–203, discusses the innovative performance in Aurelian Townshend’s masque, Tempe Restored (1632) by two female singers, one of whom played ‘the personification of Harmony’ ushering in ‘Divine Beauty, who was danced by Henrietta Maria’ (188).

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

81

her singing in Lawes’s circle.102 ‘To my Lucasia, in defence of declared friendship’ certainly connects her friend with the transcendent properties of harmony represented by her namesakes in Cartwright. Revealing the joy that even a look from Lucasia can bring her, Orinda continues: But when that look is dress’d in words, ’tis like The mystique power of musick’s Unison; Which when the finger does one Violl strike, The other’s string heaves to reflection. (69–72)

While a number of contemporary poems praise the heavenly harmony evoked by the female voice which may even equal the music of the spheres, verses in Lawes’s volumes which touch on Queen Henrietta Maria as a singer are particularly indicative of the political potential latent in such eulogies.103 Given the coding of Henrietta Maria as Cloris in Lawes’s Ayres, and Dialogues, eulogies of Cloris’s voice may be interpreted as gestures of political resistance in the face of anti-royalist discord as in ‘A description of Cloris’: Have you e’re pleas’d your skilful eares With the sweet Musick of the Spheres? Have you e’re heard the Syrens sing, Or Orpheus play to Hels black King? If so, be happy and rejoyce, For thou has heard my Chloris voyce.104

The political suggestiveness of women’s association with harmony also emerges in verse which falls outside the scope of eulogies to 102 103

See above, Ch. 1. For examples of poems which equate the female voice with heavenly harmony, see the unattributed poems, ‘Upon a Gentlewomans entertainment of him’ and ‘On Alma’s voyce’, both in Parnassus Biceps, 126–7, 163; Robert Herrick, ‘Upon a Gentlewoman with a sweet Voice’. 104 Henry Hughes, ‘A Description of Chloris’, in Lawes, Ayres, and Dialogues (1658), 24. For evidence of the link between Henrietta Maria and the ‘Cloris’ songs, see Hughes, ‘Cloris landing at Berlington’ which evidently depicts the historical events of the Queen’s landing on her return from the continent in 1643 as, apparently, does his ‘A Storme: Cloris at sea . . . Amintor, on the shore expecting her arrival’, in Lawes, Ayres, and Dialogues (1655), 1–3. James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 239 n. 95, asserts that, since the performance of Jonson’s masque Chloridia (1631), ‘ “Chloris” had functioned as a pastoral pseudonym for Henrietta Maria. It continued to serve this purpose throughout the Civil War.’

82

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

Henrietta Maria. In the heartily royalist volume, Parnassus Biceps (1656), the poet speculates that ‘Tumult would be attentive’ if only people could hear the voice of a certain ‘Gentlewoman’ singing to the lute.105 By choosing Calliope (muse of epic poetry) as its female speaker the poem implicitly connects the failure of socio-political harmony with the limitations facing any would-be epic depiction of royalist fortunes at this time. Philips’s own panegyric, ‘Lucasia’, speculates: ‘How would some brave example check the Crimes, | And both reproach and yet reform the times?’, conjecturing that even in the golden age, . . . the wise would coppys draw, And she to th’infant-World had given Law. That souls were made of number could not be An observation, but a prophesy. It meant Lucasia, whose harmonious state The spheares and muses faintly imitate. (9–10, 19–24)

The consistent depiction of women as propagators of a ‘harmonious state’ represents a further means by which Katherine Philips’s poems on friendship, including friendship between women, may be seen to have acquired authority amongst her Interregnum royalist contemporaries. Yet, whilst her perceived role as a promoter of political harmony remains crucial to her post-Restoration writings, it is essential to recognize that the political significance of harmony and friendship are altered as a result of the changed historical circumstances prevailing from 1660.

restoration verse The number and tenor of Philips’s poems on friendship alters markedly with the restoration of Charles II to the English throne. Poems on the topic of friendship constitute nearly half of those she composed during the 1650s but only around a quarter of those written from the Restoration until her death in 1664. As Patrick Thomas 105 Anon. ‘On a Gentlewoman playing on the Lute’, in Parnassus Biceps, 82. See also Edward Dering, ‘When first I saw fair Doris eyes’, in Lawes, Ayres, and Dialogues (1655), 24; ‘Song. Calliope invited to sing’, in Lluellin, Men-Miracles, 73–4.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

83

has observed, the Restoration provided Philips both with the opportunity and the necessity to concentrate more on writing openly royalist panegyric, seeking patronage from influential public figures including members of the royal family themselves.106 The necessity arose out of her husband’s predicament as a result of his Cromwellian loyalties during the 1650s. James Philips had sat as a member of the High Court of Justice which had sentenced a leading royalist, Colonel John Gerrard, to death in 1654.107 As such he could be banned from holding any public office after September 1660. Philips was suspended from the Commons on 27 June 1661 until his exoneration in February 1662 from being implicated in Gerrard’s execution. Nevertheless, his election was declared void a few months later. His troubles seem to have been compounded by financial difficulties.108 The recognition sought by Philips in her panegyric poems on royalty during this period must have been motivated (at least in part) by the hope of preventing too harsh a penalty for her husband. With the increase in panegyrics on royalty and other public figures, poems which discuss friendship as a general topic tend to disappear from Philips’s post-Restoration œuvre. Verse addressed to the female friends she made during the Restoration lacks the passionate intensity which characterizes her earlier writing on Rosania or Lucasia, as Patrick Thomas notes.109 Some commentators have plausibly suggested that Philips’s consciousness of the social superiority of these women may account for the less emotionally engaged tone of the poems she addresses to them.110 Post-Restoration acquaintances such as the Boyle sisters, daughters of the earl and countess of Cork or Lady Mary Butler, daughter of the duke of Ormonde, are simply too elevated for Philips to venture more than fairly formal or conventional compliments.111 However, as Carol Barash points out, Anne Owen had also been Philips’s superior in wealth and influence in local Welsh society.112 The crux 106 107

CWKP i. 15. For details of this case and its impact on James Philips, see CWKP i. 15, 383; 108 Ibid. i. 15. 109 Ibid. 18. ii. 157–62, 31 n. 7. 110 Andreadis, ‘The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips’, 49; CWKP i. 386–7. 111 For examples of poems addressed to these women by Philips, see ‘To my Lady Elizabeth Boyle. Singing—Since affairs of State &co.’, ‘To my Lady Ann Boyle’s saying I look’d angrily upon her’, ‘To the Countess of Thanet, upon her Marriage’, ‘To the Lady Mary Butler at her marriage with the Lord Cavendish, 112 Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 76. Octobr. 1662’.

84

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

here may be that, after 1660, social disparities were not as easily overridden by the sense of being united in political disadvantage which Philips shared with her royalist friends during the 1650s.113 The political subtexts so central to Philips’s Interregnum friendship poems are certainly notably absent from post-Restoration poems addressed to both old and new friends. Even poems to Lucasia and Rosania lack the royalist coding which typifies Philips’s approach to her two closest friends in her autograph manuscript from the 1650s.114 One of the earliest post-Restoration poems, ‘Orinda to Lucasia parting, October 1661. at London’, offers a valuable clue to the reasons which lie behind this alteration. Resigning herself to the painful necessity that she and Lucasia must part, Orinda urges: No, no, I never lov’d at such a rate, To tye thee to the rigours of my fate. As from my obligations thou art free, Sure thou shalt be so from my Injury.

(19–22)

The ‘obligations’ and ‘Injury’ to which Orinda refers signify the hardships Philips suffered as a result of the political difficulties in which her husband found himself after the Restoration.115 While her husband’s party was in the ascendant she might both benefit from his relatively secure socio-political position and (given his apparent tolerance) cherish close alliances with royalists. With the return of Charles II, however, she must begin actively to defend her husband’s cause to prevent herself from losing her material security if he were destroyed by the new regime. In becoming more closely bound up with her husband’s political misfortunes she felt herself alienated from the shared royalist identification which had masked social disparities between herself and Anne Owen during the previous decade. The assertion in ‘Orinda to Lucasia parting’ that ‘in my soul I rather could allow | Friendship should be a sufferer, then 113 Finch, Friendship, appears conscious that social inequality might be presented as an obstacle to the friendship between his addressees, Philips and Owen, showing himself at pains to argue that the friendship he defends (with its heavily royalist overtones) is not diminished by ‘disparity of condition’, 32. 114 For examples of such post-Restoration poems from Philips to Lucasia and Rosania, see ‘A Triton to Lucasia going to Sea, shortly after the Queen’s arrival’, ‘Lucasia and Orinda parting with Pastora and Phillis at Ipswich’, ‘To my Lord and Lady Dungannon on their Marriage 11. May 1662’. 115 As Thomas points out in CWKP i. 381, Anne Owen’s failure to make the match Philips desired with Sir Charles Cotterell may also have chilled the two women’s friendship but the language here suggests that something more is at stake.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

85

thou’, is revealing (27–8). The former understanding of friendship as the bond between like-minded royalists will suffer because the aftermath of the Restoration has foregrounded hitherto latent political differences between Philips and her friends. The poem captures a sense that the political repositioning she has undergone in the Restoration utterly demolishes the foundations of her previous poetic voice: ‘woulds’t thou for thy old Orinda call, | Thou hardly could’st unravel her at all’ (15–16). Some of Philips’s post-Restoration panegyrists nevertheless seem to appreciate her earlier politicized poetry of friendship. Commendatory verses by Henry Vaughan, probably intended for the 1667 edition of Philips’s works, associate the poet with the idea that the royalist hardships of the Interregnum fostered the best poetry. Condemning the literature of the Restoration Vaughan contends that, . . . wit, as well as piety Doth thrive best in adversity; For since the thunder left our air Their laurels look not half so fair.116

Although Vaughan is presenting Philips as the exception to a Restoration literary slump, the fact that the larger portion of her writing life took place during the 1650s implicitly connects her excellence with the politically adverse conditions of the earlier period during which Vaughan composed so much of his own important verse. An understanding that friendship in Philips’s verse was, in some sense, a substitute for quelled royalist military resistance during the 1650s is suggested in lines by an admirer calling herself ‘Philo-Philippa’. Celebrating the alliance between Orinda and Lucasia, Philo-Philippa exclaims, ‘For there’s required (to do that Virtue right) | Courage, as much in Friendship as in Fight’.117 116 Henry Vaughan, ‘To the Editor of the matchless Orinda’, in CWKP iii. 221–2. The poem was first printed in Thalia Rediviva: The Pass-Times and Diversions of a Countrey-Muse in Choice Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1678), but the title suggests it was intended for inclusion in Philips, Poems (1667), especially since the phrase, ‘the matchless Orinda’, is taken from the title-page of that volume. 117 Philo-Philippa, ‘To the Excellent Orinda’, in CWKP iii. 200, first printed in Philips, Poems (1667). The first trace of this poem appears in a letter from Philips to Cotterell mentioning commendatory verses elicited by the performance of Pompey including one from an author ‘who pretends to be a Woman’, see CWKP ii. 78 (8 Apr. 1663). Philo-Philippa’s true identity remains a mystery.

86

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

Abraham Cowley praises Philips for rescuing ‘the fame of friendship’ through her presentation of ‘Lucasia and Orinda’s glory’.118 The friendship between Lucasia and Orinda as represented in Philips’s poems is compared to a state of celestial union reminiscent of Philips, Finch, and Taylor’s Interregnum depictions of friendship as the foundation of royalist social cohesion: There all the blest do but one body grow, And are made one too with their glorious Head, Whom there triumphantly they wed, After the secret Contract past below; There Love into Identity does go, ’Tis the first unities Monarchique Throne, The Centre that knits all, where the great Three’s but One.119

Nevertheless, Cowley’s lines may also register the redirected meanings of unity and harmony to be found in Philips’s Restoration translations from plays by Pierre Corneille. The partisan promotion of royalism as the key to a lost social stability which typifies her poems of the 1650s gives way in Pompey and Horace to a concern with bridging the political divisions crucial to her personal predicament as to the whole of her society.

‘pompey’ and ‘horace’ The critical tendency to focus on the character of Caesar in Philips’s Pompey as a complimentary portrayal of Charles II has recently been challenged by Andrew Shifflett who reads the play as having republican overtones, regarding it as Philips’s attempt to criticize a policy of royal clemency locally manifested in the Restoration Act of Indemnity and Oblivion.120 Yet both Shifflett’s reading and those it seeks to rectify provide too politically polarized an interpretation of the play. Indeed, closer investigation indicates that Philips was attracted to Corneille’s original precisely because of its ability to 118 Cowley, ‘On the Death of Mrs. Katherine Philips’, in CWKP iii. 218. The 119 Ibid. poems first appeared in Philips, Poems (1667). 120 Andrew Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics and Literature in the Age of Milton: War and Peace Reconciled (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 3. For examples of the argument which Shifflett seeks to counter, see Catherine Cole Mambretti, ‘Orinda on the Restoration Stage’, Comparative Literature, 37/3 (1985), 233–51 (239, 243); Sant and Brown, ‘Two Unpublished Poems’, 214.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

87

illuminate the simultaneous worth of conflicting claims in the English political situation and to break down straightforward binary oppositions. Hence, her version deliberately resists becoming a clearly defined allegory of the Civil War and Restoration but seeks to promote a reconciliation which boldly confronts the pain of loss and the complexity of divided loyalties. After all, any attempt to find obvious correspondences between the English Civil War and the Roman conflict between Pompey and Caesar proves awkward. Lucan’s central account of the latter in his Pharsalia offers a clearly pro-republican slant with the death of Pompey marking the lamentable end of the Roman republic and the rise of the dictator, Caesar.121 Yet, as Nigel Smith indicates, Abraham Cowley, drawing on Lucan and on Thomas May’s politically elusive Caroline translations of Pharsalia, chose to identify Charles I with Pompey in his unfinished epic of 1643, The Civil War.122 Cowley’s ability to use the Roman republic to cypher the English monarchy in his royalist epic should warn us off jumping to conclusions about the political sympathies of Katherine Philips’s Pompey. For Philips, the figure of Pompey synthesizes republican and monarchist tendencies. Despite his allegiance to the Roman republic, Pompey, the noble leader beheaded as he fights to preserve the status quo, is certainly susceptible to identification with Charles I. Philips stresses the horror and outrage of Pompey’s off-stage decapitation (he never appears in person in the play).123 Although these are strongly felt in Corneille’s original, Philips appears to amplify the goriness in her translation.124 Philips also supplies an extra criticism 121 123

122 Ibid. 207. See Smith, Literature and Revolution, 204. See e.g. Philips, Pompey, II. ii. 59–62, 81–8, III. i. 42–51. These and all subsequent references to Pompey are taken from CWKP iii, which takes as its copy-text the first edn. of the play, printed in Dublin in 1663. CWKP iii, pp. ix–xi, and Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sybils: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (London: Viking, 1995), 150–4, discuss the considerable claims to authority of a MS copy (National Library of Wales MS 21867B) with some emendations by Philips. I have considered substantive variants from this and other 17th-cent. versions but only remarked upon them when they raise questions concerning the arguments I am putting forward. 124 I have used Pierre Corneille, Théâtre complet, ed. Alain Niderst, 3 vols. (MontSaint-Aignon: Publications de l’Université de Rouen, 1984–5) for the original versions of Pompée and Horace. Niderst uses the 1682 version for the main text but I have used his exhaustive record of variants to consider all the versions to which Philips and any revisers of her plays might have been referring. Where Philips has ‘Septimius, and three Romans more embrew’d, | Their Guilty hand in that Heroick Blood’ (II. ii. 59–60), Corneille has ‘Septime et trois de siens, lâches enfants de

88

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

of the beheading by alluding to it in the song which she adds to the end of Act II (II. iv. 93–6). The resigned dignity which Pompey exhibits at his murder and the characterization of the deed as treason necessarily evoke parallels with sympathetic perceptions of the execution of Charles I.125 Whilst Shifflett regards Philips’s interpolation of a further song by Pompey’s ghost at the end of Act III as an assertion of republican politics, here too the relationship with the English Civil War is ambivalent.126 The spectral Pompey’s assertion that, ‘ ’twould have been a harsher Doom | T’outlive the Liberty of Rome’ operates on one level as a lament for a lost republic (III. iv. 104–5). However, given the play’s earlier connections between Pompey and Charles I, his insistence that Elysium will be without the machinations of Caesar also figure the latter as a Cromwell-like usurper of quasi-monarchical power: ‘There none a Guilty Crown shall wear, | Nor Caesar be Dictator there!’ (III. iv. 124–5). As a deposed ruler forced to seek his fate in exile, Pompey may also suggest Charles II. The play’s first speech from the Egyptian King, Ptolomy, claims that Pompey, That distress’d Leader of the Juster Side, Whose wearied Fortune hath all Help deni’d, A terrible Example will create To future Times, of the Extreams of Fate: He flies, whose happy Courage had till now, Confin’d the Bay to his Victorious Brow: He in our Ports chooses his last Retreat; And wanting refuge from a Foe so Great, His bold Misfortune seeks it in Abodes, Which from the Titans once preserv’d the Gods.

(I. i. 15–24)

Philips herself had already drawn parallels between Pompey and the exiled Charles II. Her ‘On the 3d of September 1651’, a commemoration of Charles’s defeat at the battle of Worcester and his subsequent flight, exclaims: Unhappy Kings! who cannot keep a throne, Nor be so fortunate to fall alone! Rome, | Percent a coups pressés les flancs de ce grand homme’ (505–6). Similarly, where Philips describes the victim’s head falling onto ‘the blushing Deck’ (II. ii. 83), Corneille’s line runs, ‘Sa tête, sur les bords de la barque penchée’ (529). 125 See e.g. Pompey, II. ii. 4, 40–5, 68–80; III. i. 62. 126 Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics and Literature, 90.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

89

Their weight sinks others: Pompey could not fly, But half the world must beare him company. (21–4)

Likewise, a more optimistic Restoration poem urges the King: Hasten (great prince) unto thy British Isles, Or all thy subjects will become exiles; To thee they flock, Thy presence is their home, As Pompey’s residence made Afrique Rome.127

The refusal of simple political polarization apparent in Philips’s mediation of the historical defender of a republic, Pompey, as (in some sense) an English monarchical hero is also glimpsed in the play’s handling of Caesar. The connection between Caesar (who topples a republican government after civil war) and Charles II seems clearly evident. Yet, in the course of events presented by the play, Philips’s Caesar, like Corneille’s, is adamant that to accept the crown offered by Ptolomy would compromise his republican ideals.128 Nevertheless, we cannot, of course, ignore Caesar’s importance for English Restoration history as the victor who shows mercy and respect for his enemy.129 After all, it was the treacherous Ptolomy who was responsible for Pompey’s murder and Caesar attacks the Egyptian King for robbing him of: . . . the Fruit of all my Wars . . . Where Honour me engag’d, and where the end Was of a Foe subdu’d, to make a Friend; . . . . . . . How blest a Period of the War’t had been, If the glad World had in one Chariot seen Pompey and Caesar at once to have sate Triumphant over all their former Hate!. (III. ii. 108–10, 115–18)130

127 Philips, ‘On the numerous accesse of the English to waite upon the King in Holland’, 1–4. Thomas, in CWKP i. 322, points out that a letter of Philips’s to Cotterell, dated 20 Aug. 1662 (see CWKP ii. 47) shows that she began her tr. of Corneille’s play during that year although the allusion in ‘On the numerous accesse’ may suggest that she was already familiar with the play as early as 1660. 128 Pompey, III. ii. 2–12. 129 Sant and Brown, ‘Two Unpublished Poems’, 214, and Mambretti, ‘Orinda on the Restoration Stage’, 243, touch very briefly on this aspect of the play specifically in relation to the predicament of James Philips. 130 Philips appears to have heightened the importance of the concept of friendship in these lines. Where Pompey, III. ii. 110, reads ‘Was of a Foe subdu’d, to make a

90

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

Shifflett reads Caesar’s speech as exemplifying the strategic use of friendship or mercy as a tool of political control.131 Yet, this is to expunge Philips’s history of representing friendship as a positive (royalist) force for political unity—a history of which her experienced readers would have been aware. Indeed, in ‘Arion on a Dolphin to his Majestie in his passadge into England’, she specifically commends what she presents as Charles II’s policy of forgiveness: Revenge to him no pleasure is, He spar’d their bloud who gap’d for his; . . . . . . Assistant Kings could but subdue Those foes which he can pardon too. He thinks no slaughter trophyes good, Nor lawrells dipt in subjects blood; But with a sweet resistlesse Art Disarmes the hand, and wins the heart; And like a God doth rescue those Who did themselves and him opppose. (37–8, 51–8)

Meanwhile, in a letter to Charles Cotterell, the King’s master of ceremonies, she deliberately chooses an analogy which praises the magnanimity of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, telling him that his services to her have ‘oblig’d me, as my Lord of ORRERY says the King did his people by the Act of Oblivion, both in the manner and the action too’.132 The simmering hostility of Pompey’s widow, Cornelia, towards Caesar in the play, despite Caesar’s merciful attitude towards her and her husband, is taken by Shifflett as further evidence that Philips wishes to criticize the Charles II’s apparent gestures of magnanimity at the Restoration.133 Yet, although Shifflett claims that Philips’s translation amplifies Cornelia’s resistance to Caesar as compared to the French original, Philips actually inherits her

Friend’, Corneille has ‘Je ne veux que celui de vaincre et pardonner’ (916). For other examples of Caesar’s respect and praise for Pompey and his widow, see Pompey, III. iv. 90–2, IV. iv. 9–18, V. i. 75–84, V. iv. 19–30, V. v. 53–8. 131 Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics and Literature, 84. 132 CWKP ii. 52 (6 Sept. 1662). 133 Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics and Literature, 78.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

91

resentful Cornelia overwhelmingly from Corneille.134 Vitally for our appreciation of the play’s politics, Philips’s Cornelia, like Corneille’s is genuinely torn between loyalty to her husband and her allegiance to his enemy, Caesar, because her loyalty to Rome dictates that she support its new ruler. ‘I must be Witness too! and I submit; | But thou canst never move my Heart with it’, she tells Caesar: My Loss can never be repair’d by Fate, Nor is it possible t’exhaust my Hate. This Hate shall be my Pompey now, and I In his Revenge will live, and with it die. But as a Roman, though my Hate be such, I must confess, I thee esteem as much. Both these extreams Justice can well allow: This does my Virtue, that my Duty show. My sense of Honour does the first command, Concern, the last, and they are both constraind. And as thy Virtue, whom none can betray, Where I should hate, makes me such value pay: My Duty so my Anger does create, And Pompey’s Widdow makes Cornelia hate. (V. iv. 56–71)135

What Corneille’s Cornelia offers Philips is not the opportunity to undermine an institutionalized Restoration policy of royal clemency but the chance to anatomize the true cost of subduing personal pain in the interests of a political reconciliation demanded by patriotic duty. In this way, Pompey seeks to foster a more complex mutual respect and understanding rather than glibly promoting an unquestioning spirit of reconciliation. The wider attraction of Corneille’s Pompée as a play which addressed the problems of reconciliation in Restoration politics is further apparent in the fact that Philips’s version faced competition from a translation by a group of court wits including Edmund

134 Ibid. 87, 88, 89. For examples of Cornelia’s hostility to Caesar in the play, see Pompey, III. iv. 42–7, IV. iv. 19–20 and compare Corneille’s Pompée, 1021–6, 1373–4. For further observations on Cornelia’s ambiguous attitude to Caesar, see Sophie Tomlinson, ‘Harking Back to Henrietta: The Sources of Female Greatness in Katherine Philips’s Pompey’, in Wallwork and Salzman (eds.), Women Writing, 179–90 (186). 135 See Corneille, Pompée, 1719–28. See also Pompey, IV. iv. 61–2.

92

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

Waller.136 Waller’s loyalties had oscillated during the period of the Civil War and Interregnum. During the early 1640s he addressed Parliament in favour of reform but subsequently became involved in a royalist plot and was banished. In the 1650s he returned to England, publishing a panegyric in support of Cromwell.137 Thus he, like Philips, may be seen to have had a particular investment in celebrating royal forgiveness and political toleration. Nevertheless, Philips seems to have felt that the wits’ translation of Pompey had jeopardized the fluidity of the play’s political application to contemporary English history which her version values. In a letter to Cotterell, she strongly objects to the addition to Act IV (translated by Lord Buckhurst) of ‘10: or 12 lines of Romes becoming a Monarchy, for which there is no ground in Corneille’.138 Where Buckhurst interpolates in one of Cleopatra’s speeches the emphatic wish that she will see Rome ‘Bound in the Golden Chains of Monarchy’, Philips retains Corneille’s more ambivalent approach, with the Egyptian Queen fearing animosity from republican Rome but daring to hope that Caesar may ‘subdue . . . | . . . her [Rome’s] unjust aversion for a Throne’.139 Philips’s Pompey, first performed in Dublin on 10 February 1663 during her stay there, was generally well-received in Irish circles but its most active promoter was Roger Boyle, first earl of Orrery, 136 Pompey the Great. A Tragedy . . . Translated out of French by Certain Persons of Honour (London, 1664). In a letter to Cotterell, dated 10 Jan. 1663, Philips lists the translators as Waller, Sir Edward Filmer, Charles Sedley, and Charles Sackvile, Lord Buckhurst, see CWKP ii. 70–1. Her letter indicates that she is very anxious to hear ‘what Opinion the Town and Court’ have of the rival tr. and that, so far, she has only been able to procure a copy of the first act, translated by Waller. For a discussion of who may have translated the fifth act, see CWKP ii. 71. By the time she wrote to Cotterell on 17 Sept. 1663 she had seen Acts II and IV of Pompey the Great, tr. Filmer and Buckhurst respectively, see CWKP ii. 103. There is no record of any performance before the play’s publication was announced in the Stationer’s Register on 15 Feb. 1664 but the printed version makes clear it had already been performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and at St James’s, see CWKP ii. 118. Philips’s letter to Cotterell of 13 Oct. 1663 indicates he has now seen Pompey the Great acted, see CWKP ii. 108. 137 See Warren L. Chernaik, The Poetry of Limitation: A Study of Edmund Waller (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), 8–9. 138 CWKP ii. 113 (26 Oct. 1663). See Pompey the Great, 38. This letter does not appear in the 1st edn. of Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus (London, 1705) raising the possibility that it was excluded as a result of political sensitivity. 139 Pompey the Great, 38; Pompey, IV. iii. 64–5. This discrepancy between the two translations may account for the fact that Pompey the Great seems to have been chosen for performance in the public theatre in London during the 1660s instead of Philips’s Pompey, see CWKP ii. 118 n. 3, 70 n. 9.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

93

another figure whose fluctuating Civil War allegiances would have given him good reason to feel attracted to the play’s exploration of conflicting loyalties.140 He appears to have suffered no evident reprisals from Charles II who made him an earl in September 1660 and encouraged his efforts as an author of rhymed verse drama, but Orrery must surely have been highly conscious of his history of political ambivalence.141 Nigel Smith certainly reads Orrery’s romance, Parthenissa (1651–9) as an encoding of the question of ‘split loyalties’ so pertinent to the years of the text’s composition.142 Given what Smith sees as the transcendent power of friendship to overcome divisions in Parthenissa, Philips will have known and been drawn to Orrery’s romance.143 Its emphasis on the mediation of opposites matches the philosophy promoted by Philips in Pompey and Horace. Philips’s correspondence suggests that she made the decision to begin translating Pompée before Orrery, whom she met in Dublin, took an interest in her work. Nevertheless, once he saw the first scene she had attempted he insisted that she translate the rest of the act, sending her a copy of the French original. Philips sent him the completed act (the third) and was rewarded by a commendatory poem from the earl designed to encourage her to complete a translation of the whole play.144 When Philips’s version was finished, Orrery spearheaded moves to have it performed in the new theatre at Smock Alley, even contributing a hundred pounds towards costumes.145 The earl may have been moved by the fact that Philips’s initial translation drew on Act III of the play in which Caesar makes his pivotal speech concerning the reconciliation of enemies. His own probable first play, The Generall offers clear evidence that the two writers were employing related strategies in addressing the potential hostilities of Restoration politics. It 140 For the date of the performance, see CWKP i. 17. For the play’s reception, see Philips’s letter to Cotterell (8 Apr. 1663), CWKP ii. 78. 141 See Eustace Budgell, Memoirs of the Lives and Characters of the Illustrious Family of the Boyles (London, 1737), 42–60, 64, 78, 84, 87; DNB. The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, ed. William Smith Clark, II, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937), i. 23–5. 142 Smith, Literature and Revolution, 245. 143 Ibid. 144 See CWKP ii. 47–8 (20 Aug. 1662). For Orrery’s commendatory poem, see CWKP iii. 186–8. Other letters record Orrery’s support for Philips’s tr. and suggest her continuing literary relationship with him, see CWKP ii. 57, 58 (22 Oct. 1662), 145 CWKP ii. 74–5 (31 Jan. 1663). 60 (undated).

94

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

remains impossible to say whether Philips saw The Generall, which was already complete in manuscript at the time when Orrery encountered her.146 As Catherine Cole Mambretti points out, Orrery’s play certainly doesn’t seem to have been performed until over a fortnight after Pompey first reached the stage at Dublin’s Smock Alley theatre. The theatrical success of Pompey may, Mambretti argues, have encouraged Orrery to make his play public at the same venue.147 We might go further and suggest that he was even using Philips’s play as a stalking horse to find out how his own drama of divided loyalties might be received in public. In addition to cyphering Orrery’s predicament fighting against the Irish under Cromwell, the play’s treatment of its eponymous general underlines the wider idea that people nominally fighting on opposite sides of a political divide may share the same noble motivations.148 Here, as in its emphasis on toleration, honour, and clemency, Orrery’s play resonates with the same concerns which animate Philips’s Pompey. As Caesar shows respect for the memory of his opponent, Pompey, and laments his ignominious murder by the Egyptians, so Clorimum saves the life of his military enemy and love-rival, Lucidor. As Caesar rejects Ptolomy’s offer of a tainted throne, so Clorimum refuses to bring about the true King’s restoration by means of treachery. As Pompey celebrates Caesar’s spirit of reconciliation, so The Generall concludes with rejoicing at the restored King’s forgiveness of those who fought ‘on the wrong side’.149 The sense that such depictions of lenience in rulers are designed to flatter and instruct Charles II is reinforced when we consider that both Orrery and Philips (via Cotterell) brought texts 146 Orrery’s correspondence shows that by 26 Feb. 1662 he had finished his first play and presented it to Charles II and had gone on to complete his second, see Mambretti, ‘Orinda on the Restoration Stage’, 238. His letters also show that the duke of Ormonde, Charles II, and Thomas Killigrew had, by this stage, seen the first play but we have no evidence to confirm the extent of any possible MS circulation beyond this, ibid. 241. For convincing evidence that his first play was The Generall, see Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, i. 27–8. The second play appears not to have survived, ibid. 26. 147 Mambretti, ‘Orinda on the Restoration Stage’, 240–1, 242, 243; See also Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, i. 32, 103. 148 For further discussion of the autobiographical aspects of The Generall, see Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–71 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 149 Orrery, The Generall, IV. i. 94, in Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

95

of their plays directly to the King’s attention.150 Both seem to have received a favourable response.151 Philips did not live to witness the reception of her second dramatic translation, Horace, performed before the court in a version completed by Sir John Denham.152 Like Pompey, the play concerns itself with the pain and complexity of divided allegiances. Sabina, wife to Horace, and thus a Roman by marriage, finds herself torn between loyalty to her adopted country and pangs of sympathy for Alba, the land of her birth against whom the Romans are fighting. Meanwhile, Camilla, Horace’s sister, experiences a reverse predicament owing to her love for the Alban Curiace, Sabina’s brother. The play makes use of these dilemmas to delineate a classic conflict between ‘Publick’ honour and ‘Private’ love in which the women become united in a desire to see the imperatives of military combat (cherished by their menfolk) give way to the sanctity of marital and familial ties.153 Women thus become the would-be agents of reconciliation in what the play labels a ‘Civil war’ (I. iii. 56). The men on each side feel a strong tie between themselves and their opponents, a bond of what they call ‘Friendship’, forged through their sister’s or wife’s connections.154 150 See CWKP ii. 77 (8 Apr. 1663), 90 (23 May 1663). See also CWKP ii. 63 (3 Dec. 1662), 66 (27 Dec. 1662), 79 (15 Apr. 1663), which indicates that Philips also successfully cultivated the duchess of York’s attentions for her play via Cotterell. Philips, ‘To her royal highness, the Dutchesse of Yorke, on her command to send her some things I had wrote’, 5–10, suggests that the Duchess had shown an interest in Philips’s work, as does Philips’s letter to Cotterell in which she sends this poem to the duchess, see CWKP ii. 32–3 (3 May 1662). A letter from Orrery to the duke of Ormonde, dated 23 Jan. 1662 reveals that Charles II had asked the earl to write a play in rhymed verse, see Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, i. 25. The letter also claims that Charles had given Orrery’s finished play to Killigrew and that Davenant had requested another play for his company. 151 See CWKP ii. 90 (23 May [1663]). A letter from Orrery to Ormonde, dated 26 Feb. 1662, contains the transcript of a letter from the King praising Orrery’s first play and saying that he has given it to Killigrew for production as soon as his new theatre is completed, see Mambretti, ‘Orinda on the Restoration Stage’, 238. 152 For performance dates, see CWKP iii. 248. 153 Philips, Horace, I. iii. 21–4. See also I. iii. 29–38, IV. iii. 3–4. All references are taken from CWKP iii, which uses the version of the play which the editors regard as ‘a faithful transcription from her foul papers, made shortly after her death’ (119) and presented to Rosania. The first printed edn. appeared in her Poems (1667) and I have noted any significant variants between versions which may be pertinent to the arguments I am advancing. The terms ‘Publick’ and ‘Private’ in Philips, Horace, I. iii. 21, are not used in the version in Philips, Poems (1667) and Corneille has ‘L’État’ and ‘[la] famille’, Horace, 255. 154 See Philips, Horace, II. i. 42, ii. 14, iii. 41.

96

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

Yet, only the women themselves consistently plead for the superior demands of ‘friendship’ and love as against the militaristic sense of honour which ultimately appears to dominate the men to an extreme degree. The Roman men condemn the peacemaking pleas of the women as a dangerous temptation to effeminacy, with young Horace advising that the women should be confined to the home, ‘That so no femall tears, & clamours may | Disturb the manly business of the day’ (II. viii. 3–4).155 However, the play is persuasive in portraying such ‘manly business’ as senseless slaughter, a damningly labelled ‘publick Parricide’, only too tragically pertinent in a Restoration England eager to distance itself from Civil War bloodshed (I. iii. 84).156 In such a context one cannot help but feel the validity of what Horace identifies as a peculiarly feminine drive towards unity and peace, the ‘Pious tears’ and ‘spotless Love’ which seek to move ‘compassion’ in the warring armies and to oppose the logic which takes ‘Brutishness for Vertue’ (III. ii. 12, 13, 14; IV. iv. 46). Even the men themselves are on the brink of acknowledging the force of their women’s arguments for peace.157 Philips, as a woman poet known for her politically charged celebrations of women’s capacity for friendship, emerges as a highly appropriate Restoration conduit for Corneille’s play in which femininity and attempted political reconciliation are so closely allied. The notion of Philips, the female poet, as the best advocate of a much-needed Restoration accord emerges in elegies by John Crouch and William Temple. Praising the feminine power of her ‘charming numbers’, Crouch asserts that they have ‘Taught Honour, Love, and Friendship to this Age’, going on to claim that, ‘She taught the World the sweet and peaceful Arts | Of blending Souls, and of compounding hearts’.158 Temple, in similar vein, laments: 155 The overt opposition between masculine and feminine is less clear in Corneille, Horace, 696–9, as also in the version in Philips, Poems (1667, 1669). The editors of CWKP iii, point out that Horace had clearly been revized by a hand other than Philips’s for printing (119). 156 Corneille, Horace, 320, has ‘tant de parricides’. The masculine code of military honour finds its most absurdly extreme expression in Old Horace’s insistence that he would rather his son had died than fled from fighting singly against three foes at once, see Philips, Horace, III. vi. 32–43. 157 Philips, Horace, II. vi. 55, 56, 67 (mistakenly labelled 8, 9, 20). 158 J[ohn] C[rouch], ‘AN ELEGIE, Upon the Death of the most Incomparable, Mrs. KATHERINE PHILIPS, The Glory of her SEX’, 7, 16, 19–20, in CWKP iii. 207–8.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

97

. . . But she was young, And might have liv’d to tune the world, and sung Us all asleep, who now lament her fall . . .159

Meanwhile, the earl of Orrery writes, after first reading Philips’s initial translation of Act III of Pompey: ‘you have sung of Friendships power, so well | That you in that as well as wit excel’.160 These panegyrics underline the fact that long-standing perceptions of women’s capacity to propagate harmony might enhance the appeal of Philips’s politically apposite Restoration dramas pleading the cause of reconciliation. Such perceptions also lie behind ideologically resonant notions of Philips’s excellence as a translator.

philips as translator As the first rhymed translation of a French neoclassical drama to appear on the stage in either Dublin or London, Philips’s Pompey plays a central role in inaugurating the discourse of English translation as an act of cultural supremacy which bolsters the Restoration political settlement. The earl of Orrery’s commendatory poem to Philips, first printed in Dublin during her stay there, typifies the rhetoric elicited by Philips’s Pompey: The French to learn our Language now will seek, To hear their greatest wit more nobly speak. Rome too would grant, were our tongue to her known, Caesar speaks better in’t then in his own. And all those wreaths once circled Pompey’s brow Exalt his fame less then your Verses now. From these clear Truths all must acknowledge this If there be Helicon, in Wales it is. Oh happy Country! which to our Prince gives His title, and in which Orinda lives.161 159 [Sir William Temple], ‘Upon the Death of Mrs Catherine Philips’, 35–7, in CWKP iii. 206. 160 ‘Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery To Orinda’, 42–3, in CWKP iii. 187. Philips tells Cotterell that she had received this poem from Orrery in a letter, see CWKP ii. 47–8 (20 Aug.) in response to her first attempts to translate Pompey. 161 ‘Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery To Orinda’, 64–73, in CWKP iii. 188. The poem was first printed in Poems by Several Persons (Dublin, 1663) and was subsequently reprinted in Philips, Poems (1667). See also the earl of Roscommon’s prologue written for the Dublin performance of Pompey, in CWKP iii. 3–4; Cowley, ‘On

98

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

Eulogists may, in part, have responded so favourably to Philips’s translations because the supposedly feminine virtues admired in her writing were so amenable to existing or emergent ideologically weighted discourses of translation. Paula Loscocco has convincingly shown how commendatory verses addressed to Philips reiterate the idea of literary excellence as the combination of masculine and feminine qualities, a synthesis ‘highly-prized by neoclassical poetics’.162 As a woman engaged in the conventionally masculine pursuit of writing poetry, Philips is regarded as especially able to embody this mix of gender promoted in texts such as Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay (1668).163 Although I focus on some of the gendered terms such as ‘smooth’ and ‘sweet’ which also concern Loscocco, my own distinct aim is to explore relations between the vocabulary of Philips’s eulogists and that of contemporary theorists of translation, highlighting the political implications of this shared lexicon.164 Several panegyrists identify the ‘smoothness’ of Philips’s verse along with its ability to ‘flow’ as a major asset.165 An examination of the contemporary connotations of these terms and their cognates illustrates the way in which they are linked both to notions of Philips’s femininity and to ideas of royalist supremacy. Henry Vaughan renders particularly evident the connection between such smoothness and Philips’s own feminine beauty, describing her poetry as, A strain, whose measures gently meet Like Virgin-lovers, or times feet, Where language Smiles, and accents rise As quick, and pleasing as your Eyes,

Orinda’s Poems. Ode’, in CWKP iii. 195; Philo-Philippa, ‘To the Excellent Orinda’, 131–64, in CWKP iii. 202–3. 162 Paula Loscocco, ‘ “Manly Sweetness”: Katherine Philips among the Neoclassicals’, HLQ 56/3 (1993), 259–79 (262). 163 Ibid. 261. 164 Loscocco touches in passing (ibid.) on the appropriation of Philips for a nationalistic rhetoric of translation but is not otherwise concerned specifically with discourses surrounding translation. 165 See e.g. Henry Vaughan, ‘To the most Excellently accomplish’d, Mrs K. Philips’, 9, in CWKP, iii. 183; ‘Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, To Orinda’, 11, in CWKP iii. 186; Abraham Cowley, ‘On Orinda’s Poems. Ode’, in CWKP iii. 194; Philo-Philippa, ‘To the Excellent, Orinda’, 170, in CWKP iii. 203.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

99

The Poem smooth, and in each line Soft as your selfe, yet Masculine . . .166

For Philo-Philippa, the ‘smooth’ quality of Philips’s verse (both original and translated) is repeatedly associated with its ability to ‘flow’.167 The implications of such terms for Restoration royalism begin to become apparent when one considers that Philips herself elsewhere prefigures the peaceful and ordered government which awaits England in 1660 under Charles II as ‘the splendid smoothnesse of his reigne’.168 Meanwhile, Eugenius in Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie reinforces his advocacy of the orderly legacy of royalist poets by claiming that their forbears offer ‘nothing so even, sweet, and flowing as Mr. Waller’.169 The idea that Philips verse possesses ‘smoothness’ and can ‘flow’ also recalls the ‘fluency’ identified by Laurence Venuti as a key goal established in Interregnum royalist discussions of translation.170 By ‘fluency’, Venuti denotes the idea that a translation should read as if transparently at home in the English language, a goal espoused by Philips herself: ‘the rule that I understood of translations . . . was to write to Corneille’s sence, as it is to be supposd [sic] Corneille would have done, if he had been an Englishman, not confind [sic] to his lines, nor his numbers (unless we can doe it happily) but always to his meaning’.171 While John Vicars, in his translation of the Aeneid (1632) specifically describes the strategy of fluency in terms of ‘ “smoothnes” ’, John Denham hopes that his 1656 translation of Virgil will read ‘ “naturally and easily” ’.172 This air of noble ease achieved through ‘fluency’ was, argues 166 Vaughan, ‘To the most Excellently accomplish’d, Mrs K. Philips’, 5–10, in CWKP iii. 183. See also Cowley, ‘On Orinda’s Poems. Ode’, in CWKP iii. 194. 167 Philo-Philippa, ‘To the Excellent, Orinda’, 170, in CWKP iii. 203. 168 Philips, ‘Arion on a Dolphin’, 8. 169 Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesie, An Essay (London, 1668), 7. 170 Laurence Venuti, ‘The Destruction of Troy: Translation and Royalist Cultural Politics in the Interregnum’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 23/2 (1993), 197–219 (211). 171 Ibid. 211, 214, 218; CWKP ii. 114 (26 Oct. [1663]). Philips’s comments here qualify any assumption we might have that, in condemning the ‘Liberty’ taken by her rival translators of Pompée in an earlier letter to Cotterell, she intends to advocate the rigid word-for-word method opposed to the strategy of ‘fluency’, see CWKP ii. 103 (17 Sept. 1663). 172 See Venuti, ‘Destruction of Troy’, 211. See also [Sir John Denham], The Destruction of Troy, An Essay Upon the Second Book of Virgil’s Aeneis (London, 1656), A3v.

100

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

Venuti, originally designed to ‘regain the hegemonic status of the defeated Caroline aristocracy’.173 The aristocratic connotations of a translation which eschews literalism in the interests of a fluency which assimilates the original into a culturally dominant language are apparent in Sir John Denham’s commendatory verses on Sir Richard Fanshawe’s translation of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido. Denham praises Fanshawe for rejecting the ‘servile path’ [my emphasis] ‘Of tracing word by word, and line by line’, insisting that, by ‘Foording his [Guarini’s] current, where thou find’st it low’, Fanshawe ‘Let’st in thine own to make it rise and flow’.174 In his poem intended to encourage Philips to complete her translation of Pompée, the earl of Orrery echoes such ideals by connecting the smooth quality of her style with poetic and (implicitly) social elevation, praising ‘your Verses smoothness, and their height’ (my emphasis).175 Similarly, Philips herself praises the rival translators’ Pompey the Great for being, at its best, ‘great and noble, and the Verses smooth’.176 Elsewhere she commends the ‘easie and fluent . . . Vein’ of some of the earl of Roscommon’s translations in the same breath as asserting that he is ‘a very ingenious Person, of excellent natural Parts, and certainly the most hopeful young Nobleman in IRELAND’.177 The letter from which these comments are taken shows that Roscommon, who was the husband of Philips’s friend, Frances Boyle, undertook the translations Philips mentions in response to opinions she herself had put forward concerning the deficiency of Sir Richard Fanshawe’s translation of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido.178 Whilst we may regard this merely as a light-hearted social exchange, there are grounds for suggesting a more serious mutual influence between Philips, as an innovator in the rhymed translation of French verse drama, and Roscommon who was to become a key theorist of verse translation for his age. A comparison between the qualities associated with Philips’s writing and the ideals set out by Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse raise the 173 174

Venuti, ‘Destruction of Troy’, 204, 211. John Denham, ‘To the Author of this TRANSLATION’, in Richard Fanshawe, Il Pastor Fido, The Faithfull Shepheard With an Addition of Divers Other Poems (London, 1648), a1r–a1v. 175 ‘Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery To Orinda’, 11, in CWKP iii. 186. 176 CWKP ii. 103 (17 Sept. 1663). 177 Ibid. 54–5 (19 Oct. 1662). 178 Ibid.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

101

possibility that she may have been especially well-placed to embody the properties he valued and to inform the tastes he later expounded in the Essay.179 His description of the proper relationship between a translator and the author he or she translates, for example, matches the intense Platonic friendship repeatedly advocated in Philips’s poems: . . . chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend. United by this Sympathetick Bond, You grow Familiar, Intimate and Fond; Your thoughts, your Words, your Stiles, your Souls agree.180

The supreme fluency with which Philips’s eulogists credit her is also valued by Roscommon in complimenting English verse translation of Horace: ‘Serene, and clear, Harmonious Horace flows, | With sweetness not to be expresst in Prose’.181 His emphasis on the importance of a ‘harmonious’ translation, which recurs elsewhere in the essay, resonates not only with Philips’s own emphasis on harmony in her verse but with Philo-Philippa’s argument for the greater euphony of Philips’s female poetic voice: ‘our Souls by sweeter Organs speak’.182 In a letter to another female poet, Elizabeth Thomas, John Dryden links her ‘Harmony in . . . Numbers’ (which he elsewhere deems essential to good verse translation) explicitly with Philips’s poetic style.183 Such a conception of her strengths surely enhances her authority as one of the first translators of drama to use rhyming couplets, the formal epitome of the urge towards harmonizing political dualities in the Restoration.184 The way in which Philips’s supposed capacity to create smoothness or harmony renders her susceptible to appropriation for a 179 [Wentworth Dillon], earl of Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse, 2nd 180 Ibid. 6–7. edn. (London, 1685). 181 Ibid. 3. Fanshawe, Il Pastor Fido, A4v, is also interested in preserving the ‘harmonious’ quality of the original Italian in translating Guarini. 182 Roscommon, Essay, 10; Philo-Philippa, ‘To the Excellent, Orinda’, 51, in CWKP iii. 99. See also Cowley’s emphasis on the feminine sweetness of her verse in ‘On Orinda’s Poems. Ode’, in CWKP iii. 194. 183 See Loscocco, ‘ “Manly Sweetness” ’, 272–3. For Dryden’s emphasis on retaining ‘Harmony of Numbers’ in translation, see Dryden, The Works of Virgil: Containing his Pastorals, Georgics, and Aeneis (London, 1697), e1r, e3v, f2r. 184 For a brief survey of those taking this view of the rhyming couplet, see Venuti, ‘Destruction of Troy’, 217. Philips herself shows a marked respect for the couplet in a letter to Cotterell: ‘For I am of the Opinion, that the Sence ought always to be confin’d to the Couplet, otherwise the Lines must be spiritless and dull’, CWKP ii. 103 (17 Sept. 1663).

102

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

nationalistic Restoration rhetoric of translation becomes apparent if we analyse Roscommon’s own commendatory poem to her. Here he links her ability to transform chaos into the harmonizing structures of poetry with a subjection of alien forces redolent of the nationalist conception of translation: While (rul’d by a resistless fire) Our great ORINDA I admire. The hungry Wolves that see me stray Unarm’d, and single, run away. Set me in the remotest place That ever Neptune did embrace, When there her image fills my breast, Helicon is not half so blest. Leave me upon some Lybian plain, So she my fancy entertain, And when the thirsty Monsters meet, They’ll all pay homage to my feet. The Magick of ORINDA’s Name, Not only can their fierceness tame, But, if that mighty word I once rehearse, They seem submissively to roar in Verse.185

The political pertinence of such an ability to propagate harmony through translated verse (in the final years of Philips’s life as in the post-Exclusion Crisis period of the Essay on Translated Verse) is underlined by Roscommon’s own panegyrist, Knightly Chetwood. Celebrating the rules Roscommon has set out for translators in his Essay, Chetwood proclaims: Hoist Sail, bold Writers, search, discover far, You have a Compass for a Polar-Star. Tune Orpheus Harp, and with enchanting Rhymes Soften the savage humour of the Times.186

The sense of Philips’s superior capacity to achieve the ideal of harmonious order and integrity in English translation are given 185

‘The Earl of Roscomon to Orinda: an Imitation of HORACE.’, in CWKP iii.

190. 186 Knightly Chetwood, ‘To the EARL OF ROSCOMON ON His Excellent POEM’, in Roscommon, Essay, a1v.

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

103

politicized expression by Philo-Philippa when she champions Philips’s translation over that of her rivals: A Woman Translate Pompey! which the fam’d Corneille with such art and labour fram’d! To whose close version the Wits club their sense, And a new Lay poetick SMEC springs thence!187

‘SMEC’ represents an abbreviation of ‘Smectymnuus’, the name formed by the initials of the five anti-episcopal polemicists in the pamphlet war of 1641. By comparing the group translators of Pompey to Smectymnuus, Philo-Philippa links their multiple authorship to political and ecclesiastical disunity, implicitly opposing Philips’s unified efforts to such divisiveness. The contrasting ‘decorum’ upheld by Philo-Philippa in Philips’s translation comprises not merely the sense of poetic unity or stylistic aptness but Philips’s supposed feminine poise, a virtue in keeping with the propriety, elegance, and proportion recommended in Restoration discussions of translation.188 Philips herself defines the best translation as that in which ‘the Originall appears in its own true undisfigured proportion, & yet beautify’d with all the riches of another tongue’.189 Similarly, Roscommon places emphasis on the importance of ‘harmonious Symetry of Parts’ which he claims will lead to ‘attractive Majesty’.190 His association of proportion in translation with regal superiority is in keeping with PhiloPhilippa’s juxtaposition of the ‘grace’ and ‘decorum’ of Philips’s translation with the notion that her verse possesses a courtly elegance: ‘Your rich becoming words on the sence wait, | As Maids of Honour on a Queen of State).191 The heroic tone and classical subject matter of Philips’s translations from the drama of Corneille may appear to place them at a significant distance from her more intimate Interregnum poetry of 187 188

Philo-Philippa, ‘To the Excellent Orinda’, 15–18, in CWKP iii. 197–8. Ibid. 152. For the stress on ‘decency’, ‘elegance’, and ‘propriety’ in tr., see Dryden, Works of Virgil, e1r, e1v; Roscommon, Essay, 8. 189 CWKP ii. 114 (26 Oct. [1663]). 190 Roscommon, Essay, 10. 191 Philo-Philippa, ‘To the Excellent Orinda’, 134, 152, 173–4, in CWKP iii. 202, 203. As Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 58–9, notices, the regality is also evident in Philo-Philippa’s earlier comment that ‘Something of grandeur in your Verse men see, | That they rise up to it as Majesty’, 105–6. Dryden is also concerned with ‘majesty’ in English tr., see Works of Virgil, e1r, e2r, and Of Dramatick Poesie, 7.

104

‘Her Harmonious Numbers’

friendship. The frequency with which her Restoration writings use the term friendship diminishes markedly and the political valency of friendship changes from a partisan coding of royalist community and monarchical order during the 1650s to representing a Restoration spirit in favour of reconciliation and against military conflict. Nevertheless, the substance of her dramatic translations and her profile as a translator continue to promote and feed off the notion that friendship and its allied virtues of harmony, unity, and so on, share both an affinity with the feminine and a pertinence to the predicament of seventeenth-century royalists. Before I go on to examine the related but contrasting convergence between Restoration notions of femininity and Tory ideology in the work of Philips’s successor, Aphra Behn, it is important to probe further the affinities between the writings of Philips and Margaret Cavendish in their interactions with an Interregnum context.

3

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’: Cavendish, Philips, and the Potency of Feminized Retreat This chapter suggests that these authors’s depictions of feminine withdrawal reflect the Interregnum royalist need to represent the space of retirement or interiority as the actual centre of power. As royalists began to be forced into retreat by the sequestration of their estates, ejection from public office, imprisonment, or exile during the 1640s, a rhetoric of paradox emerged in the work of cavalier poets eager to convert withdrawal into self-assertion, disenfranchisement into power, confinement into freedom, and so on. Richard Lovelace’s ‘TO ALTHEA, From Prison’, for example, expounds the famous dictum that ‘Stone Walls doe not a Prison make, | Nor I’ron bars a Cage’, insisting: If I have freedom in my Love, And in my soule am free; Angels alone that sore above Enjoy such Liberty.1 1 Richard Lovelace, ‘TO ALTHEA, From Prison’, in Lucasta (London, 1649), 98. See also James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 216–17, who discusses this poem along with Lovelace’s ‘To Lucasta. From Prison’ in which he argues that ‘paradox enables the speaker . . . to represent imprisonment as a liberation into the free domain of conscience’. For further examples of the royalist rhetoric of paradox, see Lovelace, ‘The Vintage to the Dungeon’, in Lucasta (1649), 45; Thomas Stanley, ‘The Bracelet’, quoted below, p. 117, and the other related examples listed in Ch. 3 n. 32. Stanley’s Petrarchan articulations of ‘liberty’ in ‘bondage’ in his two love lyrics, ‘La belle Enemie’ and ‘Loves Heretick’, in Poems (London, 1651), 42, 38,

106

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

Similarly, a poem entitled ‘The Liberty and Requiem of an imprisoned Royalist’ asserts: I’me in this Cabinet lockt up Like some high prized Margarite; Or like some great Mogul, or Pope, Am cloyster’d up from publique sight: Retir’dnesse is a part of majesty, And thus, proud Sultan, I’m as great as thee.2

The rejection of the disempowering effects of enforced retirement or confinement achieved by the rhetoric of paradox exemplified in these two poems becomes all the more pertinent to royalists with the termination of any meaningful military resistance after their defeat at the battle of Worcester in 1651. Moreover the existence of a stateless king in exile during the 1650s lends credibility to the idea that the true nexus of power resides beyond its state apparatus, in retreat from the traditional public world. Despite the fact that the speaker of ‘The Liberty . . . of an imprisoned Royalist’ playfully likens himself to a mogul, sultan, or pope, his central conceit that ‘Retir’dnesse is a part of majesty’ offers a more serious response to the Interregnum predicament of the Stuarts and their followers. Perhaps this accounts for the continuing popularity of the poem into the 1650s.3 The topical location of the regal centre of power in a marginal space of withdrawal re-emerges in Henry Vaughan’s dedicatory epistle to Flores Solitudinis (1654): may be seen to acquire a similar political plangency at the time of their printing. Henry Vaughan’s spiritual expression of the paradox of liberty through confinement in ‘Misery’, 1–4, originally printed in Silex Scintillans (London, 1650), shares this subtextual political topicality. (This and all subsequent references to Vaughan’s poems are taken from Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, repr. with revisions 1983). Meanwhile ‘The beggers Song’ in Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (London, 1653), 122, romanticizes the freedoms of a mendicant existence with pointed contemporary relevance: ‘A beggers life is for a King: | Eat, drink and play, sleep when we list’ (Walton asserts that the song was originally by Frank Davison, ibid. 121). 2 Anon., ‘The Liberty and Requiem of an imprisoned Royalist’, in Parnassus Biceps. Or Several Choice Pieces of Poetry Composed by the Best Wits That Were in Both Universities Before Their Dissolution (London, 1656), 107–8. Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writings: Royalist Literature, 1640–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 135, says that the poem was originally printed in 1647. 3 Potter, Secret Rites, calls it ‘one of the most popular poems’ of the 1640s and 1650s.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

107

If when you please to look upon these Collections, you will find them to lead you from the sun into the shade, from the open Terrace into a private grove, & from the noyse and pompe of this world into a silent and solitary Hermitage: doe not you thinke then, that you have descended (like the dead) . . . for in this withdrawing-roome (though secret and seldom frequented,) shines that happy starre, which will directly lead you to the King of light . . . we live in an age, which hath made this very Proposition (though suspected of Melancholie) mighty pleasing, and even meane witts begin to like it.4

Vaughan’s emphasis on the fact that the historical circumstances of his own ‘age’ render these sentiments especially appealing invites us to identify ‘the King of light’ not only with Christ but with Charles II, confined to the ‘withdrawing-roome’ of his exile. James Loxley’s reading of John Cleveland’s poem, ‘The Kings Disguise’ also identifies the notion that the greater one’s retirement from the public world, the closer one comes to true monarchical authority. The poem, which deals with Charles I’s flight from Oxford in disguise in 1646, shows royalist poetics beginning to address an enforced monarchical retreat with which it was even more starkly faced after 1649. For Loxley, the key lines in the poem are: ‘ “Y’are not i’th’ presence, though the King be there” ’ and ‘ “This Privie-chamber of thy shape would be | But the close mourner of thy Royaltie” ’. He helpfully glosses these by reminding us that: The ‘Privie-chamber’ in which the disguised King remains is of course another room at court, further into the state apartments than the Presence Chamber, more inward, more private—and yet, for these very reasons, more clearly the residence of majesty. Charles had been very keen on ensuring that this strict hierarchy of rooms was maintained in his own palaces, and on elevating the Privy Chamber . . .5

These comments also illuminate Vaughan’s poem on the same episode. Here, as Loxley indicates, potential criticisms of Charles for disguising himself are parried with the exclamation: Henry Vaughan, Flores Solitudinis (London, 1654), A1r–A1v. Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, 141. See also Julie Sanders, ‘ “The Closet Opened”: A Reconstruction of “Private” Space in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish’, in Stephen Clucas (ed.), A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 127–42, on the growing significance of the ‘closet’ in the architecture of early modern aristocratic residences (129–30, 136). 4 5

108

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’ But full as well may we blame night, and chide His wisdom, who doth light with darkness hide: Or deny curtains to thy Royal bed, As take this sacred covering from thy head. Secrets of State are points we must not know; This vizard is thy privy Councel now . . .6

The evocation of the enhanced majesty of more private or interior architectural spaces (‘presence’, ‘Privie-chamber’, ‘privy Councel [chamber]’, ‘Royal bed’) in Cleveland and Vaughan’s poems is also apparent in the spatial coordinates of Vaughan’s dedicatory epistle to Flores Solitudinis and in those of ‘The Liberty . . . of an imprisoned Royalist’ with their use of the terms ‘withdrawing-roome’, ‘private Closet’ and ‘Cabinet’. (The word ‘cabinet’ may, of course, denote a private room as well as a piece of furniture or container used for concealment.7) In privileging feminized spaces of retreat or interiority as sites of authority in their writing Katherine Philips and Margaret Cavendish draw on and promote these royalist strategies of arguing for the empowerment of the King and his subjects through withdrawal or inwardness. The notion that retirement leads to the most effective affirmation of royalist values takes political engagement out of the traditional public sphere to which women have severely limited access and situates it in a more private territory, enhancing women’s opportunities for political agency alongside their male counterparts. This sense of opportunity is apparent in the way in which both writers portray the female figures who people their texts. Yet, although Interregnum conceptions of retreat are powerful catalysts to some of Cavendish’s texts even after the Restoration, the works in question lack the more immediate engagement with their political scene which characterizes Philips’s verse from the 1650s. From the point of view of a royalist readership, Philips, as a woman, is especially well-placed to endorse ideals of empowerment through withdrawal or inwardness. Such ideals find expression in 6 Henry Vaughan, ‘The King Disguised’, 33–8. The poem’s extended title describes it as ‘WRITTEN ABOUT THE SAME TIME THAT MR JOHN CLEVELAND WROTE HIS’. In claiming that ‘he | Himself deposed his own Majesty’ (6), Vaughan converts enforced disempowerment into authoritative free choice in a further example of the royalist rhetoric of paradox. 7 For the political significance of the interiority or secrecy of the ‘cabinet’ in the works of Philips and other royalists, see above, Ch. 2.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

109

discourses of feminine conduct, women’s friendship, and in Neoplatonic figurations of female virtue which her gender lends her particular authority to expound. Meanwhile, her valorization of specifically female retreat or interiority has a pertinence for male royalists forced by the Interregnum into an effectively ‘feminized’ condition of retirement. The lack of property rights, exclusion from public office, and various forms of physical restriction experienced by royalist men at this particular historical moment align them with the long-standing circumstances of women, imposed by law or social custom. I want to place my readings of Philips’s verse within a framework which recognizes that their male readers could regard her female-authored celebrations of feminine retirement or inwardness as, in some sense, endorsements of the predicament which it became expedient for royalist men to embrace during the 1650s. In doing this I am not seeking to deny the fact that many royalist men greeted enforced ‘feminization’ by attempting to reassert their masculinity, even once its conventional medium, military action, was no longer viable. James Loxley’s elaboration of a royalist poetics of political activism in which writing becomes a surrogate gesture of military engagement implicitly connects royalist verse with the reassertion of masculinity.8 Yet, if anti-royalist satire enjoyed labelling its victims effeminate and Charles I’s enemies pilloried him for supposedly uxorious effeminacy, male royalists were not deterred from using evocations of, or expressions of loyalty to, the feminocentric Caroline court culture of Henrietta Maria to reinforce their political identity during the Interregnum, as I argued in the previous chapter.9 For Philips’s male contemporaries, gestures of support for her as a woman, for her friendships with other women, and for her feminized society of friendship were a part of this process of political self-definition. It is misleading to read Philips’s accession to public political utterance as synonymous with the assumption of what Loxley calls ‘the normatively male royalist voice’.10 The need to read royalist 8 9

Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, 234. See Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 47, 75. 10 James Loxley, ‘Unfettered Organs: The Polemical Voices of Katherine Philips’, in Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (eds.), ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 230–48 (238, 245).

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

110

literature for the political signifying power of the feminine as well as the masculine is apparent when one considers his response to Humphrey Moseley’s 1651 edition of William Cartwright’s plays and poems. Loxley is surely right when he tells us that the numerous commendatory verses prefacing the volume reconstitute ‘royalist Oxford—the garrison and university of Cleveland’s “Doctors Militant”—which had been dissolved after the first civil war’.11 However, his reading omits the fact that the list of contributors of commendatory verses (which starts with Katherine Philips) also invokes another (albeit overlapping) symbolic royalist community: that of Philips’s so-called ‘Society’ of friendship with its feminocentric, précieux affiliations. It is not only royalists, however, who influence Philips’s poetry of feminine inwardness and for whom it strikes a chord. We gain only a partial picture if we fail to realize how and why it draws on Puritan ideas and attracts a Puritan readership.

interiority in philips’s verse Conventional non-aristocratic discourses of feminine conduct in the early modern period suggest that women can achieve authority not by actively imposing themselves on the public sphere but by espousing virtues of inwardness, self-restraint, and withdrawal from the world: the virtues of modesty, silence, chastity, and obedience.12 The paradoxical way in which such discourses promote status through submission, authority through retreat, and so on, tallies suggestively with the cavalier rhetoric of paradox. Katherine Philips mobilizes this potential for relevance to the royalist predicament inherent in the discourses of feminine virtue when she deploys them in elegies for Dorothy Owen and Mary Lloyd (Anne Owen’s step-grandmother and grandmother) who died in 1653 and 1656 respectively. Both poems connect the women’s inward-moving inclination towards self-denying virtue and guardianship of the domestic sphere with a spirit of royalist resistance. Hence Mrs Lloyd’s ‘Obedience’, piety, and domestic care lead to an oxymoronic ‘submissive Greatness’ which makes

11

Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, 233.

12

See above, Ch. 1.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

111

her household ‘a pattern for a Monarchy’.13 Similarly Mrs Owen’s self-effacing goodness and charity render her paradoxically ‘Great without Pride! a soule which still could be | Humble and high, full of calme Majesty’, enabling her to maintain ‘true ’State within’.14 My attempt to connect the elegies for Mrs Owen and Mrs Lloyd to a wider royalist rhetoric of freedom through confinement questions Kate Lilley’s readings of the same poems. Philips’s elegies for women friends, alleges Lilley, ‘construct conservative models of the limited heroic potential of the subject positions available to women, privileging “free obedience” and “majestic serenity” ’, in contrast to the traditions of ‘masculine, heroic, public elegy’.15 Yet, my own account presents the elegies’ panegyrics to the heroism of a more private and circumscribed sphere as somehow liberated from gender exclusivity by immediate relevance to male royalists as well as to the poems’ female subjects. Indeed, the phrase ‘free obedience’, quoted by Lilley is actually taken from one of Philips’s elegies for a man rather than a woman: John Owen, the first husband of Philip’s friend Anne.16 The fact that Owen was only 21 years and 11 months old at the time of his death in 1655 necessarily excludes him from having taken part in direct military engagement during the Civil War.17 Yet Philips’s elegy for him makes a virtue of this lack of direct involvement, not to argue for a straightforward neutrality, but to promote a philosophy of authority through retreat from public conflict which can speak to the condition of a wider Interregnum royalist readership: 13 Philips, ‘In memory of that excellent person Mrs. Mary Lloyd of Bodidrist in Denbighshire, who dy’d the 13th of November 1656, soon after she came thither from Pembrokeshire’, 28, 67, 40. 14 Philips, ‘In memory of the most Justly honour’d Mrs Owen of Orielton’, 37–8, 39. 15 Kate Lilley, ‘True State Within: Women’s Elegy, 1640–1700’, in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (eds.), Women, Writing, History (London: Batsford, 1992), 72–92 (91). 16 Philips, ‘To my dearest friend, on her greatest loss, which she suffer’d on the 27th Decemb: 1655’, 33–6. (Only the title of this poem appears in Philips’s autograph MS from the 1650s. CWKP i, uses the earliest version from Philips, Poems (1667).) 17 For Owen’s age at his death, see Major Francis Jones, ‘Owen of Orielton’, The Pembrokeshire Historian: Journal of the Pembrokeshire Local History Society, 5 (1974), 11–32 (21).

112

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’ He well knew whom, and what he did believe, And for his Faith did not dispute, but live, And liv’d just like his infant Innocence, But that was crown’d with free obedience. (33–6)

The good housekeeping elevated by Philips’s elegy on Mrs Lloyd may also be read as possessing a political relevance which crosses boundaries of gender. Her domestic prudence resembles what James Loxley argues is the ‘careful husbandry’ of limited material resources, praised in Martin Lluellin’s ‘Elegie On the Death of Sir Bevile Grenvile’ and Lovelace’s ‘The Grasse-hopper’, as a resistance to the sequestrator.18 Where Philips praises Mrs Lloyd’s generosity borne of household thrift, for example, she stresses the material preservation of the royalist household when ‘Litigious hands did her of Right deprive’ (63) and ‘the mad Tumultuous world, | Saw Crowns revers’d, Temples to ruine hurl’d’ (87–8): Her noble bounty was her prudent care, Who handsom freedom gave, yet regular. Salomon’s wisest woman less could doe: She built her house, but this preserv’d hers too. . . . . . . . All that are hers are therefore sure to be Bless’d by inheritance and Legacy. (41–4, 103–4)

The political topicality of Philips’s elegies on Mrs Lloyd and Mrs Owen is also apparent in her suggestion that the dismantled royalist state may somehow be reconstructed or sustained in more private or interior spaces. Praising the orderly domestic government of Mrs Lloyd, for example, she claims: And if well order’d Commonwealth must be Patterns for every privat Family, Her House, rul’d by her hand, aw’d by her Ey, Might be a pattern for a Monarchy. (37–40)

If we take Philips to be using the term ‘Commonwealth’ in its historically specific sense to denote the Protectorate then the lines appear stealthily to reject their initial (albeit conditional) premiss that ‘well order’d Commonwealth must be | Patterns for every privat Family’. For they ultimately insist that it is Mrs Owen’s household which promotes a pattern of government for the public 18

Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, 221.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

113

sphere from within rather than shaping itself according to the current model of Cromwell’s administration in the outside world. There are echoes of Mrs Lloyd’s household monarchy in Philips’s assertion that Mrs Owen ‘kept true ’State within’ in contrast to ‘the angry Fate | Which tore a Church, and overthrew a State’ in the external world (39, 33–4). By using the abbreviated form of the word ‘estate’ in this context, Philips suggests that Mrs Owen nourishes an interior space which might replace not only the royalist state but sequestered royalist estates like that of her oldest son, seized by Parliament two years before she died.19 Yet, the phrase ‘true ’State within’ suggests that Mrs Owen’s maintenance of a model of the monarchical state takes place not simply in the more inward space of the domestic sphere but within herself by virtue of her humility and self-control. The perceived suitability of women as interior guardians of the externally destroyed monarchy has roots not only in their habitual association with domestic order or the virtues of inwardness but also in certain Neoplatonic conceptions of femininity which flourished in the Caroline court and pervaded cavalier discourse. This becomes especially apparent if we compare Philips’s eulogy (as Orinda) to Rosania with the poem which seems, in my view, to have inspired it: William Cartwright’s panegyric to the countess of Carlisle, one of Queen Henrietta Maria’s most influential ladies in waiting.20 In praising her friend, Orinda asserts: Such constancy, such temper, truth and law, Guides all her actions, that the world may draw From her one Soule the noblest president Of the most safe, wise, vertuous government. She courts retirement, is her selfe alone, Above a Theatre, and beyond a Throne.21

The Neoplatonic notion that Rosania’s inner soul is the repository of virtue and authority (‘vertuous government’) is also expressed in terms which stress the idea that true monarchical power is located in the space of furthest retreat from the outside world: 19 20

See Jones, ‘Owen of Orielton’, 20. For Lucy Hay, countess of Carlisle, and her role at court, see Raymond Anselment, ‘The Countess of Carlisle and Caroline Praise: Convention and Reality’, Studies in Philology, 82|2 (1985), 212–13. 21 Philips, ‘19 Septemb. 1651. Rosania shaddow’d whilest Mrs. M. Awbrey’, 53–8.

114

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’ But as in Pallaces the utmost, worst Roomes entertain our wonder at the first; But once within the presence chamber doore, We doe despise what e’re we saw before: So when you with her mind acquaintance get, You’l hardly think upon the Cabinnet. Her soule! that ray shot from the Deity, Doth still preserve its native purity . . . (31–8)

The metaphor of the privileged inner space of royalty is also deployed by Cartwright in extolling the beauty which reflects the countess of Carlisle’s virtuous soul when he claims that, ‘you appear a Court, and are no less | Than a whole Presence, or throng’d glorious Press’.22 The notion that the countess generates from within her the cohesive forces underpinning state institutions (as Rosania’s soul is a model of ideal government) is suggested by Cartwright’s assertion that her ‘Vertues’ Print Love, they print Joy, and Religion too; Hence in your great Endowments Church and Court Find what t’admire; All wishes thus resort To you as their Center, and are then Sent back, as Centers send back lines agen. (15–19)23

Cartwright and Philips’s visions of the soul of woman as image or inspirational source of the institutions of monarchy and (in Cartwright’s case) the Church are founded on an economy of Platonic love in which the virtuous masculine aspirations which found good government may be fostered by the adoration of women whose beauty manifests that of the virtuous soul.24 22 Cartwright, ‘A Panegyrick to the most Noble LUCY Countesse of Carlisle’, 3–4. (This and all subsequent references to Cartwright’s plays and poems are taken from The Plays and Poems of William Cartwright, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951).) 23 Patricia M. Sant and James N. Brown, ‘Two Unpublished Poems by Katherine Philips’, ELR 24/1 (1994), 211–28 (227) identify an untitled and unattributed poem in Nicholas Crouch’s MS notebook which they claim is by Philips and which may, in my view, echo Cartwright’s panegyric. It recalls his idea that the Countess’s virtues ‘Print . . . Religion’ in its Neoplatonic address to a lady: ‘But had I not, the reverence you spread | Created from the beames & rayes you shed | Fro[m] the Majestique beauties you put on | Is such as will teach a Religion | to Sensles things, you worship & admire | when you with your bright form doe them inspire’ (11–16). 24 For the Neoplatonic notion that women deserve homage because they can lead men to moral and spiritual perfection, see Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 16–17, 27–8.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

115

Philips’s depiction of Rosania as a ‘Theatre’ and ‘Throne’ in herself, reworking Cartwright’s portrayal of the countess as ‘a Court’ and ‘Presence’, remind us of the added pointedness of reconstructing institutions associated with royalism in her own time when the theatres are under a ban and the power of the throne deposed. Indeed, the precise timing of the poem (written on 19 September 1651) lends it extra weight, given the recent defeat of Charles II’s forces in the battle of Worcester on 3 September just weeks before, thereby decisively terminating any hope of restoring the English monarchy by military force. Philips’s poem ‘On the 3d September 1651’ shows that she was, unsurprisingly, well aware of this decisive defeat. She may also have recognized what Raymond Anselment sees as the new political plangency of the Cartwright poem when it was printed in 1651 and tellingly placed at the beginnning of Moseley’s edition.25 Originally composed to celebrate the countess’s power at court in the late 1630s, the printed version appeared at a time when she was ‘in the custody of the state for her part in the Earl of Holland’s ill-fated royalist uprising’.26 Other royalist writings of the 1640s and 1650s also use the trope of a woman internally embodying the dismantled institutions of Church and State. Thomas Stanley’s address ‘To the Countess of S. with the holy Court’ asks ‘(What more a Court then where you shine? | And where your soul, what more divine?)’.27 Meanwhile, a poem ‘On a Noble Lady’ in Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s manuscript addresses the subject as ‘Thy selfe a sacred Church’ (6). Elsewhere Jane Cavendish’s formulation draws attention to the significance of Neoplatonic ideas about the virtuous soul expressing itself through feminine beauty, so central to the Cartwright poem which inspires Philips. In lines ‘On my sweete Sister Brackley’ she writes: The sweetnes of thy face; may even controll Our weakest Animall, or Liveinge soule To an understandinge Love, & in thy Looke Eache there may read, the trueth of vertues booke.

(19)

It is these properties which enable Elizabeth to provide a model of royal government: ‘Then thou great Patterne stand to bee | For 25 Raymond Anselment, Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 59. 26 Ibid.; Anselment, ‘The Countess of Carlisle’, 27. 27 Stanley, Poems (1651), 66.

116

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

Monarks, for to wishe, they had but thee’ (ibid.). Royalist John Crouch’s elegy for Philips shows how the poet herself might gain authority from becoming associated with the inward feminine conservation of monarchy. Implicitly opposing her propagation of ‘the sweet and peaceful Arts’ to the supposedly usurpatious revolutionary onslaughts of the previous two decades, he exclaims pointedly: ‘She taught a Way, and that a glorious one, | Not how to gain, but be above a Throne’.28 His final phrase distinctly recalls Philips’s own portrayal of Rosania as ‘Above a Theatre, and beyond a Throne’, enhancing the regal overtones of his assertion that ‘Her inward Pomp, through her fleshy Shrowd | Did like the Sun oft glitter through a Cloud’ (27–8). Philips’s eulogy of Rosania, like her poem in memory of Mrs Owen, promulgates the idea that the monarchist state may be relocated or sustained within an individual woman. However, Philips’s discourse of women’s friendship suggests that it is pairs of friends rather than single individuals who create the politically resonant feminized space of withdrawal. Earl Miner recognizes the idea that the literary maintenance of bonds between royalist friends can reconstitute the dismantled structures of the state in terms of a privileging of the ‘Polity of friendship’ over the power of actual monarchy.29 Philips’s femaleauthored poetry of women’s friendship has a special role to play here since, as I discussed in the previous chapter, women are seen to excel in the Platonic love which provides the most persuasive model of sustaining politicized bonds of friendship irrespective of separation or even death. Her poem, ‘Friendship’s Mysterys, to my dearest Lucasia’, first printed in the politically charged context of Henry Lawes’s Ayres, and Dialogues (1655), offers a sense of the space of Platonic friendship between women as the realm in which the authority of monarchy and the Anglican Church persist.30 She relocates the centre of 28 J[ohn] C[rouch], ‘AN ELEGIE Upon the Death of the most Incomparable, Mrs. KATHERINE PHILIPS, The Glory of her SEX’, in CWKP iii. 208. For Crouch’s politics, see CWKP iii. 207 n. 2. 29 Earl Miner, The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 290. 30 The poem appears in Lawes’s volume under the title ‘Mutuall affection between Orinda and Lucatia’ but I have followed Thomas in using its more commonly adopted title.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

117

power in relation to which banishment is defined in the place where souls unite in retreat from the material world: We court our own captivity Then Thrones more great and innocent: ’Twere banishment to be set free, Since we weare fetters whose intent Not bondage is, but Ornament. (16–20)

The imagery which she uses to depict empowerment through withdrawal and confinement recalls the cavalier rhetoric of paradox discussed earlier in this chapter: in particular, the kind of conceit used by Thomas Stanley in ‘The Bracelet’: ‘Mark but this wreath of hair and you shall see | None that might wear such fetters would be free’.31 It was Stanley himself who appears to have instituted the royalist custom of wearing a black armband in sympathy with the King’s distress after Charles’s flight from Oxford in 1646 and this gives rise to a further series of poems which prefigure Philips’s topos of fetters which liberate.32 ‘Friendship’s Mysterys’ goes on to characterize the realm of Platonic friendship as a space of retreat from the material world in which Orinda and Lucasia become ‘Both Princes, and both subjects too’ in an apparent echo of Donne’s assertion in ‘The Sun Rising’ that ‘She is all states, and all princes, I’.33 However, this line in Philips’s poem, like the stanza quoted above, seems to have an intermediary source which provides a catalyst to her notion of friendship between women as a replacement for the power relationships of monarchy. In William Cartwright’s play, The Lady Errant, the two central female friends express the sympathies which bind them to one another in language redolent of Philips’s poem. Although Cartwright’s Lucasia is a princess and Eumela her 31 32

Stanley, Poems (1651), 47. See e.g. Robert Herrick, ‘Upon a black Twist, rounding the Arme of the Countesse of Carlile’. (This and all subsequent references to Herrick’s poems are taken from Hesperides (1648), facs repr. (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969)); [Henry Hughes], ‘On a Black Ribbon’, in Henry Lawes, Ayres, and Dialogues (London, 1658), 14; James Shirley, ‘On a black Ribband’, in The Poems of James Shirley, ed. Ray Livingstone Armstrong (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1941), 12. Armstrong details Stanley’s instrumentality in cultivating the wearing of an armband, see Poems of James Shirley, 12. 33 Philips, ‘Friendship’s Mysterys’, 25; John Donne, The Sun Rising, 21, in Donne, The Complete Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, repr. 1984).

118

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

waiting-woman, Eumela claims, ‘Nor Prince, nor Subject, speaks but Love in both’ (1120). Similarly, Lucasia depicts ‘Loves Kingdom’ as ‘Founded upon a Parity; Lord and Subject, | Master, and Servant, are Names banish’d thence; | They wear one Fetter all, or, all one Freedom’ (1150–3). Yet Philips’s reworking of Cartwright’s lines seems to cater to an Interregnum royalist need to argue for the persistence of monarchy despite the dismantling of its external manifestations. Whilst Cartwright’s characters suggest that the bonds of female friendship dissolve monarchical hierarchies (‘Nor Prince, nor Subject’), Philips’s version retains a sense of the hierarchical identities involved in monarchy (‘Both Princes, and both subjects too’). In transforming Donne, via Cartwright, she omits the former’s use of the word ‘states’ in favour of ‘subjects’ thereby reflecting the historical realities of the Interregnum with its stateless Stuart monarchy.34 The claims which Donne places in the mouth of his speaker constitute brave, but manifestly self-deluding, wishful thinking since (both in the poem and in contemporary reality) the monarch and court carry on as usual regardless of the lovers. In Philips’s poem, however, the notion of state power relocated in an immaterial realm is, in some sense, substantiated by the current condition of the Stuart monarchy. Her figuration of Orinda and Lucasia as ‘both Princes’ may thus evoke Catherine Gallagher’s contention that the Interregnum empowers female royalists because Charles II’s status as ruler of a ‘fantasy kingdom’ literalizes the sovereignty of the private individual.35 Nevertheless, Gallagher’s analysis (which focuses on Cavendish’s Blazing World) fails to encompass Philips’s conception. For Philips the power of the monarchy is reconstituted not, as Gallagher would have it, in the imagination of the isolated individual but beyond the self in Platonic bonds with others. We should read Philips’s poem then as concerned less with a personal or private accession to sovereignty than with offering a wider royalist readership the possibility that the force of monarchy lives on in the mystical connections between loyal supporters of the King. 34 My emphasis here differs from that of Elaine Hobby who suggests that Philips is rewriting Donne in order to portray a more equal love relationship, see ‘Katherine Philips: Seventeenth-Century Lesbian Poet’, in Hobby and Chris White (eds.), What Lesbians Do in Books (London: Women’s Press, 1991), 183–204 (200). 35 Catherine Gallagher, ‘Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England’, Genders 1 (1988), 25–39, 28–9.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

119

Philips’s adaptation of Donne’s lines also reminds us that, since ‘soules no sexes have’ (as she claims elsewhere), the substitute kingdom of Platonic friendship, peopled by souls, provides her with the opportunity (denied her as a woman in the conventional material state) of becoming a full ‘subject’.36 Yet, this too surely has a wider significance for her male royalist readers. Her fantasy of a context in which previously disenfranchised women can, symbolically, become unproblematic political subjects of monarchy may have parallels with male royalist aspirations to regain their full identity as loyal subjects of the monarch in a royal state, an identity threatened by the banishments, sequestrations of property, and compelled oaths of allegiance imposed by the alien regime. It is not only the hierarchical identities associated with the royalist state which persist in Philips’s conception of the Platonic union between women friends. This mystical bond also creates an inner space in which to reconstitute the structures and rituals of the discredited Anglican Church with which Philips appears to have sympathized in adult life.37 In ‘Friendship’s Mysterys’ her espousal of a royalist identification between friendship and true religion (which I discussed in the previous chapter) culminates in the implication that restricted Anglican eucharistic ceremony can be played out in the realm of Orinda and Lucasia’s Platonic union: Our hearts are mutuall victims lay’d, While they (such power in friendship ly’s) Are Altars, Priests, and offerings made, And each heart which thus kindly dy’s Grows deathless by the sacrifice. (26–30)38 36 37

Philips, ‘A Friend’, 19. Although John Aubrey tells us that Philips was brought up as a ‘Presbyterian’ (see CWKP i. 353), she seems to have favoured Anglicanism as an adult, making contact with Jeremy Taylor and reading approvingly the work of Anglican divines, Cartwright and Henry Hammond, see CWKP ii. 35, 35 n. 8 (17 May 1662). Her poem ‘To my Lord Arch: Bishop of Canterbury his Grace 1664’ praises ‘the best Church of all the World’ (16). In two of her letters she goes out of her way to speak disparagingly of the Presbyterians, see CWKP ii. 28–9, 28 n. 4 (8 Apr. 1662), 53, 53 n. 3, 54 n. 4 (6 Sept. 1662). She also denounces Roman Catholicism in a letter to Dorothy Temple, see CWKP ii. 141, 141 n. 17 (22 Jan. 1664). 38 John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Austin Dobson, 3 vols. (London: Routledge and Thoemmes Press, 1996), ii. 101 (15 Apr. 1655) describes how ‘the ruling Powers’ had placed severe restrictions on the use of the Anglican liturgy in the majority of churches. Evelyn, ii. 107 (25 Dec. 1655), informs us that a Cromwellian edict came into force in this month forbidding Anglican clergy ‘either

120

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

Philips’s lines are reminiscent of what Nigel Smith identifies as a wider movement amongst other Anglican texts at this time to suggest that personal or internalized devotion can somehow provide ‘evidence of an episcopal and ceremonial church in existence but without its external structure of governance’.39 Philips’s friend, Jeremy Taylor, for example, reflects that ‘we want the blessings of external communion’ and thus: ‘He that takes all opportunities to remember Christ’s death by a frequent Sacrament (as it can be said) or else by inward acts of understanding will, and memory (which is the spiritual communion) supplies the want of the external rite.’40 Her references to ‘Altars’ and ‘Priests’ connect her with the strategies already used by Herrick (another satellite of the Lawes circle) in the Anglican verse which he published in 1648. Thomas Corns points out that ‘Herrick does not shy away from the word “altar”, despite its offensiveness to some Protestants . . . In Puritan writers, “altar” carries a taint of popery and perhaps even paganism’.41 Far from exhibiting ‘the language and logic of paganism’, then, as Carol Barash, has argued, the language of Philips’s stanza suggests Platonic friendship as an internalized repository of Anglican ceremonial.42

philips and puritanism Although Philips’s concern with interior reconstructions of religious and governmental institutions is highly resonant for royalists during the 1650s, it also draws on Puritan ideas to which her family background and marital connections would have made her no stranger. From a Puritan point of view the emphasis on inner government acts not to sustain a monarchical order currently in abeyance but to offer a radical alternative to external kingship. As Nigel Smith puts it, ‘The praise of monarchs is replaced by the internalized dynamic of to preach, or to administer Sacraments, teach schools, etc. on pain of imprisonment or exile’. 39 Smith, Literature and Revolution, 128. 40 Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (London, 1650), A6r. 41 Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 121. 42 Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 96.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

121

godly selfhood, where the true king is Christ, not of this world.’43 Philips draws on such ideas but inflects them with a royalist perspective as two of her poems which engage with Quakerism and Fifth Monarchism respectively illustrate. If we compare the first of these, in memory of Mrs Hering, the wife of a Quaker (or Quakersympathizing) colleague of James Philips, with the elegy for Mrs Owen discussed above, the coalescence between Puritan and royalist conceptions of inner government becomes evident.44 In each case a commendable withdrawal from civil strife is articulated through conventional concepts of feminine self-restraint. Hering’s retreat from ‘the tumults which the world do fill’ and the ‘glittering triffles [sic] which the most admire’ into ‘That frame of soule which is content alone, | And needs no entertainment but its Own’ expresses the Quaker rejection of externals in favour of the inner light.45 However, it also recalls Philips’s more overtly royalist praise for Mrs Owen’s maintenance of ‘true ’State within’.46 Indeed the elegy on Mrs Hering goes on subtly to inject royalist possibilities into its representation of the apotheosis of the virtuous Quaker. Hering’s ultimate retreat from the world in death becomes a suggestively regal ‘vast accession’ (36). This may, on one level, evoke the Quaker notion of the second coming of Christ’s kingdom within the godly soul but, taken with the body of Philips’s royalist verse, it also indicates that disconnection from material power structures need not obliterate monarchical authority.47 Hering’s ‘vast accession’ renders her ‘full of light’ (37) in an image which teasingly combines Quaker symbolism both with the courtly Neoplatonic vision of female virtue as a source of illumination and with royalist images of the dispossessed monarch as ‘King of light’.48 Although the Fifth Monarchists, like the Quakers, were concerned to advance an alternative to the carnal rule of earthly 43 44 45

Smith, Literature and Revolution, 14. For Hering’s religious affiliations, see CWKP i. 367–8. Philips, ‘In Memory of Mrs. E. Hering’, 19, 28, 15–16. For the Quaker rejection of externals in favour of the inner light, see e.g. The Journal of George Fox, quoted in N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987) and ibid. 180. 46 Philips, ‘In memory of the Justly honour’d Mrs Owen of Orielton’, 39. 47 For this aspect of Quaker belief, see Keeble, Literary Culture of Nonconformity, 204–5. 48 See above, p. 107. For a similar representation of Charles, see Lovelace, ‘TO LUCASTA. From Prison’, in Lucasta (1649), 52.

122

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

kings they anticipated the arrival of Christ’s ‘Personal Reign’ on earth rather than within the godly individual.49 In her poem ‘Upon the double murther of K. Charles’, Philips pounces on this literalism to suggest that Stuart kingship offers a far more transcendent model of monarchy, irrespective of the material depradations it has suffered.50 The poem’s full title identifies it as a riposte to ‘a libellous rime made by V.P.’, the Puritan preacher and Fifth Monarchist, Vavasor Powell, a colleague of Philips’s husband.51 Powell’s attack on the executed monarch ends defiantly: ‘Of all the Kings I am for Christ alone: | For he is King to us though Charles be gone’.52 Philips throws this back at him asserting, ‘Christ will be King, but I ne’re understood, | His subjects built his kingdome up with blood’ (29–30). Her reply is designed to expose the flaws in Fifth Monarchist claims to transcend earthly kingship by associating them with an earthbound literalism rooted in violence and the body. By characterizing Powell’s attack on Charles as a second ‘murther’ Philips paradoxically implies that the King lives on after his execution, thus emphasizing her own attachment to a notion of kingship which extends beyond the purely material. The existence of a dialogue between Philips’s verse and Puritan interests is firmly substantiated by the evidence of Puritan poetic borrowings from her posthumous Poems (1667). A primary motive for such borrowing is the fact that Philips’s Interregnum royalist figurations of transcendent or inwardly reconstructed government become strikingly pertinent to the concerns of the defeated Puritans after the Restoration.53 49 Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity, 204–5, and Smith, Literature and Revolution, 269, discuss these distinctions. For the phrase ‘Personal Reign’, see Alexander Griffiths, Strena Vavasoriensis, a New-Years-Gift for the Welch Itinerants: or, a Hue and Cry after Vavasor Powell (London, 1654), quoted in CWKP i. 322. 50 Although the poem’s occasion clearly attaches it to 1649 or shortly afterwards, it does not appear in Philips’s autograph MS from the 1650s. CWKP i, uses as its copy-text the version which appears in a MS collection of Philips’s poems in the hand of her friend Sir Edward Dering, probably made c.1662–3, see CWKP i. 44–5. 51 See CWKP i. 321. 52 Vavasor Powell, ‘Of ye late K. Charles of Blessed Memory’, quoted in Elizabeth Hageman and Andrea Sununu, ‘ “More Copies of it Abroad than I could have imagin’d”: Further Manuscript Texts of Katherine Philips, “the Matchless Orinda” ’, EMS 5 (1995), 127–69 (129). 53 My explanation differs from Smith’s suggestion, in Literature and Revolution, 257, that Puritans read Philips because ‘her verse escapes from the blatant signalling in much royalist verse’.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

123

While Allan Pritchard has persuasively argued for Philips’s influence on Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’, the most extensive Puritan emulation of her verse is, as David Norbrook has shown, to be found in the manuscript poems of Robert Overton.54 A Parliamentarian general during the Civil Wars, Overton became discontented with what he regarded as Cromwell’s potentially tyrannical tendencies, a view fostered by an affiliation with the Fifth Monarchists. In late 1654 the Protector had him imprisoned in the Tower of London and subsequently on Jersey for allegedly inciting his soldiers to rebel against their leader. Released by Parliament in 1659 he returned briefly to his duties as governor of Hull but was arrested in 1660 on charges of abetting a Fifth Monarchist revolt against King Charles II and returned to prison in Jersey. In December 1671 the authorities ordered his transfer to London and he may have died not long after this, although the date of his death is unconfirmed.55 It was during this second period of imprisonment that he completed a manuscript collection of prose and verse, entitled Gospell Observations and Religious Manifestations etc. designed as a memorial to his wife, Ann (a staunch Fifth Monarchist) who died in 1665.56 Internal evidence suggests a date of 1671 or 1672 for the manuscript, which draws on the work of a number of poets including, prominently, Katherine Philips, using the 1667 edition of her poems.57 The majority of his poems stick very closely to their sources in Philips, Donne, Quarles, Wither, Herbert, and so on, with Overton freely admitting the extent of his borrowing as an attempt to make up for his poetic inadequacies.58 Norbrook notes that Philips had ‘voiced a disdain for the public world’, catalysed by her political predicament during the 1650s, which could aptly articulate Overton’s political plight after the Restoration.59 However, he does not examine the specific importance 54 Allan Pritchard, ‘Marvell’s “The Garden”: A Restoration Poem’, SEL 23/3 (1983), 371–88; David Norbrook, ‘ “This blushing tribute of a borrowed muse”: Robert Overton and his Overturning of the Poetic Canon’, EMS 4 (1993), 220–66. 55 All biographical details about Overton are taken from Norbrook, ‘ “This blushing tribute” ’, 224–5. 56 Ibid. 221, 224, 227. Overton’s ‘Gospell Observations’ is now in Princeton University Library, indexed as ‘Overton, Robert, Gospell Observations, General Manuscripts Bound’. All page references are to this MS. 57 Norbrook, ‘ “This blushing tribute”’, 224, 237. 58 Ibid. 221. 59 Ibid. 244.

124

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

for Philips and Overton of the idea that state power may be reconstituted in spaces of retreat or interiority: an idea congruent both with Philips’s Interregnum royalism and Overton’s postRestoration Puritanism. Overton borrows from Philips’s poems which figure Mrs Lloyd and Mrs Owen as interior guardians of a model of the dismantled royalist state in order to represent his wife as custodian of the ‘true ’State within’.60 Although Ann Overton (unlike the female subjects of Philips’s poems) appears to have been directly involved in political action during her lifetime, Philips provides Robert Overton with representations of femininity which locate political agency beyond the material sphere from which death has severed his wife.61 Whilst Norbrook suggests the possible humiliation felt by Overton in being forced by political circumstance to advocate a feminized stance of ‘passive obedience’, Overton’s celebrations of the governmental authority located in passive feminine virtue surely serve to raise the status of his own feminized condition. His perspective is not simply that of the imprisoned post-Restoration Puritan, eager to cling on to a vision of the godly state within, but of the Fifth Monarchist rejecting the might of earthly kings. As Philips’s reply to Vavasor Powell draws on his Fifth Monarchist beliefs so Overton’s Fifth Monarchist sympathies encourage him to draw on Philips’s concern with relocations of monarchical power beyond its conventional human institutions. His wholesale appropriation of Philips’s poem, ‘Friendship’s Mysterys’, illustrates how readily her portrayal of the interior preservation of dismantled Church and State in the bonds of women’s Platonic friendship lends itself to becoming a Puritan celebration of Overton’s godly relationship with a virtuous woman which ‘transcends the scope of earthly monarchies’ or ecclesiastical rituals.62 Philips’s verse provides Overton with an invaluable example of the way in which seemingly conventional courtly or pious tributes to a woman may 60 See Philips, ‘In memory of . . . Mrs. Mary Lloyd’, 37–40, and Overton, untitled, beginning ‘I cannot hold, where merit shines so clear’, in Gospell Observations, 201; Philips, ‘In Memory of Mrs Owen’, 33–40, and Overton, ‘Elegie in memory of Mrs. A.O.’, in Gospell Observations, 203. 61 In 1656 Ann Overton was accused of spearheading an anti-Cromwellian plot with Major-General Thomas Harrison, see Norbrook, ‘ “This blushing tribute” ’, 227. 62 Overton, ‘Love. 1’, in Gospell Observations, 175–6; Norbrook, ‘ “This blushing tribute” ’, 237.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

125

act as repositories of political aspiration which has become forcibly severed from material action. Where Philips contributes to a body of royalist verse which praises women as agents of harmony and thus representatives of an outwardly disturbed political order, Overton reconstitutes this idea to suggest that his wife’s singing propagates an alternative, spiritual monarchy: . . . did not her Soule conceive and in her Night Songs holy numbers weave a Crown of Sacred Sonnets fit t’adorne a dyeinge Martyr’s brow?63

Norbrook points out that Overton is here adapting Henry Valentine’s panegyric on Donne, but the lines also recall the sentiments of couplets from Philips’s poem, ‘Lucasia’, borrowed elsewhere in Overton’s manuscript to celebrate his wife: That souls were made of number could not be An observation, but a prophesy. It meant Lucasia, whose harmonious state The spheares and muses only imitate. (21–4)64

Overton shows recurrent interest in Philips’s troping of musical concord as the embodiment of the ‘harmonious state’ of which Lucasia’s feminine excellence is the ultimate expression. He copies large portions of Philips’s poem ‘To Mr Henry Lawes’, for example, under the title ‘To H:L: upon his Composures’.65 He preserves the political resonances of musical harmony in Philips’s final couplet (‘Be it thy care our Age to new-create: | What built a world may sure repayre a state’) but he pointedly leaves out her most explicit royalist expression of this idea in the opening eight lines.66 In addition to providing Overton with the raw material to help present his wife as a model of the ideal state through her virtue or 63 Overton, no. 28 of ‘Other short Elegies to her Matchlesse Memory’, in Gospell Observations, 231. For Philips and royalist verse which praises women as agents of harmony, see above, Ch. 2. 64 Norbrook, ‘ “This blushing tribute” ’, 265 n. 7. Overton’s borrowing from Philips’s poem occurs in his poem, ‘Name’, in Gospell Observations, 195. 65 Overton, Gospell Observations, 238. 66 For a further example of Overton copying passages from Philips which expound the idea of musical harmony as political order, see Philips, ‘L’accord du bien’, 1–4, 9–16, and Overton, ‘Harmony &c.’, in Gospell Observations, 247.

126

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

harmony, Philips’s verse offers him articulations of the idea that the most powerful rule comes through internal self-governance, a notion which once again addresses both her Interregnum royalist and his Restoration Puritan dilemmas. Indeed Philips’s voicing of this notion may have found its way not only into Overton’s poems but into the verse of his close friend, John Milton in his Paradise Regained (1671). Milton’s Second Defence of the English People (1654) speaks of his ‘more than fraternal harmony’ with Overton ‘by reason of the likeness of our tastes’.67 Given the interest shown by Marvell (another of Overton’s friends) and Overton himself in Philips’s poems it seems plausible to suggest that Milton may have drawn directly on the 1667 edition of her works. The alternative possibility is, of course, that he absorbed his allusions to Philips from reading Overton’s manuscript which reproduces the two key passages amongst her poems which seem to have influenced Paradise Regained. The manuscript certainly appears, according to Norbrook, ‘to have been designed for circulation amongst [Overton’s] family and friends’ and seems to date from around the time when Paradise Regained was printed. The first significant stanza occurs in Philips’s ‘The Soule’: He that commands himself is more a prince Then he who nations keep in aw; Who yield to all that does their souls convince, Shall never need another Law. (77–80)

Her turn of phrase suggests a possible link with Christ’s speech: Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules Passions, desires, and fears, is more a king: Which every wise and virtuous man attains: And who attains not, ill aspires to rule Cities of men, or headstrong multitudes, Subject himself to anarchy within, Or lawless passions in him which he serves.68

The wording of the two passages appears to have more in common than can be accounted for by their most obvious common root in the biblical proverb, ‘He that is slow to anger is better than the 67 68

Milton, Second Defence, quoted in Norbrook, ‘ “This blushing tribute” ’, 220. Milton, Paradise Regained, ii. 466–72, in The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1968).

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

127

mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city’.69 Although Milton echoes the biblical idea of conquering a city, his ‘he who reigns within himself . . . | . . . is more a king’ imitates Philips’s ‘He that commands himself is more a prince’. Overton changes Philips’s lines only subtly: He that commands his Passion’s more a Prince then he that nations keeps in awe; who yield to all that does their souls convince, shall never need another Law.70

However, he does introduce the term ‘Passion’, raising the possibility that Milton (who also speaks of ‘Passions’) was influenced by reading Overton’s version of Philips. Alternatively, Overton may (consciously or unconsciously) be grafting Milton onto Philips. Milton himself could also be drawing on another of Philips’s stanzas, this time from ‘L’accord du bien’, which adds the idea of serving ‘lawless passions’: Rightly to rule one’s self must be The hardest, largest monarchy: Whose passions are his masters grown, Will be a captive in a Throne. (97–100)71

Whether or not Milton was conscious of Philips’s poems, his preoccupation with inner self-government certainly points up the kind of themes in her work which attracted his fellow Puritan, Robert Overton. Where Overton found Philips’s verse suffused with suggestive motifs of authority through retreat or inwardness, 69 Proverbs 16: 32, King James Bible (1611). See also the version in the Geneva Bible (1560). 70 Overton, ‘The Soule &c.’, in Gospell Observations, 255. 71 For Overton’s borrowing from ‘L’accord du bien’, see ‘Harmony &c.’, in Gospell Observations, 248. Overton may have been encouraged to substitute ‘his Passions’ for ‘himself’ in copying Philips’s ‘The Soule’ because these lines from ‘L’accord du bien’, which do refer to ‘passions’, are so similar to those I have quoted from ‘The Soule’. Several other poems by Philips from which Overton borrows also extol the virtues of inner self-government, although not in language so redolent of Paradise Regained. See Philips, ‘Parting with Lucasia’, 13–24, and Overton, ‘The Departure’, in Gospell Observations, 183; Philips, ‘Invitation to the Countrey’, 39–40, and Overton, ‘Country Comfort’, in Gospell Observations, 250; Philips, ‘Upon Mr. Abraham Cowley’s Retirement’, 25–8, and Overton, ‘Cowley’s Retirement’, in Gospell Observations, 193. Like ‘L’accord du bien’, the first two out of these three examples talk of ‘passion’ or ‘passions’.

128

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

Interregnum royalist valorizations of withdrawal also crucially shape Margaret Cavendish’s writing even after the Restoration.

interiority and isolationism in

BLAZING WORLD

In attempting to explain Cavendish’s continued fascination with ideas of empowering retirement after 1660 it should be noted not only that her direct experience of exile during the 1640s and 1650s constitutes a formative influence throughout her œuvre but that the decline in her husband’s reputation consigned the Cavendishes to a form of internal exile once they returned from the continent. It may seem unsurprising then that Cavendish’s fantasy voyage appears to echo the Interregnum royalist formulations of the space of retreat as the centre of authority which this chapter has so far discussed. The duchess of Newcastle, the literal author of Blazing World and ‘The Duchess of Newcastle’ as a character in the text, realize their avowed fantasies of achieving monarchical power by withdrawing inwards into their imaginations where they can create fictional worlds to control. In a prefatory epistle to the reader Cavendish famously exclaims: . . . though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First. And although I have neither power, time nor occasion to Conquer the World as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not to be Mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a World of my own: for which no body, I hope, will blame me, since it is in every ones power to do the like.72

Meanwhile, the ‘spirits’ of the Blazing World tell Cavendish’s namesake in the story that: ‘every human Creature can create an Immaterial World fully inhabited by Immaterial Creatures, and populous of Immaterial subjects, such as we are, and all this within the compass of the head, or scull; nay, not only so, but he may create a World of what fashion and Government he will’ (96). Catherine Gallagher links Blazing World back to the Interregnum context by arguing that Charles II’s status as exiled ‘ruler of a kind of fantasy Kingdom’ during the 1650s fosters Cavendish’s notion that individuals can fulfil their desire to govern 72 Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World Called the BlazingWorld, 2nd edn. (London, 1668), a4r (hereafter referred to as BW).

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

129

their own worlds by creating them in their imaginations.73 Yet, whilst Charles’s ‘imaginary’ rule during the period may have served as a catalyst to Blazing World as Gallagher suggests, the text appears firmly conscious of the materiality of the restored monarchy. Readers are left in no doubt that the interior kingdoms of Margaret Cavendish’s imagination are merely immaterial fantasies separate from the Restoration political order of the real world. When asked by the spirits, ‘why should you desire to be Empress of a Material World . . . troubled with the cares that attend Goverment?’, ‘the Duchess of Newcastle’ replies, ‘You have converted me . . . from my ambitious desire; wherefore, I’le take your advice, reject and despise all the Worlds without me, and create a World of my own’ (97–8). As Claire Jowitt has remarked: ‘with Charles restored to his throne, he once more had a real kingdom to govern; Cavendish did not and consequently . . . though the Empress [of the Blazing World] appears to be a female absolute monarch, she can only enjoy this sort of power in a fantasy world and because the Emperor has allowed her to do so’.74 The retreat into imaginary kingdoms in Blazing World thus posits a model in which women’s aspirations towards absolute power may be satiated without vouchsafing any actual female political agency over the public world of Restoration England. This severing of interiority or retreat from political agency differs importantly from the approaches which this chapter has already explored in Katherine Philips’s verse with its much more immediate involvement in the Interregnum context. The restrictions imposed upon royalists during the 1650s encourage them to reconceptualize political agency as something which need not be confined to its more conventional manifestations in public action. As we have seen, such a reconceptualization involves promoting the notion that retreat can be the route to greater royalist political engagement or self-determination. So, where Cavendish’s journey into the imaginary kingdoms of Blazing World further limits her influence over the material, political order, Philips’s poetry of inwardness and retirement may be seen by contemporary royalists actively to foster a monarchical state in the absence of its external signifiers. 73 74

Gallagher, ‘Embracing the Absolute’, 29. Claire Jowitt, ‘Imperial Dreams? Margaret Cavendish and the Cult of Elizabeth’, Women’s Writing, 4|3 (1997), 383–99 (395).

130

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

In Blazing World Cavendish seems to respond to the exclusion of women from traditional forms of political agency dependent on public action by offering compensatory fantasies of absolute female monarchy. Meanwhile, Philips’s verse envisages new, less externalized forms of political engagement which allow women to become political agents on an equal footing with men. Although we can say then that both Blazing World and Philips’s Interregnum verse represent the space of retreat as the centre of authority, we must acknowledge how differently they relate to the Interregnum context which provides the germ of this idea. One further aspect of this differing relationship deserves especial consideration. For Cavendish in Blazing World, retreat spells a move towards greater isolation within the self. Each individual’s internal world must remain peculiar to them as its absolute monarch. Although the soul of the Empress of the Blazing World briefly visits the imaginary world of ‘the Duchess of Newcastle’ we learn that the Empress can only requite her desire for personal power by fashioning her own alternative, imaginary world (101). Yet, for Philips, the social bonds which conventionally constitute the monarchical state may be reconstructed by individual souls coming together with one another in the realm of Platonic friendship. Where Blazing World emphasizes the realization of the absolute monarchical self (the embodiment of the ‘roi absolu’ in the ‘moi absolu’ as Gallagher wittily puts it), Philips is much more concerned with using tropes of retreat as a means of reconstructing the collective entity of the dismantled state or community.75 This is nowhere more apparent than in her primary focus on the union of souls in Platonic friendship as a potent symbol of the social bonds which underpin such a royalist community. Unlike Blazing World, Cavendish’s Natures Pictures (1656), with its conceit of tales told by a family group of story-tellers in seclusion from the world at large, does offer a glimpse of the textual reconstitution of scattered Interregnum royalist community which informs Philips’s verse. Explaining the volume’s mise-enscène in an introductory poem, Cavendish writes: The compass of this fruitless Piece so strait, I could not place those Friends I did conceit

75

Gallagher, ‘Embracing the Absolute’, 25.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

131

Were gathered in a Company together, All sitting by a Fire in cold weather; Though in my Brain a large Room I had built, Most curious furnisht, and as richly gilt, Fill’d with my Lord, his Children, and the rest Of my near Friends, and Banquets for to feast: Thus with Imaginations Phancy’s spread, Much larger than my Book, or compast Head; And as my Phancy, so my Love did flow To picture all my Friends, the World to shew; For since the Time suffers us not to meet, I thought to joyn all in a Paper-sheet. (A2r)

In a gesture which echoes her step-daughters’s earlier manuscript of plays and poems, the royalist family dispersed by the political realities of ‘the Time’ are brought together in the text.76 Whilst the term ‘Friends’ evidently indicates extended family it also echoes the coding of royalist social bonds through friendship which occurs in her step-daughters’ manuscript as in Philips’s verse. The interior space of the room within Cavendish’s imagination becomes the site of reconfigured royalist community with the notion of ‘sitting by a Fire in cold weather’ evoking the political currency of the metaphor of surviving the ‘cavalier winter’.77 One’s sense that Cavendish is presenting the volume as a statement of royalist resistance is reinforced by the overtly political content of a number of the tales told. In ‘A Description of the Civil Wars’, for example, a contest between ‘Commons’ and ‘King’ leads to the victory of the former who proceed to set up an oppressive regime (88). Meanwhile, remarks made by ‘a great Lady’ in ‘A Dialogue’ with her ‘Maid of Honour’, underline the possibility of the family group envisaged by Cavendish at the start of the volume as a model for the destroyed monarchical state (172). ‘Like as potent Kings, in my Degree’, the lady tells her maid, ‘will I be served and waited on by my own Family with Duty and Obedience’ (173). The correlation between family and monarchy is supported by the engraving used to illustrate the introductory 76 For this aspect of her step-daughters’ MS, see above, Ch. 2. James Fitzmaurice, in ‘Front Matter and the Physical Make-up of Natures Pictures’, Women’s Writing, 4|3 (1997), 353–67, reads the introductory verses and illustrations as part of an attempt on Cavendish’s part to promote more cordial relations with her husband’s family. 77 For the ‘cavalier winter’, see Miner, Cavalier Mode, 262, 282, 298.

132

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

conceit at the front of the text. Here Margaret and William Cavendish preside over their family group in two throne-like chairs and wearing laurel crowns which appear to suggest more than just literary prowess in this context (see Fig. 2). However, in order to find more sustained common ground between Philips and Cavendish in their conception of the political implications of retirement we need to turn to Cavendish’s plays, The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure. For, in these texts, Cavendish’s depiction of secluded female community may be seen to share the Interregnum royalist figuration of retreat as a genuine route to collective empowerment.

cavendish’s closet drama of female community In the case of The Female Academy we can attribute this to the fact that the play was actually written during the 1650s though it only appeared in print in Cavendish’s first collection of Playes (1662) because, as she tells us in Sociable Letters, manuscript copies of this volume were lost at sea, thereby delaying printing until after the Restoration.78 Her assertion in the preface to Playes (1662) that ‘England doth not permit . . . of Playes’ underlines the fact that the entire contents were written during the Commonwealth period when the public theatres were officially closed (A3/2v). Anna Battigelli also draws our attention to the title of a poem by William Cavendish which appears in Natures Pictures (1656): ‘A Copy of Verses to the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, of all her Works, which are now all printed, except her Tragedies and Comedies, which will shortly come out’ (B2r).79 It seems probable that he is here alluding to the plays which subsequently appeared in the first volume and that those which make up the second volume, Plays (1668), including The Convent of Pleasure, were composed after the Restoration. No record exists for any seventeenth-century performance of any of her plays. Despite apparently sharing the Restoration context with Blazing World, however, The Convent of Pleasure does not simply reiterate that text’s more solipsistic representation of female retreat, 78 79

SL 295. Anna Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 25.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

133

F i g . 2. The frontispiece for Cavendish’s Natures Pictures (1656)

134

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

preferring instead to draw on the conceptual model of retirement available to Cavendish from the 1650s when she wrote The Female Academy. In order to understand why, we need to appreciate how potent such a model remained to Cavendish in allowing her to transform Caroline sources which offered more qualified perspectives on female retreat into plays which present secluded communities of women as confidently self-sufficient and self-determining. Before returning to the relevance of Interregnum ideas to Cavendish’s handling of her sources it is necessary to identify these sources and to assess the nature of her adaptations. The combined recognition that her plays do have sources and that changing historical circumstances shape her treatment of them serves as a useful corrective to the vision of The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure as autonomously imagined feminist utopias which risks emerging from certain critical perspectives.80 In writing The Female Academy Margaret Cavendish must surely have had in mind her husband’s play, The Varietie, printed in 1649 and first performed by the King’s Men between 1639 and 1642.81 The reasonable assumption that she knew William Cavendish’s plays is supported by her prefatory claim that he read them to her.82 The titular motif of The Female Academy is developed from The Varietie which echoes, in its turn, ‘the Ladies Collegiate’ of Jonson’s Epicoene.83 The Female Academy and The 80 See, e.g. Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), 390; Jacqueline Pearson, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642–1737 (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), 126; Kathleen Jones, A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673 (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), 131. For examples of studies which do recognize Cavendish’s legacy from earlier dramatists, see Irene Dash, ‘Single-Sex Retreats in Two Early Modern Dramas: Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Convent of Pleasure’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 47|4 (1996), 387–95; Jeanne Addison Roberts, ‘Margaret Cavendish Plays with Shakespeare’, Renaissance Papers (1997), 113–24; Julie Sanders, ‘ “A Woman Write a Play!”: Jonsonian Strategies and the Dramatic Writings of Margaret Cavendish; or, Did the Duchess Feel the Anxiety of Influence?’, in S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (eds.), Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama (London: Routledge, 1998), 293–305. 81 See William Cavendish, The Country Captaine, and the Varietie (London, 1649); Alfred Harbage, The Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, 3rd edn., revised by S. Schoenbaum, revised by Silvia Stoler Wagonheim (London: Routledge, 1989), 82 Playes (1662), A3r. 144–5. 83 In making this connection, Dale Randall, Winter Fruit: English Drama 1642–1660 (Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 318, also cites ‘comparable “academies” ’ in Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels and The Devil is An Ass. William Cavendish was, of course, a patron of Jonson.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

135

Varietie share both a general structure and specific terminology. In The Varietie, Mistress Voluble delivers a so-called ‘Lecture’ from the ‘Chaire’ to an ‘Academy’ of ‘Ladies’ from which men are banished (12, 13). Meanwhile, the ‘ladies’ in Margaret Cavendish’s all-female ‘Academy’ take it in turns to ‘take the Chair’ and offer ‘Lectural discourse’ on a particular topic (653, 669). Yet, whilst William Cavendish’s ladies learn that the best ribbons and lace may be bought from Mistress Voluble, his wife depicts ‘a House, wherein a company of young Ladies are instructed by old Matrons; as to speak wittily and rationally, and to behave themselves handsomly, and to live virtuously’.84 Their discourse covers a range of weighty subjects such as wisdom, truth, rhetoric, and friendship. The triviality and preoccupation with the opposite sex which characterizes the discourse of the lady’s academy in William Cavendish’s play becomes a feature of the rival men’s academy in his wife’s. Although both men and women in The Female Academy tend to reify masculine superiority in their discourses, this is wittily offset by the men’s huffing rudeness and the women’s selfpossessed rationality. The effort of the female academy to educate the women separately renders ironic the male claim in that play that ‘men are the Instructers to inform them [women] of Arts and Sciences, which women would nere have had the patience to study, for they would never have allowed so much time and solitary musing, for the perfecting . . . those Conceptions’ (664). The lastminute revelation that the women have merely been educated to make them better wives does not preclude The Female Academy from presenting a serious consideration of female education along the lines advocated by Anna Maria van Schurman and Bathsua Makin.85 After all, the first-time reader of Cavendish’s play, like 84 85

The Varietie, 14–15; The Female Academy, 653. Anna Maria van Schurman, The Learned Maid; or, Whether a Maid May be a Scholar (London, 1659); Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (London, 1673). Although the latter postdates Cavendish’s plays, the Cavendishes may have known of Makin—who ran a school for gentlewomen—through their links with the royal household. Douglas Grant, Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957), 60, mentions that William Cavendish was governor to the young Prince of Wales (future Charles II). Makin was tutor to his sister, Princess Elizabeth, see Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing, 1649–1688 (London: Virago, 1988), 199–200. Schurman, The Learned Maid, 48, refers approvingly to Makin. The model of a single-sex educational community preparing women for a return to society also

136

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

her male characters, remains under the impression that the women have permanently rejected male company right up until the final revelation. The pattern of Cavendish’s producing a later and less satiric version of a Caroline source which mocks secluded female community re-emerges when we consider her Convent of Pleasure alongside The Bird in a Cage (1633) by James Shirley to whom William Cavendish was patron.86 In Shirley’s play, Princess Eugenia and her waiting-women are confined by her father from the sight of men in a tower until an appropriate suitor can be found. To pass the time they decide to stage a play, necessarily taking all the roles whether male or female. Sophie Tomlinson and Julie Sanders have noted that this practice echoes that of the Queen and her ladies in their theatricals at court.87 Tomlinson points out that, as chief playwright to the Queen’s Men and valet de chambre to Henrietta Maria, Shirley is implicitly identified as a champion of the Queen’s theatrical activities. This impression is strengthened by his mocking dedication of the play to the Puritan, William Prynne, currently imprisoned for his perceived attack on women’s acting at court.88 Nevertheless, Tomlinson crucially alerts us to the play’s ambiguity in asserting that ‘Shirley balances political point-scoring against Prynne with a depiction of female acting that sounds a muted echo of Prynne’s paranoia’.89 From the outset the play depicts the women’s sexual desire for men chafing at their enforced all-female seclusion. Their playacting is presented as an extension of such frustrated desire. The decision to act the story of Jupiter and Danae wryly reflects their barely disguised hopes that a male lover will penetrate their echoes the precedent of convent education, see Elissa Weaver, ‘Spiritual Fun: A Study of Sixteenth-Century Tuscan Convent Theater’, in Mary Beth Rose (ed.), Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 173–205 (173–5). 86 The play was first performed by the Queen’s company in 1633, see Harbage, Annals, 132–3. For Newcastle as patron of Shirley, see Poems of James Shirley, p. xv. 87 Tomlinson, ‘Theatrical Women: The Female Actor in English Theatre and Drama, 1603–1670’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1996), 13–15; Sanders, ‘ “A Woman Write a Play!” ’, 300. 88 Tomlinson, ‘Theatrical Women’, 13–14. See also Sanders, ‘ “A Woman Write a Play!” ’, 300; Kim Walker, ‘ “New Prison”: Representing the Female Actor in Shirley’s The Bird in a Cage (1633)’, ELR 21 (1991), 385–400 (394). 89 Tomlinson, ‘Theatrical Women’, 13. See also Walker, ‘ “New Prison” ’, 394.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

137

confinement. The link between sexuality and acting culminates in a near-lesbian encounter between Donella and Eugenia (playing Jupiter and Danae) which realizes the innuendo in Donella’s earlier reassurance: ‘Doe not distrust you owne performance, I ha knowne men ha bin insufficient, but women can play their parts’.90 Noting the fact that the association of ‘acting with transgressive sexuality’ is underlined in a series of similar sexual innuendoes, Kim Walker remarks that ‘the word “parts” slips easily between theatrical and bodily provenance’.91 Sanders recognizes the potential for Donella’s remark to be taken as a celebration of courtly all-female theatricals, although it might be seen to place particular emphasis on the need for women actors to play female roles because men are ‘insufficient’.92 Nevertheless it is impossible to escape its underlying emphasis on the satisfaction of lascivious female desire through the women’s performance. After all, the possibility for a degree of satirical distance from the practice of all-female theatricals is reinforced by the fact that (as Tomlinson reminds us) Shirley’s female characters would have been played by boy actors in the theatre.93 Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure replaces Princess Eugenia’s resistance to enforced all-female seclusion in The Bird in a Cage with the deliberate decision of Lady Happy and her women to ‘incloister’ themselves in order to ‘enjoy pleasure’ free from the restraints of marriage and male company (6–7). As The Female Academy seems to draw on the model of convent education, so the title of The Convent of Pleasure invites us even more explicitly to link the predominance of theatrical pursuits amongst the women in Cavendish’s play with the medieval and Renaissance tradition of convent theatricals.94 Yet, as in Shirley’s play, the women’s recreational activities draw most immediately on female theatrical pursuits at court. We learn that, amongst their ‘several Recreations’, Lady Happy and her companions ‘accoustre Themselves in Masculine-Habits, and act Lovers-parts’ (22). The assumption of pastoral costume in the latter stages of the play heightens the connection with court drama since pastoral was James Shirley, The Bird in a Cage (London, 1633), F3v. Kim Walker, ‘ “New Prison” ’, 396, 397. Sanders, ‘ “A Woman Write a Play!” ’, 300. Tomlinson, ‘Theatrical Women’, 14. Ibid. 266–7 n. 50; Nancy Cotton, Women Playwrights in England, c.1376–1750 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 27–8. 90 91 92 93 94

138

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

invariably the mode of the Queen’s theatricals.95 Where Kim Walker indicates that Shirley ultimately disavows an association between courtly female acting and transgressive sexuality by rendering Princess Eugenia a more passive and distanced participant in the play-acting of The Bird in a Cage, Cavendish makes Lady Happy an instigator and fully active player in the theatrical pleasures of her ‘convent’.96 In a further echo of The Bird in a Cage, role-playing activities in the ‘convent’ culminate in an intense wooing scene between Lady Happy and the ‘Princess’ (dressed as a man) who has joined her society. Although the denouement discloses the Princess to be an interloping Prince after all, the withholding of the dramatis personae until the end of the play reinforces the first-time reader’s acceptance of him as a woman until the last moment.97 While Shirley implies that all-female societies must be defined by their sense of the absence of men, Margaret Cavendish depicts them as potentially self-sufficient. The voluntary seclusion of Cavendish’s Lady Happy and her women is untroubled by the longing for men which plagues Eugenia and her companions who must be forcibly kept under lock and key. The notion of ‘pleasure’ embraced in the ‘convent’ consists in a series of harmless luxuries, free from the sexual innuendo which permeates Shirley’s representation of his courtly women.98 Indeed, The Convent of Pleasure, with its apparent titular homage to Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure (1637), also reaches beyond that play’s notion of female pleasureseeking to envisage a non-male-centred collective fantasy of female self-indulgence. Unlike the suggestive play about Jupiter and Danae in The Bird in a Cage, the histrionic pursuits in The Convent of Pleasure allow some credence to the Platonic love theme so central to the Queen’s all-female dramas, with Lady Happy and the Princess playing out the roles of ‘Mistress’ and ‘loving Servant’ (22). The withheld 95 See Harbage, Cavalier Drama, 12, 14, 18, 93–4, 119; Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–1642 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 189. 96 Kim Walker, ‘ “New Prison” ’, 395, 398–9. 97 See Sophie Tomlinson, ‘ “My Brain the Stage”: Margaret Cavendish and the Fantasy of Female Performance’, in Brant and Purkiss (eds.), Women, Texts and Histories, 134–63 (157), who also points out (156) that the Prince is referred to as ‘her’ and even ‘it’ after his disclosure. 98 See The Convent of Pleasure, 8, 13–16.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

139

disclosure that Lady Happy’s female lover is a man allows a more serious portrayal of love between women. The lesbian possibilities in The Bird in a Cage are framed in terms of women as substitutes for absent men (suggestively able to ‘play their parts’).99 Yet, Lady Happy’s desire focuses on the Princess as a woman in her own right: ‘why may not I love a Woman with the same affection I could a Man?’ (32). Despite the Princess’s dressing up in male costume to facilitate the wooing, the non-performative nature of Cavendish’s text allows the reader to imagine an encounter between two women as against the unavoidable stage presence of Shirley’s boy actors. Tomlinson suggests that Cavendish envisaged a woman actor playing the role of the Prince/Princess.100 So how did the intervention of the Civil War and Interregnum between Cavendish and her sources encourage her to adapt them in the ways described? As the first part of this chapter illustrates, the experience of exile and exclusion from the conventionally conceived public sphere generated a body of royalist responses which sought to redefine retreat not as a constrained move to the margins but as a voluntary occupation of the centre ground of true authority. By relocating the centre ground in a territory removed from the habitual masculine appurtenances of power (military engagement, public office-holding, and so on) this strand of royalist thinking offered a powerful opportunity for Philips and Cavendish to develop strong representations of specifically female retreat or interiority.101 The groups of women in The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure acquire greater self-determination by voluntary retirement from the traditional arena of the outside world. This stands in stark contrast to William Cavendish’s The Varietie and Shirley’s The Bird in a Cage in which the secluded 99 See Valerie Traub, ‘The (In)significance of “Lesbian” Desire in Early Modern England’, in Jonathan Goldberg (ed.), Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 62–83 (77). 100 Tomlinson, ‘ “My Brain the Stage” ’, 157. 101 Rebecca D’Monté, ‘Mirroring Female Power: Separatist Spaces in the Plays of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’, in Rebecca D’Monté and Nicole Pohl (eds.), Female Communities, 1600–1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 97, briefly considers The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure as emulative of the royalists’ ‘staged retreat away from society . . . during the Interregnum’, thereby relocating their power ‘from its previous position at the centre to . . . the margins’, but does not specifically explore the literary contexts for these ideas or outline their particular pertinence to Cavendish as a woman writer depicting an all-female community.

140

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

female communities clearly consider themselves marginal to an absent patriarchal centre. Both William Cavendish and Shirley insinuate that exclusively female groupings will always be underpinned or subverted by women’s heterosexual desire. The women in The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure, however, are, as has already been suggested, splendidly impervious to such concerns. The notion that their voluntary exile renders them curiously central, rather than peripheral, to their mainstream societies is reinforced if we examine the dynamics of vision in both texts. The women who retire into the female academy and the convent of pleasure seem utterly unconcerned to see or be seen by the men they leave in the plays’ ‘outside’ worlds. However, the men feel compelled to orient themselves by looking at the women or attracting their attention. Lady Happy’s refusal to have any ‘grates about the Cloister’ leads to extreme frustration amongst the excluded men who even consider trying to take bricks out of the wall so they can ‘peak’ in (11, 19). Sophie Tomlinson and Sue Wiseman have argued that certain of Cavendish’s plays are interested in how women can achieve control by manipulating their own ‘erotic spectacle’ for a male audience.102 Yet, the assured authority of Lady Happy and her women is not dependent on manipulating male onlookers through visual display. Instead the panicky disarray of the play’s male characters when they cannot see the women suggests that it is the men whose stability relies on being able to gaze rather than the women who need to be gazed upon. Indeed, the emphasis falls on the women’s being their own spectators, for we learn that the convent contains, ‘a great Looking-Glass in each Chamber, that we may view our selves and take pleasure in our own Beauties whilst they are fresh and young’ (14). As Rebecca D’Monté argues, the ‘male gaze has no strength and is transformed instead into a mutually supportive gaze between women’.103 Although Tomlinson contrasts the impenetrability of the convent of pleasure with the ‘voyeuristic access granted the men’ via a ‘large open Grate’ in The Female Academy, the latter play shares in devaluing the importance of a male audience for women while intimating that masculine identity is rooted in being taken 102 Tomlinson, ‘ “My Brain the Stage” ’, 145; Susan Wiseman, ‘Gender and Status in Dramatic Discourse: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’, in Grundy and Wiseman (eds.), Women, Writing, History, 159–77 (165). 103 D’Monté, ‘Mirroring Female Power’, 93.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

141

seriously as onlookers and indeed performers.104 The women’s delivery of a lecture to their fellow female students in the academy with the men outside as secondary or incidental witnesses differs from the more immediate and self-conscious display discerned by Tomlinson in Cavendish’s play, Youth’s Glory and Death’s Banquet (1662). In addition Tomlinson stresses the latter play’s concern with the erotic potency of Lady Sanspareille’s carefully calculated costumes.105 Much to the chagrin of the men outside the female academy, however, the female scholars show no concern whatsoever for the effect they might be having on their secondary audience. The men are driven frantic by the women’s failure to pay attention to them and resort to blowing trumpets to make their presence felt (671). Although the women ultimately ‘look through their Grate, upon the men’ and ‘seem to listen to what they speak’, these actions remain divorced from the confirmatory approbation the men so desperately seek (672). The women still ‘take not notice of . . . what the men have said; for they neither mention the men, nor their Discoursings, or Arguments, as if there were no such men’ (672). The notion of the paradoxical centrality of the exiled feminocentric community which emerges in The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure has a specific Interregnum precedent in the court of Henrietta Maria in exile. Cavendish, with her experience of serving as one of the Queen’s maids of honour in Paris during the 1640s, seems, in part, to offer idealized portrayals of that milieu in these two plays. The fact that Lady Happy takes into her convent ‘Noble Persons . . . whose Births are greater than their Fortunes’ certainly has resonances with the predicament of royalist exiles (22). The respectful nostalgia towards the feminocentric elements of Caroline court culture around Henrietta Maria which emerges during the period of royalist defeat may be seen to facilitate Cavendish’s depiction of more autonomous female communities than those which appear in her source plays. Both The Varietie and The Bird in a Cage seem to treat the kinds of feminocentrism fostered at the Caroline court as, in some sense, aberrant from patriarchal standards. Despite his affiliations with Queen Henrietta Maria, Shirley is at least ambivalent towards her all-female theatricals in The Bird in a Cage. 104 105

Tomlinson, ‘ “My Brain the Stage” ’, 153; The Female Academy, 653. Tomlinson, ‘ “My Brain the Stage” ’, 145.

142

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

As The Convent of Pleasure dispenses with such vestigial suspicions so The Female Academy erases the distaste for supposedly effeminate court fashions manifested by William Cavendish in The Varietie. For contemporary audiences or readers of The Varietie and The Female Academy, the all-female groupings which both plays depict, with their focus on women’s eloquence and learning and their (pretended or genuine) demotion of sexual relations, would echo the feminocentric culture of préciosité and Platonic love promulgated by Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria.106 Yet, where Margaret Cavendish’s play works to endorse these elements, her husband satirizes them in a critique of courtly effeminacy underlined by his play’s preference for the aptly named Manly with his wilfully old-fashioned Elizabethan dress.107 While Manly represents what is masculine, traditional, and patriotic, the new-fangled courtier, Galliard, represents all that is feminized, innovative, and ‘Frenchified’.108 As Martin Butler indicates, the court masques and associated dancing (hence Galliard) in which Henrietta Maria functioned as a leading participant also become the butts of William Cavendish’s hostility.109 The self-sufficiency of Margaret Cavendish’s single-sex community in The Female Academy, then, evidently stands apart from the way in which her husband situates his ‘academy of Ladies’ as decisively dependent upon, and peripheral to, a norm of ‘Manly’-ness. My contention that Cavendish reinterpreted Caroline plays concerning female community and withdrawal through the lens of the Interregnum is reinforced when one considers a further possible source of The Convent of Pleasure, Walter Montagu’s The Shepheard’s Paradise, commissioned by the Queen and performed by herself and her ladies at court in 1633.110 Both The Convent of Pleasure and The Shepheard’s Paradise centre on their eponymous female-governed and quasi-monastic 106 107

For these aspects of Caroline court culture, see above, Ch. 1. See Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 197, 198; Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 18. Although Margaret Cavendish’s play, The Presence, parodies the pretensions of gentlemen and Maids of Honour at court, plays such as The Several Wits (1662) and Wits Cabal (1662) appear to celebrate the précieux concern with female eloquence in all-female or female-dominated groups. 108 See Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 196–8. 109 Ibid. 197. 110 See Harbage, Cavalier Drama, 13–14.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

143

retreats for those of noble birth. Whilst the ‘Brothers’ and ‘Sisters’ entering the ‘Order’ of the shepherd’s paradise ‘vow chastity and single life’, the women inhabitants of the convent of pleasure ‘live a single life, and vow Virginity’.111 The pastoral nature of the shepherd’s paradise is strongly evoked in the convent of pleasure where the inhabitants dress up as shepherds and shepherdesses and are, at one point, absorbed into a ‘Pastoral . . . Scene’ which opens in masque-like fashion to incorporate them (33). Both plays feature a disguised Prince who infiltrates the sanctuary. Montagu also provides some precedent for the rejection of marriage championed throughout the greater part of The Convent of Pleasure by having Miranda refuse the King’s offer of marriage. Whether or not Cavendish knew Montagu’s play from one of its earlier manuscript versions or only when it appeared in print, the fact that the first printed edition came out in 1659 may be seen to have encouraged Cavendish to read The Shepheard’s Paradise in the light of what it meant to royalists at that date.112 Dale Randall states that: one may reasonably suppose that when Walter Montagu’s Shepherd’s Paradise was resurrected in 1659, it was in effect a statement on the potentially imminent return of the royal family with whom the work was so inalterably associated. In the preface, the bookseller, Thomas Dring, though he says nothing precisely royalist, certainly takes the tack of aesthetic elitism. These pages, he says, now raised from sleep to put on the ‘mmortality’ of print, are addressed ‘to the inspir’d and more refin’d part of men’ who ‘have experienced those extasies and Raptures, which are the very Genius of Poetry.’113

In 1659, then, The Shepheard’s Paradise looks forward to the Restoration but does so by evoking a politically motivated nostalgia for Henrietta Maria’s all-female theatricals which undoubtedly influences The Convent of Pleasure. Indeed the title-page of The Shepheard’s Paradise explicitly refers to the fact that it was ‘privately acted by the Queenes Majestie & Ladyes of Honor’. Moreover, Montagu’s presentation of a community of nobles in effective exile under their Queen may be seen to idealize royalist 111 Walter Montagu, The Shepheard’s Paradise (London, 1659), 22; The Convent of Pleasure, 7. 112 For MS versions, see Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, iv (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 920. 113 Randall, Winter Fruit, 231.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

144

exile in the light of pastoral retreat. After all, the Stationer’s Register indicates that Montagu’s play was brought forward for printing as early as 27 September 1658, some considerable time before the Restoration.114 Yet, whatever its Interregnum resonances, The Shepheard’s Paradise is, on one level, inescapably the product of the 1630s when no historical correlative existed to sustain the sense of the state of exile as anything other than peripheral to an established monarchical centre. A corresponding sense of wistful marginality pervades the shepherd’s paradise in contrast to Cavendish’s vision of the space of retreat in The Convent of Pleasure as confident in its own centrality. Where the shepherd’s paradise functions as a haven for unrequited lovers of both sexes driven there by thwarted matrimonial aspirations rather than personal preference, Cavendish’s play is more concerned to present a contentedly self-sufficient female community which attempts to exclude men altogether.115 Once a year the Queen of Montagu’s retreat may license ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ to marry one another and leave if they so wish (22). Thus, despite Miranda’s rejection of marriage, The Shepheard’s Paradise depicts in large part a negatively motivated withdrawal from the world which may, with luck, be alleviated by marriage, thus differing markedly from the eager espousal of retreat in Cavendish’s play. Even the language with which Lady Happy praises the virtues of retirement resonates with the notion that monarchy itself is asserted through withdrawal: I had rather be one in the Convent of Pleasure, then Emperess of the whole World; for every Lady there enjoyeth as much Pleasure as any absolute Monarch can do, without the Troubles and Cares, that wait on Royalty; besides, none can enjoy those Pleasures They have, unless they live such a retired or retreated life free from the Worlds vexations. (17)

Whilst the publication date of The Convent of Pleasure in 1668 invites the reader to contrast Lady Happy’s retreat with the overtaxed public life of the restored Charles II, her idea of acceding to monarchical status through retreat seems to echo Interregnum figurations of Charles attaining his full majesty through withdrawal. 114 115

See Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, iv. 919. See e.g. Montagu, The Shepheard’s Paradise, 25–7.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

145

Although Lady Happy’s comments here speak of attaining personal pleasure through a ‘retreated life’, the play does not simply present retirement in the manner of Blazing World as a solipsistic withdrawal into fantasies of individual absolutism. The fact that the convent of pleasure, like the female academy, provides a material alternative community in which the women can actually live selfsufficiently, and that causes disturbance amongst the men who remain in the outside world, suggests that retreat into a more private sphere can lead to forms of agency over its more public counterpart. If Interregnum royalist formulations of empowerment through exile and retreat provide a precedent for this merging of public and private spheres in The Convent of Pleasure and The Female Academy, the plays’ status as closet drama also makes a significant contribution. Without resorting to what Wiseman convincingly exposes as an erroneous ‘pairing of Puritan and antitheatrical in contrast with royalist and pro-theatre’, it is possible to recognize the ideological investment held by royalists in claiming drama as their own in order to use it as a means of cultural resistance during the 1640s and 1650s.116 With the suppression of public theatre from 1642, one effective way for royalists to resist their cultural restriction in the public sphere was to move drama into more private spaces such as the aristocratic family home or the reader’s imagination.117 Theatre—a medium inextricably linked to public display—found its freest expression in retreat from the public arena.118 Charting the political implications of play-reading for royalists during the 1640s and 1650s, Marta Straznicky remarks: 116 Susan Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7. 117 See Karen Raber, Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 189–90, on playreading as royalist political resistance. Randall, Winter Fruit, 44, 45–6, 47, and Wiseman, Drama and Politics, 5–6, importantly signal the fact that some performances did persist in a few public theatres during the 1640s, but the overall trend was clearly increasingly towards total suppression. 118 Although Emma L. E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 14, 37, signals the importance for Cavendish of the ‘alliance . . . between royalism and the exiled genre of drama’, she places emphasis more on instances of Cavendish’s registering a ‘continued enjoyment of public performance’ as ‘an expressly royalist, exilic act’ than on the resonances of closet drama.

146

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

The published play, although it issues from a private moment of composition and is usually read in the solitude of one’s closet, is constructed as surreptitious participation in the prohibited activity of theatregoing, thus doubling as political resistance. At the same time, however, the theatrical experience is contained by the private ‘perusal’ of individual readers. This public/private dynamic situates both author and reader simultaneously in the closet and at the theater, thus guarding privacy while enabling public engagement.119

These paradoxes are reminiscent of the manner in which Katherine Philips’s verse posits the spaces of retreat as the most effective locations in which to sustain the publicly dismantled institutions of Church and State. Indeed Philips’s eulogy of Rosania as ‘above a Theatre’ seems highly appropriate to Margaret Cavendish with her claims to recreate externalized performance inwardly: ‘My brain the Stage’.120 Similarly in her Orations of Divers Sorts Cavendish embodies the arenas of public discourse within her own and the readers’ imaginations: I have Written Orations and Speeches of all Sorts, and in all Places fit for Orations, Speeches, or particular Discourses; and first imagining my Self and You to be in a Metropolitan City, I invite you into the Chief Marketplace, as the most Populous place, where usually Orations are Spoken . . . I shall indeavour to Perswade you . . . to go into the Courts or Halls of Judicature . . . then to Wait upon the Kings Majesty . . . (a3v)

Cavendish draws attention to the fact that such a reconfiguration of the public sphere within a private space (redolent of the gestures of Interregnum royalism) helps to counteract the fact that ‘being a Woman’ she has not been ‘bred . . . to publick Affairs, Associations, or Negotiations’ (ODS B1r). Even though the allfemale cast of her separate section of women’s orations ‘Privately Assemble’ having left the marketplace in disgust at some of the men’s comments on their sex, the topics of their orations still firmly encompass the public world as they express their hopes not to ‘Dye in Oblivion for want of Fame’ (ODS a4r, 226). Cavendish’s prefatory play on the difficulty of getting ‘undiscovered amongst them 119 Marta Straznicky, ‘Reading the Stage: Margaret Cavendish and Commonwealth Closet Drama’, Criticism, 37/3 (1995), 355–90 (359). 120 Cavendish, Playes (1662), A2r. See also her ‘Fantasmes Masque’ in P and F 155, where she states that ‘The Stage is the Braine’, and SL 57, 408, where she speaks of ‘the stage of the Imagination’ and ‘the Fancy-Stage’.

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

147

[the women], to hear their Private Conventicles’ echoes the urgent sense, experienced by the male characters in The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure, that the space of female withdrawal is a centre of attraction (ODS a4r). Like the imagined orations, closet drama looks simultaneously inwards towards retreat and outwards towards its origins in public performance, thus offering a further precedent for the way in which the communities of The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure use retirement to consolidate their authority in relation to the ‘outside’ world. A comparison of these two plays with the closet drama of female retreat produced by Cavendish’s step-daughters during the 1640s underlines the specific importance of the Interregnum context for Cavendish’s handling of similar themes. On one level, the dramatic writing of Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley is clearly influenced by their experiences of living in their father’s home, Welbeck Abbey, during his absence at the time of its capture by Parliamentarian forces in 1644.121 The subplot of their manuscript play, The Concealed Fancies, features three female royalist cousins under siege in a manor house. However, the fact that their plays associate female retirement more with confinement and loss than freedom and empowerment as their step-mother’s do may also be ascribed to the fact that their writing predates the establishment of a King and court in exile, which fosters more positive representations of the space of retreat as an aspirational focus of authority. For Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, the realm of female seclusion is marginal to an absent patriarchal centre, lacking the confident sense of its own centrality apparent in The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure. Whilst Margaret Cavendish’s Lady Happy and her companions revel in pastoral retirement, the unspecified pastoral retreat depicted in her step-daughters’ ‘Pastorall’ serves its shepherdesses merely as a place in which to pass the time wearily away until the insistently longed-for reconciliation with father, brother, and friends.122 In a closing poem to her father, one of the authors equates the life of a ‘Shepherdess’ with that of a ‘captive’.123 121 For details of these events, see S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (eds.), Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (London: Routledge, 1996), 127. 122 Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, ‘A Pastorall’, in Bodleian Library, 123 Ibid. 84. Rawlinson MS Poet. 16, 66, 67, 73, 78.

148

‘Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne’

Although Alison Findlay has noted moments of sequestered female self-indulgence in The Concealed Fancies, the three cousins, imprisoned by the siege, stress their ‘captivity’ and sadly lament the loss of their ‘absent friends’.124 Unlike the women in The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure, those in The Concealed Fancies and ‘A Pastorall’ frequently regret the absence of a male audience for their activities or spend time gauging the effect of their dress and behaviour on male viewers.125 In similar fashion prologues, epilogues, and dedications repeatedly address the authors’ father as the desired sanctioning male viewer.126 The lamented absence of both characters’ and authors’ fathers may figure a political longing for the reinstatement of the dispossessed monarch more easily sustainable in a period before the shock of regicide.127 The distance between Cavendish’s approach to female seclusion and that of her step-daughters registers a royalist reformulation of the meaning of retreat necessitated by the political conditions of the 1650s. It is this which enables Katherine Philips to produce a poetry of feminized retirement and interiority which is nevertheless politically engaged. Whilst Cavendish’s texts of female retreat are less concerned to address an immediate political predicament, new conceptual frameworks generated by the Interregnum do feed into her innovative representations of empowered female community. Beginning her writing career in the 1670s, however, Aphra Behn, must struggle to renegotiate the terms of women’s political engagement in a climate where the idea of agency through retreat simply no longer seems a viable option. 124 Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, The Concealed Fancies, in Cerasano and Wynne-Davies (eds.), Renaissance Drama by Women, III. iv. 19, 26 (all subsequent references to the play are taken from this edn.); Alison Findlay, ‘ “She Gave You the Civility of the House”: Household Performance in The Concealed Fancies’, in Cerasano and Wynne-Davies (eds.), Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama, 259–71 (267–8). 125 Cavendish and Brackley, ‘A Pastorall’, 66; The Concealed Fancies, I. iv. 1–10; II. iii. 145–9; III. iv. 4–18. 126 Cavendish and Brackley, ‘A Pastorall’, 52, 54; The Concealed Fancies, 132, 153–4. 127 Poems in the MS which contains The Concealed Fancies and ‘A Pastorall’ also lament the ‘absence’ of the authors’ father, see ‘Passions Letter to my lord my Father’ (1) and ‘Passions Contemplation’ (3).

4

‘Secret Instructions’: Aphra Behn’s Negotiations of the Political Marketplace As the suppression of the theatres in the 1640s and 1650s renders covert forms of theatrical expression a crucial nexus of royalist political resistance, so their re-establishment in 1660 lends them a central place in the royalist project to embed political Restoration in the restoration of certain cultural forms. Yet, where Cavendish, Philips, and Behn all draw on the royalist political valencies of theatre in order to help establish the legitimacy of their authorial voices as women writers, the theatrical values which underpin Behn’s authority differ significantly from the privileging of closet drama which enables Cavendish or the elevated ethos embraced by Philips in engaging with ideas concerning the translation of rhymed heroic tragedy. Where Cavendish mines the possibilities of agency through retreat inherent in closet drama, the first section of this chapter shows how Behn’s construction of an authorial image both exploits, and is defined by, the countervailing qualities of visibility and public performance central to the Restoration theatre in which she begins her writing career. The innovative appearance of female actors on the public stage at this time is central to Behn’s identification of her authorial endeavours with the royalist political mores of the new theatre. The politicized celebration of the figure of the actress—an overtly sexualized, public, professional woman—provides a powerful analogy for the endorsement of Behn, the woman writer embracing the exposure of commercial authorship in that most public of arenas, the theatre. Behn’s audacious incursions into the marketplaces of theatre and commercial print culture severely limit her access to the

150

‘Secret Instructions’

strategies for professing feminine chastity deployed by Cavendish and Philips, with their more carefully controlled elite modes of textual dissemination. In attempting to encompass the paradoxical combination of masculine and feminine virtues perceived in the woman author, some of Behn’s panegyrists attempt to redeploy the image of chaste, female heroism propagated by Cavendish and recently applied to Philips. However, although this is sometimes advantageously connected to the notion of Behn’s pro-Stuart loyalty, the amatory content of her work and the conditions of her authorship create an erotic charge in excess of this rhetoric. Yet Catherine Gallagher’s characterization of Behn’s self-made image as that of ‘the professional woman playwright as a newfangled whore’ obscures a vital aspect of her selfpresentation and the climate of its reception.1 The prologues and epilogues to her plays, along with the commendatory verses written about her, show how some of her readers were able to construct an image of her, like the Restoration actress, as at once eroticized and heroic rather than shamefully or pitiably sexualized as Gallagher suggests.2 Moreover, this heroic eroticism is seen as an extension of the politically motivated celebration of a morally freer theatre associated by Behn with loyal Tory resistance to Whiggish constraint. Like the theatrical shift from closet drama to the reopening of the public theatres, the political transition from royalist exile and exclusion to the restoration of the monarchy fosters the possibility not only of different forms of authorial image, but of a different relationship to political agency for the royalist woman writer. On the one hand, being a pro-Stuart writer after 1660 enables Behn to deploy less coded forms of political expression (even propaganda) than those used by Cavendish, Philips, and their royalist contemporaries during the 1650s. On the other, the acute political sensitivities of her period—particularly the late 1670s and 1680s in the wake of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis—continue to call for authorial strategies of subtlety and indirection with plays figured 1 Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 14. 2 Ibid. Derek Hughes’s rebuttal of Gallagher’s arguments turns crucially on the need to avoid conflating the figure of the woman actor with that of the prostitute; see ‘The Masked Women Revealed; Or, the Prostitute and the Playwright in Aphra Behn Criticism’, Women’s Writing, 7/2 (2000), 149–64.

‘Secret Instructions’

151

by Behn as ‘secret Instructions to the People’.3 Moreover, if the Interregnum leads some royalists to valorize agency through retreat, thereby opening new routes to female political engagement, the Restoration returns royalist political agency to its conventional externalized forms which still rarely lend themselves to direct female participation. Instead, Behn’s presentation of herself as an author and the representations of gender relations in her plays (which the second section of this chapter examines) explore the ways in which women’s place in the heterosexual economy defines politicized roles for them. Whilst this opens up possibilities, it also creates new restrictions. Whereas the Interregnum creates conditions which permit some royalist men deliberately to identify with traditionally feminine virtues celebrated in Philips’s verse, the eroticization of royalist politics which surrounds Behn’s authorial image and her female characters renders them more objects of male desire (and even exploitation) than foci of identification. Yet, a number of Behn’s plays offer more varied and complex formulations of the relationships between female sexuality and political agency than has been acknowledged by most commentators who suggest that Tory support for a libertine position in some of Behn’s plays can pave the way for a liberating approach to women’s marital oppression. Probably the most precise and extensive consideration so far of the relations between gender and politics in Behn’s drama comes from Susan Owen.4 However, the very rigour with which Owen attempts to connect different periods of Behn’s play-writing to their immediate contexts of fluctuating Whig and Tory ascendancy in the 1670s and 1680s tends to elide the self-questioning nature of plays like The Rover (1677), The Second Part of the Rover (1681), and The Roundheads (1681). Owen also appears too ready to separate politics from ‘feminism’, suggesting that Behn’s interest in the latter may only assert itself when the pressure of having to peddle Tory politics is not too great: ‘Feminism and Toryism tend to be hard to reconcile in her work.’5 I would argue for a more integrated model in which a focus on the predicament of women is seen as enabled by, or growing in tandem Behn, The Luckey Chance; or, an Alderman’s Bargain (London, 1687), A2r. Susan Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 5 Ibid. 160. See also Susan Owen, ‘Sexual Politics and Party Politics in Behn’s Drama, 1678–83’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15–29 (22, 27). 3 4

152

‘Secret Instructions’

with, the political concerns articulated in Behn’s drama. Her plays push at the very boundaries of the familiar ways in which Tory ideology is expressed through gender relations, thereby probing the compromises entailed in royalist politics from the Interregnum through to the 1680s. Behn reworks Interregnum or very early Restoration dramatic sources in ways which expose the limitations of the straightforward manner in which they figure their royalist agenda through heterosexual relations. Her fully realized sense of the presence of fleshand-blood female actors on the Restoration stage animates her women characters to expose the tensions which frequently arise between their own interests and those of their male counterparts even where the latter attempt to invoke a parity of political motivation between the sexes. In particular, Behn questions the notion that libertine sexual conduct provides an equally satisfactory means of expressing Tory loyalties for men and women alike. This is frequently triggered by a highly developed consciousness of women’s economic predicaments and of the often vexed interface between economic exigencies and political affiliations. Thus women in Behn’s plays become at once the victims whose plight reveals the pervasiveness of a new mercantile sensibility and the fullest expression of that mercantilism since it stands out most starkly in contrast to the notions of selfless idealism embodied in conventions of female virtue. Behn’s female characters then unmask a widespread commercialism which is seen to seep across the notional political boundaries which separate Whig and Tory. Of course, it is true to say that her plays often imply that the partisan conflicts of the late 1670s and 1680s can be paralleled (with deceptive retrospective clarity) by reference to the political divisions of the Civil War. Yet, values and experiences—such as exile, sequestration of property, faithfulness to vows, or respect for royal succession—which tend to define the unsullied moral highground of royalism for Cavendish and Philips become tainted in the mouths of Behn’s Tory protagonists when they attempt to deploy them as badges of political rectitude in the context of the later period. Behn’s probing of the contradictions inherent in contemporary rhetorics of party loyalty constitutes one manifestation of the far greater degree of self-consciousness with which she approaches her role as a pro-Stuart woman writer as compared to Cavendish and

‘Secret Instructions’

153

Philips. The third section of this chapter argues that such selfconsciousness—catalysed by her status as a professional author— is also apparent in her attempts to challenge the erotic overdetermination of her image as a Tory woman author. In her verse, in particular, we see her actively trying to forge an identity as a political writer distinct from the sexualized image upon which she and her admirers have built elsewhere. Moreover, the final section of this chapter contends that, as a writer and translator of prose fiction, she is concerned not merely to detach her political agency from a sexualized authorial persona but to demonstrate a recognition that the female writer, like her male counterparts, may achieve political agency through her power to control the very processes of literary representation.

female authorship as heroic eroticism The manner in which the ideal of heroic femininity interacts with its political context is, of course, altered for Behn by the absence of the Interregnum scene which first nourishes the writing of Cavendish and her panegyrists. Nevertheless, it is an ideal which continues to offer an effective way of portraying the woman poet’s paradoxical combination of female sex and conventionally masculine endeavour.6 One admirer praises her in terms which recall the iconography of female fortitude evoked by Cavendish: Yet neither sex do you surpass alone, Both in your Verse are in their glory shown, Both Phoebus and Minerva are your own. While in the softest dress you Wit dispense; With all the Nerves of Reason and of Sense.7

6 Carol Barash, ‘ “The Native Liberty . . . of the Subject”: Configurations of Gender and Authority in the Works of Mary Chudleigh, Sarah Fyge Egerton, and Mary Astell’, in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (eds.), Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740 (London: Batsford, 1992), 55–69 (55–6, 57, 62, 66, 69), contends that the rhetoric of heroic femininity tends to die out in most subsequent constructions of female authorship. 7 J. Adams, ‘To the excellent Madam Behn, on her Poems’, in Behn, Poems Upon Several Occasions: with a Voyage to the Island of Love (London, 1684), A7r (hereafter Poems (1684)). See also J.C., ‘To ASTREA, on her Poems’, in Behn, Poems (1684), A6v.

154

‘Secret Instructions’

As in the case of Cavendish, the allusion to a traditional imagery of feminine heroism helps to render the achievement of authorial ‘Fame’ a cause for celebration rather than disgrace. Admittedly, William Wycherley exploits to the full the lewd paradoxes which might be suggested by the loss of feminine honour in Behn’s gaining the other kind of fame: Once, to your Shame, your Parts to all were shown, But now, (tho’ a more Public Woman grown,) You gain more Reputation in the Town; Grow Public, to your Honour, not your Shame, As more Men now you please, gain much more Fame; . . . . . . . . . . . . more Credit you from all Men gain, As you bring forth, in Public, with less Pain, . . . . . . . More Fame you now (since talk’d of more) acquire, And as more Public, are more Mens Desire.8

Yet other commentators appeal to the traditions of female heroism to sanction Behn’s attainment of public reputation without questioning her sexual honour. Praising her ‘Deathless Fame’, George Jenkins asserts: Much to the Fame of thy fair Sex of old, By skilful Writers, has been greatly told: . . . . . . . . . Whilst thou look’st down, and scorns’t so mean a Praise: Thy own just Hands do thy own Trophies raise.9

The familiar combination of the image of woman warrior with a notion of heroic fame emerges in verses addressed ‘To the Heroick Antonia’ printed among the Miscellany of New Poems published with Behn’s Lycidus; or, the Lover in Fashion (1688). Here, the author favourably compares Antonia and Behn (‘the fam’d Astrea’), proclaiming that if women Would . . . arrive at an Immortal Fame, And at the Amazonian Glory’s aim, They must your generous Presidents persue.10 8 Wycherley, ‘To the Sappho of the Age, suppos’d to Ly-In of a Love Distemper, or a Play’, in Miscellany Poems (London, 1704), 191–2. 9 George Jenkins, ‘To his admired Friend, the most ingenious Author’, in Behn, La Montre; or, the Lover’s Watch (London, 1686), a2r. 10 A Miscellany of New Poems, 11, 12. (Since this text is separately paginated, although bound with Lycidus; or, the Lover in Fashion (London, 1688), I shall refer

‘Secret Instructions’

155

Behn herself echoes this image in a rhetorical flourish from the preface to The Luckey Chance where she proclaims, ‘I value Fame as much as if I had been born a Hero’.11 It is probable that such portrayals of Behn by her admirers sought to emulate heroic depictions favoured by the eulogists of Katherine Philips, since Behn’s admirers (facing a dearth of precedents) inevitably compared her to Philips as the most well-known recent woman poet. In verses addressed to Philips on the publication of her poems in 1664, Abraham Cowley states that The Warlike Amazonian Train, Which in Elysium now do peaceful reign, And Wit’s mild Empire before Arms prefer, Find ’twill be settled in their Sex by her.12

Her heroic right to ‘fame’ is asserted by panegyrics prefacing the 1667 edition of her poems.13 Admirers of both Philips and Behn nevertheless temper the poets’ supposed masculine attributes with an insistence on intermingled femininity, reminding readers that a heroic spirit in women remains distinct from tangible heroic action. Yet the ‘Angelical’ qualities repeatedly used to achieve this effect in Philips’s case cannot readily be applied to Behn in view of her sexually frank literary output and contrastingly unapologetic entry into the public sphere as an author.14 Instead, her eulogists deploy feminine eroticism to counterbalance masculine heroism: The Queen of Beauty and the God of Wars Imbracing lie in thy due temper’d Verse, Venus her Sweetness and the force of Mars.15 to it hereafter as Miscellany (1688).) For similar depictions of Antonia in Miscellany (1688), see ‘To the Most Accomplish’t Heroick, and Incomparable, the Lady Antonia’, 33, ‘To the Fam’d Antonia, on her Dwelling’, 44. For a further heroic portrayal of Behn, see Jenkins, ‘To his admired Friend’. 11 Behn, The Luckey Chance, a1r. 12 Cowley, ‘On Orinda’s Poems. Ode’, in CWKP iii. 195. 13 Cowley, ‘On the Death of Mrs. Katherine Philips’, in CWKP iii. 217; Thomas Flatman, ‘To the Memory of the incomparable Orinda: a Pindarick Ode’, in CWKP iii. 212–13; Philo-Philippa, ‘To the Excellent Orinda’, in CWKP iii. 197, 199; James Tyrrell, ‘To the Memory of the Excellent Orinda’, in CWKP iii. 220. 14 See Cowley, ‘On Orinda’s Poems’, in CWKP iii. 194. See also Flatman, ‘To the Memory’, and Tyrrell, ‘To the Memory’, in CWKP iii. 214, 219. 15 J. Cooper, ‘To Mrs Behn, on the Publishing her Poems’, in Behn, Poems (1684), A5v. See also the following poems in the same volume: J. Adams, ‘To the excellent Madam Behn’, A7r, A7v; ‘To the Lovely Witty Astrea, on her Excellent

156

‘Secret Instructions’

Behn herself partly fosters the image of herself as ‘Loves great Sultana’, foregrounding the autobiographical element in her love verse, by addressing a number of her poems to apparently real people under pastoral pseudonyms or initials.16 The conscious process of catering to the notion that her love poetry is autobiographical is apparent in her re-use and adaptation of songs from more impersonal contexts such as her plays. Mary Ann O’Donnell points out that the song beginning, ‘I led my Silvia to a Grove’, which first appeared in the Covent Garden Drolery (1672) and then in Act II of Behn’s The Dutch Lover (1673), reappears amongst her Poems (1684) as ‘The Willing Mistress’.17 Altering the first line to ‘Amyntas led me to a Grove’, Behn renders the lyric more personal.18 The sense, encouraged by her panegyrists, that Behn, as ‘Astrea’, the ‘Nymph’ or love-‘goddess’, occupies the focus of a cult of masculine homage resurfaces in her poems such as ‘On a Locket of Hair Woven in a True-Loves Knot, Given me by Sir R.O.’.19 For Behn, as for a number of her panegyrists, the particular blend of eroticized feminine heroism of prime concern in this section evidently enhances her reputation as a Tory loyalist. Addressing her as ‘you blest Heroine’, one claims that as long as her admirers ‘are Bards, or Lovers Militant below’ they will continue to ‘build Altars to Astrea’s Fame’.20 Yet, the familiar Poems’, A8v–b1r; H. Watson, ‘To Madam Behn’, b8v; Kendrick, ‘To Mrs B. on her Poems’, in Behn Lycidus, A5r; George Granville, ‘To Mrs B—’, in The History of Adolphus of Russia (1691), 54, quoted in W. J. Cameron, ‘George Granville and the “Remaines” of Aphra Behn’, N&Q, 204 (1959), 88–92 (89). 16 See e.g. Behn, ‘A Ballad on Mr J. H. to Amoret, Asking Why I Was So Sad’, ‘On Mr J. H. in a Fit of Sickness’, ‘To Lysander, on Some Verses he Writ, and Asking More for his Heart then ’Twas Worth’, ‘To Lysander at the MusickMeeting’, in her Poems (1684), 29, 106, 109, 118. Behn’s poems ‘Our Cabal’, in Poems (1684), 33, provides the clearest sense of a coterie of friends and lovers designated in this way. The phrase ‘Loves great Sultana’ is from T.C., ‘To the Author, on her Voyage to the Island of Love’, in Poems (1684), A8v. 17 Mary Ann O’Donnell, Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986), 92–3. 18 Behn, Poems (1684), 44. 19 Ibid. 77. See also ‘To Damon. To Inquire of him if he cou’d tell me by the Style, who writ me a Copy of Verses that came to me in an unknown Hand’, in Behn, Miscellany, Being a Collection of Poems by Several Hands Together with Reflections on Morality, or Seneca Unmasqued (London, 1685), 112 (hereafter Miscellany (1685)). 20 ‘To ASTREA ON HER POEMS’, in Behn, Miscellany (1685), 87, 90.

‘Secret Instructions’

157

combination of her amatory potency and poetic fame which he celebrates here are inextricably entwined with a sense of her political forcefulness: But England has a nobler task for you, Not to tame Beasts but the brute Whigs subdue, A thing which yet the Pulpit cou’d not do. Your satyr must the Factious Age reclaim.21

The same mutually reinforcing strands of eroticism, heroism and Tory ideology are identifiable in a fellow panegyrist’s depiction of Behn. Despite her ‘one soft and tender Arm’, Behn, he asserts, possesses a ‘Conqu’ring Muse’ which will challenge the Whiggism of ‘vile Achitophels’: Long may she scourge this mad rebellious Age, And stem the torrent of Fanatick rage, That once had almost overwhelm’d the Stage . . . . . . . . . . while that spurious race imploy’d their parts In studying stratagems and subtile arts, To alienate their Prince’s Subject’s hearts, Her Loyal Muse still tun’d her loudest strings, To sing the praises of the best of Kings.22

Hence ‘the blest memory of her deathless Name | Shall stand recorded in the Book of Fame’.23 Kindred responses are evoked by one ‘F.N.W’ in neighbouring commendatory verses where he holds up Astrea as the poet who can replace the tragic loss of Katherine Philips and supply Orinda’s twin sentimental and political functions in lamenting heroes and writing about love. The speaker’s paradoxical claim that ‘At once she wounds and heals our hearts’ balances the erotic charge of Behn’s writing with the political consolation offered by ‘the Loyal musick of her layes’ as her ‘Pleasant wit yet not obscene’ offsets ‘spotless and untainted Loyalty’.24 The nom de plume, Astrea, so frequently used by Behn and her panegyrists, neatly embodies the coalescence of amatory and political 21 22

Miscellany (1685), 89. ‘Upon these and other Excellent Works of the Incomparable Astraea’, in Behn, 23 Ibid. b5r. Poems (1684), b2r, b4v, b4r. 24 F.N.W., ‘To Madam A. Behn on the publication of her Poems’, in Behn, Poems (1684), b7r–b7v.

158

‘Secret Instructions’

identities. The title originates with the heroine of Honore D’Urfé’s romance, L’Astrée, and appears to have been first applied to Behn in remarks on her apparent flirtation with one William Scot during her visit to Surinam in the early 1660s.25 However, the romantic associations evoked by depicting Behn and Scot as Astrea and Celadon soon took on distinctly political overtones when these pseudonyms were used as code-names by the English authorities employing Behn to spy on Scot and other English rebels in Antwerp during the second Dutch War in 1666.26 For those who knew about Behn’s spy mission, her assumption of the pen-name Astrea may have sent the signal that she intended to serve government aims in her writing career as in her earlier espionage activities.27 The combination of the name’s erotic frisson with an ideologically weighted image of female heroism is reinforced by the fact that Astrea is also the goddess of justice whose return to the earth was associated with the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. By evoking the myth of Astrea’s flight from the earth during the iron age and promised return with the golden age, derived from Virgil’s fourth eclogue and applied to the Restoration in poems like Dryden’s Astrea Redux (1660), Behn suggests that her writing will be dedicated to the fulfilment of a just political order as conceived by her Stuart masters. These resonances are certainly picked up in the commendatory poem, praising both Behn’s ‘Conq’ring Muse’ and her ‘soft and tender Arm’, which announces that, if this were the golden age, ‘Astraea’ would be ‘thought Immortal as her fame’, 25 A letter from William Byam, deputy governor of Surinam, to Sir Robert Harley (Mar. 1664) uses the names Astrea and Celadon and implies a flirtation, see W. J. Cameron, New Light on Aphra Behn (Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 1961), 12. 26 For a review of the documentary evidence surrounding Behn’s spy mission, see Cameron, New Light, parts II and III. For the use of Astrea and Celadon as codenames, ibid. 43, 61, 79–80, 82–3. 27 Ibid. 55, indicates that Thomas Killigrew, manager of the King’s Company and groom of the King’s bedchamber, appears to have recruited Behn as a spy. Other potential members of her audience who knew about her spy mission include her mother, her mother’s unidentified associates, ‘Sir Thomas’, the King, Lord Arlington, Secretary of State, and James Halsall, her cover correspondent and cupbearer to the King, ibid. 28, 36, 61, 62, 63–4. It seems probable that some other men also knew of her mission since Cameron shows that different hands decoded or transcribed her letters, ibid. 36, 72, 74. The prologue to her first play, The Forc’d Marriage; or, the Jealous Bridegroom (London, 1671), also suggestively puns on the presence of ‘spyes’ planted in the audience by the author ([A3r]–[A3v]).

‘Secret Instructions’

159

suggesting that Behn would be as famous as her namesake Astrea during her triumphant years on earth.28 Behn, in her own verse, uses a clear allusion to her spy mission in a manner which draws out the Tory resonances of her celebration and identification with female heroism. ‘A Pastoral to Mr Stafford, Under the Name of Silvio, on his Translation of the Death of Camilla: out of Virgil’ is pervaded by its political intent in celebrating Silvio’s Roman Catholic father, William Howard, Viscount Stafford, and lamenting his execution for treasonable involvement in the supposed Popish Plot.29 The setting of the piece as a dialogue between Thirsis and Amarillis (the poet’s persona) at first suggests Behn’s first-person insertions of herself into the discourse of pastoral love-lyric. Yet the poem dwells on the fact that Silvio’s rendering of the death of Camilla from the Latin ‘shews us how | To be at once Hero and Woman too’.30 The formulation is highly reminiscent of the panegyrics on Behn which balance heroic endeavour and unalloyed femininity. In portraying ‘th’Heroic Maid’, Behn as Amarillis tells Thirsis: Such life was in his [Silvio’s] Song, such heat such flight, As he had seen the Royal Virgin fight, . . . . . . . . . Never was fighting in our Sex a Charm, Till Silvio did the bright Camilla Arm; . . . . . . . . . Oh Conquering Maid! how much thy Fame has won, In Arcadian Language to be sung.31

The image of Camilla as virtuous warrior heroine and its provenance in the work of a Tory loyalist merge in the poem’s disclosure of Behn’s youthful political activism which clearly invite a comparison between herself and the heroic Camilla: Once Thirsis, by th’Arcadian Kings Commands, I left these Shades, to visit forein Lands; Imploy’d in public toils of State Affairs, Unusual with my Sex, or to my Years.32 28 ‘Upon these and other Excellent Works of . . . Astrea’, in Behn, Poems (1684), b2r. See also G.J., ‘To the Divine Astrea, on her Montre’, in Behn, La Montre, a1r; H. Watson, ‘To Madam Behn’, b8v. 29 Behn, ‘A Pastoral to Mr Stafford’, in Miscellany (1685), 294–6. See Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 40, 243. 30 Behn, ‘A Pastoral to Mr Stafford’, 297. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 295.

160

‘Secret Instructions’

While the image of Camilla may have more in common with the chaste femme forte (evidently in Katherine Philips’s imagination as she focuses on Camilla in her play, Horace) the mixture of eroticism and Toryism which tend to inflect heroic portrayals of Behn has a significant and more immediate precedent in the representation of Restoration actresses. From Behn’s earliest dramatic efforts, prologues and epilogues consistently identify her with the figure of the actress. The sizeable number of female prologues and epilogues attached to Restoration plays, and their plucky and forthright tone, indicate that audiences relished the novelty of women actors speaking up for themselves and for womankind.33 This stance nourished and drew on the persona of the attractively witty and contentious female characters favoured by the new comedy. The popularity of such a persona, whether in women characters or actors, might be exploited to promote Behn as a female playwright. Her plays of the 1670s frequently invite approval of her endeavours by placing her defence in the mouth of an actress who vigorously, but charmingly, champions feminine rights.34 Certain of her prologues and epilogues clearly connect the advancement of her fame as a female author with an image of heroic eroticism attributed to women actors. The vision of feminine heroism conjured up to defend the woman author in the epilogue to Sir Patient Fancy, for example, is seductively interwoven with the suggestion of women’s erotic prowess: We once were fam’d in Story, and cou’d write Equall to men; cou’d Govern, nay cou’d Fight. We still have passive Valour, and can show Wou’d Custom give us leave the Active too, Since we no provocations want from you. . . . . . . . But how much more we’re sensible of Love; Quickest in finding all the subtlest waies To make your Joys: why not to make you Plays?35 33 See Jacqueline Pearson, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642–1737 (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), 30. 34 See e.g. Behn, The Forc’d Marriage, [A3v]; Abdelazer; or, the Moor’s Revenge (London, 1671), [A3v]; Sir Patient Fancy (London, 1678), 92; The Feign’d Curtizans; or, a Nights Intrigue (London, 1679), A3r. 35 Behn, Sir Patient Fancy, 92. See also the prologue and epilogue to The Forc’d Marriage, [A3r]–[A3v], [A4r].

‘Secret Instructions’

161

Yet, the mutually reinforcing celebration of heroic eroticism which emerges in Behn’s identification with actresses possesses a further, political dimension. It forms part of the politicized devaluation of moral criticisms of Restoration theatre, thus helping to form an ideological bulwark against those who would attack her activities for the impropriety of professional female authorship and for her sexually frank material. Behn’s own work reveals an overt consciousness that the Restoration re-establishment of public theatres, deemed potentially morally suspect by the Puritans, was part of the ideological consolidation of the restored Stuart monarchy. In several of her plays, the important political function performed by the theatre is stressed. Her dedication of The Roundheads to Henry Fitzroy, duke of Grafton, states that, ‘ ’tis as easily seen at a new Play how the Royal Interest thrives, as at a City Election, how the good Old Cause is carried on; as a Noble Peer lately said, Tho’ the Tories have got the better of us at the Play, we carried it in the City by many Voyces’.36 The Roundheads, however, is declared to have been ‘carryed in the House nemine contra dicente, by the Royal Party’ (A2r–A2v). Considering the politics of the playhouse more generally, her dedication of The Luckey Chance to Clarendon concurs with the abbot of Aubignac’s assertion, which she quotes, that ‘Plays have been ever held most important to the very Political Part of Government’ (A2v).37 They are, Behn claims, ‘secret Instructions to the People, in things that ’tis impossible to insinuate into them any other Way’ (A2r). Her comments depict the playwright as political secret agent thus once again evoking parallels with her former role in service of the crown. Her transmission of secret information in letters from Antwerp foreshadows her dissemination of ‘secret’ political ‘Instructions’ through writing her plays. In the preface to The Dutch Lover, she associates a healthy unconcern for morality in contemporary drama with a welcome absence of religious pontification, implicitly criticizing dissenting opponents of the theatre: ‘our latter Plays have not done much more towards the amending of mens Morals, or their Wit, than hath the frequent Preaching, which this last age hath been pester’d with (indeed without all Controversie they have done less harm)’.38 36 37 38

Behn, The Roundheads; or, the Good Old Cause (London, 1682), A2r. See also Behn, The Emperor of the Moon (London, 1687), A3r. Behn, The Dutch Lover (London, 1673), A3v.

162

‘Secret Instructions’

In defending the right of herself and her contemporaries to write non-exemplary drama, Behn is implicitly drawing on Tory support against an emergent morally censorious Whig position. The inherently politically partisan nature of the debate over the reform of theatrical morality is underlined by the fact that, from 1688, the new constitutional monarchy under a Protestant king, William of Orange, sought to consolidate its political hold by defining itself ideologically against the moral licence of the theatre so intimately associated with the old Stuart regime.39 For its laureate, it chose Thomas Shadwell, the Whig playwright who had, as John Harrington Smith points out, been the earliest writer to champion a moral reform of drama.40 Hence, even where Behn purports to be defending her play, The Luckey Chance, against allegations of moral lewdness by claiming that it has been vetted by Davenant and Killigrew and ‘licens’d’ by Sir Roger L’Estrange, she is probably rather more concerned to remind readers of the play’s sound Tory credentials since both author and audience know that, as Harrington Smith puts it, ‘the licenser would have been on the lookout for sedition but scarcely for cuckoldings’.41 The sense that moral licence in drama is in itself a badge of Tory loyalism also surrounds Behn’s identification with the sexualized display of actresses. By virtue of her status as royal mistress, Nell Gwyn, to whom Behn dedicates The Feign’d Curtizans, provides the ultimate embodiment of the Restoration actress as Tory icon. By eulogizing the woman ‘who hath subdu’d the most powerfull and Glorious Monarch of the world’, Behn confirms her loyalty to the King.42 However, in the play’s prologue, the actress Elizabeth Currer makes a more direct connection between sexual freedom in the theatre and loyal Tory politics. Alluding pointedly to the Whiggish repressiveness fuelled by the Popish Plot scare, she exclaims: 39 See Marion Jones, John Loftis, A. H. Scouten, and Richard Southern, The Revels History of Drama in English, v. 1660–1750 (London: Methuen, 1976), 29, 52–3; John Harrington Smith, ‘Shadwell, the Ladies and the Change in Comedy’, Modern Philology, 46 (1948–9), 22–3 (24). 40 Harrington Smith, ‘Shadwell . . . and the Change in Comedy’, 24. See also David Wykes, A Preface to Dryden (London: Longman, 1977); Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1956–89), ii, ed. H. T. Swedenberg jun., 302–3, 304. 41 Behn, The Luckey Chance, A4r; Harrington Smith, ‘Shadwell . . . and the 42 Behn, The Feign’d Curtizans, A3r. Change in Comedy’, 29 n. 19.

‘Secret Instructions’

163

The devil take this cursed plotting Age, ’T has ruin’d all our Plots upon the Stage; . . . . . . But Wit as if ’twere Jesuiticall, Is an abomination to ye all . . . (A4r)

Despite this, she asserts, ‘I’me still of the Religion of my Cully’ and goes on to attack those who piously pretend, these are not days, For keeping Mistresses and seeing Plays. Who says this Age a Reformation wants, When Betty Currer’s Lovers all turn Saints? . . . . . . . Yet I am handsome still, still young and mad, Can wheadle, lie, dissemble, jilt—egad, As well and artfully as ere I did . . .

Linking the actress’s plight to that of the author, the prologue shows how the sexual impropriety with which their critics charge them can, in politically sympathetic eyes, become part of a brave affirmation of Tory loyalty against the censorious tide of Whiggism and religious dissent.

plays and politics The perceived connection between erotic freedom and loyal Toryism which helps to carve out authority for Behn as an author and to define her authorial image also plays a significant role in the treatment of gender relations in her plays. As various critics have observed, Behn’s satire on Puritan or Whig moral hypocrisy and commercial greed in plays like The Feign’d Curtizans, Sir Patient Fancy, or The Luckey Chance articulates itself through sympathy for the plight of ‘women denied sexual expression and marriage choice’.43 Women’s freedom coincides with the overthrow of the controlling strictures of the Whig husband or father, often subverted by male suitors in the form of gallants whose sexual potency marks their Tory allegiance.44 43 44

Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis, 173. Arlen Feldwick, ‘Wits, Whigs and Women: Domestic Politics and Anti-Whig Rhetoric in Aphra Behn’s Town Comedies’, in Carole Levin and Patricia A. Sullivan

164

‘Secret Instructions’

Yet, although some critics recognize the way in which Behn’s attention to women’s sexual freedom interconnects with her satire on Whiggism, they neglect the fact that a number of her plays pointedly question the notion that sexual liberty is equally available to both men and women as a straightforward gesture of Tory loyalty. Robert Markley’s notion that Behn yokes ‘Royalist loyalties’ to ‘libertine lifestyles’ in a ‘utopian union of desire and law’, for example, fails to consider this dissonance.45 Although Melinda Zook suggests in passing that Behn ‘realized that the cavalier’s libertine lifestyle was ultimately unobtainable for most women’, she elides the plays’ deeper and more sustained considerations of gender difference in relation to political agency by privileging the idea that Behn’s work ‘defended the world of those whom she admired, those who could obtain personal and public freedom, elite males’.46 While Susan Owen identifies a critique of royalist, libertine ideology in The Second Part of the Rover (1681), she attributes this to the fact that the play was first performed ‘during a period of apparent Whig ascendancy’ and thus it flows with the topical political tide.47 Like Markley and Zook she reads the earlier Rover (1677), along with The Roundheads (1682) and The City Heiress (1682), as unproblematically peddling Tory ideology through their approach to sexual politics.48 Although Hughes also overstresses The Rover’s idealization of an ‘earlier Cavalier ethos’, he does note Behn’s ‘recognition that the cult of rank, male heroism and male loyalties was one which . . . produced injustice towards women’.49 More specifically I would argue that it demonstrates that a dichotomous view of the (eds.), Political Rhetoric, Power and Renaissance Women (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 223–40 (226–8). See also S. J. Wiseman, Aphra Behn (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), 38, 45. 45 Robert Markley, ‘ “Be Impudent, Be Saucy, Forward, Bold, Towzing, and Lewd”: The Politics of Masculine Sexuality and Feminine Desire in Behn’s Tory Comedies’, in J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne (eds.), Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 114–40 (117, 125). 46 Melinda Zook, ‘Contextualizing Aphra Behn: Plays, Politics and Party, 1679–1689’, in Hilda Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75–93 (78). 47 Owen, ‘Sexual Politics’, 26. 48 Ibid. 22–3; Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis, 104, 173; Markley, ‘ “Be Impudent” ’, 125; Zook, ‘Contextualizing Aphra Behn’, 78. 49 Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 83–4.

‘Secret Instructions’

165

equation between libertinism and Tory loyalty was already apparent in Behn’s work before the climax of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis as well as continuing into the plays of the 1680s. Moreover, her concern with the ‘injustice towards women’ should not be regarded as separate from a general tendency to uphold Tory loyalties but as intrinsic to exposing flaws in the ideology of the ruling party. A comparison between both parts of The Rover and its source play, Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso; or, the Wanderer, composed during his exile in Madrid in the 1650s, reinforces the sense that Behn’s play is more politically complex than critical orthodoxies would suggest.50 At one level, both plays use the courtship of the female protagonist by an English cavalier in exile on the continent in order to articulate a pro-royalist message, with Behn employing the political map of the play’s Interregnum setting to comment on the inter-party antagonisms of the late 1670s and early 1680s. However, Behn only partly emulates the political deployment of sexual relations in Thomaso, foregrounding instead the way in which women’s distinctive social and economic situations render their relationship to the political order different to that of men. Where Killigrew implicitly connects Thomaso’s desire to protect Serulina’s honour with a subtext of royalist respect for honour in its wider sense, Behn makes her cavalier hero an assailant of feminine honour. Thomaso, has already saved the ‘Life and Honour’ of his would-be bride at the siege of Pamplona before the play begins (350). The respectful wooing through which he seeks to liberate her from her brother’s strictures thus emerges as a further attempt to uphold true cavalier values. Behn’s Willmore has undertaken no such heroic rescue of Hellena and goes on to participate in two attempted rapes of her sister, Florinda, from which Thomaso is significantly excluded in the source play. Hence, the unproblematic equation between royalism and honour founders as divisions appear between male cavalier honour and female honour or chastity. The Rover and its sequel also show how the impoverishment which accompanies loyal cavalier exile fosters the financial 50 Thomas Killigrew, Comedies and Tragedies (London, 1664), 310. Thomaso has a separate title-page dated 1663 but continuous pagination within the volume as a whole.

166

‘Secret Instructions’

exploitation of women by royalist men. Hellena’s brother ultimately agrees to ignore Willmore’s poverty and allows him to marry her because the Englishman’s financial troubles arise out of his loyal service to the Stuarts. Yet the audience is well aware that Willmore’s impecunious state has encouraged him actively to begin wooing Hellena only once he learns that she is ‘worth Two Hundred Thousand Crowns’.51 Killigrew’s Thomaso is never taxed with such mercenary motives in his wooing of Serulina. Although the pairings which conclude The Second Part of the Rover are free from Willmore’s earlier, more exploitative approach, the play does display the cavaliers’ continuing abuse of women en route in order to remedy their penury. Ned Blunt and Nicholas Fetherfool plan to inveigle two deformed sisters, described as ‘Monsters’, a ‘Giant’ and a ‘Dwarf’, into marriage in order to acquire their large fortunes.52 Even Willmore, who attacks the courtesan, La Nuche, claiming that she would sell her body to the most revolting, disfigured lecher if he were rich, later boasts that he is going to wed and bed the ‘giant’ for money (14, 42). The grotesquely exaggerated deformity of the unfortunate sisters serves to heighten the warped nature of the men’s response to their own economic condition. The sympathy elicited by the play for Ariadne (effectively a counterpart to Hellena in The Rover) similarly runs counter to the sexual and economic ideologies so staunchly identified by Willmore with loyal cavaliering. Ariadne’s understandable (if cynically resigned) desire to control her fate within the marriage market by finding a suitor who can ‘set a value and a rate’ on her charms is associated by Willmore with Whiggish commercialism and Puritannical hypocrisy. In terms which implicitly merge the Commonwealth period of the play’s setting with Tory hostilities to Whiggism in the period when it was performed, Willmore exhorts her: ‘Let the sly States-man, who Jilts the Commonwealth with his grave Politiques, pay for the sin that he may doat in secret . . . but tell not me of rates who bring a Heart, Youth, Vigor, and a Tongue to sing the praise of every single pleasure thou shalt give me’ (18). However, it remains plain that the cavalier libertinism celebrated by Willmore cannot, for all its ideological resonance, solve the economic dilemma of women who lack the social freedom simply to be rovers of fortune like him and his male royalist associates. 51 52

Behn, The Rover; or, the Banish’t Cavaliers (London, 1677), 54. Behn, The Second Part of the Rover (London, 1681), A3r.

‘Secret Instructions’

167

Despite Susan Owen’s suggestion that Behn’s later play, The City Heiress (1682) endorses such an image of ‘Tory libertinism’ as ‘something jolly, wild and cavalier, and preferable to whey-faced Whiggery and puritan sexual hypocrisy’, a closer inspection reveals a more vexed account of Tory sexual ideology.53 The play’s dedication admittedly declares it ‘in every part true Tory’, but the play itself proceeds to render questionable the subsequent assertion that it shows how ‘Honesty begins to come in fashion again, when Loyalty is approv’d, and Whiggism becomes a Jest where’er ’tis met with.’54 In the machinations of the Tory hero, Wilding, we find a challenge to the notion that ‘Honesty’, ‘Loyalty’, and especially ‘Honour’ are uncomplicatedly the province of professed royalists. Wilding’s sexual history certainly identifies him as a cit-cuckolding scourge of the Whigs, ‘lying with the Magistrates Wives, When their Revered Husbands were employ’d in the necessary Affairs of the Nation, seditiously petitioning’ (20). Such conduct continues during the course of the play with his efforts to consummate an amour with Lady Galliard, ‘a rich City-Widow’ and to marry the city-heiress, Charlotte, daughter of the late Sir Nicholas Getall (A4v). His sexual intrigues operate within the politically partisan context of his having been dispossessed of his inheritance by his Whiggish, dissenting uncle, Sir Timothy Treat-all, as punishment for adhering to royalism and the Anglican Church. Critics tend to accept the apparently straightforward political landscape of the play at face value.55 Yet, for Markley and Wiseman, this reading is troubled by a vague unease at the ‘more incisive and more ambiguous tone than her other Tory comedies’ or a sense of ambivalence in the treatment of Wilding’s sexual promiscuity.56 Derek Hughes provides a rare insight into the true magnitude of the play’s darker aspect when he characterizes it as ‘Behn’s greatest exploration of the ugly side of Cavalier glamour’.57 However, while Hughes regards The City Heiress as combining support for 53 54 55

Owen, ‘Sexual Politics’, 23. Behn, The City Heiress; or, Sir Timothy Treat-all (London, 1682), A3r. See e.g. J. Douglas Canfield, Tricksters and Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 61; Owen, ‘Sexual Politics’, 23; Markley, ‘ “Be Impudent” ’, 131; Wiseman, Aphra Behn, 38. 56 Markley, ‘ “Be Impudent” ’; Wiseman, Aphra Behn, 40–1. 57 Hughes, Theatre of Aphra Behn, 147.

‘Secret Instructions’

168

the establishment with a sense that opposing ‘male’ political orders ‘could be identical in their oppression of women’, I suggest that the play’s focus on the exploitation of its female characters is used as the main vehicle for a systematic inspection of the degeneration of Tory values.58 For all its denunciations of Whiggery, The City Heiress exhibits a sceptical feeling that libertine conduct is simply an insufficiently politically engaged response to the Whig threat. Act III concludes with a rousing denunciation by Wilding of his political enemies: Let Polititians plot, let Rogues go on In the old beaten Path of Forty One, Let City-knaves delight in Mutiny, The Rabble bow to old Presbytery; Let petty States be to confusion hurl’d, Give me but Woman, I’ll despise the World.

(36)

The punchline to this burst of heroic couplets seems, however, bathetic, since it espouses self-indulgent libertine retreat in place of any coherent political challenge. It is as if Wilding’s response is shaped by an anachronistic sense of exile as the self-justifying badge of royalist commitment, lacking the political energy required to fight the new battles of the era of Exclusion. In spite of the dedication’s confident equation between Toryism and the resurgence of moral virtues, the play makes more explicit The Rover’s subtext, repeatedly questioning Wilding’s claim to champion honour as a staunch loyalist by placing it in tension with onslaughts on feminine honour. Act IV discovers Lady Galliard ‘in an undress’ as Wilding attempts to complete his seduction, arguing that ‘According to the strictest rules of Honour, | Beauty shou’d still be the Reward of Love’ (36, 39–40). Only moments earlier, however, he has blatantly reminded her that her agreeing to an assignation will be to ‘do your Honour wrong’, a fact of which she seems only too painfully aware (34). The pliability of the term ‘honour’ is reinforced by its equally sexually opportunistic use in the blandishments of Wilding’s rival for Lady Galliard, Sir Charles Meriwill, as he tells her, ‘I’ve nought but honest meaning in my Passion’, claiming that Wilding alone ‘Attempts the ruine of your sacred Honour’ (9). Lady Galliard exposes the speciousness of both 58

Hughes, Theatre of Aphra Behn, 155, 156, 157.

‘Secret Instructions’

169

men’s rhetoric as she implores them ‘by all your Honour’ to desist from disputing their ‘interest’ in her ‘As for a common Mistriss’ (ibid.). Notwithstanding his ostensible role as Tory hero, Wilding finds himself repeatedly morally compromised in a manner which aligns him troublingly with the supposed values which he deplores in his Whig opponents. His elopement with the city heiress, Charlotte, is achieved by means of a dubious alliance with Mrs Clacket ‘a CityBawd & Puritan’ (A4v). Further hypocrisy emerges in his dealings with Lady Galliard. Echoing Willmore’s lecture to Ariadne in The Second Part of the Rover, Wilding insists that Lady Galliard should grant him free sexual access out of wedlock and so refuse to become ‘the vile Merchandize of Fortune’ (40). Denouncing the possibility that she may ‘marry an old Fool, because he’s rich!’, Wilding castigates: ‘She’s onely infamous, who to her Bed, | For interest, takes some nauseous Clown she hates’ (20, 40). Nevertheless, his tirade against Whiggish commercialism sits uneasily with his own mercantile tendencies in seeking to win the rich city heiress, as her own resolution underlines: No, since men are grown so cunning in their Trade of Love, the necessary Vice I’ll practice too, And chaffer with Love-Merchants for my Heart. (14)

The City Heiress heightens the feeling (implicit in The Rover and its sequel) that the usurpation of cavalier or Tory property by the opposition has fostered a warped reaction in which Tories become complicit in a pervasive culture of commercial greed which seeps across party boundaries. Any attempt to read Wilding’s sexual triumphs over Lady Galliard and Charlotte Getall simply as reflecting the just redistribution of ill-gotten Whig gains to their rightful Tory owners is problematic. Indeed, his associate, Dresswell, metaphorically connects Wilding’s philandering conduct and failure to espouse true devotion with the notion that he is compromising his own avowed royalism: ‘Turn out those petty Tyrants of thy Heart, and fit it for a Monarch, Love, dear Wilding, of which thou never knewst the pleasure yet, or not above a day’ (16). Elsewhere the play’s language stresses the aggression inherent in the hero’s desire to possess the women as property. Fearful for her honour, Lady Galliard challenges Wilding:

‘Secret Instructions’

170

But you disdain to satisfie those fears; And like a proud and haughty Conqueror, Demand the Town, without the least Conditions.

(8)

This image of conquest by illegitimate pillage rather than possession by honourable means is soon discomfitingly reinforced when Wilding celebrates the thrill of the chase in illicit love: The difficulty makes us always wishing, Whilst on thy part, Fear still makes some resistance; And every Blessing seems a kind of Rape. (8)

The criminal relationship to persons and property which such images suggest is borne out when Wilding and his accomplices resort to a wholesale robbery of Sir Timothy as a means of acquiring the documents which can secure the young man’s inheritance. While Sir Timothy’s reaction in wishing to restore the old Parliamentarian powers of ‘Plunder and Sequestration’ reminds us of the conditions which contribute to any Tory backlash, his perception of the crime as evidence of ‘Arbitrary Power . . . Tory Rogues . . . Tantivie Roysters’ has at least some justification (51). Although Melinda Zook regards The City Heiress as a play in which Behn equates ‘Whigs with . . . oath-breaking, and perjury and the . . . Tories with reverence for truth’, such divisions are by no means clear-cut.59 Sir Timothy may proudly proclaim that ‘We stand upon neither Faith nor Troth in the City, Lady’ (27), but Wilding deceives Lady Galliard with ‘soft feign’d Vows’ (28). ‘When he swears he loves, you wou’d swear too | that all his Oaths were true’ despairs Charlotte (60). Lady Galliard’s own plea to Wilding to ‘hear my Vows’ to reject him once and for all are casually ignored by the rake in a further act of seduction (45). The play’s conclusion fails to answer the doubts raised about Wilding during the course of the action, reverting instead to the easy polarization of Whig and Tory ideals. In a ringing valediction, Sir Charles reductively suggests that Wilding’s regaining of his inheritance and union with Charlotte make the play an unquestionable triumph for the supposed values of Tory rectitude: Let all things in their own due order move, Let Caesar be the Kingdoms care and love: 59

Zook, ‘Contextualizing Aphra Behn’, 82.

‘Secret Instructions’

171

Let the Hot-headed Mutineers petition, And meddle in the Rights of Just Succession; But may all honest hearts as one agree To bless the King, and Royal Albanie. (61)

Yet how ‘honest’ has the heart of the Tory rake hero shown itself to be? And can we feel entirely at ease with the claimed equivalence between his resumption of inheritance and the just royal succession set to defy the Exclusionists? His earlier intimation that he would rather live to revel in the fun of his inheritance without ‘the clog of a Wife’ indicates a tendency towards irresponsible self-gratification rather than the careful husbanding of reclaimed Tory wealth (16). The City Heiress, then, like The Rover, demonstrates how certain of Behn’s plays which operate broadly as anti-Whig satire can nevertheless embody elements of a sceptical approach towards Toryism, amplified by their handling of gender relations. Although Behn clearly needed to heed the political sensitivities of the licenser, it seems reductive to assume that theatre audiences only desired plays which simply echoed the political prejudices of a given historical moment. Surely their pleasure might come equally from a play’s ability to probe political contradictions. Indeed, perhaps the most seemingly straightforward of Behn’s political satires, The Roundheads (a play which Owen ascribes, along with The City Heiress to a period of Tory reaction) seems to thrive on internal divisions. Like the two parts of The Rover, The Roundheads draws on a source in which gender relations function as a relatively uncomplicated articulation of the struggle to reassert royalist ascendancy, but proceeds to elaborate a less comfortably balanced relationship between partisan and sexual politics. Behn’s most obvious debt in The Roundheads is to John Tatham’s play, The Rump (1660), an early example of the dramatic subgenre devoted primarily to political satire against the Puritans and the Commonwealth. Both plays depict the competition for the Protectorship after Cromwell’s death, making comic capital out of their portrayal of Parliamentarian wives such as Lady Lambert (weakly disguised as Bertlam by Tatham) and Mrs Cromwell. In The Rump, as in the related satires, John Wilson’s The Cheats (1662), Cowley’s Cutter of Coleman-Street (1663), and John Lacy’s The Old Troop (1672), female characters tend to be caricatured as Puritan enthusiasts. Yet

172

‘Secret Instructions’

Behn opens up the possibility of female royalist political agency by adding Lady Desbro’ who, despite her Parliamentarian husband, is ‘an errant Heroick [cavalier] in her Heart’, feigning loyalty to the Protectorate ‘only to have the better occasion to serve the Royal Party’ (4). Unlike The Rump, The Roundheads also features two dashing young cavaliers. The first, Loveless, woos Lady Lambert and eventually converts her to the King’s cause, while the second, Freeman, is suitor to Lady Desbro’. Despite the preoccupation of Behn’s critics with The Rump as her prime source, these additions align her play more with Robert Howard’s The Committee (1662) which proves a revealing touchstone when considering the intersection between sexual and partisan politics in The Roundheads.60 In The Committee, as in The Roundheads, Puritan abuse of power over a royalist woman or women is used to dramatize the wider Puritan manipulation of political control. On one level, this provides a precedent for Behn’s focus on Lady Desbro’s socioeconomic predicament trapped in a marriage she loathes. However, Behn’s perspective on this plight portrays it as something more than a simple extension of Puritan political perversity and leaves us less certain as to whether a royalist man can entirely reverse the inequities suffered by Lady Desbro’ at the hands of Parliamentarian males. For Howard, the Puritans’s unfair treatment of women as property reinforces the unfairness of their sequestration of cavalier land and wealth. Hughes identifies this as part of a tendency among early Restoration comedies to parallel ‘the hero’s marriage to the heroine with the restoration of his lost inheritance or kingdom, her body standing analogically for the estate or the realm.61 Both Arbella and Anne, the two royalist gentlewomen in The Committee, have had their inheritance confiscated by the eponymous Committee for Sequestrations. Mr Day, the chairman of the Committee, and his wife are pretending that Anne is their own daughter in order to reinforce their hold over her estate. Revealing this, Anne asserts that Day ‘has confirm’d his unjust Power by the 60 For examples of critics who cite The Rump as her main source, see Hughes, Theatre of Aphra Behn, 139; Elizabeth Bennett Kubek, ‘ “Night Mares of the Commonwealth”: Royalist Passion and Female Ambition in Aphra Behn’s The Roundheads’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, 17/2 (1993), 88–103 (88); Markley, ‘ “Be Impudent” ’, 125; Wiseman, Aphra Behn, 38. 61 Hughes, Theatre of Aphra Behn, 142.

‘Secret Instructions’

173

unlawful Power of the Times’.62 Meanwhile, the Days are eager to marry Arbella off to their son, Abel. The evocation of sympathy for the woman who may be forced to marry against her will becomes another means of dramatizing the arbitrary power and misappropriation of property practised by the Puritans. The critique of the Puritans’ legal abuses enables a passing reflection on the harshness of women’s legal predicament under the law of coverture in which they were assumed to be the property of their fathers or husbands.63 ‘How dost thou hope to get thy Estate again?’, asks Arbella. ‘I was just going to ask you, how you would get yours again’, replies Anne, ‘you are as fast as if you were under Covertbaron’ (37) Yet hope of rescue for the two ladies is at hand in the shape of two charming cavalier suitors, also deprived by the laws of sequestration. The Roundheads echoes the analogy between Puritan misappropriation of royalist property and of royalist women with the closet royalist, Lady Desbro’, mismatched to her Parliamentarian husband from whom Freeman tries to liberate her. However, whilst the legal and economic predicament of the ladies in Howard’s play is simply an extension of that of the male royalists, Behn stresses that, despite a shared political conviction, the gender of royalist men and women continues to differentiate them socio-economically. She draws attention to the fact that women may retain the status of chattels even once they are reclaimed by cavalier gallants. The royalist, Freeman, portrays his courtship of Lady Desbro’ starkly as a seizure from her husband which will make up for the loss of his property: ‘ ’tis but Justice . . . he sequester’d me of my whole Estate’ (19). While Howard’s ladies manage to escape with the documents to their estates and thus avoid compromising with the Puritans, Lady Desbro’s feminine economic dependency has forced her into a loathed marriage with a Puritan husband even before the play begins. As Freeman tellingly comments, she ‘marryed as most do, for Interest’ (7). His bald assessment undermines Robert Markley’s contention that Lady Desbro’s ‘marriage to the man who has sequestered her lover’s estate is her attempt to preserve these lands until she can restore them to her cavalier’.64 62 63 64

Robert Howard, The Committee (London, 1662), 21. See above, Introduction. Markley, ‘ “Be Impudent” ’, 126.

174

‘Secret Instructions’

Where both The Committee and The Roundheads characterize the Puritans as motivated by ‘Interest’, only Behn imputes this motive to her female royalist. By highlighting the shabby marriage to which Lady Desbro’s socio-economic plight as a woman has driven her and Freeman’s discomfitingly brutal sense of his claim on her as a restitution of sequestered property, The Roundheads embodies a sense of impure royalist compromise absent from her more sanguine source. The nearly twenty years which separate the two plays (from Restoration royalist optimism to the morass of interparty intrigue) seem to catalyse Behn’s more sceptical sense of the blurring of partisan values. As in The City Heiress, the failure entirely to separate Whiggish corruption from Tory practice manifests itself not just in the question of economic greed but in attitudes to oaths and vows. In The Roundheads, as in The Committee, the repugnance of forced marriage vows serves as an intensifying parallel to the oaths of political allegiance which the Puritans wish to force out of their royalist opponents, challenging the oath of allegiance to the monarch. 65 In Howard’s play, Arbella’s resistance to wedding the odious Abel mirrors the male cavaliers’ consistent refusal to swear the Solemn League and Covenant, imposed by Parliament, in order to be allowed to compound for their estates.66 Behn dwells less overtly on male political oath-swearing, but implicitly unites matrimonial and political vows far more closely. When Lady Desbro’ refuses to be unfaithful to her husband with her royalist lover, he dismisses her insistence on the sanctity of marriage vows, retorting, ‘So much the worse, to make a League and Covenant with such Villains, and keep the sinful Contract’ (33). Thus, while Howard focuses solely on the noble refusal to swear imposed oaths, Behn (by depicting a royalist heroine who is already married to a Puritan) touches on the more complex problem of whether it is legitimate to break

65 A similar analogy is implicit in the language of Abraham Cowley’s play, Cutter of Coleman-Street (London, 1663), 3. 66 For the Solemn League and Covenant, other oaths of loyalty imposed by Parliament, and the dilemma of royalists caused by their clash with the former oath of allegiance and supremacy to Charles I, see Susan Staves, Players’s Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 24–7.

‘Secret Instructions’

175

oaths once one has subscribed.67 Once again, Behn appears to be exploring the realities of royalist compromise through the medium of a central female character and her relationships. Although Lady Desbro’ is, ultimately, conveniently released by the death of her husband, the play makes much of her political and ethical dilemmas in resisting infidelity up to this point. Her adherence to her marriage vows and Freeman’s political pressure on her to break them offer an emotionally persuasive dramatization of opposing viewpoints: the nobility of respecting the sacredness of oaths simply because they are oaths, as against the legitimacy of breaking those which have been compelled. Freeman’s claim to be championing the true royalist position in advocating that Lady Desbro’ cuckold her husband seems all the more debatable because his approach aligns him with the easy perjury with which the play identifies the Puritans. Ambiguity concerning the precise nature of Tory values and conduct is reinforced, as in The City Heiress, by a debate over the nature of royalist honour. This stands in contrast to The Committee in which honour remains unproblematically aligned with cavalier loyalty. Here the royalists are those who ‘suffer for their Consciences and Honour’ in refusing to gain wealth by means of perjury (31). In The Roundheads, however, when Freeman tells Lady Desbro’ that it would be ‘an Act of honest Loyalty’ to break her marriage vows and ‘so to revenge our Cause’, she retorts, ‘I’m true to my Allegiance still, true to my King and Honour. Suspect my Loyalty when I lose my Virtue’ (32, 33). Hughes concedes that ‘we are, certainly, to admire’ her notion of honour here, but identifies unspecified ‘indelible anomalies in the proposition that Desbro’ and the King exert parallel claims on her.’68 Yet surely her protestations carry the weight of tradition and legal authority rather than simply sentimental appeal. Once again Behn troubles any easy symbolic equivalence between sexual and partisan politics by forcing us to pay attention to the gendering of honour. The evident disagreement here concerning the sexual politics of Tory loyalism questions Susan Owen’s assertion that The Roundheads 67 For discussions of vow-breaking in Behn’s fiction, see Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 83; Staves, Players’s Scepters, 192, 247–9. 68 Hughes, Theatre of Aphra Behn, 142.

176

‘Secret Instructions’

sees Behn ‘abandon feminist anatomization of libertinism in favour of a more conventional Tory association of royalism with virtue, and rebellion with sexual monstrosity’.69 Similarly unsatisfactory is Douglas Canfield’s contrasting reading of the play in which he sees ‘the body of woman’ as ‘a metonymy for the contested land’ which ‘deserves to be raped into submission by the real men of England, the Royalists’.70 As the comparison with its sources and analogues indicates, The Roundheads underlines the limitations of regarding women’s sexuality as their chief route to royalist political agency. Although, as I have suggested, Behn does elsewhere engage the royalist political valency of eroticized femininity (especially in constructing an authorial image) her work is informed by a counterbalancing resistance to the model which over-emphasizes women’s sexuality, thus denying them any status as political agents.

resisting the eroticized image It is Behn’s verse which provides the most concentrated blending of such apparently contradictory tendencies: the willingness to exploit the concept of her ‘natural’ feminine predisposition towards the amatory as against the concern to stress her topically engaged political sensibility. In lines addressed to Thomas Creech on his translation of Lucretius, she echoes the biologically deterministic view of her poetic bent. In keeping with Lucretius’s atomism, she maintains, . . . I of Feebler Seeds design’d, Whilst the slow moving Atomes strove, With careless heed to form my Mind: Compos’d it all of Softer Love. In gentle Numbers all my Songs are Drest, And when I would thy Glories sing, What in strong manly Verse I would express Turns all to Womanish Tenderness within71

69

Owen, ‘Sexual Politics’, 22. Canfield, Tricksters and Estates, 89. ‘To Mr. Creech . . . on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius’, in Behn, Poems (1684), 51. 70 71

‘Secret Instructions’

177

However, on a number of occasions, Behn embeds comments on affairs of state in works which are ostensibly love poems. Her song beginning ‘Young Jemmy was a Lad, | Of Royal Birth and Breeding’, touches on the fate of the duke of Monmouth.72 Although its status as a ‘Song’ amongst Behn’s other love songs and its focus on the adoration of all women for Jemmy partially veils its political significance, its tale of the exploitation of Jemmy’s ambition by ‘Busie Fopps of State’ and his eventual undoing clearly point to the fact that he is James, duke of Monmouth (124). The song, ‘Silvio’s Complaint’, incorporates another consideration of Monmouth’s political ambitions into what promises from its title to be a pastoral lament. In the refrain, Silvio exclaims, ‘ ’Twere better I was nere Born | Ere wisht to be a King’, and the poem concludes by warning ‘Noble Youths’ to beware of ambition.73 However, Behn’s verse gives its closest attention to disentangling her political agency from an eroticized authorial image in the Pindaric odes which she wrote to celebrate important state occasions or to commend illustrious public figures and which were published separately shortly after the events they describe. The notion of the Pindaric mode as a departure from her identification as the high priestess of erotic poetry emerges in her elegy on the death of Edmund Waller which speaks of the ‘nobler Panegyrick Strain’ to which, in emulation of Waller, she has graduated from the matter of ‘Love’ which nourished her ‘Infant Muse’.74 Her progression from the poetic theme of love to more public and political concerns is symbolically paralleled by the heroes of her odes who are called upon to abandon private amatory concerns for the higher disciplines of public office. In her Pindaric poem on James II’s coronation, for example, she bids him ‘from the softest Charms of LOVE, Arise!’, but makes very clear the magnetism of the nuptial bliss from which he must disengage himself in order to fulfil his new state functions.75 The tension between James’s roles as 72 73 74

Behn, ‘Song. To a New Scotch Tune’, in Poems (1684), 123. Behn, ‘Silvio’s Complaint’, in Poems (1684), 95, 98. Behn, ‘On the Death of E. Waller, Esq.’, in Poems to the Memory of that Incomparable Poet Edmond Waller (London, 1688), 18. 75 Behn, A Pindarick Poem on the Happy Coronation of His Most Sacred Majesty James II (London, 1685), 3. See also Behn, To the Most Illustrious Prince Christopher Duke of Albemarle, on his Voyage to His Government of Jamaica (London, 1687), 2–3; Behn, ‘A Farewel to Celladon, On his Going into Ireland’, in Behn, Poems (1684), 14, 17.

178

‘Secret Instructions’

lover and warrior or statesman in the poem are reflected in Behn’s depiction of her own need to disengage herself from dwelling solely on portraying the royal couple as ideal lovers to the neglect of the state occasion. Although Carol Barash argues that a fixation with the erotic and especially with Queen Mary dominates the poem, the muse who inspires Behn’s portrayal of ‘the Charmer’ Mary, is addressed as ‘fond seducer of my Nobler part | Thou soft insinuating Muse’ (3).76 In view of this, the persistent figuration of Mary as ‘Laura’, noted by Barash, seems to emphasize the pull of the Petrarchan notion of the all-engrossing mistress from which Behn’s poem seeks to distance itself (2).77 Indeed, the poem contains an exhortation to the muse to ‘Paint’ Behn’s hero ‘like Mars when Battails were in view, | And no soft Venus cou’d his Soul subue’(2). The identification of private life predominantly with the beguiling Mary and public life with James emphasizes Behn’s own progress away from the love poetry which so firmly marks her feminine gender towards a verse conceived of as more masculine. Stella Revard points out that Behn’s style of Pindaric ode is ‘the Cowleian Pindaric, whose metrical irregularities differ markedly from the absolute regularities of the true Pindaric ode’, but contemporary verses which Revard records indicate how readily any form of Pindaric might be claimed as exclusively male territory.78 In a volume entitled, Triumphs of Female Wit, In Some Pindarick Odes, a ‘Mr H.’ puts the case against women as Pindarists: What daring Female is’t who thus complains, In Masculine Pindarick Strains, Of great Apollo’s Salique Laws, Both breaks it, and pretends that she Pleads only for her Native Liberty.79

Even where a poem (purporting to be by ‘a Lady’) praises Behn’s ode on James’s coronation and implicitly confirms her equal to the 76 78

77 Ibid. 142. Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 134. Stella P. Revard, ‘Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and the Female Pindarick’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), Representing Women in Renaissance England (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 227–41 (237). 79 Triumphs of Female Wit, In Some Pindarick Odes, or the Emulation. Together with an Answer to an OBJECTOR against Female Ingenuity, and Capacity of Learning. Also, A Preface to the Masculine Sex, by a Young Lady (London, 1683), quoted in Revard, ‘Katherine Philips’, 227.

‘Secret Instructions’

179

Pindaric challenge, it tends to overstress the poem’s erotic dimension as if to bring it closer to a recognizably feminine poetic discourse. Behn, she claims, By nature temper’d more with humid cold, Doth man excel — Not in soft strokes alone, but even in the bold, And as thy purer Blood, Thro more transparent vessels is convey’d Thy spirits more fine and subtile do thy brain invade. So thy gay thought — Which thy still flowing fancy does inspire New, uncontroul’d, and warm, as young desire, Have more of kindling heat and fiercer fire . . .80

It is Behn’s Pindaric ode to the Scottish divine and apologist for William of Orange, Gilbert Burnet, which most incisively undercuts assumptions concerning the natural feminine predominance of love in her verse. She begins by portraying Burnet’s attempts to convince her, against her political conscience, to write a poem in honour of the new King and Queen, William and Mary, as the blandishments of an irresistible lover: Against my Will, you Conquer and Perswade. Your Language soft as Love, betrays the Heart, And at each Period fixes a Resistless Dart, While the fond Listner, like a Maid undone, Inspir’d with Tenderness she fears to own; In vain essays her Freedom to Regain.81

Nevertheless, her depiction of herself as the hapless ingénue who haunts her love verse is gradually called into question by blatant anomalies in the poem. She claims, for example, quite erroneously, that ‘Till now, my careless Muse no higher strove | T’inlarge her Glory, and extend her Wings’ than to sing of Shepherds, and their humble Love; But never durst, like Cowly, tune her Strings, To sing of Heroes and of Kings. (5)

80 ‘A Pindarick To Mrs Behn on her Poem on the Coronation’, in Miscellany (1688), 90. 81 A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet on the Honour he did me of Enquiring after me and my Muse (London, 1689), 4.

180

‘Secret Instructions’

The evident inaccuracy of this statement in the light of her existing and well-publicized poems on affairs of state draws attention to her poetic achievements outside the limited realm of pastoral love verse. The falseness of her denial underlines her parity with ‘Cowly’, the key proponent of Pindaric verse in the seventeenth century, and belies her supposed poetic confinement to the private and putatively feminine realm. The disparity between the claims she makes in her humble posture towards Burnet and the actual facts of her poetic œuvre begins to indicate that she is satirizing his patronage. Her contention that her muse will now be ‘allow’d a more exalted Thought’ because she has been sanctioned by ‘an Authority Divine’ suggests parodic hyperbole (5). The shallowness of the pretence that Burnet has legitimated a new departure into the regions of political verse evokes not only the existence of her previous poems on affairs of state but also their resolutely Tory hue. It is this strain of political conviction which finally serves to demolish any illusion that Behn is either swooning shepherdess or retiring lyric poet as her ‘stubborn Muse’ refuses Burnet’s commission (5). The location of Behn’s Pindarics at the point of transition from the persona of love poet to that of public political poet bears out William Fitzgerald’s contention that, for many poets, including Horace and Cowley, ‘the example of Pindar plays a vital role’ at key moments of self-definition or evolution in their poetic careers.82 The parallelism in Behn’s Pindarics between her own poetic development and her heroes’ movement from private to public concerns reflects the rivalry between poet and subject which Fitzgerald regards as characteristic of Pindar and his emulators. For Behn, however, such rivalry is doubly significant since, as a woman, she is conventionally perceived as being even further from the realm of public action of which male Pindaric authors seek to show themselves worthy in proving their equality with the warriors or statesman they praise.83 Behn cannot literally stand in the place of the public figures she celebrates, but she does, like male Pindaric poets, seek parity with her heroes by stressing their dependence on the poet to ensure their fame.84 This is most apparent in her depiction of herself as a 82 William Fitzgerald, Agonistic Poetry: The Pindaric Mode in Pindar, Horace, Holderlin, and the English Ode (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 83 Ibid. 19, 20, 110. 84 Ibid. 110. 1987), 44.

‘Secret Instructions’

181

prophet whose visions of the future are portrayed almost as if they can or have realized illustrious success for her heroes. At the end of her Pindaric poem on Charles II’s death, Behn predicts a glorious future for James.85 Her congratulatory poem to James on the birth of his son in 1688 begins with a reminder of the alleged accuracy and efficacy of her former prophecy.86 By 1689, however, the fall of James has rendered her ‘the Excluded Prophet’ of the ode to Burnet.87 Here, it is Burnet himself who is depicted as holding the power to shape history through his writing.88 Nevertheless, even after the arrival of William and Mary, Behn continues to imply that she can change the course of history though writing by shifting the emphasis from the deposition of James to rework events as an uninterrupted Stuart succession. Her poem greeting Queen Mary appears to submerge the initial misgivings of a muse saddened by James’s fall in a welcome for its subject. However, it becomes evident that Behn’s praise for Mary is grounded in the fact that she is James’s offspring, the ‘Illustrious Daughter of a King’.89 Requesting James’s permission for her ‘Muse who never fail’d Obedience yet’, Behn asks to be allowed to pay homage to ‘Maria so Divine a Part of You’ (4). Mary’s face is depicted as the image of her ‘great Father’s’, ‘But if the Monarch in your Looks we find, | Behold him yet more glorious in your Mind’ (5). The subsequent description of all the ‘God-like’ attributes which Mary derives from her father offers Behn an excuse to incorporate a eulogy of the deposed father into a poem ostensibly celebrating the antagonistic power of the daughter (5). Behn’s politically charged insistence on referring to James as a king and a god is matched by her pointed refusal to include William. The poem concludes with a contentious version of contemporary events which fosters the illusion of a continued Stuart line: 85 Behn, A Pindarick on the Death of Our Late Sovereign with an Ancient Prophecy on His Present Majesty (London, 1685), 6. 86 Behn, A Congratulatory Poem to the King’s Most Sacred Majesty, on the Happy Birth of the Prince of Wales (1688), A1r. 87 Behn, A Pindaric Poem to . . . Burnet, 6. 88 See Virginia Crompton, ‘ “For when the act is done and finish’t cleane, | What should the poet doe, but shift the scene?”: Propaganda, Professionalism and Aphra Behn’, in Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies, 130–53 (144); Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1683–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 2–3. 89 Behn, A Congratulatory Poem to Her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary, Upon her Arrival in England (London, 1689), 4.

182

‘Secret Instructions’ The murmuring World till now divided lay, Vainly debating whom they shou’d obey Till You Great Cesar’s Off-spring blest our Isle, The differing Multitudes to Reconcile. (6)

Behn’s Pindaric odes, then, do more than disentangle her political agency from the realm of the erotic, they forge the notion that such agency resides in the power to control representation.

exploring the authority of representation The struggle to control representation, and the political ramifications of that struggle, prove a pervasive concern in the prose fiction which dominates Behn’s œuvre in the latter years of her life. Her story, The Dumb Virgin makes a connection between its male protagonist and a well-publicized political scandal in which competing representations were all-important.90 In choosing Dangerfield as her character’s alias, Behn picks one of the names assumed by the notorious false witness at the centre of the socalled Meal-Tub Plot.91 Indeed, she pointedly draws attention to the name by claiming that it pleased her and thus she used it ‘in a Comedy of mine’ (76).92 The historical Thomas Dangerfield began by fabricating intelligence (subsequently discovered in the ‘meal-tub’ of midwife and Catholic sympathizer, Elizabeth Cellier) of a supposed Presbyterian plot to oust Charles II and replace him with Monmouth. Once charged with this deception, he proceeded to renege on his claims, alleging that Cellier had paid him to lie as a means of disguising the real threat of the Popish Plot.93 Although ultimately unmasked, he thus prospered along the way by winning credibility for his fictionalized accounts of political events. 90 The Dumb Virgin; or, the Force of Imagination appears only to have been printed for the first time in 1700, appearing in Behn, Histories, Novels and Translations . . . the Second Volume (London, 1700). All page references are taken from this edn. 91 See Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640–1689 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), 121–2. 92 No such play has yet been identified. 93 See Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing, 1649–1688 (London: Virago, 1988), 21–3, 188, discusses these events with particular reference to the writings of Elizabeth Cellier.

‘Secret Instructions’

183

Although Behn’s romance narrative of pirates, shipwreck, and illicit love bears no direct relationship to Dangerfield’s historical intrigues, the conduct of gender relations in The Dumb Virgin echoes his manipulation of representation as a route to material political advancement. In the story, Dangerfield initially falls for two sisters. One is beautiful but mute and the other articulate but deformed. Temporarily torn between the ‘Beauty’ of the silent Maria and the ‘Wit’ of the eloquent Belvideera (whom he does not realize are his sisters), he ultimately chooses to ravish Maria, offering as one important reason the assumption that she will not be able to disclose his conduct (78, 91). Like his historical counterpart he recognizes the authority to be gained by generating one’s own version of events and thus seeks to minimize the potential damage which might be offered by competing accounts. Yet, if The Dumb Virgin encodes the historical Dangerfield’s recognition of the potency of controlling representation, the story also contains concluding narrative twists which undermine its hero’s attempts to manipulate the reporting of events. First, we have the ironic turn by which Maria regains her powers of speech rather than remaining silent after he has assaulted her. The exposure of Behn’s Dangerfield by the newly vocal Maria, who names his deed as ‘Incest’, challenges the story’s initial suggestion that male sexual domination will inevitably follow from an assured masculine control over language and representation (96). Moreover, subtextually, The Dumb Virgin seems to share an interest (expressed elsewhere by Behn) in challenging the disempowering silencing of female voices inherent in a number of the narratives from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so influential on the amatory discourses of early modern English literature. Maria’s story may be read in relation to the Philomel myth.94 Both share the motif of incestuous rape by a brother or brother-in-law who attempts to profit from a woman’s silent inability to represent her case to the world. For both men, of course, the tables are turned, with Philomel sewing her story into a tapestry and Maria unexpectedly managing to speak out. However, where, Philomel’s voice is effectively doubly muted—by Tereus’s amputation of her tongue and by her transformation into a nightingale—Behn reworks the myth in 94 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2 vols., tr. Brookes Moore (Francestown, NH: Marshall Jones, 1978), i. 216–30.

184

‘Secret Instructions’

allowing Maria to regain her eloquence as a result of Dangerfield’s sexual onslaught (95–6).95 We know that Behn was familiar with Ovid in translation.96 The likelihood that she had Metamorphoses in mind when composing The Dumb Virgin is increased by other similar examples of her resistance to the Ovidian silencing of women evident in Philomela’s plight. Like The Dumb Virgin, Behn’s translation from the sixth book of Cowley’s Sex libri plantarum questions the aestheticizing transformation to which Ovid subjects a woman thereby stifling her ability to speak of rape or attempted rape. Cowley’s invocation of Daphne in discussing the laurel simply recalls such a moment of silencing aestheticization since the nymph was, of course, transformed into a laurel bush in order to evade Apollo’s rape.97 Behn, however, redirects the Ovidian allusion to mark not the silencing but the liberation of a female voice, in this case her own. Instead of accepting Daphne or the laurel as the crown of masculine poetry, Behn insists that she, as both woman and poet has a two-fold prerogative to wear the laurel garland in Daphne’s honour. In lines bearing the marginal gloss, ‘the Translatress in her own Person speaks’, she asserts: I by a double right, thy Bounties claim, Both from my Sex, and in Apollo’s Name: Let me with Sappho and Orinda be O ever sacred Nymph, adorn’d by thee; And give my Verses Immortality.98

The stress on female poetic eloquence is marked by the use of the term ‘translatress’ which, as Mirella Agorni observes, insists on the gender of the translator.99 Marcella and Cornelia, in Behn’s play, 95 Although Maria is attracted to Dangerfield, Behn makes clear that he ultimately forces her to consummate their relationship, see The Dumb Virgin, 92. 96 In addition to her having contributed to Dryden, Ovid’s Epistles (London, 1680), Behn’s Miscellany (1685) contains an anonymous tr. of ‘Ovid’s Amours, Book I, Elegy V’, 284. Sara Mendelson, The Mental Worlds of Stuart Women: Three Studies (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 154, remarks on the presence of Ovidian echoes in Behn’s plays and poetry. See also Jeff Shulman, ‘An Ovidian Echo in Behn’s The Rover’, N&Q, 229 (1984), 344–6. 97 Ovid, Metamorphoses, i. 18–24. 98 The Third Part of the Works of Mr Abraham Cowley, Being his Six Books of Plants (London, 1689), 143. 99 Mirella Agorni, ‘The Voice of the “Translatress”: From Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Carter’, Yearbook of English Studies, 28 (1998), 181–95 (183 n. 10).

‘Secret Instructions’

185

The Feign’d Curtizans, also express exasperation with the Ovidian aestheticization which obliterates female voices. As they enter reading from Ovid, Cornelia exclaims, ‘And prethee what a pox have we to do with Trees, Flowers, Fountains, or naked statues?’ (14). Whilst Behn’s heroine in The Dumb Virgin surprisingly gains a voice, the female narrator temporarily loses hers on discovering what has passed between Dangerfield and Maria, ‘being struck dumb by the horrour of such woeful Objects’ (96). She is only able to regain speech by promising the dying Dangerfield that she will tell his side of the story to their fellow Englishmen, to do him ‘the justice . . . to make him be pity’d for his misfortunes, not hated for his crimes’ (97). Ostensibly, then, Dangerfield finally succeeds in controlling representation even from beyond the grave, with Behn’s female narrator acting merely as the medium of her male protagonist’s version of events.100 However, Ros Ballaster points out that, since the historical Dangerfield produced a ‘ “romance” ’ version of his own biography, entitled Don Tomazo (1680), the ‘seemingly innocent desire’ of Behn’s narrator ‘to clear her countryman’s reputation becomes an ironic subversion of a political enemy’s attempts at heroic self-representation and aggrandizement’.101 After all, Behn’s story presents him in an undoubtedly dubious light. Yet Ballaster seems only half correct, for, rather than undercutting a romanticized self-representation offered by Don Tomazo, The Dumb Virgin discredits Dangerfield by reminding us that he has already been undermined in the earlier text. As Paul Salzman points out, there is no evidence to prove that Dangerfield was the true author of Don Tomazo, a text written in the third person and fitting more readily into the genre of criminal rogue biography than romance.102 The Dumb Virgin takes its cue from Don Tomazo by emulating its playfully anti-heroic approach to Dangerfield. This emerges, in particular, from the dying confession of Behn’s Dangerfield that he is really ‘Cla —’ (96). Once decoded this appears to reinforce the roguish portrayal of Dangerfield since the preface to Don Tomazo establishes its picaresque credentials by alluding not only to ‘Gusman’ and ‘Lazarillo’, but also to ‘Clavel’ whom Salzman identifies as another literary rogue, the protagonist 100 102

101 Ibid. See Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 90. Paul Salzman (ed.), An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction, Worlds Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. xx.

186

‘Secret Instructions’

of A Recantation of an Ill Led Life (1628).103 Even the tone of the promise given by Behn’s narrator to justify Dangerfield’s actions seems to echo the proleptically ironic vein of the narrator’s claims in Don Tomazo that he wishes to ‘give the world an account . . . to the end that people . . . may not think him worse than he was’.104 Behn’s most famous work of prose fiction, Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave (1688), follows The Dumb Virgin in foregrounding its female narrator’s authority as a manipulator of politically charged representations. The status of the text as Tory propaganda depends heavily on the narrator’s representation of her African hero through the medium of European heroic ideals. The Christ-like heroism which he exhibits in the face of his execution by mutilation reinforces his connection with the supposed royal martyr, Charles I, and throughout the novel Behn stresses his enduringly royal status.105 Behn’s emphasis on the intrinsic superiority of Oroonoko’s rank clearly serves as an apology for the concept of natural kingly authority.106 The narrator’s assimilation into European modes of representation is evident in his renaming as ‘Caesar’ by the whites in Surinam. The political impact of such a gesture emerges in the fact that his Roman name recalls the imperial title frequently used by Behn for the Stuart monarchs.107 Indeed, Oroonoko’s maltreatment may also be seen to represent the contemporary threat to the authority of James II posed by his opponents leading up to the time of the novel’s publication in summer 1688.108 The text’s sympathy for the King is prepared for 103 Thomas Dangerfield, Don Tomazo (1680), in Anthology of Seventeenth104 Ibid. 351. Century Fiction, 351, 557. 105 See e.g. Behn, Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave (London, 1688), 103, 106, 107, 109–10, 237–8, 239. Laura Brown, ‘The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves’, in Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1987), 41–61 (58–9), spots the connection between Charles’s execution and Oroonoko’s. 106 See Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 81–2. It is misleading to regard Oroonoko as being against slavery itself rather than primarily against the abuse of royal authority (ibid.); Maureen Ferguson, ‘Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko’, Women’s Studies, 19|2 (1991), 159–75 (173); Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London: Routledge, 1992), 27–49. 107 Brown, ‘Romance of Empire’, 58. 108 Behn, Two Congratulatory Poems to their Most Sacred Majesties . . . the Second on the Happy Birth of the Prince, 2nd edn. (London, 1688), 5, promises the ‘long Expected’ publication of Oroonoko on ‘Wednesday next’. As the Prince was born on 10 June 1688, Oroonoko must have been published soon after, since both

‘Secret Instructions’

187

by its pro-Catholic dedication to Richard Maitland, earl of Lauderdale, privy councillor to James II.109 Oroonoko’s wife, Imoinda, and his unborn child reinforce the correspondence between James and the novel’s hero, providing (as Maureen Duffy has suggested) models of Mary of Modena and the infant Catholic heir to the throne whose arrival had caused such concern amongst religious adversaries.110 The connection between Oroonoko and the highly politically charged advent of the young prince is further suggested by the fact that Behn’s poem congratulating James on the birth of a son concludes with an advertisement promising the imminent publication of Oroonoko. Yet Behn does more than deploy the currency of classical and Christian myths and of heroic romance in order to further the political goals of her text. She highlights this as a conscious authorial process of controlling representation and suggests the potential material impact of such a process in the political sphere. In a pivotal moment from Oroonoko, the narrator describes herself reading to the novel’s black slave hero and heroine. ‘I entertain’d him with the Lives of the Romans, and great Men’, she asserts, ‘which charm’d him to my Company . . . telling her Stories of Nuns, and endeavoring to bring her to the knowledge of the true God’ (141–2). In this episode, Oroonoko and Imoinda are effectively represented to themselves through European literary ideals of behaviour in the hope of eliciting cooperation and erasing any political threat (of slave rebellion) posed by their cultural difference. Her story-telling to amuse and occupy the two slaves is part of her function as an unofficial diplomat (even spy) for the white colonial government where Oroonoko is concerned. Behn’s emphasis on the use of representation through fictional identities in order edns. of the Behn’s poem, as occasional pieces, would have been published promptly after the event they celebrate. Richard Frohock, ‘Violence and Awe: The Foundations of Government in Aphra Behn’s New World Settings’, Eighteenth Century Fiction, 8|4 (1996), 437–52 (437) attributes the earliest identification of Oroonoko as a novel with sympathy for James II to George Guffey in his ‘Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: Occasion and Accomplishment’, in George Guffey and Andrew Wright (eds.), Two English Novelists: Aphra Behn and Anthony Trollope. 109 For Maitland, see Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra, 44. Lines from this dedication were later deleted as too politically sensitive, see Gerald Duchovnay, ‘Aphra Behn’s Religion’, N&Q, 221 (1976), 235–7. 110 Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess, 267. Ibid. 261 indicates that James had announced his wife’s pregnancy late in 1687 so Behn would have been aware of the imminent arrival of an heir while writing Oroonoko.

188

‘Secret Instructions’

to achieve cultural compliance and reassuringly familiarize difference exposes the process which the two slaves are already undergoing at the hands of the colonists in their renaming Oroonoko, ‘Caesar’, and Imoinda, ‘Clemene’ (108, 130). These new names clearly match the worlds of classical history and romantic fiction which the narrator evokes in reading to the slaves. The practical efficacy of the narrator’s exercise in representation is suggested by the fact that both Oroonoko and Imoinda appear to play out the models of conduct implied in the literature which they imbibe from the narrator. ‘The Brave, the Beautiful, and the Constant Imoinda’ who offers her beloved total (and largely silent) devotion even to the point of death at his hand, recalls the ethos of the romantic fiction evoked in the phrase ‘Stories of Nuns’ with its suggestion of Behn’s own tales such as The History of the Nun or The Nun; or, the Perjur’d Beauty (239).111 Meanwhile, Oroonoko emulates the ideals of the ‘Romans, and great Men’ of whom the narrator tells him, displaying heroic courage, oratorical skill, love of honour, and ultimate stoicism, seeking to die the Roman way and tolerating his final torture and execution unflinchingly.112 By rendering her surrogate, the female narrator, the medium for the transmission of romantic and classical heroic models of behaviour, Behn suggests her own role in the process of conditioning social and political relations through fiction both as character in, and author of, the text. The episode in which the narrator reads to the slave prince and princess underlines the assimilation of cultural alterity or ‘ “reductive normalizing” ’, as Laura Brown calls it, using European language and literary models not only within the text but as its very mode of operation.113 It suggests that Behn is aware of the cultural appropriation she exercises throughout the text in representing the story of her two African protagonists through the medium of European narrative conventions and ideals of behaviour. The deployment of European romantic fiction, glanced at in Behn’s 111 Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 95, considers this episode as an example of the narrator ‘tailoring her narratives towards [the] specific interests’ of her listeners in order to foster an ‘eroticized’ relationship with them. 112 See e.g. Behn, Oroonoko, 17, 27, 28, 80–1, 145–6, 185–8, 230–1. 113 Brown, ‘Romance of Empire’, 49. She takes the phrase from Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Scratches on the Face of the Country; Or, What Mr Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen’, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), 119–43 (121).

‘Secret Instructions’

189

allusion to the ‘Stories of Nuns’ read to Imoinda, is further signposted by the intimation that Oroonoko’s owner, finding ‘Caesar’ and ‘Clemene’ were lovers, ‘was infinitely pleas’d with this Novel’ (my emphasis) (136). Here, the sense of ‘Novel’ as fiction underlies the more immediate sense of it as ‘novelty’ or ‘news’. Behn also fits the African lovers into the pattern of European romantic fiction by ensuring that, despite the custom of polygamy amongst Oroonoko’s people, he himself chooses to reject it (27–8). In keeping with the standards of Western classical heroism and beauty, evoked in the narrator’s reading Oroonoko ‘Lives of the Romans’, she depicts her black hero as possessing a ‘Nose . . . rising and Roman, instead of African and flat’, a Western mouth and straight hair, above ‘all those of his gloomy Race’ (21, 16). The notion that Behn intends the reader to recognize her discursive cultural assimilation (rather than simply accept it as transparent) is reinforced by the foregrounding of its ultimate failure. The fragility of the image of Oroonoko as classical or romantic hero is exposed when he reverts to the alien customs of his native culture in choosing to murder Imoinda rather than allow her and her child to become the prey of their enemies, the hostile settlers. The inadequacy of Western literary models fully to comprehend the mores of an alien culture is, underlined by the way in which Oroonoko’s action ruptures the précieux, romantic discourse employed at this point. Despite Ros Ballaster’s assertion that Oroonoko’s deed is ‘vindicated’, the undisguised horror of the white settlers on discovering that the slave prince has murdered his wife is never adequately allayed by passing suggestions that he may have been governed by quasi-European notions of protecting his honour.114 Echoes of the murder of the innocent Desdemona by Othello, heightened by the suggestion of a warped erotic encounter, stress the idea of black nobility gone awry in a perceived reversion to native barbarity. As the discursive assimilation of Oroonoko promotes favourable analogies with Charles I and James II, so such failures of assimilation open the way for a more critical perspective on the current 114 Ros Ballaster, ‘New Hystericism: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: the Body, the Text and the Feminist Critic’, in Isobel Armstrong (ed.), New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), 292; Behn, Oroonoko, 219–20, 228–9, 234.

190

‘Secret Instructions’

state of the Stuart monarchy. Hence, the text demonstrates Behn’s dynamic relationship to political representation, showing that, as an author, she has the power to criticize rather than simply amplify the Tory cause. The fact that Oroonoko murders his own family may be read as a veiled warning that James II could destroy the future of the Stuarts if he does not moderate his pro-Catholic stance. These sentiments echo those of Behn’s associate and fellow Catholic sympathizer, John Dryden, whose recent allegorical poem, The Hind and the Panther (1687), warned James against too hasty or extreme a drive for Catholic emancipation and celebrated the Declaration for Liberty of Conscience (Declaration of Indulgence) issued on 4 April 1687.115 The Declaration sought to safeguard James’s political and religious interests by appearing to champion an even-handed toleration of dissenters and Catholics alike.116 Oroonoko too, promulgates the spirit of tolerance espoused by James in the Declaration of Indulgence. The tolerationist perspective is imaged in Behn’s text by the inclusion of benign influences from different sides of the political spectrum historically associated with contrasting shades of orthodox and dissenting religion. Oroonoko’s chief ally is the plantation owner, Trefry, whom Behn firmly links to a royalist position.117 In contrast, Oroonoko’s cause is also championed by Colonel Martin, ‘Brother to Harry Martin, the great Oliverian’ and ‘a Man of Great Gallantry, Wit, and Goodness’ (155, 209–10). This is George Marten, the real-life brother of the regicide, Henry Marten.118 Offsetting her favourable portrayal of Marten, Behn renders Byam, the royalist deputygovernor of the island, wholly repugnant and antagonistic towards Oroonoko. The centrality of the political writer in generating representations which encourage toleration or compromise between opposing factions is brought to our attention particularly in the opening stages of Oroonoko. Here, the narrator’s depiction of the native Indians of Surinam ultimately lays bare the way in which the fiction of altruistic economic cooperation between Indians and colonists may be facilitated by idealizing representations. The 115 See Dryden’s ‘Advertisement’ prefacing The Hind and the Panther, in The Works of John Dryden, iii, ed. Earl Miner, 119–21. See also 340, 419–22. 116 Ibid. 328. 117 See e.g. Behn, Oroonoko, 216. 118 Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess, 36–7.

‘Secret Instructions’

191

discursive strategies of cultural assimilation deployed by Behn are reminiscent of those used by other contemporary travel narratives concerning the discovery and/or colonial development of New World territories.119 In particular, she seems to have drawn on George Warren’s An Impartial Description of Surinam (1667).120 While the decorum of romantic fiction in Oroonoko softens Warren’s unabashedly imperialistic stance and readiness to offer somewhat contemptuous responses to the natives, Behn emulates and ultimately questions tactics used by him to elide and thus facilitate the exploitative nature of the author’s endeavours.121 One central means of diverting attention from the pragmatics of colonial exploitation is the paradisal idealization of the landscape and its inhabitants, thereby suggesting a reverential attitude on the part of the imperialists.122 Behn repeatedly likens the native Indians to Adam and Eve: ‘these People represented to me an absolute Idea of the first State of Innocence before Man knew how to sin’ (8).123 The paradisal flavour is also apparent (albeit less overtly) in Warren’s descriptions of the landscape where ‘there is a constant Spring and Fall . . . always Blossoms, and the several degrees of Fruit at once’ (5). His claim that ‘ ’tis incomparably pleasant to consider the delightful Handy-works of Nature’ is echoed in Behn’s allusion to the ‘unconceivable Wonders’ which ‘these Countries . . . produce’.124 Both Behn and Warren lessen any guilt attached to their own country’s endeavours by blaming 119 See Brown, ‘The Romance of Empire’, 51; William Spengemann, ‘The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 38|4 (1984), 384–414 (390–413). 120 Ernest Bernbaum, ‘Mrs Behn’s Biography, a Fiction’, PMLA 28 (1913), 432–53, was the first to suggest a correspondence between Behn and Warren, An Impartial Description of Surinam (London, 1667), in an effort to prove Behn never went to Surinam but copied details from Warren. In addition to the links between Warren’s and Behn’s texts discussed below, see also Warren’s description of the ‘Num-Eele’, armadillo, tigers, and marmoset, 2, 11, 12, 14 (Oroonoko, 162–3, 151, 146, 154–62, 3–4); his account of the native Indians’ dress, colour, government by war-captains, and polygamy, 23, 24, 25 (Oroonoko, 6, 7, 10, 176–9); his description of the black slaves’ living area, stoicism under torture, and belief that they ‘return into their own Countries’ when they die, 19, 20 (Oroonoko, 112, 222). Warren also refers to the river ‘Oronoque’, 23. 121 Warren’s An Impartial Description is fundamentally a textbook for colonists systematically explaining the colony’s opportunities and pitfalls. For contemptuous responses to the Indians in Warren, ibid. 23, 24, 27. 122 See Spengemann, ‘Earliest American Novel’, 391. 123 See also Behn, Oroonoko, 6, 7. 124 Warren, An Impartial Description, 5; Behn, Oroonoko, A8r.

192

‘Secret Instructions’

colonists of other nationalities for far worse treatment of the natives. Warren alleges that ‘the Mediation of the Spaniard’ is responsible for making the whole of Europe prey to the ‘FrenchPox . . . Caught by Coition with Indian-Women’ (4). Meanwhile Behn claims that the Dutch treated the Indians ‘not so civilly as the English’ (166). This detail serves to reinforce her general emphasis on the friendly and cooperative relations which are supposed to exist between the Indians and the English settlers: the ‘Natives . . . we live with in perfect Amity, without daring to command ’em; but on the contrary, caress ’em with all brotherly and friendly Affection in the World’ (3). Nevertheless, it is in deliberately exposing the myth of the ‘perfect Amity’ which she initially claims that Behn most strikingly underlines this as a discursive strategy capable of masking underlying exploitation. Echoing the oddly extreme opening assertion of total harmony between English and Indians, quoted above, Behn concludes the section which describes the island and the natives with a modified statement which stresses English fear and manipulation rather than love and respect: ‘So that they [the Indians] being, on all Occasions very useful to us, we find it absolutely necessary to caress ’em as Friends, and not to treat ’em as Slaves; nor dare we do other, their Numbers so far surpassing ours in the Continent’ (12). This passage, taken with the earlier one which it closely echoes, brings out what has been latent throughout the preceding section, that Behn’s idealizations of the natives and of their relations with the English serve to mask and promote a pragmatic and utilitarian colonial approach. Such an approach is starkly outlined by Friendly in Behn’s play, The Widdow Ranter, set in the colony of Virginia: ‘the Indians by our ill Management of Trade, whom we have Armed against Our selves, Very frequently make War upon us with our own Weapons, Tho’ often coming by the worst are forced to make Peace with us agen, but so, as upon every turn they fall to Massacring us wherever we ly exposed to them’.125 In the case of Oroonoko, the economic imbalance which underpins colonial relations shows through the myth of inter-racial friendship as Behn intimates that ‘it behooves us’ to live happily with the Indians ‘they knowing all the places 125 Behn, The Widdow Ranter; or, the History of Bacon in Virginia (London, 1690), 3.

‘Secret Instructions’

193

where to seek the best Food of the Country, and the Means of getting it; and for very small and unvaluable Trifles supply us with what ’tis impossible for us to get’ (11). This unequal exchange of ‘Trifles’ for items of far greater worth recalls Warren’s allusion to the Indians’ eagerness to secure any ‘Bawbles their Service can procure from the English’ (24). Even the colonial construction of the Indians in the image of Adam and Eve is implicitly linked by Behn to their commercial exploitation, since the natives must ‘deal with’ the English in order to obtain the strips of linen said to recall the Edenic ‘Fig-leaves’ (6). The post-lapsarian connotations of the fig-leaves further serve to undermine the superficially paradisal image. In the narrator’s manner of introducing us to the native Indians, Behn suggests that, despite her earlier expressions of regret that Charles II ever ceded the colony of Surinam to the Dutch, English colonial activities there also possess an unpalatable mercantile dimension (149). Attempts at idealized representation in the manner of contemporary colonialist texts merely gloss over this. In view of the tensions which emerge in this way, it is hard to endorse Anita Pacheco’s contention that Oroonoko’s depiction of ‘colonial expansion, conceived of as an extension of British dominion, reconciles a ruling-class royalist discourse with the discourse of bourgeois mercantile capitalism’.126 Indeed, the novel’s apparent unease concerning mercantilism moves beyond ascribing it merely to the forces of Whiggism and, as in The City Heiress, suggests that it has begun to infect royalist ideology rather than become reconciled to it.127 Behn’s sense of the importance of control over linguistic representation in facilitating colonial domination finds a catalyst in her engagement with contemporary discourses of translation.128 Like 126 Anita Pacheco, ‘Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko’, SEL 34 (1994), 491–506 (502). 127 For a reading which links the mercantile dimension with Whiggism, see Mary Beth Rose, ‘ “Vigorous Most | When Most Unactive Deem’d”: Gender and the Heroics of Endurance in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Mary Astell’s Some Reflections Upon Marriage’, Milton Studies, 33 (1996), 83–109 (96). 128 I take issue with Elizabeth Spearing’s contention that ‘consideration of late seventeenth-century theories of translation in relation to the works of Aphra Behn is of limited usefulness’, ‘Aphra Behn: The Politics of Translation’, in Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies, 154–77 (156).

194

‘Secret Instructions’

Oroonoko, her ‘Essay on Translated Prose’ explores the relationship between linguistic assimilation and conquest. Prefacing her Discovery of New Worlds (1688), translated from the French of Bernard le Bovier Fontenelle and published in the same year as Oroonoko, the ‘Essay’ claims that the ‘Goths, Vandals, and other Northern Nations . . . over-ran the Roman Empire, and conquer’d its Language with its Provinces’.129 Meanwhile, English national superiority over the French is implied by the assertion that the English ‘naturalize’ French words, including those ‘words they [the French] steal from other Languages’ (A6r). Evidently, Behn was not alone in using such metaphors during a period in which Dryden and others were attempting to promote notions of the cultural (and therefore political) supremacy of post-Civil War England by championing the dignity of their native language.130 Comparing English and French, Dryden asserts, ‘Our Men and our Verses over-bear them by their weight’.131 Meanwhile the earl of Roscommon, in his Essay on Translated Verse demands, But who did ever in French Authors see The Comprehensive, English Energy? The weighty Bullion of One Sterling Line, Drawn to French Wire, would through whole Pages shine.

(4)132

Behn’s formulations in the ‘Essay on Translated Prose’ have a clear connection to the nationalistic rhetoric of translation through which Katherine Philips’s panegyrists mediate her efforts as a translator. Yet Behn figures a process of translation shorn of the qualities of sweetness, smoothness, and sympathy for the original which play such a key role in shaping valorizations of the feminine by admirers of Philips’s translations. In theorizing translation then, as in so much of her writing, Behn’s status as a professional, political 129 Behn, The Discovery of New Worlds (London, 1688), A4v. Although the essay is entitled ‘Translator’s Preface’ in the 1st edn., the title ‘Essay on Translated Prose’ appears in the running title, A1r. 130 See Paul Hammond, John Dryden: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1991), 81–3. 131 ‘Dedication of the Aeneis’, in The Works of John Dryden, v, ed. William Frost, 322. 132 For further images of natural superiority or conquest in relation to translation, see Dryden, ‘To the Earl of Roscommon on his Excellent Essay on Translated Verse’, in [Wentworth Dillon], earl of Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse, 2nd edn. (London, 1685), A1r, A1v.

‘Secret Instructions’

195

author brings to the fore her heightened self-consciousness concerning the power relations involved in linguistic control and literary representation. She emerges as an author whose work exposes the ideological implications of her writerly practice far more overtly than either Philips or Cavendish.

Afterword This study has shown how Cavendish, Philips, and Behn decisively altered the profile of Englishwomen’s writing and has demonstrated the crucial impact of their royalist affiliations in enabling them to do so. For all three, the historical, literary, and theatrical conditions associated with pro-Stuart loyalism in their periods— along with its politicized literary discourses—assist them in constructing authorial images which shift the focus away from the dominance of concerns over the compatibility of female authorship with feminine chastity. Cavendish collaborates with her banished husband to send highly visible printed volumes out of exile, drawing on the model offered her by her experiences as a petitioner to construct a notion of her wifely representative function, but espousing an audacious rhetoric of fame developed out of royalist valorizations of heroic femininity. Philips carefully builds an increasingly visible public career germinated through the early license afforded her by manuscript circulation cultivated within Lawes’s royalist literary and musical coterie which also catalyses Cavendish’s work. Meanwhile, Behn transforms earlier royalist models of heroic femininity to develop an image of the Restoration woman author as heroically erotic, gaining legitimacy by association with Tory discourses surrounding actresses and the alleged pro-Stuart loyalism of a supposedly morally lenient theatrical culture. The reciprocity which exists between Behn and her panegyrists in constructing such an image stands as one example of the way in which I have argued that male articulations of support for these women writers could function as an act of political self-definition for the men concerned. This is also evident in the participation of William Cavendish in his wife’s literary career and the responses of some of her eulogists as well as in the nurturing reception afforded Philips’s politicized writings on friendship both before and after the Restoration. By tracing these aspects in the particular case of each of the three writers I offer a fresh perspective on formulations

Afterword

197

which have placed them as paradoxical beneficiaries of a royalist ideology conceived of as undifferentiatedly patriarchal. The inadequacy of such a model is also evident in its failure to take account of the way in which conditions of exile and dispossession in the 1650s facilitate male royalist identification with certain notions of the feminine. Only in recognizing this, I suggest, can the full political signifying power of Philips and Cavendish’s explorations of feminized spaces of retreat be felt. Reading their work in the context of other Interregnum royalist assertions of the space of retirement as the actual centre of power, I contend that, for Philips in particular, such responses to Interregnum marginalization can reconceive political agency as distinct from its conventional external manifestations in a manner empowering to her as a woman. Although Cavendish’s renderings of feminized withdrawal often appear more as acts of political sublimation than covert engagement, her dramas of secluded female community do exploit the notion of agency through retreat, enhanced by their status as closet drama—a genre which permits Interregnum royalists to enact the political gesture of reconstituting prohibited public performance through apparent withdrawal towards greater privacy. The absence of royalist exile as an immediate context for Behn’s post-Restoration writings offers both new freedoms and constraints. Like Philips in the opening occasional verses of her Poems (1664), Behn can, in some senses, articulate pro-Stuart loyalties more straightforwardly than Interregnum royalist writers. The reappearance of public theatres and officially sanctioned female performance helps to create space for a new, more sexualized model of public female authorship and popularize new dramatic genres in which her writing flourishes. However, the theatrical restoration also sunders Behn from the experimental freedoms which Cavendish finds in tackling questions of female empowerment through the medium of closet drama. The possibility for royalist literature to figure exile paradoxically as the locus of true political power dwindles with the reinstatement of the monarchy. Behn’s representations of the Interregnum period in her plays present exile neither as a serene alternative to the grubby materiality of political engagement, nor as the mysterious centre of royalist authority, but as a reflection of the moral and political compromises of pro-Stuart politics from the 1650s

198

Afterword

through until the reign of James II. Where Interregnum notions of agency through retreat allow Philips (and sometimes Cavendish) to imagine a sphere in which men and women have equal access to political engagement, Behn operates in a time when royalist political agency has been firmly relocated in the far more gender-exclusive arena of public office. Her plays then explore the ways in which women’s gender-specific positions within the heterosexual economy may be seen to play out political loyalties. On one level, this is in keeping with the tendency for playwrights to respond to the political sensitivities of their period by embedding political comment in narratives of gender relations. Yet I have argued that even the critics who recognize the currency of such strategies fail to acknowledge a number of important ways in which certain of Behn’s plays question the oversimplifications inherent in conventional pro-Stuart figurations of politics through gender relations. As her Pindaric odes challenge the adequacy of her eroticized authorial image to assert her agency as a political writer, so her plays undermine the notion of sexual freedom as a satisfactory form of political expression for her female characters, often by foregrounding their economic constraints. Catalysed by the increased emphasis on mercantilism in the partisan debates of her day, and by her own experience as a commercial author, Behn focuses far more closely than Cavendish or Philips on the entanglements of politics with economic concerns. In this way, she further exposes the particularities of women’s complex relationship with political agency and casts a quizzical eye on the pervasiveness of mercantile motivations which underlie the more idealized rhetorics of Tory loyalty. In providing a detailed examination of the work of each of the three writers in this book and situating them in their specific literary and historical contexts I have aimed to show that, whilst there are important points of contact between them as royalist women writers, there is no necessary linear progression from one to the next. Similarly, although their influences are felt in some highly significant ways in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women’s literary history, the patterns of women’s writing which become established as the eighteenth century develops appear, in many ways, to diverge from their striking models of politically inflected texts and self-presentation.

Afterword

199

The obvious successor (and self-styled heir) to Behn’s combination of avowed Tory partisanship and eroticized authorial selfpresentation is playwright, novelist, and political propagandist, Delarivier Manley.1 Yet, in echoing Behn’s participation in the politically charged valorization of sexualized femininity in the Restoration court and theatre, Manley ultimately swims against the prevailing tide of moral reform (in the theatres in particular) through which the changed political order after 1688 seeks to define itself against the supposed Stuart decadence of the previous era. Hence the tendency for a number of Manley’s contemporaries—women such as the poet, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and playwrights Mary Pix and Catherine Trotter Cockburn—to distance themselves from the style of authorial self-presentation represented by her and by Behn.2 Thus modesty and humility may be seen to reassert themselves in women writers’ images once again.3 The strong moral and sentimental impetus at work in most of the new breed of female playwrights moves them away from Behn’s searching use of sexual and party politics to interrogate one another.4 Mary Astell echoes Behn’s ideological approach in using a critique of liberal thought as the basis for an attack on the marital oppression of women but her pious monarchist prose is a very different animal from Behn’s comic drama.5 Perhaps the woman dramatist who most closely emulates Behn’s exploration of inter-party rivalry through the medium of gender conflict (and vice versa) is a Whig, Susannah Centlivre, although none of her plays approaches the earlier mode of overtly political drama adopted by Behn in The Roundheads.6 Indeed, as the eighteenth century develops—with the increasing dominance of the moral and sentimental novel as the accepted 1 See Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 114–52; Jeslyn Medoff, ‘The Daughters of Behn and the Problem of Reputation’, in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (eds.), Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740 (London: Batsford, 1992), 33–54 (35–6, 39, 40, 41–2). 2 See Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 3; Medoff, ‘Daughters of Behn’, 40–1, 44–6; Jacqueline Pearson, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists, 1642–1737 (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), 171, 173; Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: 3 Todd, Sign of Angellica, 126–7. Virago, 1989), 45–6. 4 See Pearson, Prostituted Muse, 169–70, 189. 5 See Mary Astell, Some Reflections Upon Marriage (London, 1700). 6 See Pearson, Prostituted Muse, 224, 228.

200

Afterword

model of women’s literary expression in the marketplace—both the level of explicit political content in Behn’s work and its high degree of self-consciousness concerning the relations between political agency and literary representation diminishes.7 For women’s subsumption into the mainstream of professional authorship is, it has been suggested, conditional upon their greater compliance with the belief in their supposedly natural affinity for moral and sentimental material.8 It has also been seen to entail a construction of female authorship as a private activity confined to the domestic sphere ever more sharply delineated by the growth of capitalism.9 The enhanced accentuation and essentialization of gender difference in these ways may be seen to reduce the capacity for women writers’s celebrations of certain modes of femininity and feminine interaction to embody politicized masculine aspirations in the kinds of ways which I have argued it does in the work of Cavendish and Philips. Nevertheless, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, we do find counterparts for the way in which the experience of exile (whether politically excluded within the British Isles or outside it) shapes the centrality of notions of retreat in the work of Philips and Cavendish. If writers like Manley or Pix consciously seek to identify themselves with or against Behn, Jane Barker and Anne Finch, countess of Winchilsea, emulate Philips. Where the authorial identities of Behn and Manley are forged amidst the cut and thrust of party rivalries, the peculiar type of oppositional stance associated with exile nourishes Cavendish, Philips, Barker, and Finch. The theme of feminized exile or retreat as it appears in Philips’s poems is a vital influence in the work of both Barker and Finch, who saw their monarch, James II, forced into exile after 1688. Their sensibilities are also shaped (as are those of the poet Anne Killigrew, who died in 1685) by the culture of female service around his wife, Mary of Modena, echoing the all-important feminized court culture of Henrietta Maria in the earlier period.10 Barker’s career echoes Orinda’s inasmuch as her correspondence 7 See Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 3, 29–33; Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 8 Ibid. 15. 4, 33 n. 7, 89. 9 Ibid. p. xi, 13, 15; Todd, Sign of Angellica, 126. 10 See Carol Barash, English Women Poets, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 4.

Afterword

201

with a circle of (mostly male) Platonic friends lies behind the evolution of a pseudonymous literary persona (in this case, Galesia).11 Yet Finch’s particular debt to Philips lies even more consistently than Barker’s in their shared pursuit of the centrality of Platonic friendship constructed as the virtuous antithesis of worldly concerns.12 However, where Interregnum circumstances create the unique possibility of regarding exile or retreat as the true centre of monarchical power, the Jacobite exile which shapes Finch and Barker must contend with William and Mary as parallel (if contested) monarchs on the English throne, thereby potentially reinforcing a sense of the marginality of retreat. The complex dialogue between exile and political engagement, publicity and privacy, modesty and self-assertion, within and between the writings of Cavendish, Philips, and Behn, then, continues into the work of the women writers who succeed them. Yet, whilst they leave their various legacies to literary history, the decades which pivot around the Restoration provide exceptional political conditions with which their royalist affiliations lead them to interact in ways which make this a remarkable window of experimentation and opportunity for female authorship. 11 12

See Spencer, Rise of the Woman Novelist, 63. See CWKP i. 33; Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing, 1649–88 (London: Virago, 1988), 160–1; Todd, Sign of Angellica, 42.

Bibliography primary sources 1. Manuscripts ‘Astrea’s Booke for Songs & Satyr’s’, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Firth c. 16. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Clarendon 109. Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS Poet. 16. Princeton University Library, Robert Overton, Gospell Observations, General Manuscripts Bound.

2. Books The place of publication for works printed before 1800 is London unless otherwise stated. Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, A Treatise of the Nobilitie and Excellencye of Women Kynde, tr. David Clapham (1542). The Argument of the Pastorall of Florimene (1635). Astell, Mary, Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1700). Batchiler, John, The Virgins Pattern (1661). Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies (1647). Behn, Aphra, The Amorous Prince; or, the Curious Husband (1671). —— The Forc’d Marriage; or, the Jealous Bridegroom (1671). —— The Dutch Lover (1673). —— Abdelazer; or, the Moor’s Revenge (1677). —— The Rover; or, the Banish’t Cavaliers (1677). —— Sir Patient Fancy (1678). —— The Feign’d Curtizans; or, a Nights Intrigue (1679). —— The Second Part of the Rover (1681). —— The City Heiress; or, Sir Timothy Treat-All (1682). —— The False Count; or, a New Way to Play an Old Game (1682). —— Prologue to Romulus (1682). —— The Roundheads; or, the Good Old Cause (1682). —— The Young King; or, the Mistake (1683). —— Love-Letters Between a Noble-Man and his Sister (1684).

Bibliography

203

—— Poems upon Several Occasions: with a Voyage to the Island of Love (1684). —— Miscellany, Being a Collection of Poems by Several Hands Together with Reflections on Morality, or Seneca Unmasqued (1685). —— A Pindarick on the Death of our Late Sovereign (1685). —— A Pindarick Poem on the Happy Coronation of His Most Sacred Majesty James II (1685). —— La Montre; or, the Lover’s Watch (1686). —— The Emperor of the Moon (1687). —— The Luckey Chance; or, an Alderman’s Bargain (1687). —— To the Most Illustrious Prince Christopher Duke of Albemarle, on His Voyage to His Government of Jamaica (1687). —— A Congratulatory Poem to the King’s Most Sacred Majesty, on the Happy Birth of the Prince of Wales (1688). —— The Discovery of New Worlds (1688). —— Lycidus; or, the Lover in Fashion (1688). —— Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave (1688). —— A Poem to Sir Roger L’Estrange on his Third Part of the History of the Times (1688). —— Three Histories: Oroonoko, the Fair Jilt and Agnes de Castro (1688). —— Two Congratulatory Poems to their Most Sacred Majesties . . . the Second on the Happy Birth of the Prince, 2nd edn. (1688). —— A Congratulatory Poem to Her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary, upon her Arrival in England (1689). —— A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet on the Honour he did me of Enquiring after me and my Muse (1689). —— The Widdow Ranter; or, the History of Bacon in Virginia (1690). —— Love-Letters From a Nobleman to his Sister: Mixt with the History of their Adventures: the Second Part, 2nd edn. (1693). —— The Amours of Philander and Silvia: Being the Third and Last Part of the Love-Letters Between a Noble-Man and His Sister, 2nd edn. (1693). —— The Histories and Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs Behn (1696). —— The Younger Brother; or, the Amorous Jilt (1696). —— All the Histories and Novels Written by the Late Ingenious Mrs Behn, 3rd edn. (1698). —— Histories, Novels and Translations . . . the Second Volume (1700). —— The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers, 6 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1915). —— The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992–6). Boyle, Roger, The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, ed. William Smith Clark, II, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937).

204

Bibliography

Bradstreet, Anne, The Tenth Muse (1650), facs repr. with an introduction by Josephine K. Piercy (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1965). Brinsley, John, A Looking-Glasse for Good Women (1645). [Calahorra, Diego Ortunez de], The First Part of the Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood, tr. M[argaret] T[yler] (1578). Carew, Thomas, Poems 1640, facs repr. (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969). Carlell, Lodwick, Arviragus and Philicia (1639) Cartwright, William, Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with Other Poems (1651). —— The Plays and Poems of William Cartwright, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951). C[ary], E[lizabeth], The Tragedie of Mariam, the Faire Queene of Jewry, ed. A. C. Dunstan, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914). Castiglione, Baldassare, The Courtyer, tr. Thomas Hoby (1651). Cavendish, Jane, and Elizabeth Brackley, ‘The Concealed Fansyes: A Play by Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley’, ed. Nathan Comfort Starr, PMLA 46 (1931), 802–38. Cavendish, Margaret, Poems and Fancies (1653). —— Philosophical Fancies (1653). —— The Worlds Olio (1655). —— The Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655). —— Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (1656). —— Orations of Divers Sorts (1662). —— Playes (1662). —— The Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 2nd edn. (1663). —— CCXI Sociable Letters (1664). —— Philosophical Letters (1664). —— The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe (1667). —— The Description of a New World Called the Blazing-World, 2nd edn. (1668). —— Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668). —— Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 2nd edn. (1668). —— Plays, Never before Printed (1668). —— The Life of William Cavendish, ed. C. H. Firth (London: George Routledge, 1906). —— Letters . . . Written by . . . Margaret Newcastle . . . to her Husband . . . from the Originals at Welbeck Abbey (London: John Murray, 1909). —— Political Writings, ed. Susan James, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Bibliography

205

Cavendish, William, The Country Captaine, and the Varietie (1649). —— Methode et Invention Nouvelle de Dresser les Chevaux (Antwerp, 1658). —— A New Method and Extraordinary Invention to Dress Horses (1667). —— The Humorous Lovers (1677). —— The Triumphant Widow; or, the Medley of Humours (1677). —— The Phanseys of William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle, ed. Douglas Grant (London: Nonesuch Press, 1965). Cleveland, John, John Cleaveland Revived (1659). Cockayn, Aston, The Obstinate Lady (1657). Corneille, Pierre, Théâtre complet, ed. Alain Niderst, 3 vols. (Mont-SantAigran: Publications de l’Université de Rouen, 1984–5). Covent Garden Drolery (1672). Covent Garden Drollery, ed. G. Thorn-Drury (London: P. J. and A. E. Dobell, 1928). Cowley, Abraham, Poems (1656). —— Cutter of Coleman-Street (1663). —— The Third Part of the Works of Mr Abraham Cowley, Being his Six Books of Plants (1689). —— The Poems of Abraham Cowley, ed. R. A. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905). [Denham, John], The Destruction of Troy, An Essay Upon the Second Book of Virgil’s Aeneis (1656). [Dillon, Wentworth], earl of Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse, 2nd edn. (1685). Donne, John, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, repr. 1984). Dryden, John, Of Dramatick Poesie, An Essay (1668). —— The Wild Gallant (1669). —— The Works of Virgil: Containing his Pastorals, Georgics, and Aeneis (1697). —— The Works of John Dryden, ed. by Edward Niles Hooker et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1956–89). Du Bosc, The Compleat Woman, tr. N. N. (1639), facs. repr. (Amsterdam and New York: Da Capo Press, 1968). Du Verger, Du Vergers Humble Reflections upon Some Passages of the . . . Lady Marchionesse of Newcastles Olio (1657). E., T., The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights; or, the Lawes Provision for Women (1632). Ephelia, Female Poems on Several Occasions, 2nd edn. (1682). Evelyn, John, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Austin Dobson (London: Routledge and Thoemmes Press, 1996).

206

Bibliography

Fanshawe, Richard, Il Pastor Fido, the Faithfull Shepheard With an Addition of Divers Other Poems (1648). Faret, Nicolas, The Honest Man; or, the Art to Please in Court, tr. Edward Grimeston (1632). Finch, Francis, Friendship (1654). Flecknoe, Richard, A Relation of Ten Years Travell in Europe, Asia, Affrique, and America ([1656?]). Flos Britannicus Veris Novissimi Filiola Carola et Mariae Nata XVII Marti Anno 1636 (Oxford, 1636). Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Amsterdam, 2nd edn., 1689). Geneva Bible (1560). Halkett, Anne, The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Herrick, Robert, Hesperides (1648), facs. repr. (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969). Heywood, Thomas, Gynaikeion (1639). —— The Generall History of Women (1657). Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, with an introduction by Kenneth Minogue, Everyman Classics (London: J. M. Dent, 1987). Horti Carolini Rosa Altera (Oxford, 1640). Howard, Robert, The Committee (1662). Howell, James, Epistolae Ho-Elianae: Familiar Letters Domestic and Forren, 3rd edn. (1655). [——], Poems On Several Choice and Various Subjects (1663). Killigrew, Thomas, Comedies and Tragedies (1664). King James Bible (1611). Langbaine, Gerard, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691). Lanyer, Aemilia, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). Lawes, Henry, Select Musicall Ayres, and Dialogues (1653). —— Second Book of Ayres, and Dialogues (1655). —— The Third Book of Ayres, and Dialogues (1658). Le Moyne, Pierre, The Gallery of Heroick Women, tr. the marquis of Winchester (1652). Lenton, Francis, Great Britains Beauties; or, the Female Glory (1638). —— Luminalia (1638). Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable Princess, Margaret, Dutchess of Newcastle (1676). Lloyd, David, Memoires (1668). Lluellin, Martin, Men-Miracles. With Other Poems (Oxford, 1646). Lovelace, Richard, Lucasta (1649). —— Lucasta. Posthume Poems of Richard Lovelace (1659).

Bibliography

207

Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince, tr. Edward Dacres (1640). Makin, Bathsua, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673). Mayne, Jasper, The Amorous Warre (1648). —— Two Plaies: the City Match . . . and the Amorous Warre (Oxford, 1658). —— Part of Lucian made English from the Original (Oxford, 1664). Milton, John, The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1968). Montagu, Walter, The Shepheard’s Paradise (1659). Musarum Oxoniensium Epibateria (Oxford, 1643). Osborne, Dorothy, The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple, 1652–1654, ed. Kingsley Hart (London: Folio Society, 1968). Ovid’s Epistles, Translated by Several Hands (1680). —— Metamorphoses, 2 vols., tr. Brookes Moore (Francestown, NH: Marshall Jones, 1978). Parnassus Biceps: Or Severall Choice Pieces of Poetry Composed by the Best Wits That Were in Both Universities Before Their Dissolution (1656). Pepys, Samuel, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (London: G. Bell, 1970–83). Philips, Katherine, Pompey: A Tragedy (Dublin, 1663). —— Poems by the Incomparable Mrs K.P. (1664). —— Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs Katherine Philips (1667). —— Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus (1705). —— The Collected Works of Katherine Philips the Matchless Orinda, i. The Poems, ed. Patrick Thomas (Stump Cross: Stump Cross Books, 1990). —— The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, ii. The Letters, ed. Patrick Thomas (Stump Cross: Stump Cross Books, 1992). —— The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, iii. The Translations, ed. Germaine Greer and Ruth Little (Stump Cross: Stump Cross Books, 1993). Playford, John, Select Ayres and Dialogues the Second Book (1669). Poems to the Memory of that Incomparable Poet Edmond Waller (1688). Pompey the Great: A Tragedy . . . Translated out of French by Certain Persons of Honour (1664). A Relation of the Life of Christina Queen of Sweden (1656). Rivers, George, The Heroinae (1639). Schurman, Anna Maria van, The Learned Maid; or, Whether a Maid May be a Scholar (1659). Shirley, James, The Bird in a Cage (1633).

208

Bibliography

Shirley, James, The Poems of James Shirley, ed. Ray Livingstone Armstrong (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1941). Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, iii, ed. Frederick Morgan Padelford (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1934). Stanley, Thomas, Poems and Translations (1647). —— Poems (1651). —— Poems (1652). Suckling, John, Brennoralt (1646). —— Fragmenta Aurea (1646). Tatham, John, The Rump; or, the Mirrour of the Late Times (1660). Taylor, Jeremy, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650). —— A Discourse of the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship (1657). Torshell, Samuel, The Womans Glorie, 2nd edn. (1650). Tryon, Thomas, Friendly Advice to the Gentleman-Planters of the East and West Indies (1684). Vaughan, Henry, Flores Solitudinis (1654). —— The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, repr. 1983). Waller, Edmund, Poems &c. Written upon Several Occasions, 4th edn. (1682). Walton, Izaak, The Compleat Angler (1653). Warren, George, An Impartial Description of Surinam (1667). Wycherley, William, Miscellany Poems (1704).

secondary sources Agorni, Mirella, ‘The Voice of the “Translatress”: From Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Carter’, Yearbook of English Studies, 28 (1998), 181–95. Alleman, Gellert Spencer, Matrimonial Law and the Materials of Restoration Comedy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1942). Andreadis, Harriet, ‘The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632–1664’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 15/1 (1989), 34–60. Anselment, Raymond, ‘The Oxford University Poets and Caroline Panegyric’, John Donne Journal, 3/2 (1984), 181–201. —— ‘The Countess of Carlisle and Caroline Praise: Convention and Reality’, Studies in Philology, 82/2 (1985), 212–33. —— Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988).

Bibliography

209

Ballaster, Ros, ‘New Hystericism: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: the Body, the Text and the Feminist Critic’, in Isobel Armstrong (ed.), New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts (London: Routledge, 1992). —— Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). —— ‘Restoring the Renaissance: Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips’, in Gordon McMullan (ed.), Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580–1690 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 234–52. Barash, Carol, ‘ “The Native Liberty . . . of the Subject”: Configurations of Gender and Authority in the Works of Mary Chudleigh, Sarah Fyge Egerton, and Mary Astell’, in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (eds.), Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740 (London: Batsford, 1992), 55–69. —— English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Battigelli, Anna, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1998). Beal, Peter, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Beasley, Jerry C., ‘Politics and Moral Idealism: The Achievement of Some Early Women Novelists’, in Mary Ann Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (eds.), Fetter’d or Free?: British Women Novelists, 1670–1815 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1986), 216–36. Beilin, Elaine V., Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Bentley, Gerald Eades, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, iv (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). Bernbaum, Ernest, ‘Mrs Behn’s Biography: A Fiction’, PMLA 28 (1913), 432–53. Bowerbank, Silvia, ‘The Spider’s Delight: Margaret Cavendish and the “Female” Imagination’, ELR 14 (1984), 392–408. Brant, Clare, and Diane Purkiss (eds.), Women, Texts and Histories, 1575–1750 (London: Routledge, 1992). Braverman, Richard, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Brown, Laura, ‘The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves’, in Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1987), 41–62. Budgell, Eustace, Memoirs of the Lives and Characters of the Illustrious Family of the Boyles (1737).

210

Bibliography

Butler, Martin, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Cameron, W. J., ‘George Granville and the “Remaines” of Aphra Behn’, N&Q 204, ns 6 (1959), 88–92. —— New Light on Aphra Behn (Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 1961). Canfield, J. Douglas, Tricksters and Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1997). Cerasano, S. P., and Marion Wynne-Davies (eds.), Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (London: Routledge, 1996). Chalmers, Hero, ‘ “Flattering Division”: Margaret Cavendish’s Poetics of Variety’, in Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz (eds.), Authorial Conquests (London: Associated University Presses, 2003), 123–44. Chan, Mary, ‘A Mid Seventeenth-Century Music Meeting and Playford’s Publishing’, in John Caldwell, Edward Olleson and Susan Wollenberg (eds.), The Well-Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 232–44. Chernaik, Warren, The Poetry of Limitation: A Study of Edmund Waller (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968). Clarke, Elizabeth, ‘The Garrisoned Muse: Women’s Use of Religious Lyric in the Civil War Period’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 130–43. Clucas, Stephen (ed.), A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Corns, Thomas N., Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Cottegnies, Line, and Nancy Weitz (eds.), Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish (London: Associated University Presses, 2003). Cotton, Nancy, Women Playwrights in England, c.1363–1750 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980). —— ‘Aphra Behn and the Pattern Hero’, in Mary Ann Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (eds.), Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1820 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1991), 211–19. Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings 1600–1700’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London: Methuen, 1985), 211–82. Crompton, Virginia, ‘ “For when the act is done and finish’t cleane, / What should the poet doe, but shift the scene?’: Propaganda, Professionalism and Aphra Behn’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 130–53.

Bibliography

211

Dash, Irene, ‘Single-Sex Retreats in Two Early Modern Dramas: Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Convent of Pleasure’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 47/4 (1996), 387–95. Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (London: Oxford University Press, 1885–1900). D’Monté, Rebecca, ‘Mirroring Female Power: Separatist Spaces in the Plays of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’, in Rebecca D’Monté and Nicole Pohl (eds.), Female Communities, 1600–1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 93–110. Duchovnay, Gerald, ‘Aphra Behn’s Religion’, N&Q 221 (1976), 235–7. Duffy, Maureen, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn 1640–89 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977). Edwards, Philip, Gerald Eades Bentley, Kathleen McLuskie, and Lois Potter, The Revels History of Drama in English, iv. 1613–1660 (London and New York: Methuen, 1981). Evans, Robert, ‘Paradox and Politics, Katherine Philips in the Interregnum’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 174–85. Evans, Willa McClung, Henry Lawes: Musician and Friend of Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941). Ezell, Margaret J. M., The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). —— ‘ “To Be Your Daughter in Your Pen”: The Social Functions of Literature in the Writings of Lady Elizabeth Brackley and Lady Jane Cavendish’, HLQ 51 (1988), 281–96. Faderman, Lillian, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Women’s Press, 1981). Feldwick, Arlen, ‘Wits, Whigs and Women: Domestic Politics and Anti-Whig Rhetoric in Aphra Behn’s Town Comedies’, in Carole Levin and Patricia A. Sullivan (eds.), Political Rhetoric, Power and Renaissance Women (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 223–40. Ferguson, Maureen, ‘Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko’, Women’s Studies, 19/2 (1991), 159–75. Ferguson, Moira, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London: Routledge, 1992). Findlay, Alison, ‘ “She Gave You the Civility of the House”: Household Performance in The Concealed Fancies’, in S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne Davies (eds.), Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama (London: Routledge, 1998), 259–71.

212

Bibliography

Fitzgerald, William, Agonistic Poetry: The Pindaric Mode in Pindar, Horace, Holderlin, and the English Ode (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1987). Fitzmaurice, James, ‘Front Matter and the Physical Make-up of Natures Pictures’, Women’s Writing, 4/3 (1997), 353–67. Frohock, Richard, ‘Violence and Awe: The Foundations of Government in Aphra Behn’s New World Settings’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 8/4 (July 1996), 437–52. Gagen, Jean, The New Woman: Her Emergence in English Drama 1600–1730 (New York: Twayne, 1954). —— ‘Honor and Fame in the Works of the Duchess of Newcastle’, Studies in Philology, 56 (1959), 519–38. Gallagher, Catherine, ‘Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England’, Genders, 1 (1988), 24–39. —— Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Goreau, Angeline, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). —— The Whole Duty of a Woman: Female Writers in SeventeenthCentury England (Garden City, NY: Dial Press, 1985). Grant, Douglas, Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957). Greer, Germaine, Slip-Shod Sybils: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (London: Viking, 1995), 147–72. Grundy, Isobel, and Susan Wiseman, Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740 (London: Batsford, 1992). Hageman, Elizabeth, ‘Katherine Philips: The Matchless Orinda’, in Katharina Wilson (ed.), Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1987). —— and Andrea Sununu, ‘New Manuscript Texts of Katherine Philips, the “Matchless Orinda” ’, EMS 4 (1993), 174–219. —— and Andrea Sununu, ‘ “More Copies of it abroad than I could have imagin’d”: Further Manuscript Texts of Katherine Philips, “the Matchless Orinda” ’, EMS 5 (1995), 127–69. Hamessley, Lydia, ‘Henry Lawes’s Settings of Katherine Philips’s Friendship Poems in his Second Book of Ayres, and Dialogues (1655): A Musical Misreading’, in Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (eds.), Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 115–38.

Bibliography

213

Hammond, Paul, John Dryden: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1991). Hannay, Margaret Patterson (ed.), Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985). Harbage, Alfred, The Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, 3rd edn., revised by S. Schoenbaum, revised by Silvia Stoler Wagonheim (New York and London: Routledge, 1989). —— Cavalier Drama: An Historical Supplement to the Study of the Elizabethan and Restoration Stage (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964). Harrington Smith, John, ‘Shadwell, the Ladies and the Change in Comedy’, Modern Philology, 46 (1948–9), 22–33. Healy, Thomas, and Jonathan Sawday (eds.), Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Higgins, Patricia, ‘The Reactions of Women, with Special Reference to Women Petitioners’, in Brian Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 173–222. Hobby, Elaine, ‘The Fame of the Honest Margaret Cavendish’, MA thesis (Essex, 1979). —— Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing, 1649–88 (London: Virago, 1988). —— ‘Katherine Philips: Seventeenth-Century Lesbian Poet’, in Elaine Hobby and Chris White (eds.), What Lesbians Do in Books (London: Women’s Press, 1991), 183–204. —— ‘ “Discourse so Unsavoury’: Women’s Published Writings of the 1650s’, in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (eds.), Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740 (London: Batsford 1992), 16–32. Hughes, Derek, ‘The Masked Women Revealed; Or, the Prostitute and the Playwright in Aphra Behn Criticism’, Women’s Writing, 7/2 (2000), 149–64. —— The Theatre of Aphra Behn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Hull, Suzanne, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982). Jagodzinski, Cecile, Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Charlottesville, Va., and London: University of Virginia Press, 1999). Jones, Ann Rosalind, ‘Surprising Fame: Renaissance Gender Ideologies and Women’s Lyric’, in Nancy K. Miller (ed.), The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 74–95. —— ‘Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and SixteenthCentury Women’s Lyrics’, in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (eds.), The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality (London: Methuen, 1987), 39–72.

214

Bibliography

Jones, Major Francis, ‘Owen of Orielton’, The Pembrokeshire Historian: Journal of the Pembrokeshire Local History Society, 5 (1974), 11–32. Jones, Kathleen, A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673 (London: Bloomsbury, 1988). Jones, Marion, John Loftis, A. H. Scouten, and Richard Southern, The Revels History of Drama in English, v. 1660–1750 (New York and London: Methuen, 1976). Jones, S. Hester, E. ‘Some Literary Treatments of Friendship: Katherine Philips to Alexander Pope’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1993). Jowitt, Claire, ‘Imperial Dreams? Margaret Cavendish and the Cult of Elizabeth’, Women’s Writing, 4/3 (1997), 383–99. Keeble, N. H., The Literary Culture of Nonconformity (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987). Kelso, Ruth, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1956). Kubek, Elizabeth Bennett, ‘ “Night Mares of the Commonwealth”: Royalist Passion and Female Ambition in Aphra Behn’s The Roundheads’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, 17/2 (Autumn 1993), 88–103. Kate Lilley, ‘Blazing Worlds: Seventeenth-Century Women’s Utopian Writing’, in Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (eds.), Women, Texts and Histories (London: Routledge, 1992), 102–22. —— ‘True State Within: Women’s Elegies, 1640–1740’, in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (eds.), Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740 (London: Batsford, 1992), 72–92. —— ‘ “Dear Object’: Katherine Philips’s Love Elegies and their Readers’, in Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman (eds.), Women Writing, 1550–1750, a special issue of Meridian, the La Trobe University English Review, 18/1 (2001), 163–78. —— ‘ “Margaret Newcastle’ and the Rhetoric of Conjugality’, in Stephen Clucas (ed.), A Princely Brave Woman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 19–39. Loscocco, Paula, ‘ “Manly Sweetness”: Katherine Philips among the Neoclassicals’, HLQ 56/3 (1993), 259–79. Lougée, Carolyn, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). Loxley, James, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: the Drawn Sword (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). —— ‘Unfettered Organs: The Polemical Voices of Katherine Philips’, in Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (eds.) ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 230–48.

Bibliography

215

MacCarthy, Bridget, Women Writers: Their Contribution to the English Novel (Cork: Cork University Press, 1944). McDowell, Paula, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Mack, Phyllis, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in SeventeenthCentury England (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992). Maclean, Ian Walter, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature 1610–1652 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). Maguire, Nancy Klein, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Mambretti, Catherine Cole, ‘Orinda on the Restoration Stage’, Comparative Literature, 37/3 (1985), 233–51. Markley, Robert, ‘ “Be Impudent, Be Saucy, Forward, Bold, Touzing, and Lewd’: The Politics of Masculine Sexuality and Feminine Desire in Behn’s Tory Comedies’, in J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne (eds.), Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 114–40. Medoff, Jeslyn, ‘The Daughters of Behn and the Problem of Reputation’, in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (eds.), Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740 (London: Batsford, 1992), 33–54. Mendelson, Sara, ‘Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London: Methuen, 1985), 181–210. —— The Mental Worlds of Stuart Women: Three Studies (Brighton: Harvester, 1987). Miner, Earl, The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). Norbrook, David, ‘ “This Blushing Tribute of a Borrowed Muse’: Robert Overton and his Overturning of the Poetic Canon’, EMS 4 (1993), 220–66. —— ‘Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson: Identity, Ideology, and Politics’, In-Between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism, 9/1–2 (2000), 179–203. O’Donnell, Mary Ann, Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (New York and London: Garland, 1986). Oman, Carola, Henrietta Maria, 3rd edn. (London: White Lion, 1976). Owen, Susan, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). —— ‘Sexual Politics and Party Politics in Behn’s Drama, 1678–83’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15–29.

216

Bibliography

Pacheco, Anita, ‘Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko’, SEL 34 (1994), 491–506. Parry, Graham, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981). Pearson, Jacqueline, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642–1737 (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988). Potter, Lois, Secret Rites and Secret Writings: Royalist Literature, 1640–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Pritchard, Allan, ‘Marvell’s “The Garden”: A Restoration Poem?’, SEL 23/3 (1983), 371–88. Raber, Karen, Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 2001). Randall, Dale, Winter Fruit: English Drama 1642–1660 (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 318. Raylor, Timothy, Cavaliers, Clubs and Literary Culture (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994). Rees, Emma L. E., Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Revard, Stella P., ‘Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and the Female Pindaric’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), Representing Women in Renaissance England (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997). Roberts, Jeanne Addison, ‘Margaret Cavendish Plays with Shakespeare’, Renaissance Papers (1997), 113–24. Roberts, Josephine, ‘An Unpublished Literary Quarrel Concerning the Suppression of Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621)’, N&Q 22 (1977), 532–5. Root, Robert, ‘Aphra Behn, Arranged Marriage and Restoration Comedy’, Women and Literature, 5/1 (1977), 3–14. Rose, Mary Beth, ‘Gender, Genre and History: Seventeenth-Century English Women and the Art of Autobiography’, in Mary Beth Rose (ed.), Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 245–78. —— ‘ “Vigorous Most / When Most Unactive Deem’d”: Gender and the Heroics of Endurance in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Mary Astell’s Some Reflections Upon Marriage’, Milton Studies, 33 (1996), 83–109. Salzman, Paul (ed.), An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction, Worlds Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Sanders, Julie, ‘ “A Woman Write a Play!’: Jonsonian Strategies and the Dramatic Writings of Margaret Cavendish; or Did the Duchess Feel the Anxiety of Influence?’, in S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies

Bibliography

217

(eds.), Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama (London: Routledge, 1998), 293–305. —— ‘ “The Closet Opened”: A Reconstruction of “Private” Space in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish’, in Stephen Clucas (ed.), A Princely Brave Woman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 127–42. Sant, Patricia, and James N. Brown, ‘Two Unpublished Poems by Katherine Philips’, ELR 24/1 (1994), 211–28. Sharpe, Kevin, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Shifflett, Andrew, Stoicism, Politics and Literature in the Age of Milton: War and Peace Reconciled (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Shulman, Jeff, ‘An Ovidian Echo in Behn’s The Rover’, N&Q 229, ns 31 (1984), 345–6. Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, i. The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Smith, Hilda L., Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Urban, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1982). —— ‘ “A General War Amongst the Men . . . but None Amongst the Women”: Political Differences between Margaret and William Cavendish’, in Howard Nenner (ed.), Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain: Essays Presented to Lois Green Schwoerer (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 143–60. Smith, Nigel, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Spearing, Elizabeth, ‘Aphra Behn: The Politics of Translation’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 154–77. Spencer, Jane, The Rise of the Woman Novelist from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Spengemann, William, ‘The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 38/4 (1984), 384–414. Staves, Susan, Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1979). Stiebel, Arlene, ‘Not since Sappho: The Erotic in the Poems of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn’, in Claude J. Summers (ed.), Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context, special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality, 23/1–2 (1992), 153–64. Stranks, C. J., The Life and Writings of Jeremy Taylor (London: SPCK, 1952). Straznicky, Marta, ‘Reading the Stage: Margaret Cavendish and Commonwealth Closet Drama’, Criticism, 37/3 (1995), 355–90.

218

Bibliography

Summers, Claude J., and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999). Suzuki, Mihoko, Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Thomas, Keith, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present, 13 (1958), 42–62. Thomas, Patrick, Katherine Philips (‘Orinda’) (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988). Thompson, Roger, Women in Stuart England and America: A Comparative Study (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). Todd, Janet, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989). —— (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Tomlinson, Sophie, ‘ “My Brain the Stage”: Margaret Cavendish and the Fantasy of Female Performance’, in Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (eds.), Women, Texts and Histories, 1575–1750 (London: Routledge, 1992), 134–63. —— ‘Theatrical Women: The Female Actor in English Theatre and Drama, 1603–1670’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1996). —— ‘Harking Back to Henrietta: The Sources of Female Greatness in Katherine Philips’s Pompey’, in Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman (eds.), Women Writing, 1550–1750, a special issue of Meridian, the La Trobe University English Review, 18/1 (2001), 179–90. —— ‘Theatrical Vibrancy on the Caroline Court Stage: Tempe Restored and The Shepherd’s Paradise’, in Clare McManus (ed.), Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003), 186–203. Traub, Valerie, ‘The (In)significance of “Lesbian” Desire in Early Modern England’, in Jonathan Goldberg (ed.), Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 62–83. Turner, Alberta, ‘Queen Henrietta Maria and the University Poets’, N&Q 193 (1948), 270–2. Van Lennep, William (ed.), The London Stage 1660–1800, i. 1660–1700 (Carbondale, Ill.: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1965). Veevers, Erica, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Venuti, Laurence, ‘The Destruction of Troy: Translation and Royalist Cultural Politics in the Interregnum’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 23/2 (1993), 197–219. Walker, Kim, ‘ “New Prison”: Representing the Female Actor in Shirley’s The Bird in a Cage (1633)’, ELR 21 (1991), 385–400.

Bibliography

219

Wall, Wendy, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Weaver, Elissa, ‘Spiritual Fun: A Study of Sixteenth-Century Tuscan Convent Theater’, in Mary Beth Rose (ed.), Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 173–205. Whitaker, Katie, Mad Madge: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer and Romantic (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003). Wing, Donald, Short-Title Catalogue . . . 1641–1700, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945–51). Wiseman, Susan, ‘Gender and Status in Dramatic Discourse: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’, in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (eds.), Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740 (London: Batsford, 1992), 159–77. —— Aphra Behn (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996). —— Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Wykes, David, A Preface to Dryden (London: Longman, 1977). Zook, Melinda, ‘Contextualizing Aphra Behn: Plays, Politics and Party, 1679–1689’, in Hilda Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75–93.

This page intentionally left blank

Index actors, female 136, 137, 139, 149, 162, 197; see also theatre Agorni, Mirella 184 Alice, Egerton 19 Anne of Austria 40 Anselment, Raymond 49, 115 Antwerp 42, 158 Astell, Mary 7, 199 Aubrey, John 59 Aubrey, Mary 59, 60; see also Rosania authorship, female: changes with Restoration 150–1; and chastity 149–50, 196; and feminine display 31; as heroic eroticism 153–63; justification for 31, 33–4, 69; male support for 8, 77, 78, 196; and military engagement 109; and modesty 2; moral objections to 4, 31; opportunities under royalism 7–8, 197; safeguard against immorality 31–2; significant for men 12, 109, 119, 151; autonomy, and female writers 4–5 Ballaster, Ros 185, 189 Barash, Carol 6, 8, 83, 120, 178; royalism and friendship 57–8, 60 Barker, Jane 6, 200–1 Battigelli, Anna 12, 132 Beal, Peter 3, 4 Behn, Aphra 4, 6, 7, 8, 41, 149–95 as Astrea 157, 158 authorial image 163, 180–1 controlling representation 182–95 consciousness of 187, 188 critics of 3 and eroticized image 14, 176–82 heroic 196 and exile 13 feminism 199 and politics 151–2 on gender relations 163

influence of Ovid 183–4 and heroic femininity 153–60 liberating female voice 183–4, 185 Pindaric odes 177–82 as political writer 148, 180, 200 15, 181–2, 194–5 critical 190 Tory 153, 156, 157, 159, 186, 190 political agency 177 and politics 13–14, 198, 200 and royalism 5, 8 post-Restoration 197 secret instructions 149–95 as spy 158–9 and translation 193–5 use of ‘masculine’ style 178–9 verse 176–82 City Heiress, The 164, 167–71, 174–5, 193 Discovery of New Worlds, The 194 Dumb Virgin, The 182–6 Dutch Lover, The 156, 161 Feign’d Curtizans, The 162, 163 Luckey Chance, The 155, 161, 162, 163 Lycidus 154 Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave 186–93, 194 ‘Pastoral to Mr Stafford’, A 159 Roundheads, The 151, 161, 164, 171, 172, 173–4, 171–6 Rover, The 151, 164, 165–6, 168, 171 Second Part of the Rover, The 151, 164, 166, 169 Sir Patient Fancy 160, 163 Willing Mistress, The 156 Berkenhead, John 19, 59, 71 Boyle, Frances 100 Boyle, Roger 92–3, 94, 97 Brackley, Elizabeth 42, 60–1, 115, 147 Brackley, John 19 Brown, James N. 71 Brown, Laura 188

222

Index

Burnet, Gilbert 179–80, 181 Butler, Martin 142 Butler, Mary 83 Caesar in Pompey 87, 88–90, 91 cabinet, locked 69–70 Canfield, Douglas 176 Carbery, Countess of see Egerton, Alice Carbery, Earl of 62 Carlisle, Countess of (Lucy Hay) 113–14, 115 Caroline court 36, 42, 76, 77; aristocracy 100; culture 109, 113; female display 29–30 Cartwright, William 47, 49, 68, 72, 81; and Countess of Carlisle 113–14, 115; Loxley on 110; Philips’s elegy for 20, 59; Lady Errant, The 67, 80, 117–18; Royal Slave, The 48; Siege, The 70 Castiglione, Baldassare 33 Cavendish, Charles 34, 52 Cavendish, Elizabeth 17 Cavendish, Jane 42, 60–1, 115, 147 Cavendish, Margaret 1–2, 4, 6, 7, 16–55, 149 in Antwerp 20 aristocratic status 27–8, 30 and chastity 150 critics of 3, 16–17 domestic transgressions 32–3, 34 and fame 21, 37–55, 196 and feminine display 28–37 and feminized retreat 108, 129–32, 197, 200 as femme forte 42–3, 52 and heroism 14, 45–6 as heroic 13, 14, 17, 51–4, 55 husband’s support 10–11, 54 image as author 3, 5, 14 and Interregnum 129–32 and Lawes circle 17–21, 196 marriage 21–8, 42 as petitioner 22, 23–4, 27 as political writer 6, 11, 12–13, 108, 198, 201 royalist 8–10, 149 post-Restoration 128 and royalism 5, 6–7 self-promotion 10, 16, 34–5, 51–4 as dutiful 26, 27, 28

sources 134–6, 142–3 wifely role 10 duties 24–7 Assaulted and Pursued Chastity 43–4 Bell in Campo 41, 44, 45, 47, 48 Blazing World 46, 118, 128–32, 145 Convent of Pleasure, The 132, 134, 136–45, 147–8 Female Academy, The 132, 134–5, 137, 139–42, 145, 147–8 The Lady Contemplation 44 Life of . . . William Cavendishe 23, 24, 27, 54 Loves Adventures 43 Natures Pictures 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 38, 45, 54, 130–1, 132, 133 Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy 54 Orations of Divers Sorts 27, 36, 146 Philosophical and Physical Opinions 25, 32, 35, 37, 39 Philosophical Fancies 21, 22 Philosophical Letters 54 Playes 132 Poems and Fancies 1, 21, 31, 32, 34, 38, 39, 40 Sociable Letters 32, 34, 132 Worlds Olio, The 24, 27, 32, 36, 37–8, 39 writing representing husband 22, 23, 196 Cavendish, William 17, 61, 132, 140; devotion to Stuarts 25, 28; and feminine display 29; marriage to Margaret 21–8; participation of 196; and treatment of women 36–7; on wife’s authorship 35, 54; The Varietie 134–5, 139, 141, 142 Centlivre, Susannah 199 Charles I 69, 88, 107, 109; analogy in Behn 189; Philips on 122; and William Cavendish 25 Charles II 84, 99, 118, 123, 128, 144, 193; Behn on death of 181; defeat 115; Meal-Tub Plot 182; in Philips 86, 88–90, 93, 94; and William Cavendish 25, 28

Index Charleton, Walter 51 chastity: and female authorship 149–50, 196; and female heroism 51; secrecy and friendship 68–9 Cherbury, Lady Herbert see Egerton, Mary Chetwood, Knightly 102 chivalry 35–7 Christina, Queen 41 civil strife and friendship 65–6 Civil War: and Behn’s plays 152; and friendship writing 60, 71; and Pompey 87, 88–90, 93 Cleveland, John 30, 107, 110 closet drama 12, 13, 149, 197; Cavendish 132–48 Cockburn, Catherine Trotter 199 Collier, Regina 77 colonial relations 192–3; linguistic assimilation 193–4, 195 communities, female 132–48, 197; and lesbianism 139; as political agency 145; as self-sufficient 138, 142; sexuality 136, 138, 140, 142 conduct, feminine 76; appropriate 29, 32–3 confinement see retreat Corneille, Pierre 11, 58, 87, 91–2, 96, 99, 103; meanings of harmony 86 Corns, Thomas 120 Cotterell, Charles 90, 94 Cowley, Abraham 73, 86, 87, 171, 180, 184 Creech, Thomas 176 Cromwell, Oliver 113, 123 cross-dressing plots 43–4 Crouch, John 96, 116 Crouch, Nicholas 71 cultural assimilation 188–9, 191 Currer, Elizabeth 162 Dangerfield, Thomas 182; Don Tomazo 185, 186 Denham, John 95, 99, 100 Dering, Edward 19, 59, 71, 78 Dering, Mary 19, 62 D’Monté, Rebecca 140 domestic prudence as political 110–11, 112–13 Donne, John 118, 119, 123, 125

223

d’Orléans, Anne Marie 40 drama see theatre dress see feminine display Dring, Thomas 143 Dryden, John 98, 99, 101, 158, 194; The Hind and the Panther 190 Du Bosc, Jacques 33, 75–6 Duffy, Maureen 187 D’Urfé, Honoré 74, 158 education, female 135 Egerton, Alice 19, 62 Egerton, John 18 Egerton, Mary 19 empowerment 108–9 Evans, Willa McClung 20 Exclusion Crisis 13, 165; aftermath 150 exile 200; agency through retreat 12–13, 201; idealization of 13; and writing 10, 21 see also retreat Ezell, Margaret 2, 4, 60 fame: Behn and 154, 155; Cavendish desire for 16, 38–9, 40; honourable 39; meanings of 37–55 Fanshawe, Anne 22–3 Fanshawe, Richard 100 females: as agents of harmony 80–82, 95; beauty and virtuous soul 115; economic exploitation 165–6, 169–70, 172–3; injustice towards 164–5; liberation of voice of 183–4, 185; as embodiment of monarchy 115–17; role in Restoration 151–2; treatment of 35–7; William Cavendish on 36–7 feminine display 33; royalism and 28–37; and social hierarchy 29; wifely duty 26, 27–8 femininity 7; and authorship 69; and heroism 153–7, 159–61; idealized 12 feminism and politics 151–2 femme forte 40, 41, 42, 44, 47, 160; Henrietta Maria as 45–6, 49–50, 51; see also heroism, female femmes couvertes 4, 173; Cavendish as 22

224

Index

Fifth Monarchists 123; view of monarchy 121–2, 124 Finch, Anne 6, 200, 201 Finch, Francis 59, 76 Friendship 62–71, 72, 74, 78 Findlay, Alison 148 Fitzgerald, William 180 Fitzroy, Henry 161 Flecknoe, Richard 77 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier 194 French culture 74–5; femme forte 40 friendship 11, 72–82; as coding 60–1; and Horace 95–6; monarchy relocated in 118–19, 124; as political loyalty 60–1, 68; and political secrets 69–70; politics of 56–104; and royalism 57–8, 60; secrecy as chastity of 68–9; and social stability 65–6, 67; transcending death 72–3, 116; women as exponents 76, 78 friendship writing 57;as force for cohesion 78; as longing for monarch 58; male identification with 109; political subtexts 60–2, 70–1; and Restoration 58, 82; and royalism connected 57–8, 64–5, 110; royalist coding 59–72; significance for males 119, 151; ‘society’ of friendship 60, 65, 74

Harrington Smith, John 162 Harvey, Mary 59 Henrietta Maria, Queen 36, 40, 75, 77, 136; feminocentric court 109, 141, 142, 200; as heroic woman 42, 49–50, 51 (femme forte 45–6); and Lawes 81–2 heroism, female 11, 45–6, 48, 154, 196; Behn as heroic 154–6; Cavendish as heroic 17, 51–4, 55; and chastity 51; and femininity 153–7, 159–61; heroic eroticism 150, 156, 157, 196 (female authorship as 153–63; political dimension 161); martial aspect 40, 41–3, 44–5, 47 (as warrior 154–6, 159); in political context 46, 153–4; and political writing 14; and sexual honour 154–5 Herrick, Robert 120 Heywood, Thomas 41 Hobbes, Thomas 46 Hobby, Elaine 56 honnêteté 75–6 honour, gendering of 175 Horace (Philips) 95–7 Howard, Robert: The Committee 172–3, 174–5 Howell, James 69 Hughes, Derek 164, 167

Gagen, Jean 16 Gallagher, Catherine 7, 118, 128–9, 150 Gallery of Heroick Women 40–1, 42, 46 gender: expectations of 3, 197; literary representation of 7; and political writing 6; relations 163–4, 165, 166–7, 171 (and political coding 13); roles 135 (in Behn’s plays 151) Gerrard, John 83 Gilbert, Sandra 16 Gould, Robert 3 Greer, Germaine 3 Gubar, Susan 16 Gwyn, Nell 162

imprisonment as freedom 105–6; see also retreat interiority 12; in Blazing World 128–32; as centre of power 105, 106–7; in Philips’s verse 110–20; see also retreat Interregnum 58; and Behn 13, 197; and Blazing World 128–9; Cavendish and 129–32; empowering females 118; feminine display 30; friendship writing 58, 78, 82, 86; poetry 84, 103; and retreat 12, 111, 198; royalism 17; theatrical culture 19; see also friendship; retreat, feminized

harmony: metaphor in writing 79–80, 125; through translated verse 101, 102–3; women as agents 79–82, 96–7

James II 177–8, 186–7, 200; and Behn 181 (as analogy 189, 190); court 6 Jeffreys, John 59, 71

Index Jenkins, George 154 Jones, Ann Rosalind 26, 31 Jowitt, Claire 129 Killigrew, Anne 6, 200 Killigrew, Thomas: Thomaso; or, the Wanderer 165, 166 Knight, Mary 20 Lacy, John: The Old Troop 171 Lawes, Henry 17–18, 62, 71; circle 47, 59, 78, 79, 80, 120 (Cavendish and 10, 17–21, 196); and Philips 19, 20, 196; ‘To Mr Henry Lawes’ (Philips) 125; Ayres, and Dialogues 19, 20, 29, 81, 116; Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues 59 Lawes, William 79 Le Moyne, Pierre 40, 41, 51, 52 Lenton, Francis 29, 30 lesbian dimension 56–7, 139 L’Estrange, Roger 162 libertinism, sexual 14; see also Toryism Lilley, Kate 57, 58, 63–4, 111 linguistic representation 193–4 literary circles 10 Lloyd, David 51–2, 61 Lloyd, Mary 110, 111, 112–13, 124 Lluellin, Martin 112 Lockey, Thomas 51 Loscocco, Paula 98 Lovelace, Richard 105, 112 Loxley, James 8, 12, 57, 107, 109, 112; on Cartwright 110 Lucas, Charles 18, 24 Lucasia (Anne Owen) 66, 72, 73, 82, 83; and Finch 62, 78; and harmony 80–1; ‘Orinda to Lucasia parting’ 84–5; political coding 58, 60, 72, 117–18, 119; source of 70 Maclean, Ian 52 Maitland, Richard 187 Makin, Bathsua 135 males: courtesy to women 35–7; fostering female writing 77, 78; identifying with female writing 109, 119, 151; and political coding 13 Mambretti, Catherine Cole 94 Manley, Delarivier 199, 200

225

manuscript culture 11, 59 Markley, Robert 164, 167, 173 Marvell, Andrew 123, 126 Mary of Modena 200 Mary, Queen 178, 201; Behn’s poem to 181 May, Thomas 87 Mayne, Jasper 46–7, 48, 49, 50 Meal-Tub Plot 182 mercantilism 152, 169, 193, 198 Milton, John 126–7 Miner, Earl 8, 60, 116 Modena, Mary of 6 modesty and female authors 2 monarchy: and Fifth Monarchism 121–2, 124; reconstructed in friendship 118–19, 124, 130–1 Monmouth, James, Duke of 177 Montagu, Walter 76; The Shepheard’s Paradise 142–4 Moore, Horatio 79 Moseley, Humphrey 47, 110, 115 Newcastle, duke of see Cavendish, William Norbrook, David 123–4, 125–6 O’Donnell, Mary Ann 156 Orinda (Philips) 60, 66, 69, 72, 73, 77; and authorial image 3; and Finch 62; ‘Orinda to Lucasia parting’ 84–5; political coding 58, 113, 117, 118, 119 Orrery see Boyle, Roger Osborne, Dorothy 16 Overton, Ann 123, 124 Overton, Robert 12, 123–4, 125–7; and relocated power 124–6 Ovid: Metamorphoses 183–4 Owen, Anne 58, 62, 83–5; see also Lucasia Owen, Dorothy 110–11, 112–13, 116, 121, 124 Owen, John 111 Owen, Susan 151, 164, 167, 175–6 Oxford circle 46, 47, 49, 50, 110 Pacheco, Anita 193 Paulet, John 40 peace, women and 95–6 Pepys, Samuel 16 petitioner, Cavendish as 22, 23–4, 27 Philips, James 59, 83

226

Index

Philips, Katherine 6, 7, 55, 56–104, 123, 201 authorial development 2, 10 conflicting loyalties 63 elegy for Cartwright 20, 59 feminine chastity 150 friendship poems 66–77, 110 post-Restoration 83–5 heroic depictions of 155, 157 interiority in verse 110–20 and Interregnum 129, 130 justifying authorship 69 and Lawes 19, 20 lesbian coding 56–7 and Overton 124–7 as political writer 11–12, 13, 14, 57, 58, 108–9, 198 and royalism 5, 6, 8, 149, 196 and puritanism 120–8 resistance to publication 3–4 retreat 108–10, 146, 197, 200 politically engaged 132, 148 verse 110–20 as translator 97–104, 19 ‘A Dialogue between Lucasia and Orinda’ 73 ‘For Regina’ 77 ‘A Friend’ 73 ‘Friendship’ 66–7 ‘Friendship’s Mysterys’ 117, 119, 124 Horace 95–7, 160 ‘In Memory of Mrs E. Hering’ 121 ‘L’accord du bien’ 67 ‘L’amitié’ 66, 69 ‘Lucasia’ 82 ‘On Mr Francis Finch’ 71 ‘Orinda to Lucasia parting’ 84 Poems 122, 197 ‘The Soule’ 126–7 ‘To Mr Henry Lawes’ 79, 80, 125 ‘To my Lucasia’ 81 ‘To the excellent Mrs A.O.’ 66 ‘To the Memory of . . . Mr WIL: CARTWRIGHT’ 72–3 ‘To the noble Palaemon’ 70–1 Pompey 86–95, 97, 100, 103 see also friendship writing; Orinda ‘Philo-Philippa’ 85, 99, 101, 103 Philomela 183–4 Pindaric style 14, 177–81, 182; as masculine 178, 198

Pix, Mary 199, 200 Platonic friendship and love 36, 72, 74, 77, 116, 130, 201; Church relocated in 119–20; and female communities 138, 142; monarchy relocated in 118, 124; as retreat 117 plays and politics 163–76; see also politics; theatre political coding, royalist 6; and gender relations 13; and male readers 13 political writing see under Behn, Aphra; Cavendish, Margaret; Philips, Katherine politics: and feminism 151–2; and plays 163–76 Pompey (Philips) 3, 86–95, 97, 100, 103 Popish Plot 13, 159, 165, 182; aftermath 150 post-Restoration poems 84–6 Potter, Lois 68 Powell, Vavasor 122, 124 précieux culture/préciosité 62, 74, 75, 110, 142 Pritchard, Allan 123 Prynne, William 136 publication, shame of 2; see also authorship, female Puritanism 122, 123, 161, 174; and Philips 120–8; writers 120 Quakerism 121 Randall, Dale 143 Rees, Emma 9, 12, 21 Renaissance 2, 4 representation, controlling 182–95 Restoration 2, 13, 25; change in writing 151; court culture 37; female political agency 150–1; and friendship 58 (writing 58, 61, 82–3); and reconciliation 95, 96–7, 104; theatre 161, 162; translation 97–103; verse 82–6 retirement see retreat retreat, feminized 105–48, 197; affirming royalist values 108; Cavendish on 128–32; as centre of power 12, 105, 106–7, 113, 127–8, 130, 132, 139, 197; consolidating authority 147;

Index empowerment through 12, 105, 108–9, 197; as guardian of monarchy 113–14; imaginary kingdoms 129–30; as political engagement 129, 148 Revard, Stella 178 Rosania (Mary Aubrey) 60, 69, 78, 83, 115; eulogy of 113, 116, 146 Roscommon, Earl of 100–1, 102, 103, 194 Rowe, Elizabeth Singer 199 royalism 13; appeal of 6; enhancing female agency 7; and female authors’ image 5; and friendship 57–8, 60; literary representation of gender 7; restrictions 129; and women’s writing 2, 6–7; see also Restoration Salzman, Paul 185 Sanders, Julie 136, 137 Sant, Patricia M. 71 Scot, William 158 secrecy and friendship 68–70 sexuality: and political agency 176; Restoration 152; sexual desire 136–7, 140; sexual freedom 162, 163–4 Shadwell, Thomas 162 Shifflett, Andrew 86, 88, 90 Shirley, James 136, 137, 140, 141; Bird in a Cage, The 136, 138–9, 141 Smith, Hilda 7 Smith, Nigel 87, 93, 120 social stability and friendship 65–6, 67 Spenser, Edmund 42 Stafford, Viscount (William Howard) 159 Stanley, Thomas 115, 117 Stansby, John 3 Straznicky, Marta 145–6 Stuarts 106; and sexual freedom 14; see also retreat Surinam 158, 190–1, 193 Sydney, Dorothy 41 Tatham, John: The Rump 171, 172 Taylor, Jeremy 72, 76, 120; A Discourse of . . . Friendship 62–70 Temple, William 16, 96

227

theatre 196; all-female drama 77, 137, 143–4; court drama 137–8; female actors 149, 162, 197; political function 161; in private arena 145–6; re-establishment of 14, 149, 197; as royalist resistance 145; and sexuality 137, 138, 199; suppression of 115, 132, 145, 149 Thomas, Elizabeth 101 Thomas, Patrick 62, 82–3 tolerance 190, 192 Tomlinson, Sophie 19, 42, 45–6, 75, 140–1; on female acting 136, 137, 139 Toryism 157, 159; Behn on 170, 174, 175; and erotic freedom 163–4, 167; and female conduct 14; and feminism 151–2; ideology 168–9, 170–1, 196 (sexual 167–8); and theatre 162–3 Towers, William 49 Townshend, Aurelian 79 translation 97–104; English 99; (as act of supremacy 97, 100); and feminine virtues 98–9; fluency 99–100; gender of 184–5; nationalistic rhetoric 102, 194; Philips 97–104 (and Pompey 86–95); relationship with author 101; rhymed 100, 101 (as metaphor 101) treatment of women see under females unity and peace, female poets as advocates 96–7 Valentine, Henry 125 van Diepenbeke, Abraham 52 van Schurman, Anna Maria 135 Vaughan, Henry 59, 68, 85, 98, 106–8 Veevers, Erica 75 Venuti, Laurence 99–100 Vicars, John 99 vices, Cavendish on 39–40 Walker, Kim 137, 138 Waller, Edmund 91–2, 177 Walter, William 18 Warren, George 191–2, 193 Whiggism 150, 151, 164, 168; Behn on 170, 174, 175; mercantilism 14, 152, 169, 193, 198; repression 167; and theatre 162–3

228

Index

wife: duties 24–7; as husband’s property 26; self-display 26, 27, 28–37 William of Orange 162, 201 Wilson, John 18–19; The Cheats 171 Winchester, Marquis of 42, 46 Wiseman, Sue 140, 167 withdrawal see retreat

women see authorship; females; wife Worcester, Battle of 115 writing see authorship Wroth, Mary 31 Wycherley, William 154 Zook, Melinda 164, 170