Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Textual note
- Introduction: consummate play
- Part I “COME … AND PLAY”: CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, BESIDE THE POINT
- Part II DESIRING WOMEN IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
- 5 “How strangely does himself work to undo him”: (male) sexuality in The Revenger's Tragedy
- 6 “My body bestow upon my women”: the space of the feminine in The Duchess of Malfi
- 7 “I(t) could not choose but follow”: erotic logic in The Changeling
- 8 “Old men's tales”: legacies of the father in ’Tis Pity She's a Whore
- 9 The passionate shepherdess: the case of Margaret Cavendish
- Afterword: for(e)play
- Notes
- List of Works cited
- Index
9 - The passionate shepherdess: the case of Margaret Cavendish
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Textual note
- Introduction: consummate play
- Part I “COME … AND PLAY”: CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, BESIDE THE POINT
- Part II DESIRING WOMEN IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
- 5 “How strangely does himself work to undo him”: (male) sexuality in The Revenger's Tragedy
- 6 “My body bestow upon my women”: the space of the feminine in The Duchess of Malfi
- 7 “I(t) could not choose but follow”: erotic logic in The Changeling
- 8 “Old men's tales”: legacies of the father in ’Tis Pity She's a Whore
- 9 The passionate shepherdess: the case of Margaret Cavendish
- Afterword: for(e)play
- Notes
- List of Works cited
- Index
Summary
Examining so many images of female desire (and expressions of anxiety about that desire) inevitably raises questions about how a woman writer might approach the problems they pose. The plays of Margaret Cavendish, written somewhat later than the other texts in this study, provide us with an excellent vantage point for contemplating those problems. For although her preferred genre was typically not tragedy, but comedy – a more suitable genre for a woman – Cavendish repeatedly engages with and challenges the formal and ideational perspectives of her tragic forebears.
Cavendish's plays are well known for their disregard for conventional dramatic structure and they have occasioned a fair amount of critical controversy as a result. The traditional way of approaching this disregard has been to dismiss the texts and their author completely. Critical comments have ranged from Virginia Woolf's famous evaluation of these “higgledy-piggledy” writings – “What a vision of loneliness and riot … as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death” – to later twentieth-century exclamations of frustration and despair: the plays, we are told, are “utterly undramatic,” merely “a collection of disconnected scenes.”
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- Information
- Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England , pp. 117 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009