Table Of Content01 front (1-4) 1/7/02 12:06 PM Page 1
Review Copy
This electronic material is under
copyright protection and is
provided to a single recipient
for review purposes only.
BELL IN CAMPO
THE SOCIABLE COMPANIONS
01 front (1-4) 1/7/02 12:06 PM Page 2
Review Copy
01 front (1-4) 1/7/02 12:06 PM Page 3
Review Copy
BELL IN CAMPO
THE SOCIABLE COMPANIONS
Margaret Cavendish
edited by Alexandra G.Bennett
broadview literary texts
01 front (1-4) 1/7/02 12:06 PM Page 4
Revi©ew CAolepxyandra G.Bennett
All rights reserved.The use of any part of this publication reproduced,transmitted in
any form or by any means,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,recording,orother-
wise,or stored in a retrieval system,without prior written consent of the publisher –
or in the case of photocopying,a licence from (Canadian Copyright Licensing
Agency) One Yonge Street,Suite , Toronto, – is an infringement of the
copyright law.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Newcastle,Margaret Cavendish,Duchess of,1624?-1674
Bell in Campo,and,The sociable companions
(Broadview literacy texts)
Includes bibliographical references.
---
. Newcastle,Margaret Cavendish,Duchess of,-. Bell in Campo.
. Newcastle,Margaret Cavendish,Duchess of,-. Sociable companions.
. Newcastle,Margaret Cavendish,Duchess of,-—Criticism and interpre-
tation..Great Britain—Civil War,-. I.Bennett,Alexandra G.,- II.
Title. III.Title:Sociable companions. IV.Series.
. ’. --
Broadview Press Ltd.is an independent,international publishing house,incorporated
in .
North America:
P.O.Box ,Peterborough,Ontario,Canada
California Road,Orchard Park,
TEL:() -;FAX:() -;
E-MAIL:[email protected]
United Kingdom:
Thomas Lyster Ltd
Unit,Ormskirk Industrial Park
Old Boundary Way,Burscough Road
Ormskirk,Lancashire
TEL:() ;FAX:() ;E-mail:[email protected]
Australia:
St.Clair Press,P.O.Box ,Rozelle,
TEL:() -;FAX:() -
www.broadviewpress.com
Broadview Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program,Ministry of Canadian Heritage,
Government of Canada.
Broadview Press is grateful to Professor Eugene Benson and to Professor
L.W.Conolly for advice on editorial matters for the Broadview Literary Texts series.
Text design and composition by George Kirkpatrick
PRINTED IN CANADA
01 front (1-4) 1/7/02 12:06 PM Page 5
Review Copy
02 frontend (5-22) 1/7/02 12:01 PM Page 5
Review Copy
Contents
Acknowledgements •
Introduction •
Margaret Cavendish:A Brief Chronology •
A Note on the Texts •
Bell in Campo •
The Sociable Companions •
Appendix A:Selections from Margaret Cavendish’s Auto-
biography •
Appendix B:The Purposes of Plays:Selections from Prefaces
to Playes () •
Appendix C:Warrior Women and Royalist Disorder:Letters
from the Front •
Appendix D:Warrior Women:The Queen and the
War •
Appendix E:Marriage Markets:Selections from Margaret
Cavendish’s Sociable Letters () •
Selected Bibliography •
02 frontend (5-22) 1/7/02 12:01 PM Page 6
Review Copy
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to several colleagues, particularly Anne Shaver,
Gweno Williams,Sophie Tomlinson,and Stephen Clucas,who
have been generous in sharing their work and ideas in various
forums,as well as to Mical Moser at Broadview Press for think-
ing that the vague suggestion I made for an edition of
Cavendish plays three years ago was a good idea. I am also
grateful to Mrs.Mary Clapinson,Keeper of Special Collections
and Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library,Oxford,for
permission to quote from the Bodleian’s manuscript collec-
tions. Most of all,I would like to thank my father,Greg Ben-
nett,for his help in transcribing The Sociable Companionsand for
clarifying several obscure classical references therein;my moth-
er,Gaynor Bennett,for her patience and continued interest in
what may have seemed like an endless project;and both of my
parents together for their boundless support.
02 frontend (5-22) 1/7/02 12:01 PM Page 7
Review Copy
Introduction
Life,Career,and Reputation
Among English women writers prior to Aphra Behn,few have
become so provocative to scholars in the past twenty years as
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Proto-feminist,
semi-scientist, philosopher, poet, playwright, fantasist—her
seemingly endless inventiveness has provided modern readers
with a wealth of material. A staunch Royalist and lady-in-
waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria during the years of the
English Civil War,she lived for sixteen years in exile,married a
man considerably higher in the social scale than herself despite
the disapproval of her royal mistress, and ultimately became
famous (or infamous) for her self-designed clothing, for her
flamboyant personal style,and (not least) for her prolific writ-
ing and publishing.
Unlike those of many of the women who took up the pen
during the seventeenth century,Cavendish’s personal history is
remarkably well detailed, thanks to her having composed
A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life, an autobio-
graphy appended to the first edition of her collected stories
and poems, Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life
(). According to this account,the earliest years of her life
do not appear to have been presciently fraught with excite-
ment. Born in ,Margaret Lucas was the youngest of eight
children. Her father, Thomas Lucas of St. John’s, near Col-
chester,was a gentleman who had to go into exile temporarily
after killing a man in a duel.He died during Margaret’s infancy,
leaving her mother, Elizabeth Lucas, daughter of John
Leighton,gentleman of London,to raise her three sons and five
daughters herself. The Lucas girls were accordingly given a
basic education in the skills expected of seventeenth-century
gentlewomen: reading, writing, sewing, music, and dancing,
while their mother enjoyed indulging their “honest pleasures,
and harmless delights” with the proceeds from the substantial
02 frontend (5-22) 1/7/02 12:01 PM Page 8
Review Copy
family estate.¹ Margaret writes that she and her siblings “were
bred virtuously, modestly, civilly, honourably, and on honest
principles: as for plenty, we had not only, for necessity, con-
venience, and decency, but for delight and pleasure to a
superfluity;’tis true,we did not riot,but we lived orderly”and
in apparently mutual concord throughout her childhood.²
By her late teens, however, Margaret was determined to
become a lady-in-waiting at the court of Queen Henrietta
Maria,who had removed herself to Oxford at the outset of the
struggles that had turned into civil war by . Despite the
fears of her mother and misgivings of her siblings,she moved to
the Queen’s court in . Almost immediately,her brothers’
and sisters’reservations about the possible consequences of her
inexperience of the world outside of their home proved justi-
fied:terrified that she might inadvertently say or do something
immodest,Margaret was so timid she barely opened her mouth
in her new surroundings. Not surprisingly,such shyness earned
her the reputation of a fool in a world of courtiers and patrons
where wit ruled supreme. At the same time, the idyllic envi-
ronment of her childhood was devastated as her mother and
brothers, staunch Royalists all, were “sequestered from their
estates,and plundered of all their goods”by the Parliamentary
government.³ Faced with familial ruin amid the tempestuous
life of a royal servant, she must have felt adrift in more ways
than one when she took ship for exile in France with the rest
of the Queen’s household in .
Rescue from at least some of her miseries,however,was to
come in Paris,where she met William Cavendish,then Marquis
(later Earl and Duke) of Newcastle.Unlike his fellow courtiers,
who ignored or mocked the bashful girl in their midst,New-
castle took a fancy to her, writing her flirtatious letters and
poems and ultimately falling in love with her. His first wife
having recently died, the Marquis proposed to the deeply
A True Relation ofMy Birth,Breeding,and Life,as appended to Natures Pictures Drawn
by Fancies Pencil to the Life(London:),.It is interesting to note that A True
Relationwas omitted from the second edition of Natures Picturesin .
A True Relation,.
A True Relation,.
02 frontend (5-22) 1/7/02 12:01 PM Page 9
Review Copy
smitten lady-in-waiting; she married him in despite the
disapprobation of the Queen, who felt that the differences of
thirty years and several social ranks between them were too
much of an impediment to be overcome easily. The couple
lived in Paris and then in Antwerp during the years of the
English Interregnum;since Newcastle’s estates,like those of the
Lucas family,had been appropriated and looted by the Parlia-
mentary army,they were forced like so many other exiled gen-
try to live mostly on credit, with occasional monetary relief
smuggled over from home.
This precarious financial situation ultimately gave rise to
Margaret Cavendish’s public literary career. In , she
returned temporarily to England in an attempt to retrieve her
husband’s sequestered lands and to raise some money to allevi-
ate the costs of living on the Continent. Though the trip was
financially unsuccessful (her shyness once again entrapped her
tongue,rendering her unable even to address the Parliamentary
committee meeting she attended),her publication of Poems and
Fancies and Philosophicall Fancies that year gained her the atten-
tion of some members of the London reading public. Hungry
for fame,from that point onwards she continued to produce—
and, unusually, to publish—her works, writing both while in
exile and once she returned to England after the Restoration
of Charles II in . She and her husband took up residence
at his family home of Welbeck,with the notable exception of
her visit to London in ,during which she became the first
woman ever to be invited to visit a session of the recently-
founded Royal Society. She managed to compose fourteen
printed folio volumes of generically diverse writings by the
time of her death in ;fittingly,the inscription on the tomb
she shares with her husband in Westminster Abbey proclaims
that “This Dutches was a wise,wittie,and Learned Lady,which
her many Bookes do well testifie.”
Margaret Cavendish was one of the most prolific writers of
any genre or gender in the seventeenth century, expounding
her views and extending her creative reach into prose fiction,
poetry, plays, scientific and philosophical treatises, biography,
autobiography,orations,and letters. Moreover,she was one of
