Why choose as my next read The Social Companions, which never acted in its day? First, I wanted to get a woman writer in, right at the start, but I’m not ready to tackle Aphra Behn yet. Second, Cavendish herself is such an interesting person: forget Shelley, Cavendish is the godmother of science fiction--or so it seems. I’m on fire (haha) to read her proto-SF book The Blazing World, but I may not have time to get to it this year, given this project.
The Drama of Closet Drama
While I’m interested in Cavendish, I’m fascinated by her plays. Closet dramas (plays not written for the public stage) are close to my heart, as someone who writes and writes and never publishes. There’s something to be said for just writing to please yourself. After all, although I’m writing this for a blog, it seems unlikely anyone will ever read it. This letter to the readers of one of her collections of plays speaks to me:
“I make no question but that my plays will be censured, and those censures severe, but I hope not malicious; but they will perchance say that my plays are too serious, by reason there is no ridiculous jest in them, nor wanton love, nor impossibilities; also ‘tis likely they will say that there are not plots, nor designs, nor subtle contrivances, and the like; I answer that the chief plots of my plays were to employ my idle time, the designs to please and entertain my readers, and the contrivance was to was to join edifying profit and delight together, that my readers may neither lose their time, not grow weary in the reading; but if they find my plays neither edifying, nor delightful, I shall be sorry; but if they find either, I shall be pleased, and if they find both, I shall much rejoice; that my time hath been employed to some good use.”
So yes, she did publish them (she even wrote a guide on how to read plays that aren't staged), but they were never acted until recently. And she was right about the censure: Earlier critics seem to have dismissed her plays and poetry, with maybe a little more respect for her natural philosophy (the early modern forerunner to science), and, lately, The Burning World. Color me unsurprised that one of the few women of the period to publish plays under her own name doesn’t get treated well by male critics (though Virginia Woolf piled on, too). They seem to be trying to top each other in reviling her work--especially her poetry and plays. Maybe that’s changing, though? The Paris Review published a pretty fantastic reevaluation of her work last year.
The Play Itself
Again, I only have a day with this play, but I’d be very happy to spend however long it takes to read through her other writing once this project is done. I’ll definitely come back to her plays this year.
So, since I’ve spent most of my time today thinking and reading and writing about Cavendish herself instead of her plays, I’ll just say a little before it’s time for me to quit for the day.
Cavendish was married to a Cavalier Duke, and lived in exile with Queen Henrietta Maria. When money ran out she returned to England to see if she might profit from the sale by Cromwell’s government of her husband’s estates. She didn’t. That clearly informs The Sociable Companions.
The plot revolves around a group of women--Peg Valourosa, Jane Fullwit, and Anne Sensible--who, tired of watching their ruined Cavalier brothers drink and gamble away the sad remains of their fortunes, decide to hunt for rich husbands. With the help of a semi-bawd, Mistress Informer, “an old decayed gentlewoman,” these Sociable Companions trick and cheat their way into marriage to the lawyer Sergeant Plead-all, the physician Doctor Cure-all, and a usurer named only Get-all.
What’s unusual is that, after some sad debates on poverty (the brothers contemplate becoming highwaymen) and some farcical scenes in a tavern (lots of healths are drunk, and argued over), and some pathetic pleading from the sisters, the brothers all agree to help them in their scheme, instead of opposing them in the name of honor or some such. The fact that the women are so nakedly ambitious and that they’re not punished for it is remarkable. The amount of agency they have, and the extent to which they drive the plot and save their families is contrasted by their incapable brothers, who are damaged and adrift when the army is disbanded at the beginning of the play.
Some of the Sociable Companions’ tricks are very funny, if a bit rarefied. The first, in which Peg sues Get-all in for impregnating her in a mock spiritual court (made up of her brother and his friends), revolves around the conceit that they admittedly never had sex, or even spoke. You can definitely feel the hand of the philosophically inclined Cavendish here. There’s a great (and maybe risque) part in which the fake Doctor Feel-pulse explains:
“All the Platonicks do affirm that there may be a conjunction of souls, although the bodies be at a fair distance; and I am absolutely of that opinion, and that the idea of a man by the help of a strong imagination, may beget a child; which is sufficiently proved, for she seeing Mr. Get-all enter into the house of Mr. Inkhorn the Scrivener, viewed his person so exactly, that when she was in bed, a strong imagination seized on her, by which she conceived a child.”
Get-all gives in, and becomes her Platonick husband, more out of a sense of inevitability than because he believes it. Plenty of jokes about Platonick cuckoldry, why the child needs a wet-nurse, and so on follow, until Get-all finally realizes that he likes the cut of his imaginary wife’s jib, and then the following scene takes place.
Get-all: My imaginary wife, how does our imaginary son?
Peg: Very well, sir.
Get-all: But doth he corporeally suck?
Peg: Yes sir.
Get-all: I wonder at that; but my greatest wonder is, how that an incorporeal conception, should come to be a corporeal child!
Peg: ‘Tis like spirits that take bodies, sir.
Get-all: But may I not lawfully get you with child after a corporeal manner?
Peg: Yes, surely sir.
Get-all: Then let us get to bed, and try if I can get you with child after the old corporeal way, for I never know when this child was gotten.
From there, Peg eventually persuades him that he ought to marry her first and even confesses that the imaginary child isn’t his (it’s her brother’s bastard), and he takes the news very well, thanks to her honesty--and probably because he’s anxious to make love after the old corporeal way.
The other tricks (which are also suits) go similarly, and the rich men, once convinced, even help trick the other rich marks. It gets a bit repetitive by the third time through, but it also speeds up. There’s plenty of crossdressing (both men as women, and women as men) to spice it up, too.
Although the goal is still a traditional marriage for all the trickster women, the agency they show in both their choosing their husbands/marks, and the wit which they catch them, is pretty amazing in a 350-year-old play.
The Evils of Marriage
This is all contrasted by the example of one last of the Sociable Companions, Prudence Save-all, whose family is actually rich, and who gets assailed by horrible suitors throughout the play. She finally chooses a rich old suitor who offers to marry her without any dowry, and the other suitors try to sue her, she has the last word. In a very long speech, she delivers a stinging rebuke of exactly the kinds of marriage seen in more typical Restoration-era plays:
“Concerning the Church and State, since they do allow of buying and selling young maids to men to be their wives, they cannot condemn those maids that make their bargain to their own advantage and choose rather to be bought than sold, and I confess I am one of the number of those; for I’ll rather choose an old man that buys me with his wealth than a young man, whom I must purchase with my wealth; who, after he has wasted my estate, may sell me to misery and poverty. Wherefore our sex may well pray, from young men’s ignorance and follies, from their pride, vanity and prodigality, their gaming, quarrelling, drinking and whoring, their pocky and diseased bodies, their mortgages, debts, and sergeants, their whores and bastards, and from all such sorts of vices and miseries that are frequent among such young men, good Lord deliver us.”
While this isn’t the most elegantly written play I’ve ever read, it was far, far better than I expected it to be, based on what I read while I was working on my list of plays for this year. And the proto-feminism in it makes it all the more compelling a read. I’m definitely going to put as many of her plays as I can get my hands on on this year’s list. More thoughts about her work to come.
If you want to sample Cavendish’s works, you should definitely take a look at the Digital Cavendish project, and you might also also visit the Margaret Cavendish Society.
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