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Too Theatrical? Female Subjectivity in Caroline and Interregnum Drama

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SOURCE: Tomlinson, Sophie Eliza. “Too Theatrical? Female Subjectivity in Caroline and Interregnum Drama.” Women's Writing 6, no. 1 (1999): 65-79.

[In the following essay, Tomlinson compares Shirley's Hyde Park to a play written by aristocratic women to illuminate the issue of female subjectivity. She finds in Shirley's female characters a developing assertion of the female self and feminine will.]

One of the funniest and most affecting moments in Emma Thompson's screen adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1995) occurs when Thompson, as Elinor Dashwood, bursts into what the novel describes as “tears of joy” on hearing from Edward Ferrars that he is yet unmarried. Thompson's performance of Elinor's overpowering emotion gains appreciably from its theatrical display as compared with its narration in the novel. As viewers we have witnessed Elinor's subduing of her feelings for Edward and her resignation to a state of unfulfilment. The sudden reversal of that expectation of unhappiness unleashes a show of feeling all the more cathartic for its worldlessness.

If I were to search for a comparable moment of unconstrained emotion in seventeenth-century drama, it would be the scene of Calantha's self-willed death in John Ford's Caroline tragedy The Broken Heart (1629). Paradoxically, the moment in which Calantha commands her heartstrings to crack is at once a display of supreme self-control and emotional abandon. Calantha's death is as immaculately orchestrated as Cleopatra's; the vital difference is the absence of an asp or human agent to bring it about. Ford's heroine dies from sheer intensity of grief: the spectacular breaking of her heart represents inward feeling made outward, subjectivity made theatrical.

Indeed, it was seventeenth-century drama, the immediate context of Renaissance drama by women, which allowed conceptions of female subjectivity to appear as fluid, shifting and most importantly, emergent.1 A key reason for this development was the change in what was permissible on stage, namely the representation, that is the voicing and embodying, of female roles by women themselves. What had previously been hidden was made emphatically outward in a burst of theatrical display.2

With respect to Caroline drama in particular, I would argue that this shift in the conception of female subjectivity was attributable to the increasing cultural visibility of women, specifically in the domain of theatrical performance. Plays written for both court and commercial theatres manifest a concern with the issues of liberty, civility and agency that derive from a sympathetic interest in female selfhood. At the same time these plays demonstrate a new attitude towards female theatricality, hitherto a focus of ambivalence in Renaissance drama and English culture in general. In this new disposition, the theatrical woman is viewed sympathetically, her outward identity seen either as socially imposed or as a ruse to protect her emotional self. Interestingly, this depiction of femininity is anticipated in a work by a woman, Lady Mary Wroth's prose romance, the Urania (1621). Heather Weidemann argues that in the Urania Wroth represents women “not so much as spectacles as revelatory subjects; their appearances often point to a subjective female identity which is hidden but nonetheless authentic”.3 Significantly, this sympathetic construction of female theatricality also informs the work of Wroth's admirer, Ben Jonson: in his late comedy The New Inn (1629), Lady Frampul's “excellent acting” functions as a vehicle of self-discovery in her relationship with her suitor, Lovel; indeed, in this play, Jonson represents feigning as not merely a female vice (though it is that too) but as the means of reconstituting and reconciling an entire family.

Cultural change offers a means of accounting for shifts in the literary conception of subjectivity. Occasionally a text offers a glimpse of changing mores, allowing speculation about the porousness of social and ideological boundaries. Take the use of the word “theatrical” in this excerpt from Sir Francis Osborne's Historical Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James (1658), with reference to Elizabeth I's self-presentation:

Her Sex did beare out many impertinencies in her words and actions, as her making Latin speeches in the Universities, and professing her selfe in publique a Muse, then thought something too Theatrical for a virgine Prince.4

Osborne constructs Elizabeth's theatricality as conflicting with her femininity, or her status as a “virgine Prince”. Elizabeth's display of her learning and presentation of herself as a muse are forms of assertiveness which Osborne represents as “impertinencies” in respect of the Queen's gender. At the same time, Osborne's account of Elizabeth suggests a subtle shift of response towards this performative femininity: the Queen's behaviour, he writes, was “then thought something too Theatrical for a virgine Prince”. His remark testifies to a shift of attitude, and an alteration of circumstance, taking place between Elizabeth's reign and the time of Osborne's writing shortly before the Stuart Restoration. While Elizabeth was extolled as a Phoenix, authoritative female self-fashioners from a later generation are more numerous: Queens Anna and Henrietta Maria, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and Katherine Philips, the “matchless Orinda”, come immediately to mind. It was the innovative performances of the Danish Anna and the French Henrietta which made possible the appearance of women on the professional Restoration stage: a watershed in theatrical history and in seventeenth-century English culture.5

What changes were brought about, with regard to the dramatic representation of female subjectivity, by the presence of women on stage? And what was the relationship of women dramatists to the shifts in seventeenth-century theatrical culture I am describing? This article addresses the latter question by focusing on The Concealed Fancies, a comedy of courtship written by the sisters Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley in the mid-1640s. I approach this female-authored play via a discussion of the most sparkling social comedy of the preceding decade, James Shirley's Hyde Park, (1632, published 1637), together with the court drama performed by Henrietta Maria and her ladies in January 1633, Walter Montagu's The Shepherd's Paradise (published 1659). This may seem a strange yoking: a comedy of manners written for the London stage, a court pastoral and a provincial drama by two young women, which we have no definite knowledge was ever performed.6The Concealed Fancies offers a fascinating window onto women's perception of themselves as actors in a network of familial and social relations. I believe the view of femininity, and of female self-fashioning opened up by their text, increases in interest when read in the context of the Caroline drama of Montagu and Shirley, both of whom broach new conceptions of female subjectivity and its dynamic relationship with theatricality. By juxtaposing these plays I will show that in respect to courtship and marriage The Concealed Fancies exhibits a savoir-faire quite different from the emotionally revealing drama written for the professional theatres.7

In the same year that Shirley's Hyde Park was licensed, and probably performed by the Queen's Men at the Phoenix theatre, the lawyer Thomas Edgar published his emended and enlarged version of The Lawes Resolution of Women's Rights or The Lawes Provision for Women (1632). Following his citation of God's cursing of Eve in the third chapter of Genesis, Edgar adds the following comment:

See here the reason … that Women have no voyse in Parliament, They make no Lawes, they consent to none, they abrogate none. All of them are understood either married or to bee married and their desires or [are] subject to their husband, I know no remedy though some women can shift it well enough.8

The modification “though some women can shift it well enough” suggests the gap between ideology and practice, a gap borne out by legal and dramatic discourse and by numerous cases of individual women in the seventeenth century. Feminist scholars have observed that “the notion of the husband's legal right to a woman's body and mind was … being contested in the [Renaissance] period”.9 Evidence of some women's ability to “shift it”, or to strategically secure a space for themselves in their domestic relationships may be found in the speech and actions of Maria, the heroine of The Woman's Prize or The Tamer Tamed (1611), John Fletcher's Jacobean riposte to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (1592).10 Maria counters her sister's attempt to dissuade her from withholding her sexual delights from Petruchio with words which seriously undermine the concept of wifely subjection:

A weaker subject
Would shame the end I aime at: disobedience?
You talk too tamely: By the faith I have
In mine own Noble will, that childish woman
That lives a prisoner to her husbands pleasure,
Has lost her making, and becomes a beast,
Created for his use, not fellowship.(11)

Buttressed by the Protestant ideal of equality in the state of marriage, Maria asserts a sense of herself as an independent being, encapsulated in the phrase “mine own Noble will”. The feminist implications of Maria's assertion are toned down in the Epilogue's summary of the play's intent, it “being aptly meant / To teach both Sexes due equality; / And as they stand bound, to love mutually”.12 This has all the tones of early modern marriage guidance! Nevertheless, it is this affirmation of women's will, together with their capacity to judge and find men wanting, which forms the backbone of the new dimension of female subjectivity I will delineate in Hyde Park and The Shepherd's Paradise.13

In her attempts to fend off the sleazy and overbearing Lord Bonvile in Hyde Park Julietta vows ingenuous allegiance to the system of aristocratic privilege:

It is my duty, where the king has sealed
His favors, I should show humility,
My best obedience, to his act.
LORD B.
                                                                                                                        So should
All handsome women that will be good subjects.(14)

By disregarding Bonvile's tawdry innuendo, Julietta allows his sexualised reading of social obligation to sound discordantly against her testimonial of innocence:

                                                                                                                                            I must
Be bold to tell you, sir, unless you prove
A friend to virtue, were your honor centupled …
Yet I, I in such infinite distance, am
As much above you in my innocence.

(V. 1. 130-140)

Julietta's emphatically doubled “I” testifies to her assertion of self, a boldness borne out by her protestation and defence of her discursive “liberty”:

'Tis the first liberty
I ever took to speak myself; I have been
Bold in the comparison, but find not
Wherein I have wronged virtue, pleading for it.

(V. 1. 141-144)

Do Julietta's words carry a feminist valence? Recent critical approaches downplay or sidestep this issue. Martin Butler's reading of the play somewhat narrowly identifies Julietta with the “town”: “In her, the town criticizes the court from a standpoint of independent, disinterested judgment, while still reserving its essential duty”.15 Ira Clark contends that the change wrought in Bonvile by Julietta “is no reformation but a reconversion to a set of standards already in place”; moreover, he stresses, “Julietta … remains subordinate, dependent for any leverage on marital brokerage”.16 But is it not the leverage afforded by an ethical and political voice which projects a glimpse of female subjectivity in earnest?

The graceful weave of comic registers in Hyde Park means that the notions of liberty, and of female subjectivity, are scrutinised from many different angles. The providential overtone of the plot involving Mistress Bonavent, her suitor Lacy and her husband who has been lost at sea for 7 years is offset by the satiric approach to liberty dramatised in the courtship of Fairfield and Mistress Carol. At the outset of the play Carol tells Fairfield:

You neglect
Your selves, the nobleness of your birth and nature,
By servile flattery of this jigging,
And that coy mistress; keep your privilege,
Your masculine property.

(I. 2. 88-92)

Martin Butler glosses the word “privilege” in Carol's speech as meaning “man's freedom to be his dignified self”, and suggests further, “the term ‘property’ here is close to Denzil Holles's notion of ‘propriety’ … meaning that which is proper to each man, his by right of possession” (with all its attendant political suggestions).17 This idea of integrity and property going hand in hand acquires a feminist emphasis in Carol's ironic discourse castigating her cousin Mistress Bonavent for her intention to marry: “You have / Too, too much liberty” (I. 2. 167-168). As Carol's speech wittily depicts, a leisured gentlewoman in charge of her own estate and household has much to lose “when husbands come to rule” (I. 2. 176). As defence against the plight of a “femme covert” Carol maintains the attitude of a Platonic mistress, holding absolute dominion over her servants:

                                                                                                                        I
Dispose my frowns and favors like a princess;
Deject, advance, undo, create again;
It keeps the subjects in obedience,
And teaches 'em to look at me with distance.

(I. 2. 188-192)

The dramatic interest in the courtship of Carol and Fairfield derives from the puncturing of this tyrannous relationship through Carol's inadvertent swearing of an oath never to solicit Fairfield's company. In dramatising Carol's subsequent pursuit of Fairfield, Shirley makes palpable her emotional susceptibility; for instance, in Carol's aside after she sees Fairfield with an unknown woman (in fact his sister, Julietta): “Keep in, great heart” (III. 1. 143). In the interview Carol procures with Fairfield her affected indifference prompts Fairfield to accuse her of overacting:

O woman!
How far thy tongue and heart do live asunder! …
A little peevishness to save your credit
Had not been much amiss, but this over-
Over-doing the business …

(III. 2. 51-58)

Shirley's sense of dramatic counterpoint will not let this cliché of female dissembling rest. Fairfield's boast to “see thy heart, and every thought within it” (III. 2. 55) invites Carol's answering ruse: offering to contract herself to Fairfield in front of a witness, she obstructs their union by posing as a moneylender to the witness he provides, frustrating Fairfield's expectations of victory and socially humiliating him. Carol's device upends Fairfield's complacency and highlights her independence as a woman of means. The comedy moves through another tonal shift when in spite of herself, Carol's jeering of Fairfield becomes abusive. Her asides convey her struggle to articulate her true feeling: “I'd fain speak kindly to him … I shall fool too much … it will not out” (III. 2. 142-147) The scene culminates in Fairfield's anger and sexual aggression triggered off by the call of the nightingale: “Twas Philomel, they say; and thou wert one, / I should new ravish thee” (III. 2. 156-157).

Commenting on Carol's initial greeting of the nightingale as a sign of good luck, Ira Clark writes, “as [Fairfield] stomps away [Carol] lets him know that in private she will play her society's assignment of submissive woman”.18 Clark seems determined to construe Shirley's mapping of gender relations in as conservative a light as possible. In this instance, he overlooks the density of associations which Shirley weaves through Fairfield's allusion to Philomel. The myth of Philomel represents the ambivalence attached to women's speech; the raped and tongueless woman transformed into a songbird is at once an image of muteness and inarticulacy and of feminine eloquence.19 Shirley uses this paradox to delineate the emotional impasse between Fairfield and Carol. Fairfield responds to Carol's attempted rapprochement with a derisory image of female loquaciousness: “When you are out of breath, / You will give over … stay you and practice with the bird” (III. 2. 151-156). Carol's words after Fairfield's heated departure convey her emotion, and its painful constriction by the public arena of Hyde Park:

I must to the coach and weep; my heart will break else.
I'm glad he does not see me.

(III. 2. 159-160)

At the last Fairfield forces an expression of love from Carol only by threatening to geld himself; clearly Carol has more interest in his “masculine property” than she has previously acknowledged! Shirley's scripting of Carol's speech after her declaration “I do love you” (V. 1. 287) is instructive:

                                                                                          my thoughts
Point on no sensuality; remit
What's past, and I will meet your best affection.
I know you love me still; do not refuse me.
If I go once more back, you ne'er recover me.

(V. 1. 294-298)

The difference between Carol and Cleopatra, to whom her suitor Rider compares her (I. 2. 170-172), could not be more apparent. While sharing the Egyptian Queen's histrionic caprice, Carol's love comes modestly girded. Sensuality is suppressed in the interest of feminine decorum. Shirley's ideal union is chaste and witty, with the volatility of a horse race and the elegance of a dance.

It is not only professional drama which articulates a concern with the rights of female subjects in relation to their superiors or sovereigns. The Shepherd's Paradise shows a heightened awareness of the loss of subjectivity incurred by women in the passage from courtship to marriage. The shepherd Melidoro and his mistress Camena debate the question of whether marriage entails a form of possession or “propriety” which weakens “Love's prerogative”.20 While Melidoro maintains that marriage enlarges each partner's self-possession, Camena is wary of the self-loss that “nuptiall bonds” imply for women: “I cannot yet resolve to abate soe much from what I love so well, my selfe, as to submit to a propriety” (p. 52).21

The concern with female identity, which is expressed here through dialogue, also forms the focus of the song, “Presse me no more kind love”, in which the Queen of the Shepherd's Paradise, Bellesa, acted by Henrietta Maria, confesses her love for the shepherd Moramente. After visiting the lovesick Moramente, Bellesa had expressed her disquiet at the stirrings of love: “I ne'er knew any thing yet so neer Love as the fear of it” (p. 85). Rather than a confession of love, Bellesa's song is a negotiation with Love about the terms on which she may disclose her emotions. Her conflict between the promptings of love and “virgin-shame” is expressed through the imagery of red and white, suggesting the onset of passion, offset by chastity:

I find a glowing heat that turnes red hot
My heart, but yet it doth not flame a jot.
It doth but yet to such a colour turne,
It seemes to me rather to blush than burne.
You would perswade me that this flaming light
Rising will change this colour into white,
I would fain know if this whites inference
Pretend pale guilt, or candid innocence.

(p. 112)

Bellesa's song rehearses theatrically William Prynne's association between female speech and impudence, one meaning of which is “unblushing”.22 The song symbolises a form of bodily speech, imaging the distillation of a blush from red into white. Bellesa's anxiousness about disclosing her love derives piquancy from Henrietta's physical presence on stage, which belies Bellesa's appeal to Cupid, “Not to bring me to witnesse [her love] to men” (p. 112). By stressing her pudency and innocence, Bellesa's song neutralises the implications of immodesty in the Queen's display of her body and her freedom of public speech.23

Although the song focuses on the inner motions of Bellesa's heart, it ends with a request which recognises the pitfalls involved in giving that emotion social expression:

Then take you care of me, a meane so rare
Betwixt mens vanity, and their dispaire.

(p. 112)

Bellesa's song answers the question put earlier by Melidoro to Camena as to whether Bellesa and the shepherdess Pantamora are affected by love: “Do you think, Camena, that Bellesa and Pantamora are not moved? do you think that women are like windes, that do not feel the storms they raise?” (p. 90). When Camena distinguishes between Pantamora's “restlesse humor” and Bellesa's serenity, Melidoro presses his question further: “Do you not beleeve Camena, that Bellesa doth act the Queens part more then her own, in this distancing of her selfe from any sense of Moraments love?” (p. 90).

Here Montagu spins subtle irony from the situation of coterie performance, exploiting his play's meshing of reality with dramatic role. Melidoro suggests that, in this case, for Bellesa/Henrietta to “act the Queen's part” is disingenuous: the Queen is adhering too much to her social-political persona. As a validation of that queenliness, Camena's response justifies Bellesa's behaviour as a model of decorum and naturalness:

I do not know. Methinks she hath so equall and significant a liberty, as it speakes all things that she doth naturall, as I beleeve her the perfection of our sex. I cannot think her voyd of sense; but I beleeve it sinks no deeper then the face of that civility, where men do see it set, and make a returne to Moramente.

(p. 90)

Camena represents Bellesa's agency as ambiguous, ascribing to her a “liberty” and “civility” that reside in the right of reply, rather than in voluntary self-expression.24 Her praise discreetly avoids answering Melidoro's assertion that Bellesa's behaviour is too theatrical. Instead, Camena attributes to Bellesa a sense which remains on the “civil” side of sensuality, a sensibility represented in terms of surface rather than depth. This ideal female self is immaculate and inscrutable, defined by a woman and compelling the gaze of men.

Interestingly, The Shepherd's Paradise contains an Echo scene which theatricalises Bellesa's aural confession of love. In a wood called “Love's Cabinet” (p. 134), Bellesa questions the Echo, who counsels her to “Speake”, “Love” and “Do”, reassuring her of Moramente's “Constancy” and their mutual “Content”. When Moramente finds her alone Bellesa tells him to speak to “Love's Counsellor” (p. 136) if he has any suit. To his query, “doth Bellesa love[?]”, the Echo replies in the affirmative, “Love”. When Moramente declares, “it is too much of a miracle to be beleeved from any voyce but yours”, Bellesa affirms:

It is my voyce Moramente, and I have let it loose from me, that it might not have so much as modesty to hold it back. Beleeve it. For if you put me to take it in againe, I have virgin cold that would not let it speake so cleare.

(p. 137)

Here Bellesa represents her own voice as emanating from elsewhere; the female self she represents is disembodied, theatrical. Bellesa's ventriloquism negotiates the same trauma over female self-expression registered in her song. When Moramente pleads that Bellesa re-ingest her voice (“give me leave to begg for this kind voyce … that you would take it in againe”, p. 137), Bellesa returns him an assurance which answers Camena's uncertainty as to whether she is “voyd of sense”:

I have had long a sense well fitted to your sufferings, and I have beleeved so well of you as I did not feare the seemingnesse of my indifferency would divert you from a meritorious persistency.

(p. 137)

Bellesa resolves her condition of doubleness, which she describes as “the seemingnesse of my indifferency”, by dropping her queenly role: “Rise Moramente, unlesse you wish an answer from a Queen, and not Bellesa” (p. 137). Bellesa's “answering” of Moramente, like the Echo device itself, chimes with Camena's sense of “civility” as involving a feminine reciprocation of masculine feeling. In dialogue with the Echo, Bellesa had expressed her fear of Moramente proving either vain or inconstant (p. 135). In admitting that she has been “studying you all this while” (p. 137) Bellesa signals that she has surmounted those fears through patient perusal of Moramente's character. The full scope of Bellesa's “liberty” as a lover is in trying Moramente and finding him true.

The motif of women trying men in Caroline drama does not simply invert the literary tradition of men trying women's chastity. Rather than focusing on sexuality, the trials conducted by women in Montagu's and Shirley's plays centre on the ethical and moral dimensions of their lovers. In Hyde Park, Julietta parries her suitor Trier's statement that he has found her “right / And perfect gold” (V. 2. 7-8) by asserting her right to try, and reject, him: “I have tried you / And found you dross; nor do I love my heart / So ill, to change it with you” (V. 2. 9-11). Like Margaret Cavendish 20 years later, and Mary Wroth a decade earlier, Montagu and Shirley seriously entertain the possibility of women withholding themselves from sexual exchange. In Shirley's social comedy, this possibility is foreclosed by the reformation of Lord Bonvile, whose wish to “be a servant to [Julietta's] virtue” (V. 2. 126) looks likely to prefer him in the way of marriage. However, in Montagu's pastoral, with its aestheticising of solitude, the single woman has dramatic viability: in spite of the multiple couplings with which the play ends, Princess Miranda, alias Fidamira, remains as Queen of the Shepherd's Paradise, having made “a vow of chastity which is not in my power to recall” (p. 170). Exceptionally, Montagu represents female “Selfe-love” (p. 38) as a valid alternative to marriage.25

The Shepherd's Paradise struggles with the doubts and dilemmas of female subjectivity in a wholly new context of female performance. The Concealed Fancies by Lady Elizabeth Brackley and Lady Jane Cavendish presents yet another departure from and development of seventeenth-century theatrical and dramatic tradition. The sisters' experience of being besieged by parliamentary troops in their home of Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire forms the backdrop for a comedy of courtship deriving from the drama of Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher and Shirley. Unlike the Poems and Fancies of their stepmother Margaret Cavendish, published in 1653, The Concealed Fancies was presented in manuscript form, constituting the last part of the volume entitled Poems Songs a Pastorall and a Play, signed by both women and presented to their father, “W. N.”, William Cavendish, Earl, and later Duke, of Newcastle.26

One of the delightful aspects of The Concealed Fancies is the absorption of its female characters in theatrical self-invention. In one scene the three “Lady Cousins” vie for the part of bravely suffering heroine:

—Pray, how did I look in the posture of a delinquent?


—You mean how did you behave yourself in the posture of a delinquent? Faith, as though you thought the scene would change, and you would be happy—though you suffered misery for a time. And how did I look?


—As yourself; that's great, though in misfortune.


—So did you.


—How should I do otherwise, for I practised Cleopatra when she was in her captivity, and could they have thought me worthy to have adorned their Triumphs I would have performed his gallant Tragedy, and so have made myself glorious for time to come.27

The enigmatically named “Sh.” transforms the tedium of her captivity by practising Cleopatra, imitating the Egyptian Queen's resolution and imaginatively enacting her gallant death. The frisson created by Shakespeare's ironic disclosure of the transvestite boy-actor is succeeded in the Cavendishes's text by a salute to Cleopatra as the exemplar of noble feminine action. This fantasy of heroic performance pays tribute to Plutarch, to Shakespeare and perhaps also to Mary Sidney's translation of Robert Garnier's Tragedy of Antonie (1595).28 It is hard to distinguish whether it is Shakespeare, Cleopatra or female performance per se that is depicted here as empowering.

The play, then, offers a view of theatrical self-fashioning that caters to female fantasy, and crucially, pragmatism. The distinction between the wit and fancy of the sisters Luceny and Tattiny, and duller female sensibilities is brought home in a dialogue between the chambermaid Pert and the gentlewoman Toy, servants of the upwardly aspiring Lady Tranquility. The focus of their chat is Toy's affair with her mistress's lover, Lord Calsindow. Pert teases Toy, “I know some ladies that will be so much of the wench with their husband, that thou would prove at best but a cold mouldy pie”. When Toy retorts she “would be the wife with that lady's husband, and make him fond that way”, Pert exclaims:

A pox of thy no wit, this lady that I mean will have her several scenes, now wife, then mistress, then my sweet Platonic soul, and then write in the like several changes of mistress not onely to confirm love, but provoke love, then dress themselves always as a pretty sweet wife or mistress.

(p. 148)

Pert's image of the theatrical woman confines her “infinite variety” to the boudoir or closet. The lady's role-play is the key to sustaining her husband's sexual interest, “confirm[ing] [and] provok[ing] love”. This domestication of female acting resonates suggestively with the use of Cleopatra as “a signifier of domestic concord” in texts and visual images of the Renaissance and seventeenth century. Mary Hamer scrutinises the enclosure of Cleopatra in the conjugal family, coincident with the regularising of sexual behaviour within marriage undertaken by the agents of the Reformation. Sixty years after Shakespeare's “intensely conflicted representation of Cleopatra”29, Dryden's All for Love (1677) presents her as just such a chastened figure, “a silly harmless, household dove”.30

In place of Shakespeare's serpent and Dryden's dove, the Cavendishes posit the image of woman as monkey, mimicking the wifely role.31 However, as Pert's collocation of “lady” and “wench” suggests, such feminine role-play transgresses the bounds of gentlewomanly conduct. The modern Caroline wife knows equally how to play the angel and the whore. Little wonder that Toy feels defeated by such competition: “I'll serve none of your she-wits” (p. 148).

While confined to the domestic sphere, the play's portrayal of theatrical femininity carries a political valence. The sisters view marriage as a social form “to join lovers”, rather than a bond in which “husbands are the rod of authority” (p. 153). Rather than rebelling outright, Luceny and Tattiny wield their “fancies” as instruments of self-defence and seduction. In her post-nuptial account of her relationship with Presumption, Tattiny presents herself as balancing aggression with appeasement: when Presumption is angry, she is petulant; when he speaks “in company according to a discreet husband”, she gives him “a modest return of wife, and yet appear[s] his mistress” (p. 153). Tattiny's calculated performance safeguards her “privilege”, and strengthens what she describes as her “equal marriage”.32

Thus far I have discussed the way that The Concealed Fancies draws on theatrical language to facilitate women's pleasurable and strategic manipulation of a “scene self” (p. 133).33 But does the play represent women as anything more than canny performers; or to phrase the question differently: what do the Cavendish sisters have to say about women as subjects of feeling?

Consistent with the veiling gesture of the play's title, the emotional dimension of the women's lives is overtly focused on their family relationships, particularly on the sisters' longing for their absent father (the Lady Cousins' uncle), Lord Calsindow. Midway through the sexual sparring with which they pass away their captivity, Luceny and Tattiney become nuns, a transformation motivated ostensibly by their grief for their “loved, dear and absent friends” (p. 146). Yet the sisters' profound melancholy, expressed in the formal registers of verse and song, is not immune from histrionic excess. While their sadness is sympathetically evoked, their taking the veil stems as much from “fancy” as from forlornness. In one scene Colonel Free comments, “I wonder what fancy my wife will be possessed withal, for she can neither be nun, nor vestal, she hath so many children” (p. 144). After assuring Free that “the sweet lady will be in a consumption for your sake”, Corpolant informs him that “our sweet young Stellows” (the sisters' brothers) are “very melancholy” (p. 144). Corpolant's suspicion that the Stellows' melancholy is due to their love for the “Lady Cousins” is set alongside, and reflects ironically upon, the state of their sisters as “nuns in melancholy” (p. 144). The play allows the possibility that the sisters' disguise is a further provocative deferral of their love for Courtly and Presumption. Their melodramatic role-play certainly prompts the men to greater seriousness, causing Presumption to abandon his antagonism and vow that were Tattiney his, he would “dedicated be / To her and give her leave for to be free” (p. 143).34

In a discussion with Presumption about methods of wife-taming, Courtly had earlier purported his ambition to gain, through love, Luceny's “observancy”, which he defines in terms of reciprocal respect: “she shall love me so well, as she shall think me worthy of my freedom, and so we will continue the conversation and friendship of lovers, without knowing the words of man and wife” (p. 142). This ideal looks forward to the character of Congreve's Millamant in The Way of the World (1700), with her determination not to be called names after she is married, “as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweetheart, and the rest of that nauseous cant in which men and their wives are so fulsomely familiar”.35 It is a mark of the shrewdness of the Cavendish sisters that in the extended Epilogue Luceny reveals that Courtly's practice has fallen short of his ideal.

One reason why The Concealed Fancies appeals to female students in particular is its focus on courtship as a matter of gameswomanship and performance. The same facet of the text can be viewed as jejune: as one male student commented of the play, “there's no emotion”. I believe that the Cavendish sisters were scoring a subtle point in the obliquity of their approach to female desire and affection. In naming their play, the sisters made use of a contemporary cliché about the behaviour of women in love. In his conduct book The English Gentlewoman (1631), Richard Braithwait extols the “pretty pleasing kinde of wooing drawne from a conceived but concealed Fancy”.36 In adopting his phrase the Cavendishes avoid Braithwait's stress on women's bashfulness, using “fancy” primarily in the sense of wit or caprice, and only hinting in their title at the sense of fondness or love.37

Yet if Luceny and Tattiney follow the path of discretion in their dealings with men, the play also represents the three cousins in one scene exploring their uncle's “cordials”, and devising to “pick his cabinet locks” to see Lord Calsindow's “magazine of love” (p. 144). In this scene Sh. expresses the wish that her exiled uncle “saw us in a prospective”, to which her sister replies, “'tis a great way for him to look in a prospective” (p. 143). Cerasano & Wynne-Davies offer the alternate glosses of a crystal ball and a telescope for the word “prospective” in this exchange.38 This scene is one instance of the Cavendishes' intense awareness “of the constitutive and erotic power of the gaze”.39 In this scene that awareness not only highlights the self that is seen, but discloses the self that wishes to be seen, a female self defined by desire. It is this territory that Shirley and Montagu navigate with respective tact and préciocité. All three of the plays I have discussed here manifest a concern with women's social, political and emotional selves. The Cavendishes' fond depiction of female fantasy or women's “strong imagination” (p. 144) was perhaps only conceivable in drama composed within and for a close-knit family circle. But while Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley stay close to home in their writings, their youthful stepmother, and other women who followed her, would unleash their fancies to create “far other worlds and other seas”.

Notes

  1. My argument here should be seen as a development of the feminist mode of analysis initiated by Catherine Belsey in her book, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985).

  2. Elizabeth Howe's study, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) examines the shift in women's status as actors at the Restoration and its impact upon Restoration drama. On female performance in England before 1660 see my article “She that Plays the King; Henrietta Maria and the Threat of the Actress in Caroline Culture”, in G. McMullan & J. Hope (Eds) The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (London: Routledge, 1992) and Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: the Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1-11.

  3. Heather L. Weidemann, “Theatricality and Female Identity in Mary Wroth's Urania”, in Naomi J. Miller & Gary Waller (Eds) Reading Mary Wroth Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), pp. 191-209 (p. 192).

  4. Sir Francis Osborne, Historical Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James (1658), pp. 60-61 (Osborne's emphasis).

  5. The shift I am describing was in no way absolute; theatricality in women, and in men, continued to pose a considerable threat to customary notions of identity and social stability throughout this period. Witness the upset caused by the Duke of Buckingham's impersonation of a fencing master in an anonymous Queen's masque of 1626, thought by many “too histrionical to become him”; cited in Stephen Orgel & Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973), I, p. 389.

  6. On the possibility of a private performance of The Concealed Fancies see S. P. Cerasano & Marion Wynne-Davies (Eds) Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 129. The editors suggest a date of composition circa 1645. See also the article by Alison Findlay, “‘She gave you the civility of the house’: Household Performance in The Concealed Fancies”, in S. P. Cerasano & Marion Wynne-Davies, Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama: Criticism, History and Performance 1594-1998 (London: Routledge, 1998).

  7. A discussion of the play which complements my own, but omits to consider the changing context of female performance, is Lisa Hopkins, “Judith Shakespeare's Reading: Teaching The Concealed Fancies”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 47 (1996), 4, pp. 396-406.

  8. T. E., The Lawes Resolution of Women's Rights: or, The Lawes Provision for Women (1632), p. 6.

  9. Kim Walker, Women Writers of the English Renaissance (New York: Twayne, 1996), p. 138.

  10. See the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), second edition, prepared by J. A. Simpson & E. S. C. Weiner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989): “shift”, sb, 6b, c and d, and v, 5a and b, 6.

  11. The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, General Editor, Fredson Bowers, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966-96), vol. IV, I. 2. 133-138.

  12. Bowers, Epilogue, lines 6-8.

  13. Hyde Park was revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987 and produced at the Swan theatre, the Jacobean-style playhouse designed to showcase plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries. The production was given a Bloomsburyesque setting, with Fiona Shaw portraying the heroine, Mistress Carol, as a Virginia Woolf-inspired new woman. While this approach made Hyde Park attractive to modern feminism, the setting prevented the play from speaking on its own, Caroline, terms. The Shepherd's Paradise still awaits a modern revival.

  14. Russell A. Fraser & Norman Rabkin (Eds), Drama of the English Renaissance, II, The Stuart Period (New York: Macmillan, 1976), V. 1. 116-119. All further quotations from Hyde Park refer to this edition and are incorporated in brackets in the text.

  15. Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis 1632-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 177.

  16. Ira Clark, Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), p. 143.

  17. Butler, Theatre and Crisis, pp. 178-179; see also pp. 170-171.

  18. Clark, Professional Playwrights, p. 153; Clark interprets Hyde Park as a “social comedy of adaptation”, arguing that Shirley's play reinforces “traditional hierarchies” (p. 153).

  19. The same paradox is explored in a contemporary dramatic reworking of the Philomel myth, Timberlake Wertenbaker's, The Love of the Nightingale (1988).

  20. Walter Montagu, The Shepherd's Paradise 1629 (recte 1659), p. 51. All further page references are incorporated in the text.

  21. Camena's language has political and contractual resonances, which anticipate the exploration of women's condition within marriage in Restoration comedy.

  22. OED: “impudent”, a.1.wanting in shame or modesty; shameless, unblushing. See Histrio-Mastix: The Players Scourge, or Actors Tragaedie (1633): “And dare then any Christian woman be so more then [sic] whorishly impudent, as to act, to speake publikely on a Stage”, sig. 6R[4]r.

  23. Compare Posthumous's eroticised description of Imogen's innocence in Shakespeare's Cymbeline (1609): “Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain'd … did it with / A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on't / Might well have warm'd old Saturn”, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. J. M. Nosworthy (London: Methuen, 1969), II. 4. 161-164.

  24. It is possible to discern a political aura in Camena's linking of the epithets “equal” and “natural” with the concept of liberty; yet her discourse here seems to me more focused on social propriety than political liberty, more akin to Jane Austen than to Hugo Grotius or Thomas Hobbes.

  25. In remaining wedded to chastity and herself, Montagu's Miranda mirrors the shepherdess Silvesta in Mary Wroth's unpublished pastoral comedy Love's Victory (c. 1620). See Margaret Anne Mclaren, “An Unknown Continent: Lady Mary Wroth's Forgotten Pastoral Drama, ‘Loves Victorie’”, in Anne M. Haselkorn & Betty S. Travitsky (Eds) The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 276-294 (pp. 286-287).

  26. Poems Songs a Pastorall and a Play by the Right Honourable the Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley, Bodleian, Rawlinson MS, Poet. 16. Margaret Ezell discusses the Duke of Newcastle's fostering of his daughters' literary production in “‘To Be Your Daughter In Your Pen’: The Social Functions of Literature in the Writings of Lady Elizabeth Brackley and Lady Jane Cavendish”, Huntington Library Quarterly, 51 (1988), pp. 281-296.

  27. Cerasano & Wynne-Davies, Renaissance Drama by Women, p. 143. All further page references to this edition are incorporated in the text.

  28. As suggested by Lisa Hopkins: see her valuable discussion of this scene, “Judith Shakespeare's Reading”, pp. 400-402 (p. 402).

  29. Mary Hamer, Signs of Cleopatra: History, Politics, Representation (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 25, 43.

  30. “Nature meant me / A wife; a silly, harmless, household dove”, John Dryden: Selected Works (San Francisco: Rinehart Press, 1971), IV. 1. 91-92.

  31. Cerasano & Wynne-Davies, Renaissance Drama by Women, pp. 133, 151.

  32. The Concealed Fancies forms part of a seventeenth-century feminist discourse on marriage represented by texts such as Mary More's The Woman's Right, or her Power in a Greater Equality to her Husband proved than is allowed or practised in England (c. 1674) published as Appendix II in Margaret Ezell's, The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

  33. The textual status of the phrase “scene self” must remain conjectural, as the word “self” appears to be a later insertion in the manuscript (Poems Songs a Pastorall and a Play, p. 91). I am grateful to Martin Butler for cautioning me on this matter.

  34. Thomas Hobbes's definition of “a free man” is relevant here. To paraphrase Hobbes: “A FREE-WOMAN, is she, that in those things, which by her strength and wit she is able to do, is not hindred to doe what she has a will to”. See Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 262.

  35. William Congreve, The Way of the World, ed. Brian Gibbons, New Mermaids (London: Ernest Benn, 1979), IV.1.169-171.

  36. Braithwait, The English Gentlewoman (1631), p. 131.

  37. For the latter sense see OED: “fancy”, sb., 8a and b.

  38. Cerasano & Wynne-Davies, Renaissance Drama by Women, p. 212, n. 45.

  39. Hopkins, “Judith Shakespeare's Reading”, p. 404.

Unless otherwise specified dates in brackets following films and plays refer to dates of known or estimated first performance/production. I would like to thank Marion Wynne-Davies for helpful editorial suggestions, and Sarah Shieff, Mark Houlahan, Stuart Young and Matt Mancini for commenting on drafts of this essay.

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The Triple Plot of Hyde Park