SOURCE: Roberts, Jeanne Addison. “Convents, Conventions, and Contraventions: Love's Labour's Lost and The Convent of Pleasure.” In Shakespeare's Sweet Thunder: Essays on the Early Comedies, edited by Michael J. Collins, pp. 75-89. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1997.

[In the following essay, Roberts compares Love's Labour's Lost with Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure (1668), and highlights the innovative thematic approach taken by both comedies with respect to relations between women and men.]

The temptation is strong to argue for Love's Labor's Lost as Shakespeare's most feminist play. Such an argument would be supported most obviously by the fact that the Princess of France and her three noble ladies control the action from their first appearance to their last. In spite of their exclusion from the inner sanctum of the court of Navarre because the King and his three noble followers have resolved on a cloistered life and have forsworn the company of women, the ladies arrive as visitors and soon become love objects for the four men. However, the women continue to defer capitulation to marriage even beyond the end of the play, assigning to the men a year of penance for their oath-breaking, to be followed by possible reconsideration. Such an ending has no parallel in Shakespearean comedy, and it looks like not only a violation of the conventions of New Comedy, but also a clear example of women on top.

From their first appearance, the women show unaccustomed signs of power. At the beginning of Act 2, after the men have established their resolution to renounce such indulgences as sleep, food, and the company of women, the Princess and her ladies arrive at the court in the ambiguous guise of “suitors,” a role normally commanded by men in a potentially matrimonial climate and only assumed by women when, like the three widowed queens of The Two Noble Kinsmen or Volumnia at the end of Coriolanus, they are helplessly suing for assistance or concession from powerful males. Although the Princess orders Boyet, her attendant Lord, to say that she and her ladies have come “Like humble-visag'd suitors” seeking the King of Navarre's “high will” (2.1.34), her behavior is anything but humble. Boyet describes her as a royal emissary negotiating between equals—the King of France and the King of Navarre. She instructs Boyet to say to Navarre that she has arrived on “serious business craving quick dispatch” and that she “[Importunes] personal conference with his Grace” (2.1.29-32). When the princess meets Navarre, she commands him preemptorially to conduct her to the forbidden court and charges him that it is a deadly sin either to keep his oath or to break it (2.1.96-106). She concludes with an injunction that he

Vouchsafe to read the purpose of my coming,
And suddenly resolve me in my suit.

(2.1.109-10)

And she finally rebukes him for initially rejecting her claim:

You do the King my father too much wrong,
And wrong the reputation of your name,
In so unseeming to confess receipt
Of that which hath so faithfully been paid.

(2.1.153-56)

As the women actively demonstrate their power, the men seem curiously passive. Because the King of Navarre has forbidden the Princess to “come within [his] gates” (2.1.171), he takes on the aura of the female virgin immured in a secluded garden. The aura of aggressive female power, on the other hand, is enhanced by Boyet, who notes that the women are being treated more as invaders come to besiege the court than as humble suitors. The word “suitor” slips from a female to a male connotation. The ladies are not begging, but attacking. And, indeed, the word “suitor” is later conflated with the word “shooter,” apparently a homophone in Elizabethan English. Rosaline, one of the Princess's ladies, is identified as the “shooter” in the deer hunt. An elaborate quibble on deers and horns evokes both the traditional affinity of the hunt for deer and the hunt for love, and the ubiquitous specter of cuckoldry. The Princess herself becomes a shooter who actually kills a deer, which may or may not have been a suspiciously male-sounding “pricket” (4.2.56).

The women's physical presence is, of course, accented by their beauty, which is repeatedly attested to. Boyet, as chorus, celebrates Nature's prodigality, after starving the general world, in bestowing all graces on the Princess (2.1.9-12). Beauty, traditionally the passive female lure for attracting the opposite sex, here, like skill with the bow, becomes a signal of dominant power.

While the women may be “in love,” as the Princess suggests after hearing how every one of them “her own [prospective mate] hath garnished with … bedecking ornaments of praise” (2.1.78-79), they show few signs of melting emotion. They are suitors not for spouses, but for money and land—a hundred thousand crowns and Aquitaine are at stake. The Princess urges that the suit should be settled quickly because, she tells the King prophetically, “you'll prove perjur'd if you make me stay” (2.1.113). After the first meeting, Boyet describes the King's reaction in curiously passive terms: “Methought all his senses were lock'd in his eye, / As jewels in crystal for some prince to buy (2.1.242-43). Again the usual gender roles are reversed—the male is waiting to be bought rather than negotiating a sale. And Boyet correctly assures the Princess that Aquitaine is now hers for the taking.

There is no fainting, no protestation among these women that their love, like Rosalind's in As You Like It, is as deep as the bay of Portugal, little anxiety about whether they are loved. They accept diamonds, gloves, and pearls with aplomb, but Rosaline's response is to resolve to torture her love. She wants to make him fawn, beg, seek, and spend, fancying that “he should be my fool and I his fate” (5.2.62-68). There is a nice disruption of Shakespeare's usual sun/son pun when Moth fails to get the women's attention to “sun-beamed eyes” and is advised by Boyet to shift to “daughter-beamed eyes” (5.2.170-72). And Berowne complains, “The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen / As is the razor's edge invisible” (5.2.256-57). Finally, each woman declines the offer of marriage and imposes a year's penance on her admirer. Compared with the instantaneous matrimonial imaginings of a Juliet, a Rosalind, or a Miranda, the behavior of these ladies seems strikingly cool. Is this a feminist's dream? a conventional comedy? or perhaps an idiosyncratic Shakespearean vision?

Love's Labor's Lost is one of the very few Shakespeare plays with no known source—the others are A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Tempest—and I should like to imagine that Shakespeare, with mind unfettered by sources, reveals himself to be a closet feminist. The first three of these plays have in common the depiction of powerful women. There may be some echo of the viragoes of Love's Labor's Lost in Hippolyta, the Amazon of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in the formidable Titania, who is a dominant presence until Oberon succeeds in tricking her into relinquishing her changeling boy and renouncing her animalistic erotic adventure with Bottom as ass. The merry wives are repeatedly victorious in shaming Falstaff. And all three of these plays exhibit the deception of men by women. The Tempest, of course, is a serious impediment to a theory of a Shakespeare with feminist leanings when unencumbered by an inherited plot, but three out of four is not bad.

And yet the case for a feminist Love's Labor's Lost remains unconvincing. The sense persists that the play is actually not about women at all. The noble ladies appear in only three scenes (the last admittedly a long one): one scene in Act 2, one scene in Act 4, and one scene in Act 5 and not at all in Acts 1 and 3. The peasant Jaquenetta appears also in only three scenes, and she has a total of thirteen lines. Her main function in the two latter scenes is as an instrument of plot—to deliver letters to the wrong people. Her only distinguishing qualities are stupidity, physical appeal, and fertility, all of which amusingly attract both the aristocratic Don Armado and the lowly Costard. Although the court ladies, especially the Princess and Rosaline, are slightly individualized, they lack the marked distinctions between Helena and Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Portia and Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice, Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It, or Beatrice and Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. The focus is almost entirely on the men. We are diverted with the pleasures of male bonding, male frailty, male pedantry, male posturing, male dullness, and male wit, but the women remain fixed points to be reacted to.

But if Love's Labor's Lost is not about women, it is certainly about male reactions to women, and it raises the question of what is behind the portraits of the men? The question has puzzled generations of critics. The play seems to have a specifically topical agenda, now lost. The King of Navarre, de Mayenne, the Duc de Biron, and the Duc de Longueville were actual historical French characters, and many identifications with real Englishmen have been suggested for Don Armado, Holofernes, Nathaniel, and Moth.¹ In 1936, Frances Yates advanced the theory that the play was written as a tribute to the brilliant sisters of the Earl of Essex, Penelope and Dorothy Devereaux, in refutation of a tract by the Earl of Northumberland, a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, which argued that “the entertainment of a Mistress was inconsistent with the pursuit of learning.”² And most persistently, following Muriel Bradbrook's 1936 book, the play has been explained as a satire of Raleigh and his followers and friends—supposedly united in a School of Atheism, obliquely referred to in the play as “the school of night” (4.3.251).³ Connections have also been made with George Chapman, another Raleigh ally, whose two poetical hymns, “To Night” and “To Cynthia,” were published together, probably about the time of Shakespeare's play, in 1594 as The Shadow of Night.

The evidence for all of these identifications is murky and ambiguous. The reference to the school of night may be a textual error or an explainable image, and there is no solid evidence that such a “school” existed. If Shakespeare means to attack Chapman, why do so many passages echo Chapman rather than reject him?

Chapman laments the corruption of the present “day” where men's faces glitter while their hearts are black.⁴ But, like Shakespeare, he celebrates the power of women and their association with night, especially Cynthia/Diana, the goddess of night, saying,

But thou (great Mistresse of heavens gloomie racke)
Art blacke in face, and glitterst in thy heart.

(Biiv)

He conjures great Hercules to “shoote, shoote” and stop the pride of the sun, suffering

… no more his lustfull rayes to get
The earth with issue …

(Biii)

Night shall then live forever as “the Planets Queene” (Eiiv). He prophesies that maids will subdue the might of Jove “with well-steeld lances of [night's] watchful sight” (Eiiv). He praises the pureness of Cynthia/Diana's “never-tainted life, / Scorning the subject title of a wife” (Civ) and urges her to seek hounds and archery and “shun faithlesse men's society” (Ciii). And he concludes “Musicke, and moode, she loves, but love she hates” (Ci).

Much of this rhetoric and the determined rejection of marriage is obviously relevant to Queen Elizabeth as well as to divine philosophy. But it is not foreign to the mood of Love's Labor's Lost. Rosaline is repeatedly associated with black—black eyes, ebony, pitch, Ethiopes, colliers, and chimney sweepers. Berowne insists that “No face is fair that is not full so black” (4.3.249), and she repeatedly refers to herself as a moon. Both she and the Princess are archers, and both end by shunning faithless men's society. True, in the play there is also attack on blackness—the King declares black “the badge of hell,” while Berowne argues that Rosaline is “born to make black fair” (4.3.250-57). But this is the matter of witty debate. It seems to me unthinkable that satire is meant to be directed against the women. The audience stands with Berowne in admiring and enjoying Rosaline as well as the other ladies. If satire of women is intended, at least for modern audiences, it misses its mark. And if there is local satire of London dramatists or courtiers, we no longer get the point. The eccentrics seem rather incarnations of recurring types from traditional comedy and the commedia del'arte.⁵

If the play cannot be read by us as either a precociously feminist or a specifically satirical drama, how can we view it? The 1598 Quarto confidently advertises it as “A Pleasant Conceited Comedie,” and it is generally accepted as such. But not within the play, where Berowne declares with apparent regret that the comic structure is unfinished and self-consciously distinguishes it from the comedic tradition:

Our wooing doth not end like an old play:
Jack hath not Gill. These ladies' courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.

(5.2.874-76)

The implication is clearly that, although comic, the play does not fit the traditional pattern of New Comedy.

Like Berowne, most modern scholars, under the powerful influence of Northrop Frye, have taken as the very essence of New Comedy a movement toward erotic consummation and the establishment of a new society.⁶ But I suggest that this definition, while useful, is not fixed in stone. Students tend to define comedy as drama that is funny and ends happily. But the arbitrarily predetermined marriages that terminate Roman comedy may not be “happy endings,” especially for women.

I think one might argue that Shakespearean comedy, while not clearly feminist in the modern sense of promoting equality of fully developed genders, may be read as evolving toward such an end. As Love's Labor's Lost experiments with the rejection of comedic convention, other early Shakespearean comedies modify comedic expectations. In The Comedy of Errors, the Abbess, relic of the older generation, remains firmly in charge, and the reunion of her son with his wife is shadowed by the memory of the courtesan who earlier entertained the husband. But a new generation is established, and lovers are united. In The Taming of the Shrew, two out of three of the new marriages seem headed for trouble, but there can be no doubt that the inexorable movement toward coupling and presumably toward fertility has been reenacted. This process recapitulates what audiences are assumed to want and what society needs and is therefore provided ritualistically as the “happy ending” of comedy. Hollywood colludes in such unlikely unions as that of a prostitute and a millionaire at the end of the film Pretty Woman, apparently because preview audiences would not accept the original “unhappy ending” in which the two were separated.

But comedy is not ritual, and the inherited generic traditions are strongly patriarchal. While the marriages of classical New Comedy are arranged by and for men, Shakespeare's comedies seem to be evolving toward a newer and more female-oriented form. The wishes of audiences and societies are neither simple nor univocal; and as women grow in power, comedic patterns change. Shakespeare's early comedies modify tradition; his later ones show further evolution. As female characters are more fully developed in the later comedies, it might be argued that the real pleasure is not in their rather perfunctory promise of consummation at the end, but in their exquisite prolonging of the slow movement toward it, their achievement of what Milton describes as Eve's mastery of “sweet reluctant amorous delay” (3.311).⁷

Male resistance to commitment is axiomatic in modern self-help literature as well as in Elizabethan drama. Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing displays this quality at some length, and Bertram in All's Well that Ends Well is the quintessential personification of it. Don Armado in Love's Labor's Lost says, “there is no evil angel but love” (1.2.173), and Cyrus Hoy sees in him the blend of aversion and desire “to be noted whenever passion long withstood is yielded to.”⁸ Women, however, are often thought of as the great romantics. For this very reason, they too may relish delay, as Rosalind obviously does in As You Like It, in order to enjoy the process rather than its outcome.

Most of Shakespeare's heroines are eager for love—the notable exceptions are Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, who seems (to put it mildly) resistant at first; Luciana in The Comedy of Errors, who fears what seems to be adultery; Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who has been wooed with the sword; and Emilia in The Two Noble Kinsmen, who prefers not to marry at all, cherishing rather the memory of her dead female companion and arguing

That the true love ‘tween maid and maid may be
More than in sex [dividual].

(1.3.81-82)

The more typical eagerness for love and marriage in Shakespeare's young women may reflect social and economic necessity or, indeed, may be constructed by male projection of a vision of what woman want. But surely some of Shakespeare's female audience could relate to the country's Virgin Queen and to Chapman's Diana in wishing to scorn “the subject title of a wife” and to “shun faithlesse men's society.” In opening up this possibility, Love's Labor's Lost might be thought of as a pioneer work. The deviant comic structure encourages a realization of revolutionary possibilities. And indeed, men in the audience as well as women may take pleasure in the violation of convention at the end of this play.

For ambivalent audiences, male and female, the ending of Love's Labor's Lost may well be a happy one—endlessly postponing the perils as well as the pleasures of consummation. Like the lovers of Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, the “lovers” of this play are frozen eternally in time. The year will never end; and, indeed, if it did, all the couples might well have changed their minds. The faint promise of fertility in Jaquenetta's pregnancy is demoted to the cursory subplot. The “message” of nonconsummation is encapsulated in the song of spring followed by the song of winter at the play's end. Spring brings flowers and fertility, but also the fear of cuckoldry. The regression to winter provides a temporary safe haven where “blood is nipp'd” and where unthreatening domesticity can offer the childish comforts of food and warmth without the hazards of sex (5.2.894-929). Resistance has its victories no less renowned than capitulation. Modern comedies, especially those written by women, increasingly celebrate this fact. Love's Labor's Lost may not be a protofeminist play or a specifically satiric one, but in its violation of convention it has come to seem like an amazingly modern one. We might claim it as at least a forerunner of feminism.

The absence from the Renaissance stage of female playwrights has made it almost impossible to determine how dramatic visions by women might compare with those by men.⁹ In the case of Love's Labor's Lost, however, we have the good fortune to possess a play by a woman, published in 1668, which seems extremely likely to have been inspired by Shakespeare's play. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, wrote the first known prose assessment of Shakespeare's plays in an undated letter to a friend published in 1664. She defends Shakespeare from carping criticism, displaying a wide knowledge of his plays, mentioning comedies, tragedies, and histories, and speaking of his works in a way that implies a familiarity with one of the early Folios. Describing Shakespeare's versatility, she praises his female characters as so accurate that “one would think that he had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman.” She may have been especially fond of The Merry Wives of Windsor, since four of the eight women she mentions specifically are from that play. All eight are notably independent. Her knowledge is so specific and so wide-ranging that it is hard to imagine that she did not know Love's Labor's Lost. She declares Shakespeare so superior that “those, who writ after him, were Forced to Borrow of him, or rather to steal from him.”¹⁰

She herself was probably of this number, for in 1668 she published The Convent of Pleasure, a closet drama that seems in part a witty reversal of Shakespeare's plot.¹¹ Lady Happy, young, beautiful, and very rich because of the recent death of her father, resolves to retire with her female friends to a convent, to live “incloister'd from the world” (6). But her convent will be like Rabelais's Abbey de Théleme, where the motto is “Do as you list.” Not for her is Navarre's ascetic devotion to study at the expense of food and sleep. She says she intends “to enjoy pleasure, and not bury [herself] from it” (6). Only poor women, she adds, need men; “those Women, where Fortune, Nature, and the gods are joined to make them happy, were mad to live with Men, who make the Female sex their slaves …” Accordingly, although her Cloister is to be “a place for freedom, not to vex the Senses but to please them” (7), men are duly excluded.

Cavendish's play seems to have a stronger claim to feminism than Shakespeare's since it focuses on women and celebrates their freedom and independence. And yet by the end, her play is as puzzling and ambiguous as Shakespeare's. The beginning seems a joyous vision of a world of women, celebrating their competence and independence. Like the Princess of France at the end of Love's Labor's Lost, Lady Happy has achieved absolute power and wealth through the death of her father—the disappearance of the patriarch. The convent is described much more extensively than Navarre's court. It has women physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, and is provided with “Gardens, Orchards, Walks, Groves, Bowers, Arbours, Ponds, Fountains, Springs, and the like” (11-12). The decor changes with the seasons, and the general delight is such that Madam Mediator declares that she had rather be in “the Convent of Pleasure, than Emperess of the whole world” (14-17). Unlike Shakespeare, who satirizes the folly of the men, Cavendish seems to applaud the liberated feminist vision. The only overt satire is directed against the male would-be suitors to the encloistered women. Excluded from the convent, they consider such drastic measures as knocking down the walls, setting the place on fire, and even disguising themselves as women, but reject each plan as impractical.

Also unlike Shakespeare's, Cavendish's play has an unconventional beginning and, in the middle, an unprecedented recital of the woes of women in marriage. For the first half of the play, her main purpose has seemed to be to imagine an idyllic reversal of the male-centered cloister at the start of Love's Labor's Lost. But the ending of her play reverts in a rather cursory fashion to the standard New Comedy closure based on marriage and the creation of a new society. If satire of the women is intended, it becomes apparent only retrospectively.

As in the case of Navarre's court, into the cloistered world arrives a “great Foreign Princess,” “a Princely brave Woman truly, of a Masculine Presence” (16). A warm friendship develops between the Princess and Lady Happy—so warm indeed that Lady Happy seems called upon to insist on its purity, avowing

More innocent Lovers never can there be,
Than my most Princely Lover, that's a She.

(23)

The two “imbrace and kiss, and hold each other in their Arms.” And the Princess now declares that

These my Imbraces though of Femal kind,
May be as fervent as a Masculine mind.

(33)

As the relationship intensifies, Lady Happy does wonder

… why may not I love a Woman with
the same affection I could a man?

But answers

No, no, Nature is Nature, and still will be
The same she was from all Eternity.

(32)

Like Love's Labor's Lost, The Convent of Pleasure has a play within a play and both playwrights people these plays with lower-class characters. But where Shakespeare's actors absurdly assume the personas of the Nine Worthies, great men of history, Cavendish's play provides nine scenes of the miserable lives of average wives. There is nothing satiric about their treatment, and the effect is to stunningly testify to the evils of marriage. Her internal play is a grim and extended catalog of the woes of married women. It features in rapid succession (1) women who pull their drunken husbands out of the ale house, expecting to be beaten when they get them home; (2) a sick pregnant woman; (3) male gamblers who waste their estates and entertain whores; (4) a mother of a dead child; (5) women drinking to cure their melancholy over unfaithful husbands; (6) a woman painfully giving birth; (7) ancient ladies discussing the trials of motherhood; (8) a dead child born to a dead mother; and (9) a married man pursuing a virgin (24-30). The Epilogue to this internal play declares, quite understandably after what we have seen, that

Marriage is a Curse we find,
Especially to Women kind.

(30)

So far the “message” seems clear. Only in retrospect does the reader begin to wonder whether the juxtaposition of the miseries of the poor with the pleasures of the rich may reveal some satiric social commentary on the frivolity and excess of the rich. Could Cavendish intend to criticize the detailed devotion to decor and physical pleasures that characterize the Convent? Or is she merely demonstrating that it is better to be a rich woman than a poor one? The answer is simply unclear.

Both plays also contain masques, but where the men in Love's Labor's Lost make fools of themselves in pretending to be Russians, the two masques of The Convent of Pleasure are much more traditional, at least on the surface. The Princess expresses the desire to affect male dress, which she does through the rest of the play. In the first masque, she is a shepherd come to woo Happy, who appears as a shepherdess and who agrees to marry “him.” In the second masque, the Princess appears as the sea-god Neptune and Lady Happy as a sea goddess. They seem a well-matched couple.

As in Love's Labor's Lost, the festivities are interrupted by the arrival of an ambassador to the Princess, who now reveals that “she” is actually a prince, and the Prince now claims Lady Happy as his “Soveraigness.” Lady Happy is silent, and she says almost nothing through the rest of the play, but the two are quickly married. She loses her name and seems to dwindle complacently into a conventional New Comedy wife. The extended vision of female independence and self-sufficiency fades, and the sustained flirtation with the celebration of a lesbian relationship is disavowed, although in the mildest and most ambivalent terms. Madame Mediator (in a scene apparently written by the Duke of Newcastle, Cavendish's husband) merely suggests that the couple's earlier kissing has been too enthusiastic to have been the “unnatural” and presumably tepid amorousness of two women. She says,

… you know Women's kisses are unnatural, and me-thought they kissed with more alacrity then Women use, a kind of Titillation, and more Vigorous.

(24)

Except for the brief contention after the play-within-a-play by the “Princess” that

… though some few be unhappy in Marriage, yet there are many more that are so happy that they would not change their condition.

(31)

the impetus of the first part of Cavendish's play is to preach against marriage for women, and she is clearly enjoying the titillation of a conceivable lesbian alternative. But her two masques lay the groundwork for a marriage to follow by presenting the two protagonists in each masque as a male and female couple. The pull of social and artistic conventions seems to be so strong that Cavendish cannot resist the “happy ending” of matrimony, thus satisfying the expectations of New Comedy.¹² Shakespeare's play, on the other hand, begins like a conventional New Comedy, and only with the failure of the masque does the movement toward consummation seem to grind to a halt. There is no reconciliation after the women's trick, no concession to commitment on the women's part. The tongues of mocking wenches continue as keen as a razor's edge, and we are not wholly unprepared for their rejection of the men's proposals.

Both plays, then, change course in mid-stream. Both move from artificially imposed systems of regulating society to a reorganization based on unforeseen experience—thus creating, in some sense, a new society. But unlike the usual New Comedy, neither play includes the older generation—usually the blocking force working against the consummation of the young. Lady Happy's father is dead as the play begins, and Shakespeare's Princess of France's father is inoperative during the play and dead at the end. The forces that block consummation are internal, and in both plays they are in the women themselves. Both playwrights contravene conventional expectations as well as reversing the directions established within their own plays. Both draw out the pleasures of amorous delay, but Shakespeare ends by denying them closure and Cavendish ends by redefining the terms.

After permitting his audience the delights of witty courtship and laughter at the rapid capitulation of the men, Shakespeare reveals that the women have never taken the men seriously. The Princess says,

We have receiv'd your letters full of love;
Your favors, embassadors of love;
And in our maiden council rated them
At courtship, pleasant jest, and courtesy,
As bombast and as lining to the time;
But more devout than this [in] our respects
Have we not been, and therefore met your loves
In their own fashion, like a merriment.

(5.2.777-84)

The “new society” is more like a revision of the cloister than a celebration of fertility. The King must go “To some forlorn and naked hermitage, / Remote from all the pleasures of the world” (5.2.795-96). The Princess will shut her woeful self in “a mourning house” to grieve for her father. (5.2.807-8), while Berowne must “jest a twelvemonth in an hospital” (5.2.871).

Margaret Cavendish, on the other hand, paints a happy and prosperous world of women, contrasts it with an extended depiction of the woes of wives in marriage, and then, in collaboration with her husband, imposes on her unconventional play a conventional ending. Mimick, in the Epilogue, separates himself from his author in order to declare,

I dare not beg Applause, our Poetess then
Will be enrag'd, and kill me with her Pen;
For she is careless, and is void of fear;
If you dislike her Play, she does not care.

(53)

But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that she has not escaped completely the pressures of society and of the traditional dramatic form that supports that society. The surprise is that she ventures as far as she does. If her play had been put on in a public theater, it probably would have been seen “to show virtue her feature” and to satisfy “the age and body of the time” (Hamlet 3.2.22-24). Only those who took pleasure in the end of Love's Labor's Lost might have grieved for the loss of the Convent of Pleasure.

Both Shakespeare and Cavendish show some signs of incipient feminism. Both enjoy satirizing men—the one at length and the other in passing—and both demonstrate considerable originality in shaping their dramatic forms. Cavendish in the preface to the readers of her volume calls into question whether her works should be called plays at all because

… it would be too great a fondness to my Works to think such Plays as these suitable to ancient Rules, in which I pretend no skill; or agreeable to the modern Humour, to which I dare acknowledge my aversion …

(n.p.)

and she insists

I regard not so much the present as future Ages,
          for which I intend all my books.

(n.p.)

It is a great strength of both these plays that their authors were able to imagine dramatic form not “suitable to ancient rules.” In this regard, both were indeed writing for future ages and providing clues as to how ancient rules might be changed with the passage of time and the impact of social revolutions.

Notes

1. For a sustained discussion of possible topical relevance, see G. R. Hibbard's “Introduction” to Love's Labor's Lost in the Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 49-57.

2. A Study of “Love's Labour's Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 25-26. The text of the tract, discovered by Yates in manuscript in the Public Records Office, is reprinted in her book, 206-11.

3. Bradbrook, The School of Night: A Study in the Literary Relationships of Sir Walter Raleigh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936). Hibbard traces and finally dismisses these theories, but the idea of a School of Night persists, reinforced most recently by a play by Peter Whelan called The School of Night, which deals with Raleigh and his circle in connection with the death of Christopher Marlowe. The play was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1992.

4. G[eorge] C[hapman], The Shadow of Night (London, 1594).

5. See Yates, 177-82.

6. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957; repr., 1973), 44.

7. See, for example, my article, “Strategies of Delay in Shakespeare's Comedies: What the Much Ado is Really About,” in Renaissance Papers 1987 (Durham, North Carolina: The Southeastern Renaissance Conference, 1987), 95-102.

8. The Hyacinth Room (New York: Knopf, 1964), 25.

9. A small ray of light has been cast on the question in recent years by the new attention given to Elizabeth Cary's closet drama, Mariam, a play about a jealous husband who kills his wife, written probably about the same time as Shakespeare's Othello. Elizabeth Cary, The Lady Falkland, The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, eds. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

10. Letter CCXI, Sociable Letters (London, 1664), 246-47. I am extremely grateful to Professors Elizabeth Hageman and Susan Green for generously sharing with me their knowledge of Cavendish and her work.

11. Duchess of Newcastle, Plays Never Before Printed (London, 1668). Pages of each play are numbered separately: Numbers in the text refer to pages.

12. Cavendish herself seems to have been happily married to a much older husband. He was an appreciative spouse. Writing in his wife's book, Nature's Pictures (London, 1656), Biiv, the Duke of Newcastle compares her to Homer, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Lucian, Lucan, Plutarch, Esop, Terence, Plautus, Tully, Seneca, Tibullus, Orpheus, and the Apocrypha.