Cavendish’s Clowns: Uses of Wise Folly in Four Plays by Margaret Cavendish

54 CAVENDISH’S CLOWNS: USES OF WISE FOLLY IN FOUR PLAYS BY MARGARET CAVENDISH1 Martina Pranić DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2021.62.4 Abstract: This article explores the significance of the figures of folly in four plays by Margaret Cavendish: The Matrimonial Trouble, published in her first volume of drama, Playes, in 1662, and The Presence, The Bridals and The Convent of Pleasure from the 1668 Plays, Never Before Printed. An author of considerable breadth and some influence in her day, Cavendish, who also published poetry, natural philosophy, essays and a plethora of other genres, wrote at a time when the literature of folly, immensely popular only a few decades earlier, fell out of favour. After close consideration of the ways artificial fools are used in the four aforementioned plays, Cavendish’s decision to include these fools – so far largely passed over in criticism – is interpreted as an example of her creative appropriation of early modern folly as a discursive phenomenon which was, at its height in the works of Erasmus, Shakespeare, Rabelais and others, employed as a way of questioning the knowledge of the ostensibly reasonable world. Keywords: Margaret Cavendish, early modern comedy, fools, folly, Shakespeare, humanism The Fantastical Fool is wedded to strange singularities. Margaret Cavendish, “Of Fools,” The World’s Olio Margaret Cavendish’s second volume of dramatic texts, Plays, Never Before Printed (1668), opens with a preface in which the author considers the wisdom (and, implicitly, the folly) of publishing knowingly unconventional work, of the type 1 This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734). Cavendish’s Clowns 55 that had already earned her a considerable amount of notoriety. As is typical for her paratextual addresses to the readers2 – and this one is atypical only in its brevity – Cavendish professes a lack of concern for whether her work is read and how it may be judged, proclaims writing to be her “cheafest delight and greatest pastime” and reaffirms her position as an author whose principal concern is subsequent survival in the discourse, stating that: “I regard not so much the present as future Ages, for which I intend all my Books.”3 All of this falls in line with many of her prefaces which, as Amy Scott-Douglass notes, constitute “deliberately crafted devices for establishing her public identity.”4 Far from being expressions of disinterest, or indeed authorial humility, such openings showcase Cavendish’s knack for pre-emptive rhetorical justification and point to an intentional straying from the playwriting norms of the age. Rather than admitting fault in her plays for not being “suitable to ancient Rules, in which I pretend no skill,”5 Cavendish demonstrates that she indeed is well aware of the Aristotelian principles of dramatic structure, which were increasingly prevalent guidelines at the time, but that she just happens to be of the opinion they should be scrapped. As Sarah Mendelson observes, “Cavendish habitually used the topos of the self-deprecatory preface to emphasize her own originality,” while her “apparent avowals of her lack of skill should be seen as a rhetorical ploy that enabled her to occupy the moral high ground in her debate with the ‘carping critics’ in her audience.”6 But her prefaces are another thing too: by implicitly affirming what they appear to deny, they open something of a semantic labyrinth and allow for the first subtle glimpse into the workings of a creative mind with a pronounced tolerance for contradictions and an understanding of the discourse of folly which suggests the ways of the world may always be viewed differently, an understanding, as this essay will show, which Cavendish likely gleaned from Shakespeare and, indirectly, Erasmus. 2 For a detailed overview and discussion of Cavendish’s paratextual materials, see Amy Scott-Douglass, “Self-Crowned Laureatess: Towards a Critical Revaluation of Margaret Cavendish’s Prefaces,” Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2000): 27-49. 3 Margaret Cavendish, Plays, Never Before Printed (London: A. Maxwell, 1668) prefatory matter. 4 Scott-Douglass 30. 5 Cavendish, Plays, Never Before Printed prefatory matter. 6 Sara Mendelson, “Playing Games with Gender and Genre: The Dramatic Self-Fashioning of Margaret Cavendish,” Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish, ed. Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz (Madison, WI, and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/Associated University Presses, 2003) 198. Martina Pranić 56 Where Cavendish is concerned contradictions abound. She was herself a paradoxical figure in her own age, when she was, as David Cunning notes, “regarded alternately as mad, pretentious, a curiosity, and a genius.”7 Hilda Smith argues that Cavendish “understood, better than any of her sisters, the multifaceted nature of women’s oppression […] and society’s pervasive vision of women as incompetent, irresponsible, unintelligent, and irrational.” Yet, as Smith also notes, “she often suggested that society’s perception was correct; women had made few contributions to past civilization, not because they were ill-educated but because they had less ability than men.”8 Cavendish observed the world, natural and political, from the position of an exile, that is, of an ex-centric outsider nonetheless actively concerned with matters of central importance and familiar with the work of leading contemporary thinkers. Her engagement with and appropriation of the typically maledominated new science and its rationality is especially telling because, as Anna Battigelli argues, “these systems seemed to her to promise to provide explanations for the political turbulence of mid-seventeenth-century England.”9 And her fictional work secured her an arena for experimentation and creation of worlds free of frustrations imposed on her, as a woman, by that same environment. She embraced this textual experimentation wholeheartedly. As she proclaims herself in Nature’s Pictures, “Since all Heroick Actions, Publick Employments, as well Civil as Military, and Eloquent Pleadings, are deni’d my Sex in this Age, I may be excused for writing so much.”10 In other words, Cavendish managed to thrive in her own way despite finding herself torn between the externally prescribed guidelines for how to properly perform herself as a woman, and the urge to bring into existence something that would dislodge her (and her readers) from the tired and tyrannical ways of the surrounding world: she thrived despite finding herself torn between the push to perform and the urge to create. 7 David Cunning, “Margaret Lucas Cavendish,” The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2017), https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/sum2017/entries/margaret-cavendish. 8 Hilda Smith, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982) 75-76. 9 Anna Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998) 8. 10 Margaret Cavendish, Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (London: John Martyn and James Allestrye, 1656) sig C. Cavendish’s Clowns 57 Plays for the Page Cavendish’s plays – her fragmented dramatic collages reminiscent more of playful postmodernism than anything contemporary – bear little resemblance to other plays published and performed in the seventeenth century. They were not her primary output, nor do they currently receive as much critical attention as her natural philosophy or her proto-science-fictional utopian romance, The Blazing World, for instance.11 Of the two dozen plays collected in two volumes and preserved thanks to Cavendish’s dedication to seeing her work in print, not a single one was performed in her lifetime,12 as is now fairly certain. She wrote them, however, with considerable gusto, as she demonstrates in her addresses to the readers, showcasing a brazen assurance that her gender need not be a hindrance, even daring to suggest that her creative act has certain revolutionary potential. She dramatizes these ideas in the Introduction to her first volume of plays, tongue firmly in her cheek: 2 Gentleman: A woman write a Play! Out upon it, out upon it, for it cannot be good, besides you say she is a Lady, which is the likelyer to make the Play worse, a woman and a Lady to write a Play; fye, fye. 3 Gentleman: Why may not a Lady write a good Play? 2 Gentleman: No, for a womans wit is too weak and too conceited to write a Play. 1 Gentleman: But if a woman hath wit, or can write a good Play, what will you say then. 2 Gentleman: Why, I will say no body will believe it, for if it be good, they will think she did not write it, or at least say she did not, besides the very being a woman condemnes it, were it never so excellent and care, for men will not allow women to have wit, or we men to have reason, for if we allow them wit, we shall lose our prehemency.13 11 Gweno Williams, “‘Why May Not a Lady Write a Good Play?’ Plays by Early Modern Women Reassessed as Performance Texts,” Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (London: Routledge, 1998) 100. 12 Mendelson 195. 13 Margaret Cavendish, Playes (London: John Martyn, James Allestry and Thomas Dicas, 1662) 2. Martina Pranić 58 Yet, Cavendish’s plays are still something of an acquired taste. Famously deemed “intolerable” by Virginia Woolf,14 they sometimes earn such scathing remarks as that of Rose A. Zimbardo who declares that, “[a]s a playwright Cavendish is a strong contender for worst in the tradition,” quickly qualifying it with a concession that “she is a thinker of some stature, and even her mockery of the popular practice of her time is enlightening.”15 These plays are possibly best seen as rudimentary experiments in creative expression where Cavendish proceeds through a steady accumulation of detail or series of loosely connected vignettes to construct scenarios for her heroines in which they can creatively defy normative female behaviours of the age, while she as a playwright can comment upon the practice as she perceived it in the peculiar historical moment of writing, before (and immediately after) the ban on theatre was repealed in 1660. As Judith Peacock contends, drama “not only offered [Cavendish] an opportunity to explore her own vacillating and often contradictory ideas about gender roles, but her dramatic writing also demonstrates a theoretical exploration and an understanding of the constraints of the form.”16 14 Virginia Woolf, “The Duchess of Newcastle,” The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1986) 87. Woolf is often quoted for her colourfully negative portrayal of Cavendish in A Room of One’s Own, which likens the Duchess to a “giant cucumber” which “had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (San Diego, CA, and New York: Harvest Books, 1989) 65. For a discussion of the usage of Woolf in Cavendish scholarship and a comprehensive list of negative portrayals, see Lara Dodds, “Bawds and Housewives: Margaret Cavendish and the Work of ‘Bad Writing,’” Early Modern Studies Journal 6 (2014): 29-65 (esp. 29-32). Woolf is, although still patronising, rather more generous in the aforementioned quote: if not to the writing itself, then to Cavendish’s genuine and unique creativity. In its entirety, the quote reads: “Though her philosophies are futile, and her plays intolerable, and her verses mainly dull, the vast bulk of the Duchess is leavened by a vein of authentic fire. One cannot help following the lure of her erratic and lovable personality as it meanders and twinkles through page after page. There is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her. Her simplicity is so open; her intelligence so active; her sympathy with fairies and animals so true and tender. She has the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of some non-human creature, its heartlessness, and its charm.” 15 Rose A. Zimbardo, A Mirror to Nature: Transformations in Drama and Aesthetics, 1660-1732 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1986) 58. 16 Judith Peacock, “Writing for the Brain and Writing for the Boards: The Producibility of Margaret Cavendish’s Dramatic Texts,” A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ed. Stephen Clucas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) 87. Cavendish’s Clowns 59 Her plays have a paradox at their core. Akin to closet dramas, a genre that exists at the intersection of the public and private spheres – although she never designates them as such – they are spectacles that cannot be observed, or unstaged stagings.17 By incorporating scenes that describe battles, masques, or elaborate and fantastical scenery, the performative aspects of Cavendish’s plays transpose the enactment into the imagination and invite the reader to fashion themselves a spectator. Such experimental quality of form coupled with experimental quality of content whereby she places strong female characters into plots that rely on unorthodox sexual politics and situations, which challenge and affront perspectives on gender relations, are what makes her plays distinguish themselves and demand attention. They are creative efforts that stand in complex relation to the tradition she esteems and is striving to both emulate and supplement with her unconventional imaginings, always looking more to the past glory of early modern playwriting than to her contemporaries. As Anne Shaver summarises: The duchess’s plays are structurally closer to some of Shakespeare’s than to the neoclassical ideal espoused but not always happily achieved by Ben Jonson and most Restoration playwrights. Her works cohere not through unities of time, place, or affect but through an underlying question or idea that may be treated fantastically, realistically, comically, and pathetically all in the same work.18 The Discourse of Folly It is indeed “Gentle Shakespear” with his “fluent Wit”19 who earns a lot of Cavendish’s earnest admiration, even at the time when his popularity was 17 However, Cavendish’s plays are far from unperformable, as Gweno Williams’s work on their actual staging and the recorded versions of six plays demonstrated. See Gweno Williams, Margaret Cavendish: Plays in Performance (York: York St John University, 2004) [video]. Discussing Cavendish and several other English early modern female playwrights, Williams argues that “the continuing and increasingly undeserved question mark over the issue of the performability of these plays has led to the maintenance of a critical blind-spot, a repeated and sustained ambivalence about their significance and full status as theatrical texts and their unique and important place in the complex history of English drama.” See Williams, “‘Why May Not a Lady Write a Good Play?’” 95. 18 Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays, ed. Anne Shaver (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1999) 10. 19 Cavendish, Playes, “A General Prologue to all my Playes.” Martina Pranić 60 approaching an “all-time low.”20 Ever the independent thinker with little regard for fleeting fashions dictated by authorities on different matters, Cavendish had anticipated even John Dryden in delivering “the first sustained evaluation of Shakespeare as playwright,”21 defending Shakespeare from the view typical for the Restoration, namely that his plays are “made up onely with Clowns, Fools, Watchmen, and the like.”22 In the now-famous Letter 123 of her Sociable Letters, she offers a critical appraisal of playwriting through an assessment of Shakespeare’s artistry and his ability to write plausible characters, claiming boldly that “’tis Harder, and Requires more Wit to Express a Jester, than a Grave Statesman,”23 and revealing particular admiration for his capacity for empathy and compassion, specifically when it concerns women, because “one would think that he had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman, for who could Describe Cleopatra Better than he hath done.”24 By noting the understanding of liminality necessary for a successful portrayal of folly and a writer’s openness and fluidity which allow for the genuineness found in Shakespeare’s female characters, Cavendish calls attention to qualities crucial in her own creative and philosophical writing. As Brandie Siegfried observes, “she saw in [Shakespeare’s] theatrical works an ontological constant that paralleled her own philosophical stance on matter” and perceived in his works “learned schemes which could be useful for the study of both moral and natural philosophy.”25 It is hardly surprising that a thinker such as Cavendish, who unequivocally advocates the view that a vital energy permeates matter itself,26 who exalts bodies 20 Emma Depledge, Shakespeare’s Rise to Cultural Prominence: Politics, Print and Alteration, 1642-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) 39. For a thorough discussion of the popularity of Shakespeare’s work in print and the various alterations it underwent during the renewed staging in the period when Cavendish was publishing her own plays, see especially Chapter 2, “Shakespeare on the Early Restoration Stage and Page, 1660-1677,” 39-51. 21 Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice, eds., Cavendish and Shakespeare: Interconnections (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) 2. 22 Letter CXXIII in Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (London: William Wilson, 1664) 245. 23 Cavendish, Sociable Letters 246. 24 Cavendish, Sociable Letters 247. 25 Brandie R. Siegfried, “Dining at the Table of Sense: Shakespeare, Cavendish and The Convent of Pleasure,” Cavendish and Shakespeare 64. 26 For a comprehensive discussion of Cavendish’s animate matter, see Jonathan L. Shaheen, “The Life of the Thrice Sensitive, Rational and Wise Animate Matter: Cavendish’s Cavendish’s Clowns 61 and subjectivities together and is capable of drawing on reason as well as imagination in equal measure, would understand the paradoxical wisdom of folly, as encountered in the works of Erasmus, Shakespeare, Rabelais and Cervantes – to name but the most celebrated few – which exposes incongruities and contradictions in everyday knowledge as well as in theoretical systems, shedding light on flaws in human pretentions to certainty. Rather than signifying simply a trifling involvement with the comic or the absurd, the discourse of folly in the Renaissance is a profoundly serious matter: as a way of understanding, it makes no positivist truth claims; rather, it fragments and creatively reassembles the fictions that shape reality. It is not wholly constrained by the ways of the world, but is prepared to postulate alternatives, and its paradoxical wisdom is equally as performative as it is creative. As Sam Gilchrist Hall reflects in his lucid examination of the Shakespearean philosophy of folly in the context of contemporary humanism: many of Shakespeare’s most profound philosophical ideas stem from the discourse of folly’s critique of dominant modes of reason. The wordplay, jubilant ironies and vertiginous paradoxes intrinsic to this discourse offer alternatives to the instrumental ways of understanding that continue to dominate and dogmatise serious philosophy.27 And this is what Cavendish reaches for and recuperates in her plays, boldly and deliberately, which is all the more significant given the fact that she is writing at the dawn of the Age of Reason. The falling into disfavour of the discourse of folly in the Age of Reason was famously taken up by Michel Foucault. As he argues in Madness and Civilization, first “a great disquiet”28 occurs on the horizon of European culture when folie – a term that encompasses both madness and folly – leaves the place in the hierarchy of Vices that the Middle Ages had assigned it, and steps out into the limelight of literary, philosophical and moral concern. Folly contests the truth of man’s knowledge by pointing to its absurdity and becomes, among other things, “the punishment of a disorderly and useless science.”29 Not merely a sin among other Animism,” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11, no. 2 (2021): 621-41. 27 Sam Gilchrist Hall, Shakespeare’s Folly: Philosophy, Humanism, Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 2016) 2. 28 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1964), trans. Richard Howard (London: Routledge, 2006) 11. 29 Foucault 22. Martina Pranić 62 sins any longer, madness, or folly in early modernity becomes a tool of derision and a method of a Madman who in early modern farcical forms “is no longer simply a ridiculous and familiar silhouette in the wings: he stands centre stage as the guardian of truth.”30 But soon after such liberation, Foucault identifies a “strange act of force”31 that occurs in the Age of Reason, when madness is defined, pathologised and disconnected from reason by Rationality. In this traumatic split, “the classical age was to reduce to silence the madness whose voice the Renaissance had just liberated, but whose violence it had already tamed.”32 Disagreeing with Foucault’s sweeping work on the history of the concept of madness has a history of its own and doubtless some of its parts will never pass the scrutiny of orthodox historiographical standards,33 but a much more focused historicist study such as Robert Hornback’s The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare34 clearly reveals the same fate of folly in Cavendish’s age and milieu. Employing an approach he terms “literary archaeology,” Hornback draws on religious, political and theatre history, combining them with various methods of historicist and literary research to re-examine “supposedly long familiar comic figures,”35 discerning reductive and dismissive attitudes derived from a long history of misconceptions that shoehorned early modern comedy and folly into an easy category of “comic relief,”36 a concept that originated as late as 1825. Hornback locates a very precise waning of the age of clowning already at the end of the Jacobean era37 and the new primacy of neoclassical aesthetics and decorum which favoured a diffused satire and a more gentrified kind of comedy aimed at aristocratic audiences. However, clowning was not simply unpopular towards the end; in the great political turmoil Cavendish herself witnessed first-hand, it was becoming dangerous too. The very last popular player of clownish roles with a political bent, William Robbins, was in fact assassinated in 1645 during the Civil War, while fighting for the King, which illustrates that, as Hornback notes, “the lengths to 30 Foucault 11. 31 Foucault 35. 32 Foucault 35. 33 For an overview of the historicists’ reception of Foucault’s Histoire de la folie see Colin Gordon, “History, Madness and Other Errors: A Response,” History of the Human Sciences 3, no. 3 (1990): 381-96. 34 See Robert Hornback, The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare (Woodbridge, and Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2013). 35 Hornback 20. 36 Hornback 13. 37 Hornback 191. Cavendish’s Clowns 69 opinions, to pursue the profession of an orator. Following, of course, the uncrowned queen of foolish oratory, Erasmus’ Moria, Cavendish thus yet again quite explicitly invokes the tradition of an inconspicuous but enduring philosophy which mocks the omnipresent certitudes of reason, a paradoxical, non-hereditary “tradition” peculiarly attuned to the dual etymology of the word itself, which carries within it the sense of both “deliver” and “betray.” Mimick’s newfound profession is then put into practice and, after some bravado on his deep understanding of the art of persuasion, both performative and intellectual, he lunges into an oration on the subject that lies at the very heart of The Bridals: the chastity of women. This is delivered in a marvellously parodic manner, declaring chastity and women two subjects in their essence so far apart that they can never be joined, or if done so, then joined only nominally, because “Names are more easily joined than the things they signifie.”58 Cavendish here makes him a mock-humanist, basing this ‘foolosophical’ argument which bungles Shakespeare’s famous “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet” (Romeo and Juliet, II.i.85-86), on the vacuousness of words and their inability to express felt reality. Mimick’s foolish oration is, however, soon interrupted by Lady Vertue who, seemingly outraged at his very words, forces him to descend from his makeshift pulpit and addresses his make-believe audience of nine thousand herself. Literally taking the place of a fool, Lady Vertue proceeds to deliver a sizeable speech of her own which, granting first the existence of “some Women, as the scum of the Female Sex, [who are] Incontinent,” exalts the many virtues of their vast majority, who are “beloved and favoured by the Gods” despite being “the unhappiest Creatures which Nature ever made,”59 given how they are treated by men. This jolly foolish debate is continued in Act 5, when Mimick offers to prepare a metaphysical “Hodge-podge” consisting of a long catalogue of faults, ills and vices to be served at Pluto’s table, which Lady Vertue immediately counterpoints with her own concoction of honours, virtues and qualities fit for the table of Jove. Mimick and Vertue’s good-humoured and lengthy sparring, however, should not be taken at face value; it is not a simple exposition of a faulty argument followed by a winning one. By having a fool involved in the delivery of what seems to be the central philosophical point of the play, Cavendish judiciously deploys the discourse of folly in order to show that the truth – be it the truth of female chastity as taken up in the play, or the truth which one attempts to reach by the means of rhetoric – depends greatly on perspective. 58 Cavendish, Plays, Never Before Printed 39. 59 Cavendish, Plays, Never Before Printed 40-41. Martina Pranić 70 Mimick of The Bridals is carried over into The Convent of Pleasure, where he also appears as the fool of another Lady Vertue, although the Mimick of the latter play may seem but a pale shadow of the garrulous provocateur who took up so much of The Bridals. And it is quite significant that The Convent of Pleasure contains a fool. Contemporary critics’ favourite due to its honest portrayal of potentially queer desire, the play, as Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson note, “unfolds as an ongoing debate over what constitutes ‘natural’ behaviour [and] demonstrates, in numerous ways, what Judith Butler calls the ‘performative character of gender.’”60 Performativity is in fact one of the mechanisms Cavendish employs to build her subversive fictional worlds (or social orders) in which new conceptualisations of identity become possible. As Katherine Kellett argues, “by resisting stable identities in [The Convent of Pleasure], Cavendish exemplifies queer performativity more radically than by just resisting heterosexuality and instead complicates the very identity categories on which heterosexuality relies to assure its dominance.”61 The role that the discourse of folly plays in this has so far mostly been overlooked. The Convent of Pleasure gradually moves from active engagement with an alternative existence for Lady Happy and her companions in the all-female cloister – the pleasingly creative proto-feminist scenario of the first part of the play – to the push towards reinstating the dominant order for which the man in the guise of a Princess is the catalyst. This move is parallel to Lady Happy’s gradual silencing: from the self-assured, outspoken and witty creator of an alternative safe space for women instituted through performative utterances (most significantly in the first two acts of the play), to her stumbling into stunned silence after she becomes aware of her passionate feelings for the Princess/Prince and ultimate surrender to marriage she once so vehemently opposed. The play thus creates a tension not only between intentions and outcomes, but also between private affections and public status and the binary of feminine and masculine. What remains is the question of the play’s attitude towards this tension and whether or not it can even be read as resolved. Writing about Cavendish’s view on the gendered production of knowledge, Lisa Walters concludes that, “[a]s Cavendish systematically deconstructs metaphors, analogies and cultural associations that define and maintain authority, she reveals the multifaceted dimensions of power, particularly how the belief in natural gender differences and the patriarchy they entailed was entrenched within 60 Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson, eds., Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader (Peterborough, Ont., and Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2000) 17. 61 Katherine Kellett, “Performance, Performativity, and Identity in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 48, no. 2 (2008): 430. Cavendish’s Clowns 71 the early modern perception and experience of the world.”62 It is possible to find a very similar awareness of multiplicity articulated in The Convent of Pleasure, regardless how traditional its outcome may seem at first. A hint for a possible reading that could overcome a rigidly constructed conclusion that rejects alternatives proposed at the beginning of the play appears at its very end, when Cavendish, seemingly out of nowhere, concocts the character of Mimick, quite obviously a professional fool. After her mute marriage to the Prince, and after they mime the first rituals of a married couple – the walk under a canopy, the dance, all described in stage directions – Lady Happy breaks her silence only to address Mimick and offer him to leave his mistress, Lady Vertue, and become her own fool. All of that might seem gratuitous – a married woman trifling with a jester, two creatures whose words are null and void interact while her new husband handles the affairs of the Convent and what is to become of it now that the couple is about to re-enter the world – were it not for the fact that it establishes a direct connection with the discourse of early modern folly. After it has been settled that the Prince will make a gift of the Convent (which through marriage became his to give away) under the condition that Mimick speaks the Epilogue, the fool is left as the final voice of the play and, before the standard speech, has this curious exchange with himself: I have it, I have it; No faith, I have it not; I lie, I have it, I say, I have it not; Fie Mimick, will you lie? Yes, Mimick, I will lie, if it be my pleasure: But I say, it is gone; What is gone? The Epilogue; When had you it? I never had it; then you did not lose it; that is all one, but I must speak it, although I never had it; How can you speak it, and never had it? I marry, that’s the question; but words are nothing, and then an Epilogue is nothing, and so I may speak nothing; Then nothing be my Speech.63 For a play which is as economical with the lines as The Convent of Pleasure, this is more than a navel-gazing riff. Tara Pedersen notes that in this passage, “Mimick invokes the philosophical Latin grammars that would have been commonplace in the learned society of the seventeenth century, specifically the familiar syllogism that words are air or breath.”64 62 Lisa Walters, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 99. 63 Cavendish, Plays, Never Before Printed 52. 64 Tara Pedersen, “‘We shall discover our Selves’: Practicing the Mermaid’s Law in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure,” Early Modern Women 5 (2010): 129. Martina Pranić 72 Apart from that, it calls to mind Falstaff – Shakespeare’s larger-than-life creation of folly who also happens to speak an Epilogue which complicates the play that precedes it – and his “catechism” on honour. Called upon by prince Hal to fight in the battle that rages around them, he is left alone on the stage, posing copious rhetorical questions and answering them with literal counter intuition: “What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning!” (Henry IV, Part 1, V.i.139-40) But Mimick’s “nothings” are reminiscent also of the tragic “nothing” that echoes ominously throughout King Lear, a play deeply concerned with the misapplication of folly and reason. Cordelia’s “Nothing” (I.iv.93) is the answer that provokes the old king when he grasps for a quantification of love, and one that triggers all the madness that ensues. It is also what his Fool repeats back to him, mocking him and the terrible mistake he had made in banishing his only honest child: “I am better than thou art now: I am a fool, thou art nothing.” (I.iv.183-84) And Lear’s Fool and Cordelia share more than the fact that they would have originally been played by the same actor: they share the affection of the foolish king and an important capacity for seeing through pretensions and telling the unadorned truth – which is a hallmark of the discourse of folly. Mimick’s words at the end of The Convent of Pleasure pull into focus the fact that “sense and nonsense are locked in a mutually defining relationship”65 and his presence (and the presence of folly) opens up critical space in which incongruities such as those that arise in the play in fact need no resolution. This is the space in which John Keats will later recognise the concept of Negative Capability, a philosophical position which substantiates the state of cognitive dissonance, or a way of thinking which is, in Keats’s words, “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”66 And if anyone had first-hand knowledge of such a position, it would have been Margaret Cavendish with her great intellectual project in which she dared to make a stand against entrenched traditions. So much so that she might have agreed with the line from Ecclesiastes (1:17): “And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.” Cavendish’s direct engagement with folly at the end of The Convent of Pleasure devalues the neat conventional conclusion of the comedy and reveals both the performative constructedness of this conclusion and the potential consequences of the play’s more creative proposals. After what had happened between and to the two central characters, what ensues can hardly be a typical marriage. And this 65 Gilchrist Hall 1. 66 John Keats, “To George and Tom Keats, 21 Dec. 1817,” The Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) 60. Cavendish’s Clowns 73 is very much in accord with what Butler says about performativity, which is that it “describes this relation of being implicated in that which one opposes, this turning of power against itself to produce alternative modalities of power” – and to become creative with it, one might add – “to establish a kind of political contestation that is not a ‘pure’ opposition, a ‘transcendence’ of contemporary relations of power, but a difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure.”67 Creativity and Folly One of the main aims of this article was to draw attention to a particular brand of creativity that can be ascribed to Margaret Cavendish, which she used to bring about primarily “alternative modalities” of writing and, consequently, of power, as Butler has it. This creativity is, however, significantly different from what it might entail today. Put bluntly, creativity is always an ability to bring into existence something that was previously not there; while not being altogether synonymous with invention. Today, social sciences (and psychology) operate with a standard definition of creativity, one that has been in circulation since at least 1952, and that postulates two crucial requirements of creativity: originality and effectiveness.68 In contemporary world, it is a particularly potent concept, one that is even elevated to the status of an imperative. We tend to have high hopes for creativity to be the means to save us from ourselves by providing innovative solutions for immensely difficult issues, such as the climate crisis. Practically useful and usually very marketable, creativity is an object of private desires and a valuable commodity. And when yoked to capital and redirected towards profitable ends, it becomes one of the great ills of neoliberalism, appropriated and redefined to augment the injustices of capitalism and feed the growth of the very system it should seek to contest.69 One of the reasons why such creativity is divorced from its full experimental potential can be sought in the fact that it curbs the discourse of folly and its paradoxes, failing to understand the deadening effect that “proliferat[ing] more of the same”70 has on the imagination. 67 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London: Routledge, 1993) 241. 68 See Mark A. Runco and Garrett J. Jaeger, “The Standard Definition of Creativity,” Creativity Research Journal 24, no. 1 (2012): 92-96. 69 For a thorough exposition of these ideas, see Oli Mould, Against Creativity (London: Verso, 2018). 70 Mould 7. Martina Pranić 74 This, a thinker like Margaret Cavendish seems to have known all too well. Her ideas remain peculiarly fresh even to this day, so much so that her theory of matter could be read as something of an alternative to mainstream physicalist metaphysics of the present moment. Her insistence on writing in various generic forms reveals a respect for both intellectual rigour and the fluidity of imaginative literature, especially that of Shakespeare’s works, and shows a readiness, and even need, to accept the free flow and exchange of ideas. As Brandie Siegfried insightfully argues, [b]y alluding to Shakespeare’s plays, and then restructuring Shakespeare’s theatrical strategies as evaluative sieves for philosophical assertions, Cavendish firmly folds the arts of delight back into the practice of moral and philosophical reason. For Cavendish, aesthetically tutored senses not only warm the intellect to true insight, but make possible the cognitive leap from the limitations of present episteme to new realms of knowledge.71 In writing her curious plays, Cavendish, dissatisfied with the gendered social roles of the world around her and unperturbed by societal expectations of women, performs what Gilles Deleuze would deem a creative act as an act of resistance. Her unperformed, unorthodox plays open up experimental literary spaces to think through problems despite the obvious limitations of the seventeeenthcentury reality and put forward creative examples of how to think differently. They also exemplify the fact that, as the French philosopher boldly claims, “[c]reation takes place in choked passages.”72 And it is precisely overcoming an intellectual climate that tends to “choke” voices that are conspicuously different what Cavendish is most concerned with, introducing as she does clowns into her plays who, speaking their “nothings” from the liminal position of relative freedom, manage to criticise without claiming authority and complicate the order of things which would normally be taken for granted. As Deleuze elaborates further, [r]epressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and even rarer, thing that might be worth saying.73 71 Siegfried 65. 72 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) 133. 73 Deleuze 129. 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