Reviewed by:
Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice , eds. Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006. xii + 218 pp. index. illus. $89.95. ISBN: 0–7546–5453–2.

As editors Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice remark, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) published the "first sustained evaluation of Shakespeare as playwright" (2) in her Sociable Letters. In letter 162 Cavendish recalls her early passion for Shakespeare, when "I only was in Love with three Dead Men," Caesar, Ovid and "our Countryman Shakespear, for his Comical and Tragical Humour." Letter 123 praises Shakespeare's ability to inhabit characters so that "as one would think he were Really the Coward he feigns, so one would think he were the most Valiant and Experienced Souldier" and that "he had been metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman." The ten essays in Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections explore Cavendish's complex relationship with her countryman's dramatic works, considering ways her plays and other writings both appropriate and revise Shakespearean characters, genres, and political positions. [End Page 316]

Shakespeare's mix of comic and tragic modes exerted a strong influence on Cavendish's drama, as Erna Kelly brings out in "Drama's Olio: A New Way to Serve Old Ingredients in The Religious and The Matrimonial Trouble." Kelly demonstrates how Cavendish's tragicomedies incorporate elements of Measure for Measure, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello, allowing her to "fuse love with politics" (49) and provide a "panoramic survey of matrimony" (59). Brandie R. Siegfried considers ways Cavendish, like Shakespeare, pursued philosophical questions through comedy. In "Dining at the Table of Sense: Shakespeare, Cavendish and The Convent of Pleasure," Siegfried links Cavendish's "allusive preference" for Shakespeare's comedies and romances (75) to her interest in "the relationship of sensory experience to moral and scientific reason" (64), showing how Cavendish uses cross-dressed lovers to bridge the gap between sense and reason. Mihoko Suzuki also treats "Shakespearean subtexts" (104) in a Cavendish comedy in "Gender, the Political Subject and Dramatic Authorship: Margaret Cavendish's Loves Adventures and the Shakespearean Example." Suzuki finds allusions to at least twelve Shakespeare plays in Loves Adventures, though Cavendish "imagines a greater range of political possibilities for female subjects" (114).

While Suzuki detects an "anti-monarchical, democratic notion of the self" (106–07) in Loves Adventures, Karen Raber believes another Cavendish play reinforces the need for "an absolute monarch capable of rectifying violations of 'nature' in both family and state" (180). Raber's "The Unnatural Tragedy and Familial Absolutism" argues that Cavendish's tragedy, like Measure for Measure, dramatizes patriarchal control of incest and libertinism. Alexandra G. Bennett's "Testifying in the Court of Public Opinion: Margaret Cavendish Reworks The Winter's Tale," on the other hand, views Shakespeare's Hermione and Paulina as sources of female authority in Cavendish's Publick Wooing, The Sociable Companions, and Youths Glory and Deaths Banquet. Bennett sees "a distinct progression from convention to defiance" (88–89) in the heroines' speeches and in the stage directions Cavendish uses to convey their public power. Vimala C. Pasupathi's "Old Playwrights, Old Soldiers, New Martial Subjects: The Cavendishes and the Drama of Soldiery" also examines Cavendish's concern with public speech and power, particularly in the military. Pasupathi suggests Shakespeare's adoption of soldier and female personae helped license the women warriors of Bell in Campo and the soldiers' speeches in Orations of Divers Sorts. Pasupathi also considers how Cavendish's soldiers reconceive the figure of the aristocratic warrior from her husband the Duke of Newcastle's life and his play The Country Captain.

Amy Scott-Douglass focuses on Margaret Cavendish's women warriors, finding sources for the Amazonian characters of Bell in Campo in French women who fought in the Thirty Years' War and the Fronde. Scott-Douglass's extensive research for "Englarging Margaret: Cavendish, Shakespeare, and French Women Warriors and Writers" counters the assumption that Cavendish's "heroickesses" are products of female fantasy. Like Pasupathi, Scott-Douglass believes Shakespeare's metamorphosis into characters unlike his own authorized Cavendish's portrayal of female soldiers, but the Shakespearean connection here is otherwise slight. [End Page 317] Shakespeare also serves more as frame than interconnection in James Fitzmaurice's "Shakespeare, Cavendish and Reading Aloud in Seventeenth-Century England." Nevertheless, Fitzmaurice's discussion of Cavendish's instructions for reading plays, her desire that readers "imagine a stage performance as they read or listen" (42), elucidates the tradition of reading dramatic literature aloud, a practice that intensified in the Interregnum, when Cavendish wrote most of her plays.

Two essays in the volume extend the interconnections between Cavendish and Shakespeare to a third writer. Shannon Miller's "'Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe': Affiliation and Memorialization in Margaret Cavendish's Playes and Plays, Never before Printed" argues that Cavendish's prefaces to her plays associate them with Shakespeare's by distinguishing them from Ben Jonson's, becoming "an early voice in elevating Shakespeare over Jonson" (9). Miller indicates further Shakespearean influence in the folio format Cavendish used for her play collections. Katherine Romack triangulates Cavendish with Shakespeare and Dryden in "'I wonder she should be so Infamous for a Whore?': Cleopatra Restored." Romack's essay demonstrates how Cavendish's reflections on Cleopatra in Sociable Letters and The Worlds Olio draw on the sexuality of Shakespeare's Cleopatra while anticipating Dryden's domestication of her in All for Love.

As is often the case with such collections, some essays have the brevity of conference papers, while others read like condensed monographs. The volume as a whole would have profited from closer editing and proofreading; missing letters and words sometimes distract and the index page numbers are inaccurate. Nonetheless, Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections marks a milestone in Cavendish criticism by charting this prolific woman writer's creative engagement with Shakespeare and revealing her early contributions to critical assessment of his work.

Cynthia Garrett
Wells College

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