Warrior Women in the Plays of Cavendish and Killigrew

The figure of the Amazon or warrior woman repeatedly emerges from classical and Renaissance cultural documents as an integral part of the story of national identity and state formation. Travel narratives, epics, stage plays, masques--these diverse forms collectively mobilize the warrior woman to make issues of gender difference, chastity, and sexuality central to the imaginative construction of nationhood. For adventurers like Sir Walter Ralegh, "Amazons figure the sense in which boundaries between experience and fantasy are permeable," allowing the recuperation of classical models of heroism. ¹ William Shakespeare might use Joan la Pucelle to denigrate French Catholicism and justify English military aggression, or offer his audience a subjugated Amazon such as Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream to explore masculine anxiety over England's anomalous rule by a woman. ² Similarly, Edmund Spenser's national epic, The Faerie Queene, imaginatively reconciles English civil order to its female ruler through conflicts between warrior women and associated conflicts over types of chastity. The appearance of a pantheon of Amazonian characters in Ben Jonson's Masque of Queens demonstrates that the importance of the figure of the Amazon was not limited to Elizabeth's reign. While a great deal has been written on Elizabethan and Stuart uses of the Amazon myth, there has been less consideration of how the figure of the Amazon develops through the Civil War and into the Restoration. For English writers of this later period, national identity again became a question of immediate and material importance; the reality of war gave the figure of the warrior woman greater ideological urgency and also changed the material pretexts for her representation. When real women fought on English soil, established relationships between the mythology of warrior women and the lived experiences of women at war were liable to dissolve quickly, making those relationships susceptible to new and different meanings. History records the many heroic exploits of women during this period of social and political crisis; through their deeds, the warrior woman was temporarily liberated from her position within the safe prison of myth and metaphor to prove her currency, her power to inspire Royalist and Roundhead women, and her potential as flesh and bone. The anxieties and possibilities attendant on the figure of the warrior woman are charted in works by two Civil War exiles, Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Killigrew. Similar in cultural position and political sympathies, Cavendish and Killigrew also wrote remarkably similar closet plays during their time away from England, addressing and imaginatively redressing the traumas of war. But their warrior women function quite differently, suggesting the ways that authorial gender influences the place of the warrior woman in their visions of restored nationhood.

For both Cavendish and Killigrew, personal upheaval, civil war, and the death of the king represented the end of all the constitutive hierarchies that had shaped their identities. Prior to the Civil War, Killigrew and Cavendish moved in the same court circles and might well have crossed paths more than once: Margaret Cavendish, then Margaret Lucas, was sent to serve as maid of honor to the queen in 1642; while she was shy and withdrawn, she nonetheless found a place among the young women who surrounded Henrietta Maria and would have witnessed their dramatic entertainments, appreciated the queen's interest in performance, and circulated among the many courtiers who fed the court's appetite for plays with their creative talents. ³ Another of the queen's maids of honor, Cecilia Crofts, became Killigrew's wife in 1636. After holding various positions with the court, Killigrew turned to playwriting in the comic mode preferred by Caroline audiences with his first publicly performed work, The Parson's Wedding (1642). Killigrew and Cavendish, in sum, shared their focus on the court as the center of power, privilege, and intrigue--and consequently shared their devastation at its dissolution.

The years leading up to Charles I's...