“Treble marriage”: Margaret Cavendish, William Newcastle, and Collaborative Authorship

Margaret Cavendish’s publications abound with her claims to individuality as a thinker and as a writer, yet her husband, William, Duke of Newcastle, appears throughout these works as a teacher, a character, a co-author, and a promoter of her writing. These texts exhibit a tension between Cavendish’s public identity as the wife of an aristocrat and her self-constructed identity as a unique writer. This article posits that Cavendish manages this tension by engaging in forms of literary collaboration with her husband that revise discourses about and practices of collaborative authorship while at the same time critiquing and renegotiating contemporary views on marriage. In both her life writing and her plays, Cavendish imagines relationships that I term “collaborative marriages,” which subordinate physical gender difference and heterosexuality in order to achieve an equal spiritual and intellectual partnership. Her prefaces and life writing establish the husband and wife as a writing team and use literary production to construct a revised, mutually beneficial marital relationship. The plays The Convent of Pleasure(1668) and The Religious (1662) posit yet other versions of this new concept of a collaborative marriage, experimenting with ways in which a marriage could become a collaboration of bodiless souls rather than a sexual hierarchy. The forms of collaborative marriage Cavendish develops in her life writing and her plays revise both seventeenth-century collaborative literary practice and dominant cultural ideas about marital relationships.