Abstract
Carole Levin’s influential book, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power, broke new ground for better understanding the Tudor period on the topic of queenship and gender. The compelling argument of that volume and its subsequent popularity helped point other scholars toward the enduring cultural reverberations of Queen Elizabeth’s influence on subsequent seventeenth-century writers. The Tudor monarch’s continued sway is certainly discernable in the literary endeavors of Margaret Lucas Cavendish (ca. 1623–1673), an extraordinarily prolific English poet and natural philosopher. This essay explores how Cavendish crafted elements of Elizabeth I’s Golden and Tilbury speeches to dramatize and advance key aspects of her theory of Nature.
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Notes
- 1.
Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1994).
- 2.
See, for instance, Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England”, Genders 1 (1988): 24–39. See also Rachel Trubowitz, “The Re-enchantment of Utopia and the Female Monarchical Self: Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World”, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 11 (1992): 229–45.
- 3.
See, for instance, Clair Jowett, “Imperial Dreams? Margaret Cavendish and the Cult of Elizabeth”, Women’s Writing 4.3 (1997): 383–99. Jowett explains, “Margaret Cavendish’s own hostility towards the Dutch is apparent in the Empress’s protection of her native land from foreign invaders and traders … It seems, then, that Cavendish’s text functions as a fantasy of English imperialism”.
- 4.
Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, ed. Sara H. Mendelson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2016), 60. Hereafter, BW.
- 5.
Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. Eileen O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Hereafter, OEP.
- 6.
For examples of works Cavendish explicitly invokes in The Blazing World, see Harry Power, Experimental Philosophy (London: T. Roycroft, 1663; Wing P3099); Thomas Glanville, Scepsis Scientifica (London: E. Cotes, 1665; Wing G828); and Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London: Jo. Martin, 1665; Wing H2620).
- 7.
See John Davies, Orchestra: Or, A Poem of Dancing (London, 1596).
- 8.
See Margaret Cavendish, A True Relation, in Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (London: J. Martinal and J. Allestrye, 1656). Several modern biographies flesh out additional details of Margaret’s life, but the most thorough is Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Hereafter, The Extraordinary Life.
- 9.
The first domestic news book went to press in November 1641—The Heads of Severall Proceedings in This Present Parliament—and was followed by several others. During the Civil War, news books were published to provide both information and propaganda for each side: Mercurius Aulicus, for instance (first published January 8, 1643), supported the Royalist cause, and Mercurius Britanicus stood as the Parliamentarian response (first published August 29, 1643). According to some estimates, up to 1,500 copies of each of the more successful news books may have been printed. See British Library, Burney Collection of Early English Newspapers (also available by title in the Short Title Catalogue). See also Josheph Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961).
- 10.
For the “generalissima” reference, see Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria Including her Private Correspondence with Charles the First, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Richard Bentley, 1857), 222.
- 11.
See A True Relation, 373 and 375.
- 12.
Whitaker, The Extraordinary Life, 89.
- 13.
All portraits discussed in this essay are readily available for viewing online via various durable links.
- 14.
See, for example, John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Nicola J. Watson and Michael Dobson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 43–79.
- 15.
Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (London: J.F., 1627; Wing B327).
- 16.
A portion of this essay was originally published as Brandie R. Siegfried, “Bonum Theatrale: The Matter of Elizabeth in Francis Bacon’s Of Tribute and Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World”, in Resurrecting Elizabeth I in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Elizabeth H. Hagemann and Katherine Conway (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), 185–204. Copyright belongs to the author.
- 17.
The Felicity, 5.
- 18.
Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies (London, 1668), poems 1–6. Hereafter, P&F. Two earlier editions, 1653 and 1664, were also published in London. All subsequent citations are to Poems and Fancies, ed. Brandie R. Siegfried, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series, ed. Albert Rabil and Margaret King [general series editors], and Elizabeth Hageman [English series editor] (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto in conjunction with Iter), forthcoming, based on the 1668 edition. Citations refer to poem number rather than page.
- 19.
For a good discussion of this in relation to topics of special interest to readers of Cavendish, see Olivia Weisser, Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).
- 20.
See also poem 245, P&F, “Of the Animal Spirits”, which posits that “Those spirits which we ‘animal’ do call, /May men and women be, and creatures small /And may the body into kingdoms wide, /As muscles, nerves, veins, arteries, divide”.
- 21.
Descartes, Les passions de l’âme (Paris, 1649). The English translation (anonymous) was released a year later as The Passions of the Soul (London: J. Martin and J. R. Ridley, 1650).
- 22.
See Descartes, Passions, 25–29, where he asserts that the soul or mind resides “in the kernell in the middle of the brain”. See also poem 243, P&F, “The City of These Fairies is the Brain”, where King Oberon resides “in a royal head, whose court is there /Which is the kernel of the brain”.
- 23.
Hobbes’s metaphor for absolute sovereignty, Leviathan, is found in Job 41:1–34.
- 24.
1 Cor. 12:12–27. See especially verse 21: “And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you”.
- 25.
See Charleton, Natural History of Nutrition, Life, and Voluntary Motion (London, 1659), A3 V; Harrington, The Art of Law-Giving (1659), in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 656; and Prynne, cited in Alan Shepherd, “‘O Seditious Citizen of the Physicall Common-Wealth!’: Harvey’s Royalism and His Autopsy of Old Parr”, University of Toronto Quarterly 6.5 (1996): 482–505.
- 26.
Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical Letters (London, 1664), 185. Hereafter, PL.
- 27.
See the famous frontispiece to Leviathan: at first glance, the gigantic monarch appears to be rising out of the sea, wearing scaly armor. Closer scrutiny reveals the armor to be made up of tiny individuals all unified in the person of the monarch who is actually coming across a hilly countryside.
- 28.
Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England”, Genders 1 (1988): 24–39. Gallagher conceptualizes the figures of absolute sovereignty as having a paradoxically liberating effect for the construction of female subjectivity.
- 29.
PL, 366.
- 30.
See Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), 839, cited in Rogers, 197. That Cudworth, a dedicated royalist, would attack another royalist in such terms is telling and suggests that we might easily miss the more radical implications that readers of Cavendish’s day so readily recognized.
- 31.
Queen Elizabeths Speech to Her Last Parliament (London: E. Husband, 1647).
- 32.
See Ideology and Politics on the Eve of Restoration: Newcastle’s Advice to Charles II, intro. Thomas P. Slaughter (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1984), 73, 75.
- 33.
TR, 41.
- 34.
See Todd A. Borlick, Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures (New York: Routledge, 2011), 69. See also Henry Summerson, “Lille, Alain de (1116–1202 CE)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biogragphy (online edition).
- 35.
Watchet is a shade of blue, usually denoting sky blue, but sometimes referring to a green-tinted sky.
- 36.
P&F, 136. I am indebted to Amy Scott-Douglas for directing my attention, many years ago, to the link between this poem and the portrait of Elizabeth I known as “Nature’s Dress”. For a useful related discussion, see Amy Scott-Douglas, “Enlarging Margaret: Cavendish, Shakespeare, and French Women Warriors and Writers”, Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections, ed. Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 147–78.
- 37.
For the corresponding lines, see “Queen Elizabeth: The Golden Speech”, in Elizabeth I and Her Age, ed. Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 503–05.
- 38.
See “Speech to the Troops at Tilbury”, Elizabeth I and Her Age, 392. To fully appreciate this allusion, see Carole Levin’s insightful analysis of gender in The Heart and Stomach of a King.
- 39.
Jane Kromm, “The Bellona Factor: Political Allegories and the Conflicting Claims of Martial Imagery”, Early Modern Visual Allegory: Embodying Meaning, ed. Cristelle Baskins and Lisa Rosenthal (Ashgate, 2001), 175–95 at 176.
- 40.
Marina Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 29.
- 41.
BW, 145.
- 42.
BW, 149.
- 43.
BW, 149.
- 44.
BW, 150.
- 45.
See the version made available in Leonel Sharpe, Cabala… mysteries of state (London: G. Bedel and T. Collins, 1654; Wing C184).
- 46.
BW, 150.
- 47.
BW, 150–51.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
OEP, 138.
- 51.
BW, 163.
- 52.
BW, 154.
- 53.
See Hobbes, “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind As Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery” in Leviathan (London, 1651).
- 54.
BW, 150–51. For an example of Cavendish’s prior meditations on the ordering power of a spectacular vitalist light in nature, see “The Motion of Thoughts” in P&F, 59–62.
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Siegfried, B.R. (2018). Conjuring Three Queens and an Empress: The Philosophy of Enchantment in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World . In: Bertolet, A. (eds) Queens Matter in Early Modern Studies. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64048-8_18
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