ABSTRACT
A different emotional history emerges popular native English literary genres that deal in emotional excess, and deploy it in political and gendered terms. In Margaret Cavendish’s account a powerful and disorienting emotional experience, such as grief and its expression in tears, represents a liminal emotional state between two extremes: passionate loss of control and reasoned heroic action. Two participants, Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes, wrote extensively about the passions. Their understanding of the passions was far more capacious than ours is of the emotions. Cavendish uses the paratexts to her Playes to position her work within royalist theatrical discourse about the passions — and to preempt her critics. Playes opens with ‘A Dedication’, a poem describing the author’s ‘pleasure and delight’ in rehearsing the plays in her mind. Dramatic form allows Cavendish to enter a politicised debate about emotions through character.
