ABSTRACT
The closet is frequently used as a metonym for ‘private space’ in literature of the early modern period, and yet, in a manner comparable to Margaret Cavendish herself when she declared via the character of Lady Happy in The Convent of Pleasure: ‘My Cloister shall not be a Cloister of restraint, but a place of freedom […],’ 1 I intend in this essay to challenge traditional concepts of privacy and the closet in the seventeenth century, most obviously by challenging the category of closet-drama, but also by challenging the role or function of the closet space within the ‘real’ early modern household and within fictional texts.
