ABSTRACT
Margaret Cavendish places the transvestite within the epistemological divide typified by the topos of the opposing banquets of sense and reason. This chapter examines the history of the banquet topos and shows that William Shakespeare’s sway in Cavendish’s play is evident in the banquet’s thematic application. While the influence of Shakespeare is evident in many of Cavendish’s works, The Convent of Pleasure is an especially intriguing example of dramatic strategies borrowed from the future-famous bard. In Timon of Athens, the feast scenes reveal an Epicurean concern with the ways in which material superfluity may engender a poverty of wisdom—a state which degrades sense, ultimately emptying sense of pleasure. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the transvestite functions as the theatrical analogue to nature’s improvisational unity, and explains an important theoretical proposition: the process that fuses aesthetic sense to reason’s role in knowing is the same process that reconciles the performativity of gender to the prospect of social equity.
