ABSTRACT
The Lady-Errant seeks to expand the scope of such political friendship so that it might also include women, and in doing so it considers the relative political merits of friendship and love. This chapter shows the utopian space presented to the women of the play is ordered according to the principles of friendship rather than love. William Cartwright's royalist sympathies notwithstanding, the chapter suggests that The Lady-Errant is more than mere propaganda because it uses friendship as a subtle way of opening up questions of community, government and gender that are not necessarily reactionary. The chapter argues that The Lady-Errant-within its own historical and cultural limitations-attempts to do something subtly different with the tradition of friendship that it inherits from the classical world. By setting The Lady-Errant in a war-torn state, Cartwright seems determined to draw the attention of his audience to what he sees as the perverse rationale of a love that models itself upon tyranny.
