‘No Silent Woman': The Plays of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), an aristocrat by marriage who wrote prolifically in almost every known literary and scientific genre, published 19 plays, mostly comedies, in two handsome folio collections in 1662 and 1668 respectively. These volumes were sold commercially: ‘Twenty one¹ Plays, Written by the thrice Noble, Illustrious and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle … These are sold by J. Martin; J. Allestry; Tho. Dicas; at the Bell in S. Pauls Church-yard’² were advertised in The Kingdoms Intelligencer of 3–10 February 1662. Cavendish also presented numerous copies of her publications to institutions and individuals; the dramatist Thomas Shadwell acknowledged ‘the Noble Present of all your excellent Books’ in his dedication of the play The Humorists (1671) to her (Kewes 1998: 196). Despite this public evidence of Cavendish’s status and desire for recognition as a dramatist, her protofeminist plays have no recorded performance history until the 1990s, when their stageability has been clearly demonstrated to counter two centuries of dismissive critical comments (Williams 1998; Findlay, Hodgson-Wright, Williams 1999a and 1999b).