Cavendish

Abstract

Chapter 3 challenges the conventional understanding of Margaret Cavendish as a royalist, by focusing on her less-studied works of the early 1650s, when absolutist arguments were being pressed (by Davenant and others) in service of more flexible forms of allegiance. The chapter maps and contextualizes Cavendish’s common ground with Hobbes, but especially the suggestively close relationship between her political writings and those of her husband, Newcastle. It compares the critique of cavalier tropes in Cavendish’s poetry with Marvell’s, before moving on to unravel the complex political theory of Cavendish’s first essay collection, The Worlds Olio. Cavendish takes a highly artificial view of sovereignty as a psychological phenomenon stimulated by the sensory experience of ceremony. This belief exists in complex tension with a more ruthlessly defactoist view of sovereignty based on coercive force.