Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections explores the relationship between the plays of William Shakespeare and the writings of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673). Cavendish wrote 25 plays in the 1650s and 60s, making her one of the most prolific playwrights”man or woman”of the seventeenth century. The essays contained in this volume fit together as studies of various sorts of influence, both literary and historical, setting Cavendish's appropriation of Shakespearean characters and plot structures within the context of the English Civil Wars and the Fronde. The essays trace Shakespeare's influence on Cavendish, explore the political implications of Cavendish's contribution to Shakespeare's reputation, and investigate the politics of influence more generally. The collection covers topics ranging from Cavendish's strategic use of Shakespeare to establish her own reputation to her adaptation of Shakespeare's martial imagery, moral philosophy, and marriage plots, as well as the conventions of cross dressing on stage. Other topics include Shakespeare and Cavendish read aloud; Cavendish's formally hybrid appropriation of Shakespearean comedy and tragedy; her transformation of Shakespearean women on trial; and her re-imagining of Shakespearean models of sexuality and pleasure.

Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the seventeenth century's most striking figures: a woman who ventured into the male spheres of politics, science, philosophy and literature. The Blazing World is a highly original work: part Utopian fiction, part feminist text, it tells of a lady shipwrecked on the Blazing World where she is made Empress and uses her power to ensure that it is free of war, religious division and unfair sexual discrimination. This volume also includes The Contract, a romance in which love and law work harmoniously together, and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, which explores the power and freedom a woman can achieve in the disguise of a man.

Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673), Duchess of Newcastle and one of the best-known women writers of the her time, is enjoying a revival in the wake of Aphra Behn's canonization: She appears in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, her poetry will appear in a new edition, and Penguin has recently reprinted her science-fiction novel The Blazing World. This is an edition of her hilarious and rowdy letters, unavailable since their original publication in 1664 Margaret Cavendish: Sociable Letters is a window into the world of 17th-century marriage and daily life displaying a pleasing blend of the comic, the ironic, and the serious. Along the way, the author provides us with the first detailed criticism of Shakespeare's plays, which she defends against the Restoration distaste for low characters. She also comments on food, home remedies, the English Civil Wars, religious fanaticism, street entertainers, churchgoing as a way to find a husband, and winter sports This edition offers a full introduction to Cavendish's life and works, a bibliography, and detailed notes, and takes account of hand-corrections made at the author's behest

The Blazing World, is a 1666 work of prose fiction by the English writer Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. Feminist critic Dale Spender calls it a forerunner ofScience Fiction-General. It can also be read as a utopian work

A comprehensive account of the Cavendish family's creative output and cultural significance in the seventeenth century, combining a survey of existing work on the Cavendishes with new, wide-ranging research.

As a reader of her literary predecessors, and as a writer who herself contributed to the emerging literary tradition, Margaret Cavendish is an extraordinary figure whose role in early modern literary history has yet to be fully acknowledged. In this study, Lara Dodds reassesses the literary invention of Cavendish--the use she makes of other writers, her own various forms of writing, and the ways in which she creates her own literary persona--to transform our understanding of Cavendish's considerable accomplishments and influence. In spite of Cavendish's claims that she did little reading whatsoever, Dodds demonstrates that the duchess was an agile, avid reader (and misreader) of other writers, all of them male, all of them now considered canonical--Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Milton, Bacon. In each chapter, Dodds discusses Cavendish's moments of reading of these authors, revealing their influence on Cavendish while also providing a lens to investigate more broadly the many literary forms--poetry, letters, fiction, drama--that Cavendish employed. Seeking a fruitful exchange between literary history and the history of reading, Dodds examines both the material and social circumstances of reading and the characteristic formal features and thematic preoccupations of Cavendish's writing in each of the major genres. Thus, not only is our view of Cavendish and her specific literary achievements enhanced, but we see too the contributions of this female reader to the emerging idea of literature in late seventeenth century England. Most previous studies of Cavendish have been preoccupied with literary biography, looking into her royalist politics, materialist natural philosophy, and ambivalent protofeminism. The Literary Invention of Margaret Cavendish is significant, then, in its focus outward from Cavendish to her most enduring and positive contributions to literary history--her revival of an expansive model of literary invention that rests uneasily, but productively, alongside a Jonsonian aesthetics of the verisimilar and a Hobbesian politics of social strife.