ABOUT THE PLAY

Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure is a play that envisions a female utopia. When the play begins we learn that the main character Lady Happy has just inherited a large sum of money from her father’s death, and immediately four male suitors, Monsieurs Take-Pleasure, Advisor, Facile, and Courtly, plot marriage for control over this vast fortune. Lady Happy, however, decides that rather than give up her money and power, she will found a Convent of Pleasure, a women-only retreat that, despite calling itself a “Convent”, will be devoted not to religious observance but to broadening the realm of female experience: women will act out plays, talk about philosophy, and form female friendships apart from the world of romantic and sexual coupling. The Convent is not just a social or political experiment, however. We learn in Lady Happy’s long justification in Act 1 that it is grounded in a philosophy of nature that aligns the pleasures of a personified Nature with religious belief. In this philosophy, anything that causes our bodies pleasure cannot be unnatural.

Of course, the plot itself will immediately press on and complicate this “naturalness” of bodily and mental pleasures. The suitors, assisted by the go-between Madam Mediator, scheme about how to break into the Convent, and stress how unnatural it is to separate the sexes. The Convent will be visited by a foreign Princess who presents as masculine and who often dresses up in male apparel to “pretend” to court the Lady Happy; the same-sex attraction that Lady Happy feels for the Princess causes her to question the boundaries between the natural and the unnatural. The play seems to end in a very different place from which it started; does this departure show the ideals described in Act 1 to be unworkable in reality? Or are we meant to see in the dissolution of this secular convent a warning about the specific kinds of pressures that will be brought to destroy such utopian feminist ideals? There is some difficulty in answering even the fairly straightforward question: does The Convent of Pleasure have a happy ending?

Formally the play is also very complicated. Though it is divided into acts and scenes, it is very different than many other early modern plays, especially those of Shakespeare, written for the public stage. Cavendish herself notes her very different approach to dramatic form in the numerous prefatory essays to her first collection of plays published in 1662. Convent of Pleasure, like all of Cavendish’s plays, is a closet drama, meaning it was written with no real intention for it to be staged publicly (though many closet dramas were acted out in households and private spaces). She seemed to find it both frustrating and liberating to not write for the public stage: frustrating in her lack of an audience, liberating in her ability to do things with dramatic form that went well beyond the norms of typical staged drama. And those dramatic norms are thoroughly violated in The Convent of Pleasure, the vast majority of which is made up of things that are not dramatic action: interpolated songs, long philosophical speeches on the nature of pleasure, and numerous plays within plays. The middle of the play gives us an explosion of small micro-scenes (acted out by the members of the Convent) depicting the unhappinesses of childbirth, families, and marriage. The play’s disruptive form, alongside this explosion of micro-scenes depicting the miseries of marriage, both work to make the ending of the play (which shows a marriage) all the more unstable—the play’s disruptive form invites us to reconsider its content.

​

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

Margaret Cavendish (née Lucas), Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673) was an early modern poet, playwright, philosopher, and polymath whose interests were as numerous as the genres in which she wrote. She served as a lady-in-waiting for Queen Henrietta Maria and spent much of her adult life in exile on the Continent during the English Civil Wars. Across the genres in which she wrote, her works take up questions of nature and what is natural—including speculation on whether women are “naturally” subordinate to men, or whether their subordination is a social and historical accident. Her plays often feature women protagonists and center on questions of women’s rights and abilities. Though her drama was never performed on the public stages of London during her lifetime, she was deeply engaged with theatricality and theatrical traditions: she attended theatrical performances in both London and Antwerp, as well as being involved (and possibly acting) in the masques of Henrietta Maria’s court. She also wrote the first critical essay on Shakespeare’s plays, satirized the public stage in her most famous novel The Blazing World, and wrote self-reflective essays comparing her dramatic techniques to those of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. 

​

–Liza Blake (she/her/hers)

Associate Professor of English, University of Toronto

Associate Professor of English and Drama, University of Toronto Mississauga