Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), until recently remembered more as a flamboyant eccentric than as a serious writer, was in fact the most prolific, thought-provoking, and original woman writer of the Restoration. Cavendish is the author of many poems, short stories, biographies, memoirs, letters, philosophical and scientific works (including The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World, the first work of science fiction by a woman), and nineteen plays. "The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays collects four of Cavendish's dramatic works that are among the most revealing of her attitudes toward marriage and her desire for fame. Loves Adventures (1662) centers on a woman succeeding in war and diplomacy by passing as a man. Similarly, the heroine of Bell in Campo (1662) rescues her husband at the head of an army of women in this tale of a marriage of near equals. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) proposes a separatist community of women and has received attention for its suggestion of lesbian sexuality. The Bridals (1662), a more typical restoration comedy satirizing marriage, rounds out the collection. Edited with notes and annotation by Anne Shaver, "The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays also contains a timeline, biography and bibliography of the Duchess, an appreciation of Cavendish's life and work, and a bibliography of critical essays. Also included are all of Cavendish's epistles To the Reader as well as Other Preliminary Matter from Playes (1662), and Cavendish's original preface to Plays Never Before Printed (1668). A valuable collection from an extraordinary writer, "The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays raises important issues about women and gender.

Margaret Cavendish was one of the most subversive and entertaining writers of the seventeenth century. She invented new genres, challenged gender roles, and critiqued the new science as well as the mores of society. “Paper Bodies” was the wonderful phrase she used to described her manuscripts, which she hoped would continue to make “a great Blazing Light” after her death. There are connections here to Cavendish’s most famous work, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666), a unique tale of a woman travelling through the north pole to a strange new world. In addition to The Blazing World, this volume includes Cavendish’s brief autobiography, A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life (1667), her play The Convent of Pleasure, and selections from her Sociable Letters, her poetry, and her critical writings. A variety of background documents by other seventeenth-century writers helps to set her work in context for the modern reader.

Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Works attends to the religious, social, and material changes in England during the century following the Reformation, specifically examining how the English came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices even after they disappeared from the physical and social landscape. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts that refuse easy generic classification: problem plays such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Marlowe's comic tragedy The Jew of Malta; Margaret Cavendish's closet dramas The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious; Aphra Behn's Restoration comedy The Rover; and seventeenth-century dialogues that include both a Catholic treatise promoting women's entrance into European convents and a proto-pornographic exposé of such convents. Convents, novices, and problem plays emerge as parallel sites of ambiguity that reflect the social, political, and religious uncertainties England faced after the Reformation.

When Margaret Cavendish published her first collection of dramatic work in 1662, she was keenly aware that none of her comedies or tragedies was unlikely to be acted, at least in her lifetime--but that did not deter her. "To those that do delight in scenes and wit / I dedicate my book," she writes at the beginning of the volume entitled, simply, "Plays." As for the hard reality that her plays were not to be produced? She has an answer for that as well: "For all the time my plays a-making were, / My brain the stage, my thoughts were acting there." "The Female Academy," the last play in her 1662 collection, opens with a fait accompli-a group of "old matrons" has established an educational institution devoted exclusively to the education of young women, "a house wherein a company of young ladies are instructed . . . to speak wittily and rationally, . . . to behave themselves handsomely, and to live virtuously." In this play, Cavendish presents the Female Academy as an institution created by women, inhabited solely by women, and operated for the benefit of women. The play also allows us to see the reactions of men, excluded from the Female Academy. Instead of ignoring the school, or wishing its young pupils well in their educational pursuits, men can't stay away-they hang around and spy on what's going on through "a large open grate" that allows them to hear the lectures being given inside. The play alternates scenes between the young women inside the Female Academy and the increasingly frustrated men in the outside world. This new edition, designed for classroom use, provides an ample introduction to Cavendish and her work, a carefully modernized text, with helpful glosses and notes, and a useful bibliography with references for further reading.

Art and poetry, mystery and desire collide in this sensual and “elegantly moving” literary romance set in the cobbled streets and painted halls of Florence, Italy (New Yorker). Margot Harrington, an American volunteer in Florence, is an expert at book conservancy. While struggling to save a waterlogged convent library, she comes across a fabulous volume of 16 erotic drawings by Giulio Romano, accompanying 16 steamy sonnets by Pietro Aretino. When first published over 4 centuries ago, the Vatican ordered all copies destroyed. This one—now unique—volume has survived. The abbess prevails upon Margot to save the order’s finances by selling the magnificently illustrated erotica discreetly—meaning without the bishop’s knowledge. Margot’s other clandestine project is a middle-aged Italian who is boldly attempting radical measures to save endangered frescoes. She is 29 and available; he, older and married. He shares her sense of mission and soon her bed in this daring story of spiritual longing and earthly desire.

"Which one of you bitches is my mother?" Four elegant, successful, and sophisticated women in their forties are called to New York's Pierre Hotel to meet Lili -- a beautiful, young, and notoriously temperamental Hollywood movie star. None of the women knows exactly why she is there; each has a reason to hate Lili and each of them is astonished to see the others. They are old friends who share a guilty secret and who have for years been doing their best to keep that secret quiet. Their lives are changed forever, however, when Lili suddenly confronts them. When the women refuse to answer her, Lili proceeds to travel around the world through the playgrounds of the rich and famous, seeking to answer the question that has obsessed and almost destroyed her. From Paris to London, from the boardroom to the bedroom, Lace takes the reader into the rarified world of five unforgettable women who are as beautiful, as complex and as strong as...lace.

This is a ground-breaking edition of three seventeenth-century plays that all engage in diverse and exciting ways with questions of gender and performance. The collection, edited by three pioneering scholars of elite female culture and early modern drama, makes the texts of three much-discussed plays - John Fletcher's The Wild-Goose Chase, James Shirley's The Bird in a Cage and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure - available together in a full scholarly edition for the first time.The Wild Goose Chase (1621) and The Bird in a Cage (1633) were both performed in the commercial London theatres in the Jacobean and Caroline periods respectively. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) is a so-called 'closet' drama, designed primarily for reading but drawing on a tradition of aristocratic theatricals. In a wide-ranging co-authored introduction to the volume, the editors explore the concerns of these playtexts in relation to contemporary debates surrounding popular festivity and anti-theatricalism, as well as the agency of elite female culture in the Stuart period and the emergence of the professional female actor in the Restoration.The volume will be an invaluable teaching and research tool for students and scholars of early modern drama, women's writing and performance studies more generally, as well as providing a rich sourcebook for the reader interested in seventeenth-century theatrical culture.

Seven plays by the genius of French theater. Including The Ridiculous Precieuses, The School for Husbands, The School for Wives, Don Juan, The Versailles Impromptu, and The Critique of the School for Wives, this collection showcases the talent of perhaps the greatest and best-loved French playwright. Translated and with an Introduction by Donald M. Frame With a Foreword by Virginia Scott And a New Afterword by Charles Newell

Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections explores the relationship between the plays of Shakespeare and the writings of Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673). 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 and explore the political implications of Cavendish's contribution to Shakespeare's reputation.