The Grounds of Literature and Science: Margaret Cavendish’s Creature Manifesto

Abstract

In the lines that serve as my epigraph, addressed to Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle—a writer active in the middle of the seventeenth century whose expansive and numerous works included natural philosophical treatises, poetry, scientific satire, fables, plays, philosophical arguments, political writings, and volumes of letters—Francis Fane attempts to count disciplines. In ancient days, he claims in this admittedly sycophantic poem of praise, poetry and philosophy were the two different disciplines that ‘cut’ ‘Learnings Empire … in twain’; in the work of Cavendish, however, these two previously separate disciplines at last ‘joyn’ into one. The numerical games then continue: her several ‘sacred Lines’ can be expressed in one paradox, itself a device that joins two contradictory ideas into one idea that contains them both without collapsing them. In Cavendish’s hands (or brain), Fane insists, truth is both naked (‘plain, straightforward’; perhaps also, ‘unencumbered, free’),¹ and dressed (adorned, attired in more or less decorative fashion).² By playing with the image of something that is at once naked and dressed, Fane here subtly maps these lines onto the (female) body, imagining, perhaps, Cavendish’s lines as Cavendish herself.

Philosophers and Poets were of old

The two great Lights, that humane minds control’d;

The one t’adorn, the other to explain,

Thus Learnings Empire then was cut in twain.

But Universal Wit and Reason joyn’s

To make you Queen: nor can your sacred Lines

Without a Paradox be well express’d

Truth never was so naked, nor so dress’d. ¹