“Building Castles in the Air”: Margaret Cavendish and the Anxieties of Monumentality

Abstract

Published in 1653, thirty-seven years after Jonson’s Workes, Margaret Cavendish’s Poems, and Fancies presents itself with all the self-importance and monumental pomp of its more famous predecessor. Although Poems, and Fancies represents a first book by an entirely unknown poet who possessed no place in the literary landscape of Interregnum England, rather than the collected poetry and plays of one of the foremost dramatists of his day, its author claims for herself and her book memorial aspirations that rival those of Jonson:

But at all other things let Fancy flye,

And, like a Towring Eagle, mount the Skie,

Or lik the Sun swiftly the World to round,

Or like pure Gold, which in the Earth is found.¹