Bellicose Passions Iin Margaret Cavendish’s Playes (1662)

Women and Stoic ethics in early modern England

“…Royalist women also found recourse to Stoicism helpful in the aftermath of the civil war. Writing in the 1650s and 1660s, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, embraced Stoic principles across her oeuvre and within her specifically philosophical writings (see Broad & Sipowicz, 2022; Barnes, 2018; Boyle, 2006; Cunning, 2016; Bennett, 2011; O’Neill, 2001, 2013). Cavendish contrasts the Stoic to a person who is a slave to their passions, which are (in the Stoic view) excessive impulses—such as appetite and pleasure, fear and distress—that are contrary to nature and incompatible with reason 3 .…”

“…In Bell in Campo (1662), Stoicism strengthens two royalist wives' resolve and capacity to support their husbands in the war effort: Lady Jantil commemorates her late husband's heroism by building a mausoleum and writing his biography (Cavendish, 1662, 600), and Lady Victorious corrals grieving wives into military action for the royalist cause, urging “instead of weeping eyes, let us make them weep through their Veins” (Cavendish, 1662, 596). Such examples figure in a discussion about how women should best manage those passions unleashed by civil war, exile, and political misfortune (Barnes, 2018). Stoic therapy provides women with a way to deal with excessive emotions that are disobedient or contrary to reason, in order to take public action.…”