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Margaret Cavendish and the Romance of Contract*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Victoria Kahn
Victoria Kahn*
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
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Extract

All things by war are in a Chaos hurl'd

But love alone first made,

And still preserves the world.

— Alexander Brome

I have heard [William Cavendish] say several times, that his love to his gracious master King Charles the Second was above the love he bore to his wife, children, and all his posterity, nay, to his own life: and when, since his return into England, I answered him that I observed his gracious master did not love him so well as he loved him; he replied, that he cared not whether his Majesty loved him again or not; for he was resolved to love him.

— The Life of William, Duke of Newcastle

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 1997 , pp. 526 - 566
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1997

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Footnotes

*

This essay is part of a book-length project entitled The Romance of Contract: Literature and Politics in England, 1640-74. Among the many colleagues who have commented on this essay, I am particularly grateful to Helene Silverberg for her suggestions for revision, to Kevin Sharpe and an anonymous reader for Renaissance Quarterly for their extraordinarily helpful reader's reports, and to Neil Saccamano for conversations about Cavendish.

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