THE RELIGIOUS

Margaret Cavendish wrote The Religious along with thirteen other plays later published as Playes (1662) and Plays Never Before Printed (1668) while in exile with her Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria. The dramatist began writing after her marriage to William Cavendish, himself a playwright.  Reading the plays produced by the Duchess of Newcastle, a modern reader might assume that the influences of Catholicism, the court and marriage made her an unhappy woman with a wry and bitter sense of humor.  While most of her plays are comic in nature, each propose that a woman live a single, chaste and cloistered life, "marriage says Cavendish, prevents the realization of a life of solitude, contemplation, and the creative imagination.  It destroys personal autonomy and enforces a narrow definition of the social roles of men and women may inhabit...Each of the plays depicts female characters who at one time or another express their wish not to marry (Jagodzinski 108).  Yet, Cavendish touted herself as a happily married woman.  To Margaret, her relationship with William who was thirty years her senior, was ideal.  This husband and his lady engaged in a marriage of the mind and allowed each other individual freedom.  To a large extent, Cavendish was able to live her chaste ideal.  The feminist theme of a woman's struggle to become autonomous in a society that measured female virtue by "domesticity, silence and obedience" became an overriding theme in Cavendish's work.  A creative, outspoken individual, Cavendish struggled to "reconcile her life of writing with her feminine self, her domestic role with her public persona....Cavendish had to test her readers' gendered conceptions of moral life, which presumed that female virtue depended on confinement to the domestic, private sphere" (Jagodzinski 108). As a means to this end, Cavendish  often appealed to the public's idea of a moral woman in the Catholic religion, that of a cloistered nun.  The virginal life of a nun offered women the autonomous, spiritual and intellectual life that Cavendish hoped to promote in her works.  In Cavendish's drama, religion was not engaged as devotion to God, but as a philosophical, political, feminist tool.  Representative of closet drama, Cavendish's works move away from religious themes and toward domestic, political and intellectual issues.  Margaret Cavendish's The Religious serves as a model for closet drama and reflects the changing nature of religion and femininity in the mid to late seventeenth century.

The Religious shares a similar plot to many of Cavendish's other works, a young woman is presented with the prospect of marriage, she refuses by joining the cloistered life and is eventually reconciled to the idea of matrimony through the idea of a spiritual, chaste marriage.  Also representative of a Cavendish play, the comedy carries two distinct plot lines, that of the romance of Lord Melancholy and Lady Perfection and the other of the Mistress Odd-Humor.  The common thread between the two plots is the idea of marriage as a bargain between two households.  The parents of the principal characters contrive to marry their children for the wealth of the family.  Lady Gravity wishes to marry her daughter to Lord Melancholy so that the son-less couple may have an heir to their estate, while Lord Dorato desires to marry his son to the Arch-Princess so that he may share in the fortune as an old man.  The First-Gentleman  and Mistress Odd-Humor best sum up Cavendish's argument of what seventeenth-century marriages were based upon:
 

I Gent: So are all wise men: for they know that Wealth and Honor are the Pillars and Supporters, to hold up their Familyes; that makes Fathers delerious, and industrious to marry their sons to great Fortunes, and not to great Beautyes, that their successors may not be buryed in Pverty...(II, xii).

Nan: Mistress, I hear there is a Suter preparing to come a wooing to you.

Mistress Odd Humor: What preparations doth he make?

Nan: Why he hath been with your Father, to entreat him concerning your portion.

Mistress Odd Humor: That is not a Suters preparation, that is a Merchants Trafficking, that is to make a bargain, not to woo a Mistress; but the preparations of a Suter, are fine Clothes, Coaches, and great Attendance, with rich presents; otherwise a woman is not wooed, but a husband bought (II,x).
 

The play begins with two maid-servants talking about the love between the lord and lady, the "kindest lovers."  This love is platonic as the children are a mere ten and thirteen years of age.  Their relationship has not yet been polluted by the ways of society, "They have been bred together, and they have not been acquainted with the Vanityes and Vices of the World, which makes love more pure" (I,i).  Cavendish opens the play with a relationship that would qualify as her ideal, but quickly challenges the platonic relationship by introducing a plan for an arranged marriage.

In the second scene of her drama, Cavendish introduces the audience to the unhappy married couple of Sir Thomas and Lady Gravity in an argument over whether to join the youths in marriage.  Sir Thomas has guardianship over his nephew while Lord Dorato is abroad.  Lady Gravity bids him arrange the marriage while he has the power.  That Cavendish chooses children as her subjects is interesting in that, like married women,children are the possession of another.  Children and wives lack autonomy.  In a sense, both Lady Perfection and Lord Melancholy take on this feminine identity.  The arranged marriage benefits the parents' and imprisons  both youth in another dependent relationship.  Cavendish's play then argues that traditional marriage benefits neither party.  This proves true.  The two maids meet again to talk over the change in the couple, "they behave themselves so gravely, and so formally, as if they were an Ancient couple; for there is no appearance of Childhood in their behavior" (I,v).  The marriage between Lady Perfection and Lord Melancholy has darkened their relationship.  Although no details are given as to what distresses the couple, the reader is to assume that the mere institution of marriage and hint of a sexual relationship has destroyed the ideal, platonic relationship of their childhood.

In a reversal of plot, Cavendish introduces Lord Melancholy's father Lord Dorato "Ambassador and a Man of Letters" who, opposed to the marriage on the basis that the bride is "a Girl whose Estate hath more Debts than Lands," will "break the marriage knot...and het another that may prove more a wife..."(I, iv).  Again, Cavendish portrays the institution of marriage as a mere financial arrangement.  The idea that man and wife are powerless children within the institution is also continues:
 

1 Man: Why, would not my Lord have his Son love his Wife, now he is marryed?

2 Man: No, for my Lord faith that the marriage is not a true marriage; for the Lady is not of marriageable years, and that us not until the Female is past twelve.

1 Man: Why so?

2 Man: I know not, but so it is according to our Canon and Common laws (II, i).
 

ironically, the play titled The Religious speaks little of religion until scene twenty-one when the seeds of a theme are developed.  The Arch-Prince asks Lady Perfection's hand in marriage which she refuses.  Based on her Conscience and he religious vow she had made to Lord Melancholy, she will  remain chaste until parted from her husband by death.  The Arch-Prince does not take the rejection well and threatens violence on Lady Perfection lest she change her mind.  Given the time to think, Lady Perfection makes the first decision in the play that is entirely her own:
 

Lady Perfection: I have thought of a way, that best fits my Condition and Disposition, which is to take a Religious habit, and enter into a Religious Order; for though I cannot vow Virginity, nor a single life, having a Husband, and been used as  a Wife, yet I can vow Chastity and retirement; and if I could be permitted to a Nunnery, as perchance I cannot, yet would I go into any of them for there is too much Company in ordinary Nunnerys, and I love Solitariness; wherefore I will live a kind of hermits life, only my nurse and I; and that little Tower my Father built for pleasure, shall be my Cloister, and before it is publicly known; I will send or go to the Fathers of the Church, and acquaint them, and straight incloister myself, and there I shall be safe; for the Prince dares not commit Sacrilege, for Gods and men would rise against him if he did" (II, xxiii).

Lord Melancholy: Which time will seem to me as like an Age, Till that our Souls be fled forth from their cage.

Lord Perfection: My Soul will fly your Soul to embrace, And after Death may hope a resting place. (IV, xxxiii).
 

In order to save her comedy, Cavendish proposes a new Religious Order of chastity in marriage.  In this way, Lady Perfection may keep her vow and autonomy while enjoying a platonic marriage t Lord Melancholy.  As the couple prepares to impale themselves, a religious father enters and tells them of the new order, "...marry this lord again, and let him take the same Vow, and enter into the same Religious Order of Chastity, and being Man and Wife you are but as one person, so that if you be constant and true to yourselves, you keep the Vow of Chastity; for what is more Chaste then lawful Marriage, and Virtuous man and Wife?" (V, xxxv). The sub-plots of Mistress Odd-Humor and the two gentlemen provide an answer to this question.  In scene thirty-six, Nan explains the difference between a Husband and a Virtuous Man to Miss Odd-Humor:
 

Nan: Why a wise husband is to rule and govern his wife, well, but a wise Man is to rule and govern himself well, and there is more that can tell how to rule and govern others than themselves, like as there may be good Kings and not good Men, and good Men and not good Kings, or there may be good Teachers as Preachers, and not good practicers; so this Gentleman you are to marry may be a wise Husband, although not a wise Man (V, xxxvi).

1 Gent: Do you hear of the new Religious order?

2 Gent: What new Religious Order?

1 Gent: Why the Order of Chastity in marriage.

2 Gent: That's a new order indeed, never heard of before, at least not practiced; but this Order, if it continue, will make marriage as Religious in life as the marriage of Saints.

1 Gent: Why the marriage of men and women is a type of the marriage of Saints.

2 Gent: But the type ofte commits Adultery, and for my part I would not be one of that order (V, xxxvii).
 

In The Religious, Cavendish creates a religious order that does not govern souls, but domesticity and philosophy.  Cavendish uses religion, particularly Catholicism, when it is convenient to her political, domestic or intellectual cause, " certain aspects of the Catholic imagination may have appealed to margaret Cavendish. The hidden life required of English Catholics (and perhaps their sense of persecution) coincided nicely with her desire for privacy and solitude, and the language of the cloister provided her with the framework for describing a life for women independent of men (Jagodzinski 123). Cavendish was not, however, Catholic, nor did she profess a strong belief in any faith.  A maid of honor to Queen Henrietta, a devout Catholic, Cavendish was exposed to religious traditions and beliefs, but was skeptical about religion's effect on her personal life and upon society, "fascinated as she must have been by the queen's active interest in the inner life, she had experienced first hand the disastrous results of Henrietta's attempts at imposing her ideals on the world.  Cavendish's exile, her husband's wartime losses, and her family's tragic civil war experience had forced her to see...the disastrous consequences of trying to enforce political change on an unweilding world...Whereas the queen used the 'wooing of the mind' to encourage religious conversion, Cavendish used it more broadly to explore the troubled negotiations between the mind and its world" (Battigelloi 26).  Closet dramatists such as Cavendish began to write about religion not in order to change society's morals or as a devotion to God, but as a convenient tool for philosophical thought.  Devotional religious themes became secondary to philosophical, political and domestic issues.