From Drama to Science: Margaret Cavendish as Vanishing Mediator

Abstract

This paper introduces a Literature Compass cluster on Margaret Cavendish. The full cluster is made up of the following articles: ‘Recent Developments in the Study of Seventeenth-Century Literature and Three Papers from the 2007 Margaret Cavendish Conference’, James Fitzmaurice, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00523.x. ‘Filling in the Picture: Contexts and Contacts of Jane Cavendish’, Alexandra G. Bennett, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00524.x. ‘Mrs. Dalloway and the Duchess: Virginia Woolf Reads and Writes Margaret Cavendish’, Lise Mae Schlosser, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00525.x. ‘From Drama to Science: Margaret Cavendish as Vanishing Mediator’, John Shanahan, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00526.x. *** This essay examines Margaret Cavendish's dramatic and scientific works together in order to find shared features among them. What is common in all of her work is a commitment to a form of knowledge I term ‘forensic’. I argue that Cavendish contributed to the conceptual formation of the new science of the seventeenth century in two ways: first, in the imagination of highly forensic spaces (that is, spaces for the examination of rival hypotheses), and second, by focusing on the inherent theatricality of empirical experimentation. But this two-fold contribution was muted and increasingly rendered invisible as the new Royal Society pioneered ways to exploit such forensic spaces in ways Cavendish did not imagine, and developed rhetorical strategies to disavow or manage the theatricality of experimentation. Cavendish's work as a fellow-traveler of the new science, once notable in its time, became – with the triumph of the Royal Society program – a vanishing mediator in the development of experimental science.