Read The Blazing World and Other Writings (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Margaret Cavendish
By this poetical description, you may perceive, that my ambition is not only to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole world; and that the worlds I have made, both the Blazing and the other Philosophical World, mentioned in the first part of this description, are framed and composed of the most pure, that is, the rational parts of matter, which are the parts of my mind; which creation was more easily and suddenly effected, than the conquests of the two famous monarchs of the world, Alexander and Caesar: neither have I made such disturbances, and caused so many dissolutions of particulars, otherwise named deaths, as they did; for I have destroyed but some few men in a little boat, which died through the extremity of cold, and that by the hand of Justice, which was necessitated to punish their crime of stealing away a young and beauteous Lady. And in the formation of those worlds, I take more delight and glory, than ever Alexander or Caesar did in conquering this terrestrial world; and though I have made my Blazing World, a peaceable world, allowing it but one religion, one language, and one government; yet could I make another world, as full of factions, divisions, and wars, as this is of peace and tranquility; and the rational figures of my mind might express as much courage to fight, as Hector and Achilles had; and be as wise as Nestor, as eloquent as Ulysses, and as beautiful as Helen. But I esteeming peace before war, wit before policy, honesty before beauty; instead of the figures of Alexander, Caesar, Hector, Achilles, Nestor, Ulysses, Helen, etc. chose rather the figure of honest Margaret Newcastle, which now I would not change for all this terrestrial world; and if any should like the world I have made, and be
willing to be my subjects, they may imagine themselves such, and they are such, I mean, in their minds, fancies or imaginations; but if they cannot endure to be subjects, they may create worlds of their own, and govern themselves as they please: but yet let them have a care, not to prove unjust usurpers, and to rob me of mine; for concerning the Philosophical World, I am Empress of it myself; and as for the Blazing World, it having an Empress already, who rules it with great wisdom and conduct, which Empress is my dear Platonic friend; I shall never prove so unjust, treacherous and unworthy to her, as to disturb her government, much less to depose her from her imperial throne, for the sake of any other; but rather choose to create another world for another friend.
1
i.e. reproached me for behaving dishonourably.
2
Obsolete form of curtsy.
3
Ambitious rivalry.
4
Fear
shamefastness:
bashfulness, modesty.
5
Struggle indecorously.
6
Cavendish’s coinage, meaning spectacular, viewable.
7
Lens by which the rays of the sun may be concentrated on an object, so as to burn if combustible; often used figuratively to suggest inflaming beauty.
8
Perverse, difficult.
9
Until.
10
Phrase meaning ‘a trifle’.
11
In obsolete sense of consciousness.
12
Harem.
13
Ecclesiastical law, used in church courts.
14
The unwritten law of England, administered by the King’s ordinary courts; as opposed to statute law, or canon law.
15
The condition of being under age, minority.
16
Cheating, deception, fraud.
17
An estate belonging to the owner and his heirs forever.
18
Small group of wind instrumentalists maintained at public expense; here used ironically.
1
See Genesis 34; Dinah’s brothers, Simeon and Levi, avenged her rape in a massacre which led indirectly to the foundation of Israel.
2
Surgeons.
3
Knowledge of the human body.
4
Treatises on the properties of plants.
5
Small ship’s boat.
6
The fork or junction of the thighs.
7
Slabs.
8
Level, open fields.
9
West wind.
10
Swooning, fainting.
11
Spartans.
12
Africans.
13
Emended from ‘indifferent’.
14
The text at this point bears the marginal note, ‘Here ends the Kingdom of Phancy’.
15
Parthian horsemen were famed for the rapidity and cunning of their manoeuvres.
16
The change of pronoun in this passage, as in many others, is symptomatic of the text’s instability in representing Travellia’s gender.
17
Tumours in a horse’s leg caused by inflammation.
18
Emended from ‘will not hear me.’
19
Recluse.
20
Plans, diagrams, designs.
21
One of the four humours of early physiology; associated with bile, temper.
22
Spears and hand-guns.
23
Horse soldiers wearing cuirasses, i.e. armour for the body.
24
Order of battle, battle array.
25
i.e. the beams of Travellia’s eyes.
26
‘spake her father’s funeral speech’ is added in Cavendish’s hand.
27
Debauch.
28
Body.
29
A marginal note printed beside this speech reads, ‘the antient custom was for the nearest friend to speak their funeral speech’.
30
Meeting.
31
Emended from ‘doth not’.
32
A marginal note in Cavendish’s hand reads ‘These verses are my Lord marquis’s’. William Cavendish contributed several short pieces of prose and poetry to
Nature’s Pictures.
1
The Blazing World
was published together with
Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy
in both 1666 and 1668.
2
Lucian of Samosata (
AD
125?–200?), Greek satirist, author of dialogues and of an imaginary voyage (trans. 1634); Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac (1620–55),
Histoire comique contenant les états et empires de la lune
(1657).
3
In 1649 William Cavendish, Marquis (later Duke) of Newcastle was banished from England and his estates confiscated. William’s elder brother,
Charles, bought some back and the rest were restored in 1660. In her
Life
of Newcastle Margaret estimated, and inflated, his financial losses at £941,000. See Mendelson on ’the myth of the Duke’s sufferings which Margaret had created’ (p. 50).
4
Sealed.
5
Fiery precious stone, especially garnet. Christian lapidaries in the Renaissance associated the carbuncle with the light of faith, and the diamond with repentance and steadfastness (see G. F. Kunz,
The Curious Lore of Precious Stones
, 1913). For Cavendish, it is the spectacular blazing of both carbuncle and diamond which seems most important.
6
Half-boots, associated with royalty, and the elevation of classical tragedy.
7
Small round shield.
8
Mermen.
9
Outer surface.
10
Slivers.
11
Triangular.
12
Haemorrhoids.
13
Waxy membrane used in surgery and as winding sheet.
14
A reputed substance or preparation supposed by alchemists to possess the property of changing other metals into gold or silver.
15
‘Universal solvent’ sought by alchemists; probably a pseudo-Arabic coinage by Paracelsus, pioneer of chemical medicine.
16
Followers of Galen, celebrated physician of 2nd century AD who used vegetable rather than synthetic remedies; opposed to Paracelsian chemistry.
17
Literally, ‘tradition’; Jewish esoteric interpretation of the Old Testament, christianized by Pico della Mirandola in the Renaissance. For connections with magic see Frances Yates,
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
(1964).
18
John Dee (1527–1608), influential Christian Cabbalist and Neoplatonist virtuoso, famed for his library and wide-ranging scholarship as mathematician, numerologist, astronomer, alchemist and imperialist historian, but under suspicion of heresy in his last years. Edward Kelly, alchemist and apothecary, was Dee’s close associate, thought by some to have discovered the secret of transmutation. See Lyndy Abraham,
Marvell and Alchemy
(1990), ch.l, ’The Alchemical Context’, and Frances Yates,
The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age
(1979). Cavendish compares Dee to Moses, who was ’often interchangeable with Hermes Trismegistus as the founder of the art of alchemy’ (Abraham, p. 174), and Kelly to Aaron, elder brother of Moses, who made a golden calf to be worshipped (Ex29:1–7).
19
The Alchemist
was first acted in London at the Globe Theatre, 1610 and published in 1612; it was revived at the Restoration. In Act 2, Scene I Jonson satirizes the claim that Moses was an alchemist. Newcastle was a patron of Jonson.
20
Heterogeneous mixture, medley.
21
‘Then she enquired…forms and shapes?’ omitted from 1668.
22
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Italian astronomer, defender of Copernican system, author of
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
(1632); Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), French philosopher who developed a theory of matter within a mechanistic framework (for a comparison with Cavendish’s natural philosophy see Sarasohn, p. 306 n.49); Renée Descartes (1596–1650), French mathematician and philosopher, author of the
Discours sur la Méthode
(1637), a crucial figure in the ’scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century; Jan Baptista Van Helmont (1577–1644), renowned Flemish chemist, author of ’Alkahest’; Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), English mechanistic philosopher and political scientist who had a long association with the Cavendish family, author of
De Cive
(1642),
The Elements of Law
(1650) and
Leviathan
(1651); Henry More (1614–87), one of the anti-materialist Cambridge Platonists, argued for the importance of reason in apprehending the immanence of God in the creation, author of
The Immortality of the Soul
(1659). In her
Philosophical Letters
(1664) Cavendish had entered into dialogue with the previous four. Hobbes, Gassendi and Descartes were all in Paris in the 1640s, along with the Newcastles and Sir Charles Cavendish.
23
‘not possible’, 1668.
24
One of the Seven Sages who, according to Aristotle, believed that the world originates from and returns to water.
25
None of Pythagoras’s writings survive, but his theories of mathematical relations and number symbolism were widely known in the Renaissance. See S. K. Heninger,
Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics
(1974).
26
Sultan of Turkey.
27
West wind.
28
Newcastle’s main residence in Nottinghamshire before and after the Restoration; see Ben Jonson’s masque,
The King’s Entertainment at Welbeck
(1640).
29
This castle in Nottinghamshire was Newcastle’s favourite property. Confiscated by Parliament, it was bought back and saved from demolition by Newcastle’s brother, Charles, who soon after died and was buried there (25 February, 1654). In October 1662 Newcastle angered his adult children by willing Bolsover Castle and manor, along with other properties and money, to Margaret. In fact, he outlived her. See Margaret’s poem, ’A Dialogue between a Bountifull Knight, and a Castle ruin’d in War’
(Poems, and Fancies
, 1653, pp. 89–90), and Jonson’s masque
Love’s Welcome at Bolsover
(1640).
30
Ménage, the trained movements of horses. Newcastle was a famous horseman whose writings on this courtly discipline include
A New and Extraordinary Method to Dress Horses
(1667).
31
Harem.
32
(Figuratively) overthrown or defeated.
33
This speech before the immaterial assembly is the favourable fictional rewriting of Cavendish’s unsuccessful appearance before the parliamentary Committee for Compounding in London in 1651, where she met with a
hostile reception and remained silent (see Grant, 108–9). In this episode her fictional counterpart supplies the missing defence, but is also unsuccessful.
34
Fortune’s court is here an allegorized version of the Restoration court of Charles II, at which Newcastle was similarly passed over in favour of the next generation of courtiers.
35
‘commended’, 1668.
36
‘on their backs’, 1666, emended to 1668, ‘in their beaks’.
37
England. The Empress’s native country, EFSI, is another version of England.
38
foolish farce, a farce extraordinary pleasant, plays and farces:
both printed texts have ‘verse’ in each case. I have adopted the marginal authorial emendations of the Bodleian library copy of 1668.
39
Perfumed waxy substance.
40
Large double-necked lutes, popular in the seventeenth century.
41
Guitar strung with wire, played with a plectrum, related to the zither.