During the Civil War, Jane Cavendish (1621-1669) and her sister Elizabeth Brackley (1626-1663) compiled original lyrics and two original plays – a pastoral and a comedy, The Concealed Fancyes – into two manuscripts, which survive now in the Bodleian and Beinecke libraries. While the drama was likely the work of co-authorship, the lyrics are probably Cavendish’s own (as suggested, moreover, by a dedicatory poem addressed to her in the Beinecke MS.) Across her poems, Cavendish shows a fascination with medical and culinary knowledge – much of it drawn from domestic sources – in the making of chemical conceits that bring about change. She recognised a strong, meaningful connection between processes of chemical transformation and her mutable emotional state – or at the very least, the emotional state of her lyric speakers – during times of anxiety, loss and isolation during the war. Here is an especially striking example, a short poem titled ‘The discoursiue Ghost’:
Clog of my Spirit prethee get thee hence
And bee not mallencholly Ghost of wench
Swearinge it’s sad knowing not how to tell
The fortune of it freinds, nor selfe not well
But hope doth gellye mee, yet angry read
My Cauelleriship St George Ginger bread
Soe I am now a compound Christmas dish
Which prophesies absolued is your wish.
The Collected Works of Jane Cavendish, ed. Alexandra G. Bennett (Routledge 2018), p. 68.
The speaker recognises a chemical disruption to her spirit – what should be spirit, or gaseous, has a solid ‘clog’, a chemical reaction to the misery of not knowing the whereabouts of friends and family (recollective of the heavy, cold substance of black bile in humoural theory.) In response to this, a chemical and culinary resolution is offered with the turning point of ‘hope’ in the poem’s second half. Optimism ‘gellyes’ the speaker and her ‘Ghost’: the poem, rather than take the direction of distilling and purifying soul back to spirit, opts to make something solid with its transmuted properties. By ‘jelly’, Cavendish likely refers to setting, solidifying or coagulating (as Alexandra Bennett suggests) – though it is notable, given the image of the next line, that a jelly could also be a sweet or savoury food stuff. And with this in mind, what does it mean to be ‘gellyed’ by hope? Jelly is set, but it still wobbles.
The speaker’s chemical-culinary journey is not yet over, as she abruptly transforms to gingerbread in the sixth and seventh lines. This surprising metamorphosis moves the poem from personal melancholy to political anger. Cavendish identifies ‘St George Ginger bread’ – a holiday baked treat in the image of England’s saint – with her allegiance to the Royalist, Cavalier cause. The gingery sweet, associated moreover with Christmas, becomes a symbol of what puritanical Parliamentarians had threatened to abolish. Even with the underlying seriousness of the lyric, it is impossible not to smile at the confident, even jolly iambic regularity of ‘Soe I am now a compound Christmas dish’! This playful humour, which brings about political resistance and strength of resolve in the face of melancholy, is enabled by a chemical transformation. By ‘compound’, at this point in the seventeenth century, Cavendish could be referring either to a mixture of elements (in this case, the ingredients or properties of gingerbread) or the chemical, proportionate composition of a substance (in the modern sense of a chemical compound.) She would have found references to compounding in contemporary recipe books, including the popular A Choice Manuall of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery by her aunt, Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent (Grey’s book was published in 1653, but there is evidence to suggest Cavendish and her sisters worked with her receipts in manuscript – including a direct reference to her medicines in The Concealed Fancyes.) Grey uses the verb ‘compound’ to describe mixing elements together so they assume unified appearance (of substance), so ‘to compound’ is a more specific instruction than simply to ‘mix’ ingredients. In one of her medicines for a consumption, for example, she instructs the reader to ‘stir them [rosewater, various flowers and a powder] together, till they be all compounded together’ (p. 2.)
In ‘A discoursiue Ghost’ and across her poems, Cavendish’s knowledge about the chemical forms of properties accompanies her use of humour to resolve a difficult situation with lyric assertion. Her poetry changes direction with the application of chemical conceits: chemical, medical and culinary mixtures permit comic resolutions, or healings, to serious and even potentially tragic situations.
Further Reading
- Daniel Cadman, ‘The Closet as Form and Theme in Cavendish and Brackley’s The Concealed Fancies’, in A Companion to the Cavendishes, ed. Lisa Hopkins and Tom Rutter (ARC Humanities Press, 2020), pp. 239-54
- Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘“To Be Your Daughter in Your Pen”: The Social Functions of Literature in the Writings of Lady Elizabeth Brackley and Lady Jane Cavendish, Huntington Library Quarterly, 51:4 (1988) 281-296
- Sara Mueller, ‘Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s Manuscript Collections’, in A Companion to the Cavendishes, ed. Lisa Hopkins and Tom Rutter (ARC Humanities Press, 2020), pp. 199-215
- Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2015)