Microscope

In the Paris of February 1648, during their time of Royalist exile on the continent, William Cavendish, marquess of Newcastle, and his brother, Sir Charles Cavendish, began investing in optical instruments. To be exact, they ordered eight telescopes, garnering much international attention for the scope (pardon the pun) of their collection, as well as a microscope that belonged to William’s wife, the scholar and playwright Margaret Cavendish.

Despite managing to fill long hours with experiments, thoughts, conversations and writing, Margaret was left ultimately both unimpressed and unconvinced by her microscope. She was disappointed that the microscope could show only a magnified image of the exterior of an object — and, she believed, a distorted image of it at that — instead of enabling a viewer to further understand its inner workings. Furthermore, she lamented the lack of utilitarian purpose that the microscope could offer to society. In 1666 Margaret placed these criticisms in print in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy: she scathingly referred to the experimental philosophers at the Royal Society (founded 1660) as ‘boys that play with watery bubbles […] wasting their time with useless sports’. Margaret wanted there to be a point to the scientific work being conducted both in and outside of the Royal Society, and was unafraid to criticise what she viewed as the lack of one.

Engraving of Hooke’s microscope, first plate (Schem. I) in Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London, 1665). National Library of Wales. Public domain.

Margaret Cavendish was a strange and formidable seventeenth-century woman. As her Observations show, she wanted to contribute not just to scientific, but social progress. She was the only English woman to publish work on natural philosophy during this century, and was also the first woman invited as a special guest to the Royal Society in May 1667 — although her appearance famously disappointed the also present Samuel Pepys, who mercilessly described her as having a ‘deportment so unordinary’ and a ‘dress so antic’ that he did not ‘like her at all, nor […] hear her say anything that was worth hearing’. The use to which Margaret put her scientific knowledge was, in short, simply not the norm for women in England in the 1600s.

Whilst Margaret wrote about the microscope in the 1660s, Shakespeare wrote about the educational materials that his learned female characters used in the early 1590s. The Taming of the Shrew’s subplot focuses on the courtship between Bianca and Lucentio. In the play’s opening scenes Bianca’s father, Baptista, states that he will hire tutors for his daughter: in order to gain access to his beloved, Lucentio thus disguises himself as a tutor. Even before Baptista’s decision to hire tutors, however, it is clear that Bianca has been spending her time learning alone:

My books and instruments shall be my company,
On them to look and practise by myself.
(1. 1. 82-3)

(The word ‘instruments’ might give us pause: it could simply mean musical instruments, but given that Cavendish would have encompassed her microscope within the term, who knows what educational items Bianca could have housed in her room…)

Baptista says that his daughter ‘taketh most delight / In music, instruments and poetry’ (ll. 92-3), which is proven by the demonstration of her Latin prowess in Act 3 Scene 1, in which she reads Latin fluently. Baptista’s love for Bianca means that he allows her to satisfy her educational desires: significantly, he hires tutors not in order for Bianca to learn accomplishments that would please a husband, but because learning pleases her. Oliver Ford Davies describes Bianca’s education as ‘token’, but he overlooks the personal importance of education to Bianca. Just as the Cavendish’s multitude of telescopes and microscopes occupied them during their long years of exile, Bianca’s books, instruments, and so forth occupies her throughout the potential monotony of days as a young, rich, unmarried woman.

There are countless representations of women learning on the early modern stage, and there are many reasons why they learn: some are learning writing literacy to help their husbands in business, others are learning needlework to keep themselves financially stable as single women, and others still are learning various skills to become good companionate wives. I’m fascinated, however, by dramatic representations of women learning so that they have something to do with their time. In contradistinction to Cavendish’s outward-looking purpose for studying her microscope, multiple women presented on the early modern stage learn for the same, inward-looking reason as Bianca.

Moving from the 1590s and past Cavendish in the 1660s, we arrive in 1706 at London’s Drury Lane Theatre, where Susanna Centlivre’s late-Restoration comedy The Basset Table is being performed for the first time. The play’s subplot features the teenager Valeria, a natural philosopher. Like Bianca, Valeria has a rich father who can fund her studies, and she spends her free time learning. Act 3 opens to an extraordinarily detailed description of Valeria’s learning space: ‘The Scene draws, and discovers Valeria with Books upon a Table, a Microscope, [Valeria] putting a fish on it, several Animals lying by’. In this scene, we witness a woman conducting scientific research on the stage before us, using her microscope to ‘see how the Blood Circulates in the Tale [sic] of this Fish’ (p. 77). Valeria is so dedicated to her learning, and her beloved microscope in particular, that she refuses to elope with her suitor, Ensign Lovely:

LOVELY Consent then to Fly with me.
VALERIA What, and leave my Microscope, and all my Things,
For my Father to break in Pieces.
(p. 78)

In this scene Valeria ensures that her education is not impeded by courtship. Bianca, on the other hand, is unable to do so when her suitors impede her space of learning disguised as ‘tutors’, despite her protestations:

I am no breeching scholar in the schools:
I’ll not be tied to hours nor ’pointed times
But learn my lessons as I please myself
(3. 1. 16-20)

Through placing herself in juxtaposition with a schoolboy, Bianca emphasises herself as a female autodidact, learning what she wants, when she wants to.

By beginning with Margaret Cavendish’s study of the microscope, we can zoom outwards to consider not only what early modern women learned, but why they learned it. Margaret believed in the utilitarian purpose of scientific research, but she had the unusual freedom of being able to share her scientific knowledge with the public. I argue that an overlooked but equally important ‘why’ regarding female learning is, as we have seen, women educating themselves for their personal pleasure and enjoyment. Just as Virginia Woolf would emphasise the importance of the freedom of space for women to intellectually grow in the twentieth century, Shakespeare and Centlivre suggest the same point several hundred years earlier. Women need a space of their own and, in these dramatic instances, their fathers’ money, in order to learn.

Orlagh Davies is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English Studies at Durham University.

Selected Bibliography.

Cavendish, Margaret, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. by Eileen O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Centlivre, Susanna, The Basset Table, ed. by Jane Milling (Peterborough, Ont; Buffalo, NY: Broadview Press, 2009).
Davies, Oliver Ford, Shakespeare’s Fathers and Daughters (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017).
Shakespeare, William, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. by Barbara Hodgdon (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2010).
Wilkins, Emma, ‘Margaret Cavendish and the Royal Society’, Notes and Records, no. 68 (2014), pp. 245-260.

1 Sep 2022.