Happy World Theatre Day! 🎭🎩 💐🎉🎊🎉 This day has been celebrated for decades, indeed since 1962. Theatre is culturally very important because it gives a social commentary as well as educating and entertaining people. It's also a vital part of a country's culture and identity. Who hasn't heard of Shakespeare? He's not just taught in the UK but all around the world.
For Theatre Day this year, I've decided to focus on the 17th century philosopher and creative writer Margaret Cavendish who was arguably the first English feminist playright. She also wrote poems, novels, philosophical texts and orations and it's the latter that I bring to life on my Philosophy Fluency podcast today. I read all 7 of her 'Female Orations'. These are a section within her philosophical work 'Orations of Divers Sorts, Accommodated to Divers Places (1662). Most of the speeches within this text focus on the theme of World Theatre Day this year: the importance of peace and living harmoniously. Many of the speeches are delivered within the context of war or it's aftermath but in these Female Orations, Cavendish is taking a different angle: the lack of peace and harmony between the sexes as a result of patriarchal oppression. The discussion revolves around how to best create a more equitable and harmonious society within which both sexes flourish.
Although the Orations are not a theatrical work, Cavendish still expects readers to imagine a dramatic scene. So I've drawn on my acting methods to show how she presents it as a debate and discussion between 7 different women. Cavendish examines an issue from multiple points of view in a creative yet Socratic, philosophical way. In my podcast today, episode 7, Season 3, I bring out the character of each of the women and change the timbre and pitch of my voice accordingly to reflect their personality and the point they are making about gender.
Cavendish has, to my mind, undertaken a fascinating task of depicting characters without a plot, character descriptions, stage and stage directions. She has encouraged us to use our imagination in such a way that we are compelled to listen to the speeches and thereby understand the type of women they are by the way they think about one particular topic, that of women's position in society. It's a clever, unique, theatrical yet philosophical device which draws on ancient rhetoric. What's striking about her Orations is that not only were they based on real conversations she had heard but also we can still relate to these women because we hear the same arguments today. That makes Cavendish timeless. But it's also worrying in terms of social progress or rather the lack of it!
I thought this was a fitting way to celebrate a woman playwright in history for the last week of women's history month. Have a listen to me dramatising Margaret Cavendish's Female Orations on my Philosophy Fluency podcast here.
