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Thomas Shadwell’s dramatic satire The Virtuoso is the period’s most trenchant formal examination of an ideological crisis associated with the new science. While Robert Boyle and his fellow virtuosi sought to make natural philosophy increasingly autonomous from discourses of theatricality, Shadwell short-circuited their message by representing the new empirical work onstage and “inside,” as it were, the more capacious and flexible empirical space of live theater. The Virtuoso claims that Royal Society science ought to be seen as little more than a species of drama.

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

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