Imagine spending much of one's life, like a Lucretius or a Dante, in a world one created, correlative to the world at large (not, as with a Mallarme,
corrival and finally supplanting).
In a brief final chapter, "Mistris
Corrival," Masten contemplates the intrusion of a self-styled female author, Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, into the formerly all-male world of printed authority.
The Argument likely alludes to that fact when stating that Filadelfe betrayed his initial love and alliance ("et peu a peu mettant en oubly sa premiere amie, il en feit une nouvelle") (10), right before evoking the various attempts to abduct the king by disclosing the
corrivals' (23) plot ("complot") (37), to enter Fleurdelys's room at nightfall.
Toliver has called Hotspur's "aggressive, individual dream" of honor (67): his eagerness to burnish his own reputation, to "wear / Without
corrivals all [honor's] dignities" (1.3.206-07).
"The court had wars," the narrator goes on to remark, "but they were amourous Encounters: Foes, but they were
Corrivals." (86) While Brathwaite condemned the "effeminacy," "amorous Encounters," "Masks, Treats, [and] Balls" of the Jacobean court as obstacles to martial valor, Sales suggests a self-conscious revival of Caroline aestheticism (in particular, the aesthetic response of pity and fear) as a way of channeling and defusing the passions of war.
