1. See Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), chapter 5, for more on this portrait and others of white Europeans and black Africans and how they comment on colonialism and the slave trade.
2. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 115. For further discussion on the early modern marriage economy, see Theodora A. Jankowski, Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), chapter 2, and ‘Hymeneal Blood, Interchangeable Women, and the Early Modern Marriage Economy in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works. Volume IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 89–105.
3. See Theodora A. Jankowski, Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), chapters 4–6, for an extended discussion of the power of virginity and how the drama of the period reflected it.
4. See Kay Stanton, ‘“Made to Write ‘Whore’ Upon?” Male and Female Use of the Word “Whore” in Shakespeare’s Canon’, in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 80–102.
5. Interestingly, despite Lady Coy’s reference to the fact that she must change her name to ‘Amorous’ (an ominous change) now that she is married, Cavendish refers to Coy and Lady Vertue continuously by their ‘maiden’ names. Cavendish also clearly indicates what her husband has contributed to this play, notably an Epithalamion. He is also identified as the author of the ‘recuperative’ section of The Convent of Pleasure; it is significant that the achievement of heteronormative marriages in both plays is attributed to him. See also Mihoko Suzuki, ‘Margaret Cavendish and the Female Satirist’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 37.3 (1997): 483–500 on how Cavendish critiques marriage in other plays.