Margaret Cavendish’s plays were written for the stage: not for the theatres of London, but for those of the Blazing World. She stages her plays by writing a world around them: her utopian text The Blazing World (1666) would have included a play, a fragment of which she published later, under the title A Piece of a Play (1668). Her world-making and playwriting are a critical enterprise. The female characters of her plays challenge contemporary gender conventions: through marriage as a central theme, they discover and expose the socio-economic causes of oppression against women. Read together, A Piece of a Play and The Blazing World attribute a pedagogical role to theatre valuing depth and the “natural” over the superficiality and dissembling characteristic of the society of conversation. Thus, they criticise both the dominant theatrical genre of the Restoration period, called comedy of manners, and the culture of conversation prevailing in court society.