Abstract
The works of Elizabeth Cary (1585/86–1639), her closet drama The Tragedie of Mariam (1613) and her History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II (published in 1680 but apparently written around 1627) place women’s sexual and discursive self-determination at centre-stage.2 The issues of female sexual autonomy and linguistic power take on new meanings in the context of marriage which these works provide. Writing original works rather than translating, Cary goes further than Sidney in her engagement with her female protagonists and treats with unprecedented sympathy two characters whose portrayal in contemporary texts was far from favourable. Mariam’s story was known in England primarily through the works of Josephus, translated by Lodge in 1602.3 She argues with her husband Herod over his murder of her grandfather and brother (to secure his usurped crown) and his insistence that she should be killed in the event of his own death; for this defiance, and incited by his sister Salome, he accuses her of infidelity and executes her. Josephus’s portrayal of the character (Mariamme) is largely unsympathetic, and this is a feature of other versions too.4 The story of Edward II’s neglect of his wife and her adultery and deposition of him was treated by numerous historians and poets, who generally portray Isabel as an unnatural, transgressive woman, even if they simultaneously deny her power.5
But what sweet tune did this faire dying Swan
Afford thine eare …1
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Notes
Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, ed. A.C. Dunstan and W.W. Greg (Oxford, 1914; rpr. 1992), ll. 2007–8.
See Maurice Valency, The Tragedies of Herod and Mariamne (NY: Columbia University Press, 1940).
See Michael Drayton, Mortimeriados. The Lamentable ciuell warres of Edward the second and the Barons (1596) in Works, i, England’s Heroicall Epistles (1619); Christopher Marlowe, Edward the Second in The Complete Plays, ed. J.B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969; rpr. 1988);
Sir Francis Hubert, The Historie of Edward the Second. Surnamed Carnarvan (1629) in The Poems of Sir Francis Hubert, ed. Bernard Mellor (Hong Kong and Oxford: Hong Kong University Press and Oxford University Press, 1961).
Critics have read Mariam as a paragon of chastity [see Beilin (1987), p. 167; Nancy Cotton Pearse, ‘Elizabeth Cary, Renaissance Playwright’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language xviii (1976), 601–8 (604)] and Isabel as a victim [see Krontiris, pp. 92–5].
See Dympna Callaghan, ‘Re-reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry’ in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London and NY: Routledge, 1994), pp. 163–77 (165–9).
See ll. 1845, 1991, 623. For Elizabeth’s use of the term, see p. 147. For the oblique connections between Mariam and Elizabeth, Mary Tudor and Mary, Queen of Scots, see Ferguson, ‘Running On With Almost Public Voice: The Case of “E.C.”’ in Tradition and the Talents of Women, ed. Florence Howe (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 37–67 (43), and ‘The Spectre of Resistance: The Tragedy of Mariam’ in
Staging the Renaissance: Interpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (NY and London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 235–50 (245). For the significance of Henry VIII’s divorce as a ‘social text’ to Mariam, see Waller and Ferguson, pp. 30–5.
See Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and difference in Renaissance drama (London and NY: Methuen, 1985), pp. 129–48;
Linda Fitz (Woodbridge), ‘“What Says the Married Woman?” Marriage Theory and Feminism in the English Renaissance’, Mosaic xiii (1980), 1–22.
In wishing herself a milkmaid, Mariam recalls Elizabeth I’s use of this idea in her speech to Parliament in 1576, where she uses it to reject marriage. See Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Mediæval into Renaissance (Ipswich and Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1977), p. 193.
James I said, ‘I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife’. The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Oxford: Oxford University Press and London: Humphrey Milford, 1918), p. 272.
See William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), p. 222; T. Becon, trans. Bullinger, The golden boke of christen matrimonye (1543), f. xx. See Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 94.
Cary was sympathetic to Catholicism from around 1605 and converted formally in 1626. See The Lady Falkland: Her Life, ed. Waller and Ferguson (1994), p. 190.
See Kathleen M. Davies, ‘Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage’ in Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage, ed. R.B. Outhwaite (London: Europe Publications, Ltd, 1981), pp. 58–80 (78).
See, for example, The King’s Book Or A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man (1543), ed. T.A. Lacey (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1932), pp. 111–12.
Theobald cited Mariam in the context of the ‘Indian’/‘Iudean’ controversy, as evidence of contemporary knowledge of the story, in his argument for the latter reading, but did not refer to the verbal similarity. See Lewis Theobald, ed. The Works of Shakespeare (1762), p. 339. Farmer quoted Cary’s lines to support this reading. See Horace Howard Furness, ed. Othello, A New Variorum Edition (Philadelphia, 1886), p. 329. Waller and Ferguson note the similarity but conclude that we cannot tell which play influenced which (pp. 41–3).
Othello, ed. M.R. Ridley (London and NY: Methuen, 1958; rpr. 1987).
See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 250.
See Thomas Becon, An humble supplicacion vnto God for the restoringe of hys holye woorde vnto the churche of Englande (1554), sig. A7; Constance Jordan, ‘Women’s Rule in Sixteenth-Century British Political Thought’, Renaissance Quarterly xl (1987), 421–51.
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© 2011 Jocelyn Catty
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Catty, J. (2011). ‘Vnbridled Speech’: Elizabeth Cary and the Politics of Marriage. In: Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230309074_8
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