A Space for Women in The Tragedy of Mariam

In a time and place in which women were encouraged to conform to the classical “chaste, silent, and obedient” model of femininity, publicly supporting independent thought in women was seen as potentially transgressive.  In 1613, however, in Early Modern England, Elizabeth Cary picked up pen and paper with the intent of addressing that very topic.  As the first original play written in English by a woman, Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry, stages the question of who can have power and how that power is used.  In Mariam, she who controls and manipulates speech holds the ultimate power, and in most cases throughout the play, she is a woman.  Other groups of individuals excluded from the dominant white patriarchal system that governed Early Modern England, however, also directly affect how speech is used and who benefits from it.  These categories of exclusion include religion, nationality, ethnicity, class, and gender.  Due to their lower social and/or economic status within the patriarchy, individuals from excluded groups were constructed by Early Modern mandates, as well as Cary’s text, as possessing different access to speech, and, thus, power.

 Using Cary’s play as an example of a text authored by a member of one of these excluded groups--women, we can unravel some of the complexities involving public expression at this time from a new perspective.  Exploring the play’s various themes and underlying ideologies, however, cannot simply elucidate our understanding of all women’s voices in this period.  A major criticism of patriarchal attitudes, in fact, includes the tendency to categorize all women under a single definition.  Elizabeth Cary, coming from an upper-class, progressive, Christian background, does not, for example, necessarily represent the perspectives of women from lower economic classes, non-Christian faiths, and/or foreign origins.  On one hand, then, we may assume that Cary’s voice more clearly represents women from an upper-class, aristocratic, Christian background.  On the other hand, however, we need not read Cary’s work as simply an autobiographical expression of her own social and economic upbringing.  Considering Cary’s voice in this text, then, we must be cautious of two issues:  first, that we avoid the tendency to allow a single author’s voice to speak for all individuals who share some characteristics with that author’s social or economic position; second, that we  avoid the tendency to assume that Cary is capable of speaking only from her specific social, economic, and political condition.  Cary’s Christian up-bringing, in other words, does not circumscribe her ability to understand and, thus, describe elements of a non-Christian subjectivity.

 In examining Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam with the intent of enhancing our understanding of voice in the Early Modern Period, I have attempted to achieve a balance between Cary’s specific position in the hierarchy and her ability, as writer, to extend beyond that position.  Her very act of writing, after all, suggests a sensibility interested in pushing the boundaries of her prescripted female identity as “chaste, silent, and obedient.”  Women at this time were discouraged from participating in the literary community that included reading, writing, and public speaking, as all of which were deemed innately “masculine.”  Furthermore, Cary’s entry into this literary realm through drama suggests a desire to break into not only the more private sphere of writing, but a more public realm of speech.  That her play has been defined as a “closet drama,” and thus never publicly performed, does not efface Cary’s interest in examining problems of women’s public speech, as well as private writing.  Acknowledging the power of conduct manuals, guidebooks for women, and a general ideology that contained women in the private domestic sphere, we can examine, then, the issue of public speech in this play as representative of Cary’s concern for the expression of women’s voices.

 Cary’s discussion of women’s public speech becomes a space in which she can explore not only the construction of “Woman” as a category, but also the construction of various “Others,” whose subjectivities are imagined in their similarities and differences to her own.  Setting the play in Jerusalem with her main character, Mariam, as Queen of the Jews, for example, Cary appropriates the voice of an upper-class, non-Christian women, in dialogue with other upper-class and lower-class Jewish men and women.  The dimensions of women’s speech, thus, are directly affected by dimensions of race, nationality, religion, and economics.  The construction of diversity among her characters shows Cary’s ability to imagine subjectivities beyond her own and an awareness of the complex influences that constitute subjectivity.  That Mariam experiences a transformation at the end of the play into a symbolic Christ-type martyr, however, suggests an adherence to many of her own socially constructed ideologies that posit her Englishness as superior to other nationalities.  In discussing this play’s themes of public voice and access to power systems, then, we must examine various categories of difference in conversation with the overarching category of “Woman.”

 Acknowledging Cary’s adherence to nationalistic prejudices or patriarchal assumptions, however, does not disqualify her as an early feminist writer, as many critics on this issue would suggest.  On the contrary, Cary’s discussion of the dimension of women’s speech opens up a space for a wider acceptance and understanding of women as subjects with the ability to construct and control their own subjectivity.  Rather than dismissing Cary for her contradictory “feminist” and “non-feminist” portrayals of women in this play, we can praise her insistence on discussing the issue of voice in a society that prescribed women as incapable of subjectivity and more naturally suited for their role as object of male desire.  By first examining the cultural mandates of Early Modern England that influenced Cary’s development as a writer, we can more clearly see the radicalism of Cary’s authorship.  Focusing then on how speech is used in the play, we will see how Cary uses this public forum to construct a space in which women’s speech is examined as a tool through which women both empower themselves and disempower those who threaten their power.  More specifically, by looking at how women characters use the medium of speech to obtain power over a situation versus the ways men use speech in conflicts, we can see how women challenge the tendency to be excluded, or Othered, while at the same time “Othering” individuals lower on the hierarchy, including other women, by linguistically labeling them as inferior.  Although Cary’s construction of female characters as both self-elevating and demeaning to other women can be seen as contradictorily upholding and degrading feminist ideologies, the presence of this contradiction signifies an important introduction to the concept of women’s speech as a necessary element of Early Modern discourse and a modern feminist ideology.

 Before examining the implications of women’s speech in Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam, I will set up a historical backdrop to contextualize Cary’s resistant act of composing this text.  The common metaphors circulating at this time of the pen as equivalent to either the penis or male weapons conceptualized writing as essentially a masculine domain.  Women writers were often charged, thus, of acting like men when attempting to create texts.  With the pen metaphorically representing the penis, men were constructed as possessing inherent abilities to create knowledge, while women were to be, as Ferguson writes, “receptacles for European men’s words rather than as authoritative wielders of the pen” (“Renaissance concepts” 153). Although figured as innately less capable of authorship, however, women--especially upper-class women--were often encouraged to learn to write as well as read.  Teaching women to write, in fact, was generally perceived as a useful means of controlling their potential unruliness.  In his widely circulated instruction manual, Instruction of a Christian Woman, written in 1523, Juan Luis Vives explains the teaching of reading and writing as a means of controlling a girl’s morality:

When she shall be taught to read, let those books be taken in hand, that may teach good manners.  And when she shall learn to write, let not her examples be void verses, nor wanton or trifling songs, but some sad sentences prudent and chaste, taken out of holy Scripture, or the sayings of philosophers, which by often writing she may fasten better in her memory. (55)

 Although Elizabeth Cary reproduced in her writing some of the domestic ideologies circulating at this time which encouraged the subjugation and silencing of women, her very act of creating text classified her as transgressive to some degree.  A possible explanation for Cary’s reproduction of patriarchal ideals that disadvantaged women is her understanding of this act as a means for breaking into a forum in which she could incorporate new dimensions of women’s subjectivity under the guise of chastity.  One example of Cary’s apparent advocation of patriarchal ideals about female acquiescence to male ideology is expressed in her characterization of the slave-girl, Graphina, in Act 2 of the play, in which Graphina functions to do little more than reproduce what her lover Pheroras desires to hear: “You know my wishes ever yours did meet,” she explains, “And fast obedience may your mind delight” (2.1.48, 71).  In accord with his “wishes” and obeisant to his “delight[s],” Graphina represents the type of woman Juan Luis Vives hoped to engender through his encouragement of women’s study of male-authored texts about female obedience.  That the name “Graphina” can be derived from the Greek word graphein, meaning “to write,” suggests a parallel between her acquiescent character and the Early Modern construction of women’s writing as non-creative reproduction of male thought (Ferguson, “Renaissance concepts 155).  Furthermore, Graphina’s lower economic status as a slave girl positions her with few options but to agree with individuals who possess greater control of her future status.  As Cary herself was a member of the upper-class aristocratic society, which permitted her limited access into the public realm of print, she likely understood the diminished potential for self-expression permitted to lower-ranking individuals, particularly women.  Deciding whether Cary’s construction of the dutiful Graphina reflects the author’s belief that the lower class was less capable of independent thought or rather reflects her attempt to showcase the double-bind in which lower-class women existed, is less important than acknowledging that her characterization of Graphina initiates discussion of the ways in which patriarchal structures diminish voice for both women and lower-class individuals.  Her apparent support of these patriarchal ideals may have also allowed her increased access to the realm of writing, as her text would seem less a “created” work, and more a “reproduction” of male teachings.  The dramatic contrast we will see later between Graphina’s obedient speeches and the more unrestrained speeches of the two upper-class female characters, Mariam and Salome, suggests that Cary creates Graphina not in order to advocate such dutiful speech, however, but to acknowledge the existence of mandates that would encourage women’s reproduction of patriarchal discourse through speech and construct her text as less transgressive.

 Contrasting the more private nature of Graphina’s speech with the more public speeches of Mariam and Salome, which will be discussed in more depth later, parallels the contrast between the private nature of writing and the public printing of that writing.  After the introduction of the press in 1476 with Caxton’s first printed book, the mass printing of texts came to be figured as the transgressive act of an author selling himself to the public. The beginnings of a secular profession of writers transformed the writer, then, from a subject interested in private and “chaste” discourse, to a commodity, a “person who could sell his or her ‘product,’” and was likened to prostitution (Ferguson, “Renaissance connects” 144-5).  Print publication came to be associated, then, with promiscuity for both men and women, and was described as a generally lower-class activity.  That women specifically were relegated to the private realm of domesticity in Early Modern England, exemplified in the character Graphina, made the act of women’s publication doubly transgressive.  While Elizabeth Cary’s play passed into this public realm from manuscript form to print, however, we must acknowledge that the text possessed merely a limited and elite readership.  Furthermore, while Cary allowed its publication, she neither “will[ed]” nor encouraged its circulation (Ferguson, “Running On” 43).  Cary’s text, then, while transgressive in its discussion of concepts that threatened patriarchal stability--such as women’s right to public speech--and in its movement out of manuscript form into printed text, was perceived as generally less transgressive than more widely circulated texts.  Its limited circulation allowed its continued consideration as a “private” text, unmotivated by a desire to profit from public acknowledgment.

 Not only did the play’s limited circulation lessen its figuration as a public text, but its classification as a Senecan closet drama removed it even further from the “vulgar” public realm and into a more elite private domain.  Intended to be read rather than publicly performed, closet dramas avoided connection with the coarseness associated with theater and the lower class at this time.  The play’s movement from manuscript to printed text, then, was not as transgressive as the publication of texts intended for public performance.  If publication was figured as a wanton act due to its increased public contact, theatrical performance faced even more censure for its  public exposure.  While elite audiences circulated closet dramas, any class of individual could partake of the performances of public drama.  Wendy Wall notes, for example, that in comparison with closet dramas and poetic texts, theatrical texts “were seen as illegitimate and vulgar...associated with a socially suspect cultural domain” (89).  That dramatic texts and their performances were perceived as morally questionable and described in similarly negative terminology as published texts suggests once again the anxiety associated with the public domain, especially in connection with women, whose natural domain was classified as the private.  Cary’s publication of non-performative text, then, curtailed much of the criticism leveled against performative drama by raising its readership to the private realm and the upper-class.

 Like dramatic performance, speech was equated with the public realm and, thus, discouraged of women whose natural domain was in the home.  Social perceptions of writing as masculine approximated perceptions of speech as an inappropriate space for women.  In his Instruction of a Christian Woman, Juan Luis Vives writes, “[I]t were better [for a woman] to be at home within and unknown to other folks, and in company to hold her tongue demurely, and let few see her, and none at all hear her” (qtd. in Wall 281).  This suggestion that women remain not only confined within the domestic sphere, but silent even within that sphere is echoed by Cary’s chorus at the end of act 3:
 

That wife her hand against her fame doth rear,
That more than to her lord alone will give
A private word to any second ear . . . .
No sure, their thoughts no more can be their own,
And therefore should to none but one be known.
                                     (3.3.227-229, 237-238)

 That the wife risks tainting her reputation, or “fame,” by voicing herself to “any second ear” reflects the Early Modern ideal of a wife’s total obedience to the husband, obedience which includes limiting all speech to either the husband or the self, and never expressing oneself publicly.  As wives were defined by Common Law as femes couvertes or covered women, owned or “covered” by their husbands through marriage, their thoughts, and therefore their potential for speech, “no more can be their own,” but were rather owned and controlled by the husband (Ferguson, “Renaissance concepts” 147).  Although clearly authored by Cary, the chorus’s words possess a dogmatism that she, as a married author who composed and communicated her own original thoughts, did not herself subscribe to.  Married to a man with whom she disagreed religiously as well as politically, Elizabeth Cary’s ties to the marriage contract did not prevent her free expression, despite Henry’s desire to the contrary.  The chorus’ advocacy of absolute patriarchal power and female submission, then, can be seen as Cary’s presentation of social prescripts of her time that she did not herself accept.  Through this presentation, however, Cary positions the subject of women’s speech as a central concern, and the chorus as a kind of foil against which her other characters can express advocation for women’s speech.

 The notion that women risk defaming themselves through public speech resembles the moral depravity coupled at this time with the act of publishing mentioned earlier, or in any way marketing ones thoughts publicly.  The link between silence and chastity, thus, paralleled the link “between public speech and harlotry” in women, who were conceived of as less able to deflect the corruption of public exposure (Wall 280).  One male educator describes the threat of public speech to female chastity with the warning that “an eloquent woman is never chaste; and the behavior of many learned women confirms (this) truth”  (qtd. in Weisner 12).  Cary’s framing of her play as a closet drama, on first glance, then, resists censure aimed at female attempts to enter the realm of speech.  When we examine the content of the play, however, we see that Cary’s foremost concern involves women’s right to public speech.  Circumventing critique of her authorship by incorporating patriarchal ideologies into her text, of her publication by limiting the text’s circulation to an elite audience, and of her text’s dramatic form by presenting it as a closet drama, Cary is able to voice some central concerns about women’s rights that would otherwise go unrecognized.  Positing her discussion of the benefits of women’s public speech within a religious, private, and upper-class context, Cary creates a space in which feminist ideology is able to break into the formerly secured realm of patriarchal discourse.
 Implicit within the social construction of the three modes of communicating--writing, publishing, and speaking--is the concept that whoever possesses the means of communication possesses control.  Recalling the precepts in place about women’s inability to create texts, for example, we see they are founded in an anxiety about women’s potential to express discontent with their positioning by the patriarchy.  Juan Luis Vives’s concern that women learn only male-authored “chaste” texts suggests a fear that women reading or writing texts that do not submit to the “chaste, silent, obedient” model would have an increased tendency to morally “fall” from such a model.  Proscriptions about women’s publication and speech are constructed upon the same fear about women’s potential to fall from virtue.  Thus, controlling a woman’s access to expression was seen as controlling her inherent virtue, and it is this very issue of control that underlies Cary’s advocation of female speech in her Tragedy of Mariam.  Through public speech, or verbal articulation of thoughts, female characters acquire power over respective situations in which they were previously powerless.  Although this acquisition of power often comes at the expense of others, even other women, speech becomes the central method through which women access power that is otherwise denied them by the patriarchy.

 One method in which women utilize speech to acquire control over a situation involves monologue.  In a society in which women are censured for not only speaking their thoughts publicly, but for originating such thinking in the first place--as in the suggestion that women reproduce male thoughts in writing rather than compose original text--transgression of patriarchal doctrine begins with independent construction of thought.  The form of monologue generally allows female characters to reconstitute a situation in a way that most benefits them by forcing them to think pro-actively, rather than re-actively.  In this sense, they become subjects with authority and foresight over external situations that otherwise would seem beyond their control.  Unlike Graphina, then, who dutifully accepts Pheroras’s construction of her role as obedient lover and who speaks more re-actively, both Mariam and Salome are provided space for private monologue in which they construct their own positions before confronting others with them.

 Although, as mentioned earlier, Mariam originally reproduces much of the patriarchal doctrine which disadvantages her, through monologue, or self-talk, she can obtain a greater understanding of the dangers implicit in this patriarchal doctrine and discover solutions.  In the opening scene of the play, for example, Mariam mediates her confusion about her contradictory emotions which compel her to both miss her slain brother and miss her deceased husband who murdered him.  Chastising herself for her original anger toward her husband and King of the Jews, Herod, Mariam begins the speech reproducing the patriarchal warning about women’s speech.  “How oft have I with public voice run on,” she scolds, simultaneously introducing the plays central theme of women’s public speech and revealing her partial agreement with patriarchal assumptions about her public role (1.1.1).  Recapping the murderous acts of Herod against her family, however, Mariam asks herself, “Then why grieves Mariam Herod’s death to hear?” (1.1.38).  Having articulated both sides of this issue, Mariam makes a more resolute decision to maintain her anger toward Herod for his deeds, remarking to herself, “These thoughts have power, his death to make me bear” (1.151).  By articulating her conflicting thoughts, Mariam is able to construct her own resolution to the conflict, one which reflects her own subjectivity and is not imposed on her from without.  Having achieved control of herself by establishing her position toward Herod, Mariam can control her reaction in her later reunion with him after she discovers he is still alive.  Disavowing his eager welcome, Mariam maintains her accusation that he has killed her brother and refuses to soften when he requests, “Yet smile, my dearest Mariam, do but smile,” to which she responds, “I cannot frame disguise, nor never taught/ My face a look dissenting from my thought” (4.3.143, 144-45).  Resolved in the validity of her “thoughts” revealed in the opening monologue, Mariam refuses to feign a response that will be more palatable to Herod, as she has now the strength to maintain her position and resist Herod’s command that she relent.

 Salome similarly utilizes the forum of monologue to mediate her conflicting emotions about leaving her husband for Silleus.  Convinced when the speech begins that her “tongue/ To Constabarus by itself is tied,” she expresses submission to the marriage contract by which she and her speech are bound.  Recalling, however, how she “begg’d his life” when Herod discovered Constabarus’s plan to overtake his kingdom, Salome reframes her own conflict as the result of Constabarus’s bad character, rather than her own inconstant love (1.4.319).  She both reveals the initial power of her speech which was able to save Constabarus from death, and reinstates that power in this present monologue.  “I’ll be the custom-breaker,” she remarks, “and begin/ To show my sex the way to freedom’s door” (1.4.309-310).  By articulating this internal conflict, Salome constructs a solution that places her in a position of control, able to proceed with divorcing Constabarus and securing his replacement, Silleus.  Confounded originally with her duties as wife, Salome reconstitutes the situation as an ethically necessary act and herself as innocent, in that she has no choice but leave the traitor of her brother.  Like Mariam, Salome ends her speech firmly convicted in her decision and able to maintain conviction during the subsequent confrontation with Constabarus, the man she has chosen to defy.  For in response to Constabarus’s ensuing charges that her private conference with Silleus “is shame,” placing her reputation as a “chaste” and “virtuous woman” in question, Salome confidently replies, “Thy love and admonition I defy./ Thou shalt no hour longer call me wife” (1.6.377, 392, 394, 416-417).  Resisting both his pleas of love for her and his reproach, Salome leaves the conference having exerted her will, feeling “resolv’d it [the divorce] shall be so” (1.6.434).  Salome’s decision to mediate her confused thoughts independently constructs an agency that secures her superior power later in dialogue with others.  Resisting Constabarus’s insistence that she comply with behavioral standards appropriate of a “virtuous woman”--similar to Juan Luis Vives’ insistence that women read only “prudent” texts to enhance their natural virtue--Salome, in essence, writes her own ending to a situation that was constructed to her as unalterable.  Transgressing the boundaries of her “fixed” identity as wife of Constabarus, just as Elizabeth Cary has transgressed her boundaries as a domestic “receptacle” of male knowledge in creating this character, Salome, like Mariam, reveals the power implicit in women’s speech through the pro-active technique of monologue by re-constituting the situation.

 That Cary has revised the original account of this history written by the Jewish Historian Josephus, to have Salome fall in love with Silleus before, rather than after, Constabarus’s death, reveals Cary’s interest in a woman’s ability to independently revoke a bad marriage and pursue an alternative that is better for her.  To achieve such a thing at this time, the wife must clearly disobey established doctrine and promote a revision of such law.  Although Moses’ law decrees that the husband “[w]ho hates his wife” may divorce her-- though wives may not do the same--Salome decides to “wrest” such law, “Though [she] be the first that to this course do bend” (1.5.335, 338, 1.6.435).  Just as Salome re-writes the cause for her divorcing Constabarus--as his betrayal of Herod rather than her love for Silleus--she re-writes the very law in order to permit the divorce (just has Cary has rewritten the original account), enacting the very type of composition Vives and his contemporaries so feared.  While Cary may not approve of the extent of Salome’s forwardness--given the Chorus’s subsequent admonition of  Salome’s “wavering mind”--she is clearly intrigued by the possibility of such a character and insistent that such power derives from speech.

Although male characters achieve power through speech by defending themselves against various types of attacks, only women engage in the initial act of monologue, in which they address their thoughts to no one but themselves and are presented as “sola” on stage.  This suggests, again, that women are constructed in this play as generally pro-active, whereas men are constructed as generally re-active.  As seen in the above two examples of Mariam and Salome, this pro-active mediation of thought appears to help ensure control over later encounters with male characters.  That men lack this initial step in the construction of their thoughts may account for their tendency to waver more in their decisions.  Two situations in which men’s reactive attempt to gain power over a situation through speech reveals their inconstancy and ends in failure involve the fight between Silleus and Constabarus, and Herod’s order to have Mariam killed.

 When Silleus attempts to exert control over Constabarus, whom he feels has slandered Salome’s name, it is clear that neither is able to maintain his position in the face of opposition.  Although Silleus initiates the argument by demanding a retraction of this slander from Constabarus, telling him to “Suck up the breath that did my mistress blame,” he realizes his hastiness in charging Constabarus after he is injured in the ensuing fight, and apologizes for his unruly speech, retracting his own slandering of Constabarus (2.4.299).  Wishing “my heart and tongue [had not] engag’d me so,” Silleus vows to “honour Constabarus still.”  Similarly, Constabarus originally takes the position that, “for Salome I will not fight,” yet as soon as he is called a “coward” he immediately engages Silleus, only to quickly repent injuring him, saying, “[I] grieve for thy complaint,” and welcoming him “as friend” (2.4.308, 398).  The inconstancy of these men’s behavior evokes a criticism from the reader that resembles the Chorus’s earlier accusation of Salome as possessing a “wavering mind” that cannot be content with what it has (1.6.498).  Unlike Salome, however, who in no way wavers from her conviction to forswear Constabarus, Silleus and Constabarus are easily swayed by opposition.  Although they reach reconciliation, neither has his requests satisfied, and they leave stage under a false sense of fulfillment.  Silleus has in no way redeemed Salome’s name, and Constabarus has in no way resisted Silleus’s invitation to the fight.  Unlike for female characters in this play, then, speech for men generally becomes a means of relinquishing control over themselves as well as the situation.

Although Herod clearly possesses control over the subjects in his kingdom, he expresses a similar relinquishment of this control when verbally confronted by opposition.  When Mariam first accuses him of murdering her brother, for example, all of his attempts to convince her otherwise  fail.  Unprepared for such an attack, Herod is ineffective in his speech and eventually reconciles himself to silence: “I will not speak, unless to be believ’d” (4.2.139).  Although he is ultimately effective in silencing Mariam’s accusations when he condemns her to death--by beheading her--he is ineffective in convincing himself that this decision was correct.  As wavering in his conviction  as Constabarus and Silleus are in their accusations of each other, Herod vacillates from extreme certitude to extreme doubt.  “Here,” he tells a soldier, “take her to death.  Come back, come back...She must not, shall not, die” (4.4.235, 249).  That this uncertainty continues until and after Mariam’s beheading suggests the ineffectiveness associated with re-active speech.  Although Herod is clearly effective in achieving his initial goal of killing Mariam, that goal is not representative of his overall belief about her, even before he discovers that she is innocent of the crime of adultery.  Sentencing her to death is a reactionary response to Salome’s accusation of Mariam, not thoroughly considered in the manner Salome and Mariam consider their conflicts in their opening monologues.  Just as Silleus and Constabarus reconcile without their true desires fulfilled, Herod ends the play enormously dissatisfied.  “Oh, that I could that sentence now control,” he remarks to a Nuntio who reveals Mariam’s final request that he tell her lord “thou saw’st me loose my breath” (5.1.74, 73).  Herod’s unfulfilled desire to control even Mariam’s reported speech reveals his overall inability to govern Mariam and the situations in which she opposed him.

That male speech is often constructed as wavering and ineffective in this play, in contrast to more convicted, effective female speech, does not decree gender as the only variable in one’s access to power.  As seen earlier, for example, Graphina deviates from the model set up by Mariam and Salome in that her speech to Pheroras is far less direct and independent.  Subscribing to the model instituted at this time that figured women as incapable of independent thought, let alone expression of that thought through speech, Graphina more or less reiterates what her lover Pheroras desires to hear.  That Graphina possesses a far lower rank as a slave girl, however, than other female character--such as Mariam, Queen of the Jews, and Salome, sister of the King--suggests that expression of thought that in any way contradicted upper-class authority would not only be likely ignored, but, even more probably, punished.  Graphina’s silence, then, may be more a result of her class position than her gender.  Other categories of difference similarly affect the level and nature of expression for other characters throughout this play.

 Although both Mariam and Salome possess powerful conviction and agency due to their pro-active method of speaking, they also gain power by highlighting the inferiority of those from whom they would like to gain power.  Speech, then, becomes not only a means of manipulating power, but, more directly, a weapon with which to seize it.  When Salome scorns Mariam, claiming that Herod could have married better, for example, Mariam’s retort comes in the form of ethnic labeling, meant to retrieve the power that Salome arrested.  “Thou parti-Jew, and parti-Edomite,” Mariam rebukes, “Thou mongrel: issue’d from rejected race” (1.3.235-236).  Referring to Salome’s Idumean origin, Mariam positions herself as a pure Jew and, thus, ethnically superior to both Salome and Herod, who originated from a converted race of Jews from Idumea (Cary 152).  This Ethnic Othering becomes a technique with which to position one’s power as superior.  Just as Silleus and Constabarus batted mutual insults during their fight scene, Mariam and Salome exchange insults dealing with their nationality.  Unlike the former pair, however, Mariam and Salome maintain their conviction, once again, in the superiority of their own position.  That Mariam seized Salome’s power by ethnically debasing her is apparent by Salome’s pursuance of revenge later in the play in order to retrieve that lost power.  Concocting the lie that Mariam will attempt to poison Herod, she explains, “I scorn that she should live my birth t’upbraid,/ To call me base and hungry Edomite” (3.2.93-94).  Though convicted in her position toward Mariam, this revenge, however, is reactionary, and, like Constabarus and Silleus’s fight, is unable to retrieve the power that Mariam’s forceful words previously revoked.  Even after her plan is believed and Mariam punished, Salome will still be perceived as ethnically inferior to Mariam, who is, after all, considered the pure Jew.  Despite his anger toward Mariam, for example, Herod even defends her superiority over Salome, saying “You are to her a sun-burnt blackamoor (4.7.462).

This last reference to skin color pervades the use of ethnic labeling throughout the play, suggesting that Mariam’s lighter skin reveals her superior morality over Salome, whose darker skin, in contrast, reveals her innate depravity.  As Mariam transforms into a Christ-like martyr at the end when she is condemned, we see the suggestion of Christianity as superior to Judaism through dark and light symbolism.  “[S]he was fair,” Herod notes when Mariam is gone, “Oh, what a hand she had, it was so white” (5.1.149-150).  That Jews were demonized in early modern England, at the time this play was written, considered “responsible for what was thought to be the most heinous act in human history - the crucifixion of Christ,” illustrates the parallel conceived between their darker skin and what was perceived as moral deficiency (Callaghan 164).  Thus, as Mariam is removed from the scene and silenced in the process, she increasingly resembles a Christian martyr, bearing her discrimination placidly and simultaneously becoming de-racialized.  Recalling the last moment of her death to Herod, a Nuntio recalls how “after she some silent prayer had said...to Heav’n her heav’nly soul is fled,” her soul virtuous and redeemed (5.1.84, 86).  Elizabeth Cary’s own strong Christianity makes it probable that she bought into the construction of Judaism as inferior and, thus, darker than Christianity.  Cary’s own Christianity, then, foregrounds Cary’s death.  That Mariam’s amount of speech decreases and is only recounted in retrospect suggests that the type of bold female speech exhibited by Mariam in the beginning and Salome throughout may be perceived as more Jewish than Christian, more dark than light.  While Cary privileged Christianity over Judaism, however, her interest, again, in the possibility of female speech reveals itself in its permeation of all types of difference--gender, class, race, nationality, and religion.  The balance, then, between her own prejudices and her ability as writer to imagine beyond those prejudices comes into play.

 Resisting the cultural mandates that positioned her as a “private” being incapable of creating original written work, masculine for attempting it, base for publishing it, and, as a whole, transgressive for centering it around the topic of women’s public speech, Elizabeth Cary presents a text that articulates the problem of expression for not only women at this time, but other groups whose public voices were similarly silenced.  Although she participates in some of the Othering and stereo-typing that prohibited her own public expression, Cary presents an interest in the possibility for enhanced access to women’s public speech, primarily through her characters Salome and Mariam.  In a first analysis of the text, one notices a difference in the ways in which female and male characters compose speech--women generally follow a more pro-active model that allows for self-reflection and weighing of variables to make a confident decision, whereas men generally respond re-actively to situations as they occur, which produces more uncertainty in terms of the appropriate response.  That the pro-active model generally provides more ability to fulfill one’s objective suggests Cary’s interest in the possibility of female speech to provide more satisfaction of needs than extant in the time in which she wrote.  On a closer examination, however, the simplicity of this male/female model of communication gets complicated, as variables such as class, nationality, ethnicity, and religion come into play.  Only women with somewhat secure class and social positions, for example, are able to utilize that pro-active model which better ensures fulfillment of their objective.  The speech of characters of lower economic backgrounds, like Graphina, for example, or foreign places of origin, like Salome at times, are not permitted the same freedom of expression provided to Mariam, who possesses appropriate nationality, class background, and potential to be de-racialized.  Furthermore, as we notice Mariam begin to resemble a Christian-like saint near the end, perceived as whiter and more virtuous as her speech becomes more reserved, we see that unbridled speech has a consequence.  Although Cary champions the success of the speeches of women for most of the play, then, the silencing and deracializing of Mariam suggests that the ultimate goal for women may finally be a balance between effrontery and reticence, between Difference and sameness, at least in early modern England.  Though encouraging of women’s progression in the public realm of speech, perhaps Cary’s main concerned lies, after all, in the impracticality of women such as Salome existing in Early Modern England.  Being the first original play published by a woman in England, however, Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam makes clear progression toward the evolving discussion of women’s needs for public self-expression.  Breaking into a medium generally restricted to men, Elizabeth Cary enacts a progressive glimpse of women’s equal--and often superior--ability to construct and communicate their subjectivity.

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Cary, Elizabeth.  The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry.  Ed. Barry Weller and  Margaret W. Ferguson.
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Ferguson, Margaret W.  “Renaissance concepts of the ‘woman writer.’”  Women and  Literature in Britain 1500-1700I.
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Ferguson, Margaret W.  “Running On with Almost Public Voice: The Case of ‘E.C.’”   Tradition and the Talent of
        Women.  Ed. Florence Howe.  Urbana and Chicago:  University of Illinois Press, 1991: 37-67.

Vives, Juan Luis.  De Institutione Foeminae Christianae.  Trans. Richard Hyrde.  New  York: Longmans, Green and
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        Cornell University Press, 1993: 279-340.

Wiesner, Merry E.  “Women’s Defense of Their Public Role.”  Women in the Middle Ages  and the Renaissance.
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  ©Copyright Susan M. Weaver