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Part 3. Religious Dispute on Stage: The Art of Conflict and Appeasement

Stirring Tongues and Fumish Words: Representing Jewishness in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam

Becky S. Friedman
p. 209-235

Abstracts

This article explores the anti-Jewish rhetoric of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, with particular attention on the linguistic deployment of scorning, scolding, and slurring. It argues that Cary’s closet drama revises Jewish dramatic representation for an elite literary audience, employing incendiary discourse to (1) relay the enduring interconnections between censure and Jewishness stemming from the medieval English imagination, (2) adapt popular representational practices from the public theater for the context of private reading and performance, and (3) contribute to the gendered production of Jewish difference in English Renaissance playwriting. Ultimately, the article reveals that The Tragedy of Mariam is a crucial, if overlooked, resource in the study of Jewish representation in English theater, providing evidence of widespread interest in Jews outside of London’s popular performance culture while offering a rare female perspective on Jewish questions and Jewish women in particular.

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  • 1 Cary, Elizabeth, The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, Barry Weller, Margaret W. Ferguson (...)

1The linguistic sphere of The Tragedy of Mariam (1613)1 is rife with scolding, cursing, and slurring. The word “scorn” appears no less than 24 times in the course of the play, while the word “curse” surfaces 16 times. Variations on the theme turn out in the form of “execration,” “railing,” “censure,” and “wrath.” Characters cite and spew “fumish words,” admit to “moving tongues,” and mention “chiding,” “reviling,” and “rating.” Name-calling, including racist insults, also operates within the play’s acoustics.

2This castigatory rhetoric is an example of the text’s thematic interests in speech and voice, but it is also a reflection of contemporary Jewish representation. The setting, source text, and characters engage Jewishness, Jewish identity, and Jewish questions in significant ways, offering valuable context for the tragedy’s vituperation. Jews, with a history of being scapegoated and derided, are figures that make sense in a play which aggressively incorporates censure and blame. And while the early modern stage weaves material and embodied dimensions of Jewishness—and anti-Jewishness—into performance, Elizabeth Cary relies wholly on language to adapt such representative elements for her closet drama.

  • 2 Supersessionism, also variously called Pauline Supersessionism or Replacement Theology, is the beli (...)

3In this article, I show how The Tragedy of Mariam revises Jewish dramatic representation for an elite literary audience through the linguistic deployment of scorning, scolding, and slurring. This language is a reflection of supersessionist2 rationale. Placing Mariam within a network of early modern English literature reveals how the text participates in enduring anti-Jewish thought and contributes to the contemporary production of Jewish difference in drama. I begin by exploring the correlation between censure and Jewishness in the English imagination, and demonstrate how this positions Cary’s play as part of a literary legacy that advocates for anti-Jewish sentiment. Then, I show how Cary transfers anti-Jewish representation from performance to the realm of the privately read, cultivating language to achieve on the page what the stage complements with spectacle. Within this analysis, I address how closet drama is a particularly fitting genre for this endeavor. And finally, I show how Cary’s focus on Mariam offers essential insight into the gendered production of Jewish difference, shifting audiences’ attention away from the popular characterization of the Jewish man to consider instead the Jewish woman, and, in the process, gendering signifiers of Jewishness.

Censure and Jewishness

  • 3 Marlowe, Christopher, “The Jew of Malta,” Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, David Bevington, Eric Ras (...)

4Whenever Mariam employs the vocabulary of accusation and name-calling, it draws on a robust English legacy of inciting animosity towards Jewish people. Wide-ranging conspiracy theories had provided the fuel for anti-Jewish sentiment since the time of the crucifixion, an event which irrevocably tethered the Jews to charges of betrayal, obstinacy, bloodlust, and wickedness. Judas’ duplicity, Jesus’ suffering, and the Jewish population’s participation in his torture and execution became routine fodder in medieval English texts featuring Jewish themes. English Renaissance drama still actively implemented these New Testament tropes, and did so liberally in works featuring Jewish characters. Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, for example, offers evidence in its incorporation of a protagonist who shares a name with the prisoner freed in Jesus’ place at the time of the crucifixion.3 The villainy of Barabas—both Marlowe’s stage figure as well as the criminal from the biblical record—unambiguously links the popular representation of Jewishness with the sins of the past. And, of course, Ithamore’s comment that “The hat he wears, Judas left under the elder when he hanged himself” emphasizes these connections further (4.4.66–67). Contemporary drama cites crucifixion-era associations in implicit and explicit ways, often layering names, props, and traits to recall the New Testament narrative as much as the compendium of ecclesiastical and literary works that followed from it. It is a catchall method to convey the Jews’ oppositional stance to Christianity.

  • 4 Scholars such as Kathy Lavezzo have shown that Christian ideology deprecated the Jews by insisting (...)

5A demonstration of the antagonistic nature of the Jews, stubbornness became a conventional Jewish character trait in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English plays. This obstinacy is often described in terms of hard-heartedness, a word that encompasses a failure to feel compassion for Christ’s woes, an unwillingness to recognize the authority of Christianity, and a cruel disposition which enables acts of violence. All of these attributes are seen as biologically determined, the result of an internalized bodily difference located within the Jews’ hearts. It cannot be converted or excised. The thinking attempts to provide an explanation for Jewish continuity and, simultaneously, to perpetuate its inferiority.4

  • 5 Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice, Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine eds. (New York: Wa (...)

6As hard-heartedness lends itself to multidimensional readings of anti-Jewishness, it emerges with frequency in the period’s drama. Abigail calls out her “hard-hearted father, unkind Barabas” in The Jew of Malta after his plotting results in the death of her suitors (3.3.36). Antonio dismisses any chance of Shylock’s leniency in The Merchant of Venice when he says, “You may as well do anything most hard as seek to soften that than which what’s harder?—His Jewish heart” (4.1.79–81).5 Like the allusions to biblical characters and events, the incorporation of Jewish acts of refusal is a signal of Christian censure. Jewish obstinacy reinforces contemporary popular opinion on the adversarial nature of the Jews.

7Mariam draws on this rhetorical legacy in the opening lines of Cary’s play when she calls herself “hard-hearted Mariam” (1.1.63). Later on, she rejects Herod’s sexual advances and refuses to dissemble, echoing her early words and exhibiting stereotypical Jewish resistance. Herod remarks upon her audacity to deny him and entreats her to become more compliant:

Herod.
Yet smile, my dearest Mariam, do but smile,
And I will all unkind conceits exile.
Mariam.
I cannot frame disguise, nor never taught
My face a look dissenting from my thought.
(The Tragedy of Mariam, 4.3.142–145)

8Mariam’s stated inability to alter her facial expression reproduces the logic that her nature is unchangeable. Even if her words communicate an incapacity to be deceitful—a claim that attempts to differentiate her from the Jewish association of duplicity—they reinforce her intractability at the same time. She defies her husband and king by not smiling when she states, “I know I could enchain him with a smile: And lead him captive with a gentle word, I scorn my look should ever man beguile” (3.3.163–165). This scene activates two major elements under consideration here: when Mariam declines to cooperate, she reveals one of the demonstrative ways that the play engages with Jewish hard-heartedness, and at the same time, she displays a variant of scorning, one of several which the text cultivates in its focus on censure and disapproval.

9The ensuing lines between Herod and Mariam continue to interrogate Jewish stubbornness, employing the language of fixedness versus flexibility to emphasize Jewish-Christian opposition. “Noght is so fixed,” Herod says, noting how his own mind may “be moved” and how his heart may still be won over when he reiterates, “Yet let your look declare a milder thought, My heart again you shall to Mariam bind” (4.3.148–153). Whereas Herod’s moods may seem mercurial or inconstant, he claims that they show receptiveness, and that his heart is open to change. Mariam, he argues, is rigid and uncompromising. Her noncompliance is triply problematic, as she defies her husband, her king, and a proto-Christian authority all at once. Herod censures her for this behavior, which was, for audiences in early seventeenth-century England, as recognizably Jewish as if it were depicted on the public stage.

  • 6 I have examined the progressive leanings of The Tragedy of Mariam at length in my dissertation, in (...)
  • 7 León Alfar, Cristina, “Elizabeth Cary’s Female Trinity: Breaking Custom with Mosaic Law in ‘The Tra (...)
  • 8 Glimp, David, “Extreme Cary,” This Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature, Marcie (...)
  • 9 Gajowski, Evelyn, “Intersecting Discourses of Race and Gender in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Ma (...)

10In contrast with my analysis of this scene’s attention to derivative anti-Jewish literary conventions, recent scholarship has regarded Mariam’s lines as progressive.6 Her resistance to patriarchal expectations combined with the play’s broader emphasis on women’s lives has inspired a wave of studies about this text, early modern women, and the political nature of closet drama. Cristina León Alfar, for example, sees Mariam privileging what she calls “feminine anxieties,” including male violence against women and patrilineal authority.7 David Glimp observes “egalitarian desires” in the play.8 And Evelyn Gajowski has regarded Salome’s scrutinization of male-determined divorce proceedings as advancing a form of women’s liberation. She even identifies Salome’s characterization as “feminist, or proto-feminist” in presentation.9

  • 10 A famous illustration from Cary’s lifetime is Dr. Rodrigo Lopez, a physician who was accused of att (...)

11However, there is a reluctance to acknowledge the ways in which the play upholds age-old attitudes of anti-Jewish feeling at the same time that it advocates for women’s rights. Given the story’s geographic and temporal proximity to the events recorded in the New Testament, the religious interpolations of Mariam demand audiences to recall the connections between Jews and transgression. Mariam’s resistance to Herod’s advances is ultimately a reenactment of Jewish recalcitrance, and her eventual execution is likewise a demonstration of Jewish-Christian historical relations, which often involved Christian authorities executing Jewish people for crimes, both actual and alleged.10

  • 11 “Jewry, n.,” OED Online, December 2021, accessed January 29, 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/101236
  • 12 Wray, Ramona, “Performing The Tragedy of Mariam and Constructing Stage History,” Early Theatre 18, (...)

12An often-overlooked detail of Cary’s text is that her protagonist is Jewish. The play’s full title—The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry—underscores this significant aspect of Mariam’s identity through the use of a word that refers both to the Jewish people and also to the place where Jewish people lived.11 In other words, if Mariam is “of Jewry,” she was born Jewish, but she is also from a location colloquially known as Jewry. She is autochthonous, indigenous to the Jewish setting of Cary’s closet drama and a real historical figure rather than an invention. Ramona Wray observes that “in the gender-inflected criticism on Mariam, setting receives scant mention, but, in fact, Jerusalem is hard to ignore.”12 Still, many seem to manage it, disregarding the significance of this Jewish backdrop as much as Mariam’s position as a Jewish woman and monarch.

  • 13 The International Journal of the Classical Tradition 23, no3 (2016).
  • 14 Augur notes that Cary’s contemporaries, including Gervase Markham and William Sampson, authors of H (...)

13As with setting, recent literary criticism has downplayed the historicity of the narrative. To compose The Tragedy of Mariam, Cary drew from Thomas Lodge’s translated works of the ancient historian Josephus, a Jewish author who wrote about events that occurred in Judea shortly after they happened. Josephus’s writings were immensely popular in Cary’s lifetime, a fact recently underscored by a special issue of The International Journal of the Classical Tradition, which focused on the “Reception of Josephus in the Early Modern Period.”13 The issue featured 13 articles on the popularity of the historian across Europe during the era that Cary was living. Peter Auger’s contribution to this collection notes that in England, “Josephus was apparently well known enough to advertise on the title-pages of printed plays and incorporate as a character.”14 Perhaps it is because The Tragedy of Mariam resists both of these practices, omitting explicit references to its literary antecedent, that critics have underestimated the interconnections between Josephus’s work and Cary’s. Mariam’s relationship to Josephus’s Antiquities, however, should not be neglected.

  • 15 Weinberg, Joanna, “Early Modern Jewish Readers of Josephus,” International Journal of the Classical (...)
  • 16 Goodman, Martin and Joanna Weinberg, “The Reception of Josephus in the Early Modern Period,” Intern (...)

14The link to Josephus reveals Mariam’s status as a text that concerns itself with Jewish questions, and one that was produced within a popular literary culture that marketed the history of the Jews’ downfall as an enjoyable readerly pastime. Joanna Weinberg has observed that “many writers gloated at Josephus’s vivid description of divine vengeance on the wicked Jews,” a driving factor of Josephus’s fame in the period.15 The destruction of Jerusalem played a major role in Josephus’s popularity,16 so even if recent scholarship has given minimal attention to Mariam’s setting, as Wray accurately notes, the same was not true for Cary’s readers. Audiences, especially those cultured circles for which Cary was writing, would have recognized Mariam’s reference material and setting as contributing to the story about a real-life Jewish woman who lived in a place that had historically been occupied by Jewish people. This fact provides valuable context for the attention to Jews and Jewishness in The Tragedy of Mariam. If the play narrates a tale about a Jew who loses her position and makes aggressive rhetorical use of censure and insults to do so, it shares in the popular contemporary imagination that celebrated Jewish defeat and destruction.

  • 17 While Groves demonstrates that English Protestants increasingly identified with the Jewish experien (...)
  • 18 Groves, The Destruction of Jerusalem, 51.

15Beatrice Groves writes, “Despite being overlooked by critical studies of the early modern period, the Roman fall of Jerusalem was a moment in history that held immense sway over the early modern imagination.”17 Like the robust historical and literary legacy of deriding Jews for their participation in the crucifixion, citing Jerusalem’s destruction, and drawing from the authoritative source on the topic to do so, firmly establishes The Tragedy of Mariam as a text intent on evoking anti-Jewish sentiment. Focusing on Roman client king Herod reinforces the allegorical links to this Josephan precedent. Its strategic deployment of scorning is thus not merely an example of the play’s exploration of speech and vocal expression, but a reflection of beliefs about Jews, who had long been associated with animus and censure and whose merited ruination aligns with the English nation-building project of supersessionism in the context of what Groves calls “the present time.”18

  • 19 Kaplan, M. Lindsay, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University (...)
  • 20 Kaplan, The Culture of Slander, 33.

16In her work on the Elizabethan period, M. Lindsay Kaplan has shown how defamation became something of a national interest and that the rise in specific types of litigation reflects what she calls “the culture of slander.”19 She describes how “slander develop[ed] as a central, powerful, and unstable concern for most segments of English society,” and that it incited anxiety for individuals as much as for the state.20 Certainly, slander, libel, defamation, and the cognate terms for language meant to cause public shame and reprisal, are not matters that affect only Jews. If Cary’s particular historical moment had a calumny panic, as Kaplan expertly illustrates, then this fact is doubly true. But in the context of a play that broaches Jewishness so plainly, this discourse held a special resonance. Jews have contended with character assassination for centuries, and malediction and Jewishness had an especially close-knit bond on English soil, where the Blood Libel canard was established.

  • 21 Heng, Geraldine, England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in (...)

17It was during the medieval period—when the stories of William of Norwich, Little Hugh of Lincoln, and Simon of Trent began to circulate by word of mouth and by early printed texts—that England became what Geraldine Heng has described as “the first racial state.”21 Heng shows how religious intolerance and violence operated concomitantly, amplifying conspiracy theories about Jews. Her work illuminates how the accusations of ritual murder, in particular, created a sense of solidarity among the English:

  • 22 Heng, Geraldine, “England’s Dead Boys: Telling Tales of Christian-Jewish Relations Before and After (...)

After the Expulsion of Jews from England, in the absence of real Jews of the flesh, is in fact when anti‑Semitic literature exponentially increases. Stories of Jewish culpability continued to elicit human passions ranging from pathos and rage to indignant laughter, thus uniting and pulling together the English Christian community, whose collective identity, and devotional and corporate life were sustained by the repeated recall of the once-resident alien, in pious and recreational acts of solidarity.22

  • 23 Teter, Magda, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press (...)

18Ecclesiastical, literary, and political texts mutually reinforced claims of Jewish wickedness, exalting the superiority of Englishness and its ascendancy over the banished, racialized Other. The canonization of the Blood Libel plot in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale” (The Canterbury Tales), some 200 years after the Jews were expelled by King Edward I, substantiates the enduring nature of the anti-Jewish narrative and the power of literature in the amplification of Jewish defamation. Magda Teter observes that “these stories drew on themes from Christian beliefs and practices, which made them more believable.”23 And while ritual murder and ritual crucifixion accusations became associated with English Jewry and then the Jewish people more broadly, it is the Blood Libel that exemplifies how Jews, in the English imagination, were particularly associated with slander.

19The Tragedy of Mariam weaves together the crucifixion narrative, Josephus’s tale of Jerusalem’s destruction, and explicit references to Jewish proclivities for violence, stubbornness, and/or duplicity in order to tell a story about a Jewish woman for an audience of Christians. Cary’s literary strategy secures her work in a long list of English texts that promote anti-Jewish attitudes. As a playwright participating in a culture that does not shy away from representing Jews in unfavorable terms, Elizabeth Cary also actively contributes to constructions of Jewish difference in early modern theater through the deployment of scorn, censure, and shame, to which my analysis now turns.

From the Public Stage to the Closet Drama

20The Tragedy of Mariam draws from a robust literary heritage of anti-Jewish rhetoric to underscore its engagement with Jewish themes, a practice that was commonplace in contemporary performance as well. The space of the theater incorporated a variety of strategies to convey supersessionist attitudes, the superiority of English nationhood, and the unfavorable nature of Jewish difference. It is important to acknowledge that Cary’s work participates in enduring anti-Jewishness as much as in the English Renaissance culture of Jewish-Christian opposition, which found new ways to defame and deride the Jews.

  • 24 Berek, Peter, “Looking Jewish on the Early Modern Stage,” Religion and Drama in Early Modern Englan (...)
  • 25 Zinsser-Krys, Saskia, The Early Modern Stage-Jew: Heritage, Inspiration, and Concepts (New York: Pe (...)
  • 26 David Ruderman’s work shows how the commercial and colonial expansion of Europe depended, in part, (...)
  • 27 Zinsser-Krys’s work demonstrates that early modern travel culture amplified the strangeness of Jews (...)

21The spectacle-laden domain of live performance used costume, props, and embodied dimensions to construct Jewish subordination while extolling the superiority of Englishness. According to Peter Berek, performers donned a funny-looking nose prosthetic to pillory Jews and entertain theatergoers.24 Saska Zinsser-Krys has shown how foreign elements, including vocal and sartorial practices, were implemented to communicate the alien nature of the Jews.25 Not English but also not belonging to any homeland, Jews were perceived to be wanderers.26 “They say we are a scattered nation,” Barabas states summarily in The Jew of Malta, testifying to the universal awareness of the Jews’ diasporic lifestyle and general foreignness (1.1.119). It is likely that materiality promoted this perception to echo the messaging of characters’ lines.27 Shylock offers a suggestion of contemporary Jewish costuming when he refers to his “Jewish gaberdine” in 1.3 of The Merchant of Venice. The physical and visual nature of performance promoted these conventions, which invited audiences to see Christian actors performing the parts of Jewish characters on a public stage.

  • 28 Kaplan, M. Lindsay, “Constructing the Inferior Body: Medieval Theology in The Merchant of Venice,” (...)
  • 29 Other marginalized populations were also represented in these terms. Kim F. Hall has shown how race (...)
  • 30 While comparing them to a dog might have been—and may still be—an obvious insult, the offense is pa (...)

22The vigorous application of animal comparisons offers a most useful example of early modern drama’s culture of subordinating Jewishness. Analogizing Jews with dogs, in particular, seems to be standard practice in the period. The Merchant of Venice is crawling with canine comparisons. “You call me misbeliever, cutthroat dog,” Shylock says to Antonio at one point and then, you “foot me as you spurn a stranger cur over your threshold,” asking, “Hath a dog money? Is it possible a cur can lend three thousand ducats?”; Shylock repeats the point, stating, “You called me ‘dog’” (1.3.121–38, emphases added). Later, he proclaims, “Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a cause, But since I am a dog, beware my fangs” (3.3.7–8, emphases added). Solanio also calls him “the dog Jew,” while Gratiano addresses him, “be thou damned, inexecrable dog” (2.8.14; 4.1.130, emphases added). M. Lindsay Kaplan has shown that in The Merchant of Venice, “the play’s characters describe [Shylock’s] body as inanimate, bestial, dark, and demonic in an attempt to construct a physical inferiority that will return him to his rightful place of subjection.”28 This practice is commonplace across early modern theater as a whole, as Jews are routinely compared to animals and devils.29 However, the associations with dogs are especially persistent and carry meaningful resonance for literature which aims to represent Jews as unsophisticated, lowly, and servile.30

23Mariam’s rhetorical profile is not far off from this. While the closet drama does not mention the word “dog” itself, it still participates in rhetorical maneuvering to stoke anti-Jewish attitudes (and does actually use homologous canine terminology). The curses, slurs, scolding, and castigating of The Tragedy of Mariam imitate the name-calling of live theater, illuminating how Cary crafts a work that parleys with the broader dramatic culture of the moment while revealing how anti-Jewish discourse was adapted for elite literary crowds.

24An early scene in The Tragedy of Mariam depicts a sensational barrage of insults between the protagonist and her sister-in-law, Salome. The fast-paced quarrel recalls the dehumanizing rhetoric of the public theater at the same time that it brings attention to the language and practice of scorning itself:

Mariam.
My betters far! Base woman, ’tis untrue,
You scarce have ever my superiors seen:
For Mariam’s servants were as good as you,
Before she came to be Judea’s queen.
Salome.
Now stirs the tongue that is so quickly moved,
But more than once your choler have I borne: anger
Your fumish words are sooner said than proved, irascible
And Salome’s reply is only scorn.
Mariam.
Scorn those that are for thy companions held.
Though I thy brother’s face had never seen,
My birth thy baser birth so far excelled,
I had to both of you the princess been.
Thou parti-Jew, and parti-Edomite,
Thou mongrel: issued from rejected race,
Thy ancestors against the Heavens did fight
And thou like them wilt heavenly birth disgrace.
(The Tragedy of Mariam, 1.3.223–238)

  • 31 Hall, Things of Darkness, 6.
  • 32 Hall, Things of Darkness, 7.

25This row amplifies numerous discourses of the early modern period that cultivated race-making through “language itself.”31 As Kim F. Hall has observed, “It is impossible to look solely at a single broad group, for the investigation of one difference inevitably opens up inquiry into other cultural, religious, and ethnic differences.”32 These lines encapsulate the point, registering the politics of class, culture, power, religion, and nationality in explicit ways that mirror the contemporary theater’s language when representing various marginalized figures. Mariam cites hierarchical diction and sociocultural categorization with “betters,” “base,” and “superiors” in reflection of the stage’s racist leanings, and even uses the words “rejected race.” Cary exploits this rhetoric to underscore the thematic investments of The Tragedy of Mariam and to highlight English concerns surrounding Jewishness and difference more broadly. Within the space of these 15 lines, the play exposes significant racial and religious worldviews that bear value for the study of Mariam as engaging with contemporary beliefs about Jews (among others) and as adapting public theater’s approach to representing Otherness for the context of closet drama.

  • 33 Bovilsky, Lara, Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage (Minneapolis: University of M (...)

26Demonstrative of what Lara Bovilsky has shown to be a convention of the contemporary stage,33 as it was in medieval texts, the argument between Salome and Mariam also brings in the Old Testament, signaling the Jewish characters’ rejection of Christ and the New Testament that relates his story. Calling Salome a “parti-Jew, and parti-Edomite” may be a slur, but it also discloses Mariam’s Jewishness in obvious ways. This language links The Tragedy of Mariam to the production of Jewish difference made popular in the public theater and to the discourse of scorning that accompanies Jewish representation in English literature at large.

  • 34 We can discern that Cary was familiar with ancient drama and its conventions, not only by virtue of (...)

27In response to Mariam’s remarks, Salome calls attention to the queen’s “stirring tongue” and “fumish words.” It is worth noting here that “fumish” is a word that conveys anger as well as physicality, as a kind of heaviness or darkness that accompanies smoke. And, in a meta-demonstration of the exchange’s emphasis, she states, “Salome’s reply is only scorn.” Her claim that Mariam has a history of anger—evident when she remarks, “more than once your choler have I borne”—further attests to the associations of censorious language with the queen of Jewry if not with Jews more generally. And the format, approaching (but not quite qualifying as) the classical use of stichomythia in its alternating lines of riposte, likewise contributes to this deprecatory acoustic climate.34 The scene thus prominently employs libel and slander in a dialogue that underscores the semiotics of race, inherited somatic difference, and insuperable polarity.

  • 35 Shapiro, James, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 24.

28The interconnections between Jewishness and vituperation have a particularly strong resonance in the English imagination. James Shapiro has shown that “the word Jew had entered into the English vocabulary in the thirteenth century as a catchall term of abuse.”35 This English vernacular variously proposed antipathy, artificiality, opportunism, lust for material goods, and wickedness, and was still used in this way at the time that Cary was writing The Tragedy of Mariam. It finds normal incorporation in stage practice and thus makes the natural transition to closet drama, which depends entirely on language. Mariam herself participates in this insult culture when she labels Salome “parti-Jew,” criticizing Herod’s sister’s mixed heritage even as she denigrates her with even a partial designation as a Jew. These insults are noteworthy, not only by virtue of providing evidence of the closet drama’s engagement with broader theatrical practices of Jewish representation, but also because they set in motion the scheme which culminates in Mariam’s death.

29Salome reveals how she intends to unseat Mariam in the familiar style of a villain broadcasting her conspiracy to the audience:

Salome.
She shall be chargèd with so horrid crime,
As Herod’s fear shall turn his love to hate:
I’ll make some swear that she desires to climb,
And seeks to poison him for his estate.
I scorn that she should live my birth t’upbraid.
To call me base and hungry Edomite:
With patient show her choler I betrayed,
And watched the time to be revenged by sleight.
Now tongue of mine with scandal load her name,
Turn hers to fountains, Herod’s eyes to flame:
(The Tragedy of Mariam, 3.2.84–98)

  • 36 See Kaplan, “Constructing the Inferior Body.”
  • 37 Patricia Akhimie’s work on the ways that access is bestowed upon or denied to different early moder (...)

30Recognizable themes emerge in Salome’s machinations, affirming Mariam’s contributions to enduring trends of Jewish representation in English literature as well as to contemporary approaches of depicting stage-Jews. The plan to accuse Mariam of a “horrid crime” reeks of Blood Libel allegations, while the unsubtle reference to a Jew seeking “to climb” above her station recalls the Christian sense of urgency to keep Jews in their “rightful place of subjection.”36 One need only think of Shylock’s “Shall I bend low” to acknowledge how submission, or a desire to see Jews as subservient, was a key component of performed Jewishness in the period’s theaters (1.3.133). Just as in Mariam, these statements on Jewish status—enforced peonage or forestalled socio-political and personal advancement37—attend to a contemporary interest in portraying Jews as inferior.

  • 38 Tzafrir Barzilay traces the historiography of the well-poisoning claim and determines that it origi (...)

31When Salome discloses her plan to “make some swear that she…seeks to poison him for his estate,” she also calls upon anti-Jewish narratives about contamination, deriving from medieval rhetoric linking Jews to well pollution.38 The idea that Jews infected Christian populations across Europe—an allegation that not coincidentally dovetailed with the emergence of plague—offers another example of the potency of anti-Jewish defamation. Popular theater from Cary’s lifetime still called on the Jewish poisoning motif with regularity. Machiavel, the Prologue in The Jew of Malta, demonstrates when stating that those who reject him are “poison’d by my climbing followers” (Prologue.13). Subsequent to Machiavel’s foreshadowing, Barabas brags openly about his habit of turning to poison for fun. “Sometimes I go about and poison wells,” he says at one point, and confirms this inclination to be true when he laces porridge with poison, murdering everyone within a nunnery (2.3.177). Later, he poisons Ithamore, Bellamira, and Pilia-Borza through similar means. A Jewish character named Abraham emerges within the plot of Selimus solely to administer poison, and Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, calls upon poison as a universal agent of death in his famous line of questioning when he asks, “If you poison us, do we not die?” (3.1.64–65). If an early modern English play incorporates a Jewish character, it routinely invokes poison as a stigmatizing device to appeal to audiences’ expectations of Jewish delinquency and to connect the drama to a network of texts that similarly exploit anti-Jewishness. The Tragedy of Mariam is no exception. Antipater even suggests using poison to remove Mariam’s family from the lines of royal succession when he says, “Therefore we had best some subtle hidden plot devise, that Mariam’s children might subverted be, by poison’s drink, or else by murderous knife, so we may be advanced…” (2.3.272–276). There is no subtlety here; Antipater seeks to supersede Jews using the very same destructive means associated with Jewry.

  • 39 The poison motif likewise links The Tragedy of Mariam to numerous contemporary dramas, such as Haml (...)

32Poison also supplies Cary with a useful metaphor within a play that is as consumed by reputational concerns as it is by the mechanisms that enable them. Even if the poison plot fits nicely within the nexus of contemporary Jewish dramatic representation, therefore, it also provides a literary function. Mariam’s reputation is befouled when Salome slanders her, the allegation poisoning Mariam’s status.39

33Notable about Salome’s plotting is her deliberate attention to defamation, supplied by her use of words like “scorn” and “scandal” as much as by her expressed intentionality to stir up rumors about Mariam. “Now tongue of mine with scandal load her name,” Salome plans. The line avers the vilification of a Jewish stage figure in a drama that interrogates the theme of character assassination and assertively avails scorning to do so. Salome is aware of the influence that criminal allegations will have and the effectiveness of those claims once she “make[s] some swear” to their veracity. It is not only a demonstration of Kaplan’s “culture of slander,” but also a crucial paradigm of the construction of Jewishness in early modern English theater.

  • 40 The stage directions offer one excellent example of how Cary imagined Mariam to be performed, if no (...)

34Plotting emerges as a conventional feature in Cary’s work, as this moment shows, and it is one that likewise resonates with contemporary dramatic stereotypes, something that audiences would come to expect of Jewish characters in popular theater. When Salome comes upon Mariam and Alexandra at the beginning of the play, she hurls accusations at the queen and charges her and her mother with imprecating. “More plotting yet?” she asks, then mistakes Mariam’s mournful tears for celebratory ones when she alleges, “Her eyes do sparkle joy for Herod’s death” (1.3.207–210). The incendiary discourse, like the setting that provides a rich background for political and religious conflict, amplifies the sense of opposition between Christians (or proto-Christians) and Jews. At the same time, the pattern of hurling accusations—plotting, insults, and the crafting and dissemination of canards—delivers to the audience, elite readers though they might have been, the familiar practices of the public stage. It is yet another example of Cary’s awareness of popular dramatic convention, how she adapts it for closet drama, and how she might have envisioned her work to be performed.40

  • 41 Wray, “Performing The Tragedy of Mariam,” 150.
  • 42 Wray explains that the text “engages with casting, costume, lighting, set, and movement,” among oth (...)

35Ramona Wray’s observation that Cary’s play has been excluded from generic discussion despite “sharing an interface with the drama of its time” as well as a “sensitivity to other dramatic influences” registers how the text’s relationship with contemporary literary forces has been historically overlooked.41 The copious anti-Jewish facets in The Tragedy of Mariam supply excellent evidence of Wray’s assertion about the work’s participation in broader theatrical culture.42 Just as the public stage incorporated wide-ranging libelous associations with Jews, so too does Mariam. The tragedy’s interrogation of defamatory issues, vis-à-vis the rhetorical deployment of scorning in particular, highlights the text’s connections to contemporary performance practices and established literary cultures.

  • 43 Raber, Karen, Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama (Newar (...)
  • 44 Excluded from the popular theater scene, Cary takes up the subject of the people who were denied ac (...)

36As a closet drama, Mariam was designed to engage with political issues and to trigger debate. “In both its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century incarnations,” Karen Raber posits, “closet drama had specifically political ends and political ramifications.”43 The fact that the genre eluded the sanitizing oversight of the London theater scene and was adopted by women writers who were otherwise excluded from the popular domain of performance shows that the literary approach provided an outlet for early modern thinkers who wanted to offer political commentary and participate in, if not critique, dramatic forms. Jewishness provides a particularly useful theme for this genre that engages with public affairs, tyranny, and power.44 As a Catholic living in Protestant England, Cary herself has a fitting profile to author a play with political implications, featuring marginalized figures.

  • 45 Coodin, Sara, Is Shylock Jewish?: Citing Scripture and the Moral Agency of Shakespeare’s Jews (Edin (...)
  • 46 Callaghan, Dympna, “Re-Reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry,” Wom (...)
  • 47 Callaghan, “Re-Reading,” 169.

37In addition, Jews became something of a national interest in the early modern period, when England worked to define itself with a religious autonomy separate from Rome’s Catholic authority. The rise of Christian Hebraism, as Sara Coodin has shown, reflects an esteem for Jewish texts and even Jews’ ability to resist external pressures that sought to alter them.45 Dympna Callaghan also observes that, in circles like Cary’s, there was an “intellectual fascination with Judaism which [had] swept England from the reign of Henry VIII.”46 Educated groups even increasingly learned Hebrew, something Cary herself had done.47 The Tragedy of Mariam’s engagement with Jewishness at a time when elite families—including, presumably, Cary’s—held Jewish materials and culture in some regard signals how Jewishness functioned as a fundamental and complex feature of the play. Thus, while engaging in popular insult culture linked to Jewish stage representation, made popular in canonical works like The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice, The Tragedy of Mariam also participates in a contemporary intellectual practice which cultivated a curiosity in Jews and Jewishness.

The Gendered Production of Jewish Difference

  • 48 While the First Folio lists Shakespeare’s comedy as The Merchant of Venice, the title page of the f (...)

38This article has, until this point, concentrated on the ways that Mariam participates in an established literary culture of anti-Jewishness, borrowing from an enduring medieval legacy, contemporary theatrical practices, and intellectual values of its playwright’s time. However, the tragedy also actively contributes to the English Renaissance’s production of Jewish difference through its attention to gender. Centered on a Jewish woman, it is a rarity not only by virtue of its interest in a female protagonist but also by that character’s identity as a Jew. The title unabashedly names the Jewish lead in stark contrast with The Jew of Malta, which leaves Barabas’ name out entirely, or The Merchant of Venice, which only mentions Shylock’s name in a kind of subtitle.48 Before Mariam even begins, therefore, the drama presents novel approaches to depicting Jewishness.

39The word “tongue” provides an excellent entry point for examining how Cary’s closet drama plays an instrumental role in the construction of gendered Jewish difference in early modern England. The Jewish woman’s tongue is an object of concern, with repeated statements about its treacherousness. At one point, Salome addresses Alexandra saying, “You durst not thus have given your tongue the rein,” as though Mariam’s mother has lost control over her own speech (1.3.219). The punning accusation links the tongue to royal authority (reign) as well as to a lack of restraint (reins). Less than ten lines later, Salome turns to Mariam, observing, “Now stirs the tongue that is so quickly moved” (1.3.227). As she did with Alexandra, Salome accuses Mariam of being incapable of restraining her vocal apparatus. Rather than finding issue with the content of their speech, Salome concentrates her disapproval on the body part that produces it.

  • 49 The tongue is replete with the perfidy of a serpent and Eve’s mediating role in convincing Adam to (...)

40Appearing 24 times in Mariam, the “tongue” laps up the text’s interest in scorning as much as its attention to ineradicable Jewish difference and to the biblical associations made famous in the Genesis Fall story.49 Salome’s claim that Mariam has a tongue that “stirs” functions as an allusion to Old Testament treacherousness, which had become a fixed association of Jewishness in both biblical and dramatic contexts for the early modern Christian imagination. Salome’s comment on the quick movement of Mariam’s tongue reinforces these popular tropes regarding Jewish slyness and its instinctive nature.

41Later on, Salome defines Mariam’s tongue as the source of the queen’s manipulative powers when she convinces Herod that his wife is deceptive and dangerous:

Salome.
She speaks a beauteous language, but within
Her heart is false as powder: and her tongue
Doth but allure the auditors to sin,
And is the instrument to do you wrong.
(The Tragedy of Mariam, 4.7.428–431)

  • 50 The “liver of blaspheming Jew” ingredient from Macbeth’s cauldron scene shows how the entirety of a (...)

42As a metonymic comment, Salome’s diction operates multivalently. For one thing, she refers to Mariam’s tongue as an “instrument,” prominently identifying it as a device deployed for strategic purposes; namely, to inflict harm on Herod. For another, she marks Mariam’s tongue as a tool of deception, evoking the blaspheming associated with rejecting Christianity and the contemptibility that results from that narrative.50

43When Salome says that “her tongue doth but allure the auditors to sin,” she discloses the play’s concern with the physical implement that facilitates speech and highlights the body part as a locus of disgust. The tongue is dangerous because it produces Jewish thought and has the capacity to beget sin, even among listeners who are not Jewish; it signals the potential harm that coincides with proximity to Jewish bodies.

44Salome’s comment on Mariam’s heart renews the anti-Jewish stance regarding congenital Jewish cruelty as much as it links the tongue to established commentary about Jews and their problematic carnality. When Salome mentions powder, though, she provides us with another example of Mariam’s contributions to the construction of gendered Jewish difference. As the editorial gloss explains, “powder” is another word for cosmetics, and thus conveys the idea that a Jewish woman has the means to manipulate her appearance. In a play engaged with Jewish themes, this diction translates Jewish duplicitousness to the domain of womanhood.

  • 51 Traub, Valerie, “Jewels, Statues, and Corpses: Containment of Female Erotic Power in Shakespeare’s (...)

45Valerie Traub’s work on Othello offers a strong analog to the way that cosmetics function in Mariam. “That a woman may ‘seem’ to be one thing and yet ‘be’ another comes to signify, in the masculine mind of Othello, woman’s very existence,” Traub writes.51 Without a doubt, Herod shares these concerns, worrying as he does about Mariam’s apparent chasteness but actual sinfulness. “Oh, thine eye is pure as Heaven, but impure thy mind,” he addresses her at one point, following up soon after with, “Hell itself lies hid beneath thy heavenly show” (4.4.189–190; 4.4.202–203). Like Othello, Herod cannot distinguish between Mariam’s inner and outer life, inculpating her as a result of his inaccess to her thoughts and as a result of his paranoia that those thoughts deviate from her external presentation.

  • 52 Traub summarizes in the context of Desdemona: “Whereas usually women are presumed to be either virg (...)

46Salome appeals to these insecurities when she fixes Herod’s concerns on Mariam’s mouth, tongue, and the words they form. When she calls Mariam’s language “beauteous” and alleges that it does not match “her heart,” Salome draws upon contemporary anxieties about beauty operating as a cover.52 Herod comes to believe this conspiracy, viewing Mariam’s appearance and behavior as entirely distinct from her inner feelings. “She showed the best, and yet did prove the worst,” he states, convinced that she only seemed loving but was actually disloyal and uncaring (4.7.475).

  • 53 Woosley Poitevin, Kimberly, “‘Counterfeit Colour’: Making Up Race in Elizabeth Cary’s ‘The Tragedy (...)
  • 54 For more on the contemporary understanding of cosmetic use and its connections to travel documents, (...)

47In Kimberly Woosley-Poitevin’s work on the use of cosmetics in The Tragedy of Mariam, she observes that “female characters in the play often contrast the ‘naturalness’ of Mariam’s complexion with the cosmetically enhanced complexions of other women.”53 Constabarus offers an example when he says that Salome “merely is a painted sepulchre” (2.4.325). Salome is distinguished from the superior, organic beauty of Mariam by her use of cosmetics, a difference that suggests racializing as much as moralizing overtones.54 Despite Mariam’s natural fairness and her lack of interest in applying substances to her face, as Woosley-Poitevin shows, Salome manages to associate her with cosmetic use by claiming Mariam’s heart to be as false as powder. Cary thus establishes an innovative approach to depicting Jews via gendered means. Applying makeup to the context of a closet drama that examines Jewish women accused of deception, she blends women’s issues with Jewish ones.

  • 55 For more on the Venetian response to Jessica deserting Shylock and converting see Metzger, Mary Jan (...)

48These modifications to established dramatic practices concerning Jewish representation hinge on Mariam featuring a female protagonist and other Jewish women. In canonical works such as Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s, Jewish women exist as minor stage figures. They are extremely isolated, lacking community, female friendship, and maternal support. Absent other Jewish women, these popular plays stage female Jewishness as a miserable identity to inhabit. Jessica validates these circumstances as luckless and despairing when she says, “Our house is hell” in The Merchant of Venice (2.3.2). Her willful absorption into a Christian context is a reflection of a need to seek out companionship, and casting off her Jewishness is a decision even if the Venetian population must also be willing to accept her.55

49Mariam, living in Judea, departs from this convention by being cast amongst a robust Jewish populace. Furthermore, she regularly interacts with another Jewish woman: her mother, Alexandra. The text even situates the Queen of Jewry within an established and impressive bloodline when it refers to connections with her “grandam Sara” (5.1.180). If characters like Shylock refer to Abram, Laban, and Jacob, it is perhaps only fitting that Mariam should refer to their female counterpart(s). While awaiting execution, Mariam is comforted by the idea that she will be reunited with a female progenitor. “In Heav’n shall Mariam sit in Sara’s lap,” she says, conjuring an image that evokes consolation at the same time that it reiterates her Jewish lineage and sense of community with Jewish women (4.8.573). Within the context of a broadly anti-Jewish literary document, this departure from established customs provides evidence of Cary’s inventive approach to depicting Jewishness, and, in particular, to depicting Jewish female stage figures.

  • 56 Either one signifying “docked masculinity,” as Dympna Callaghan demonstrates in Shakespeare Without (...)

50The feminist scholarship that has, in recent decades, taken up Cary’s work has observed the closet drama as a genre that allowed female authors to participate in the period’s literary output, interrogating women’s issues and bringing domestic topics into the theater’s domain. Mariam shows how closet drama also allowed women to develop and disseminate new theatrical concepts. In its portrayal of a Jewish woman, the text does not merely reiterate pervasive stereotypes yoked to Jewish unmanliness, which had been considered intrinsic to contemporary theatrical representations. Notably, it does not refer to castration or circumcision56 for comic effect or even to meet contemporary representational conventions. This is a significant deviation from The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice, which incorporate bawdy humor focused on Jewish male genitalia in explicit ways. The Tragedy of Mariam also leaves out references to money lending and financial responsibility, turning away from age-old themes associated with Jewish men. The words ‘ducat’ and ‘coin’ do not materialize once, differing remarkably from canonical plays of the period and from works engaging Jewish questions from medieval times, too. The tragedy approaches Jewishness from a different angle, underscoring the play-long investment in Jewish women within a dramatic context that would normally marginalize them.

51As a woman, Cary also provides us with a rare female perspective on Jewishness. Her work, as a closet drama, is not only divorced from the material concerns of public performance, but is also dissociated from anxieties linked with masculinity, which invariably arise in male-authored texts. Mariam thus provides a window into female attitudes towards Jews as much as towards Jewish women in particular, while still participating in a broader culture of anti-Jewish literary praxis.

Conclusion

52This article has shown how The Tragedy of Mariam draws on an extensive archive of anti-Jewish records, adapts theatrical practices for a context that precludes material and embodied dimensions, and contributes to constructions of Jewish difference in imaginative ways. Cary’s play is ultimately a resource for accessing early modern constructions of Jewishness as crafted for elite literary circles, but it also offers evidence of scholarly assertions that closet drama participates in broader theatrical currents. Cary deploys supersessionist features that were routinely implemented on the public stage, accommodating them in gendered terms and expanding contemporary dramatic considerations of Jewishness. The play concentrates on a Jewish woman, spotlights her stirring tongue, and re-envisions approaches to portraying Jewish difference, all while deploying fumish words amidst a general discourse of scorning. The result is a text that advances a fuller understanding of early seventeenth-century English attitudes towards Jews and towards Jewish women specifically.

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Notes

1 Cary, Elizabeth, The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, Barry Weller, Margaret W. Ferguson eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

2 Supersessionism, also variously called Pauline Supersessionism or Replacement Theology, is the belief that the New Testament has superseded the Old, not only displacing Jews from their biblical status as God’s “Chosen People” but also specifically situating Christians in their place. Supersessionist artwork often pairs Ecclesia and Synagoga together to illustrate the concept; the former is set in a superior position, accompanied by signifiers of health and power, while the latter is depicted in a weakened state, eyes covered as if blind and holding tablets that recall the Hebrew Bible.

3 Marlowe, Christopher, “The Jew of Malta,” Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, David Bevington, Eric Rasmussen eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

4 Scholars such as Kathy Lavezzo have shown that Christian ideology deprecated the Jews by insisting on their inferiority. Every time Jewish characters are demeaned on the stage, through language or by way of physical performance, they are represented through the lens of supersessionism. For more, see Lavezzo, Kathy, The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016).

5 Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice, Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine eds. (New York: Washington Square Press, 2002).

6 I have examined the progressive leanings of The Tragedy of Mariam at length in my dissertation, in a chapter focused on Cary’s play and its favorable representations of Jewishness. For more, see Friedman, Becky S., “The Badge of All Our Tribe”: Contradictions of Jewish Representation on the English Renaissance Stage”, PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 2021.

7 León Alfar, Cristina, “Elizabeth Cary’s Female Trinity: Breaking Custom with Mosaic Law in ‘The Tragedy of Mariam’,” Early Modern Women 3 (2008): 62–65.

8 Glimp, David, “Extreme Cary,” This Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature, Marcie Frank, Jonathan Goldberg, and Karen Newman eds. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 46.

9 Gajowski, Evelyn, “Intersecting Discourses of Race and Gender in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam,” Early Modern Literary Studies 27 (2017): 16.

10 A famous illustration from Cary’s lifetime is Dr. Rodrigo Lopez, a physician who was accused of attempting to poison Queen Elizabeth. Claimants pointed to Lopez’s link to Spain and Catholicism, his inauthentic conversion, and his Jewish history in the case against him. He was executed in June 1594. References to the dispute crop up in numerous contemporary popular plays, including Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

11 “Jewry, n.,” OED Online, December 2021, accessed January 29, 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/101236

12 Wray, Ramona, “Performing The Tragedy of Mariam and Constructing Stage History,” Early Theatre 18, no2 (2015): 153.

13 The International Journal of the Classical Tradition 23, no3 (2016).

14 Augur notes that Cary’s contemporaries, including Gervase Markham and William Sampson, authors of Herod and Antipater (composed c. 1613, printed 1622), as well as William Heminge, author of The Jewes Tragedy (composed c. 1626, printed 1662) gave the Jewish historian an active role in their texts. For more, see Auger, Peter, “Playing Josephus on the English Stage,” International Journal of the Classic Tradition 23, no2 (2016): 327.

15 Weinberg, Joanna, “Early Modern Jewish Readers of Josephus,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 23, no3 (2016): 289.

16 Goodman, Martin and Joanna Weinberg, “The Reception of Josephus in the Early Modern Period,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 23, no3 (2016): 167–171.

17 While Groves demonstrates that English Protestants increasingly identified with the Jewish experience, I contend that Mariam—the output of a Catholic playwright—reflected the author’s marginalized and objectionable status. See Groves, Beatrice, The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 5.

18 Groves, The Destruction of Jerusalem, 51.

19 Kaplan, M. Lindsay, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 19.

20 Kaplan, The Culture of Slander, 33.

21 Heng, Geraldine, England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

22 Heng, Geraldine, “England’s Dead Boys: Telling Tales of Christian-Jewish Relations Before and After the First European Expulsion of the Jews,” MLN 127, no5 (2012): S59.

23 Teter, Magda, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 4.

24 Berek, Peter, “Looking Jewish on the Early Modern Stage,” Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage, Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson eds. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 55‑70.

25 Zinsser-Krys, Saskia, The Early Modern Stage-Jew: Heritage, Inspiration, and Concepts (New York: Peter Lang, 2017).

26 David Ruderman’s work shows how the commercial and colonial expansion of Europe depended, in part, on the Jews’ wandering. For more, see Ruderman, David, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

27 Zinsser-Krys’s work demonstrates that early modern travel culture amplified the strangeness of Jews, who were not only found abroad but around many different places abroad. Their diasporic lifestyle augmented their foreignness.

28 Kaplan, M. Lindsay, “Constructing the Inferior Body: Medieval Theology in The Merchant of Venice,” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, Valerie Traub ed. (Oxford: Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016), 1. https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34624

29 Other marginalized populations were also represented in these terms. Kim F. Hall has shown how race-making proliferated in the early modern literary imagination, especially the mutually constitutive constructions of race and gender that were contrived and perpetuated. For more, see Hall, Kim F., Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

30 While comparing them to a dog might have been—and may still be—an obvious insult, the offense is particularly resonant in the context of Jewish figures. For more, see Stow, Kenneth, Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).

31 Hall, Things of Darkness, 6.

32 Hall, Things of Darkness, 7.

33 Bovilsky, Lara, Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 67‑102.

34 We can discern that Cary was familiar with ancient drama and its conventions, not only by virtue of her incorporation of a chorus but by her adherence to Senecan tradition, including, as Lara Dodds has observed, “long speeches and restricted onstage action, the presence of a Chorus, and unity of place, time and action.” For more, see Dodds, Lara, “Passionate Time in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam,” Temporality, Genre and Experience in the Age of Shakespeare: Forms of Time, Lauren Shohet ed. (New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2018), 190.

35 Shapiro, James, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 24.

36 See Kaplan, “Constructing the Inferior Body.”

37 Patricia Akhimie’s work on the ways that access is bestowed upon or denied to different early modern groups offers an excellent guide to the topic of restrictions on Renaissance self-fashioning. For more, see Akhimie, Patricia, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2018).

38 Tzafrir Barzilay traces the historiography of the well-poisoning claim and determines that it originated in fourteenth‑century Europe. For more, see Barzilay, Tzafrir, “Early Accusations of Well Poisoning against Jews: Medieval Reality or Historiographical Fiction?” Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Culture in Confluence and Dialogue 22, no5 (2016): 517‑539.

39 The poison motif likewise links The Tragedy of Mariam to numerous contemporary dramas, such as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, among others. Its popularity as a plot device thus knits Cary’s text to stage performance and to routine early modern English theatrical references.

40 The stage directions offer one excellent example of how Cary imagined Mariam to be performed, if not how it was acted out of the time that it was published in 1613.

41 Wray, “Performing The Tragedy of Mariam,” 150.

42 Wray explains that the text “engages with casting, costume, lighting, set, and movement,” among other dramatic conventions of the time. For more, see Wray, “Performing The Tragedy of Mariam,” 151.

43 Raber, Karen, Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001).

44 Excluded from the popular theater scene, Cary takes up the subject of the people who were denied access in England, the Jews who had been expelled in 1290 when Edward I issued the Edict of Expulsion.

45 Coodin, Sara, Is Shylock Jewish?: Citing Scripture and the Moral Agency of Shakespeare’s Jews (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

46 Callaghan, Dympna, “Re-Reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry,” Women, “Race” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, Margo Hendricks, Patricia Parker eds. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 168.

47 Callaghan, “Re-Reading,” 169.

48 While the First Folio lists Shakespeare’s comedy as The Merchant of Venice, the title page of the first quarto (1600) reads, “The most excellent Historie of the Merchant Of Venice. With the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Iewe towards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a just pound of his flesh and the obtaining of Portia by the choyse of three chests.”

49 The tongue is replete with the perfidy of a serpent and Eve’s mediating role in convincing Adam to sin. While Eve technically predates Judaism, her identity as an Old Testament figure makes her a permanent associate of Judaic tradition. Her inclination to sin, goaded by the words of Satan, is key to her being tokenized as a symbol both patriarchal and anti-Jewish feeling. For more on the encounter between Eve and the serpent, see Gen 3:1–20.

50 The “liver of blaspheming Jew” ingredient from Macbeth’s cauldron scene shows how the entirety of a Jew’s body was believed to be tainted as a result of a profane tongue (4.1.24). The reference to Jewish sacrilege made special sense in the context of witchcraft and as a constituent part of a potion concocted with sickening, offensive things.

51 Traub, Valerie, “Jewels, Statues, and Corpses: Containment of Female Erotic Power in Shakespeare’s Plays,” Shakespeare and Gender: A History, Deborah Barker, Ivo Kamp eds. (New York: Verso, 1995), 126.

52 Traub summarizes in the context of Desdemona: “Whereas usually women are presumed to be either virgins or whores, in Othello the split within each woman between ‘seeming’ and ‘being’ suggests women are simultaneously ‘seeming’ to be virgins and ‘being’ actual whores.” For more, see Traub, “Jewels, Statues, and Corpses,” 126.

53 Woosley Poitevin, Kimberly, “‘Counterfeit Colour’: Making Up Race in Elizabeth Cary’s ‘The Tragedy of Mariam’,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 24, no1 (2005): 22.

54 For more on the contemporary understanding of cosmetic use and its connections to travel documents, see Woosley Poitevin, “Counterfeit Colour,” 22–27.

55 For more on the Venetian response to Jessica deserting Shylock and converting see Metzger, Mary Janell, “‘Now by My Hood, a Gentle and No Jew’: Jessica, The Merchant of Venice, and the Discourse of Early Modern English Identity,” PMLA 113, no1 (1998): 52.

56 Either one signifying “docked masculinity,” as Dympna Callaghan demonstrates in Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Race and Gender on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 2000), 74.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Becky S. Friedman, Stirring Tongues and Fumish Words: Representing Jewishness in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of MariamCaliban, 67-68 | 2022, 209-235.

Electronic reference

Becky S. Friedman, Stirring Tongues and Fumish Words: Representing Jewishness in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of MariamCaliban [Online], 67-68 | 2022, Online since 20 October 2022, connection on 08 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/11446; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.11446

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About the author

Becky S. Friedman

Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include English Renaissance drama, the history of Jews and Judaism in England, and gender and religion in early modern Europe. Her work reveals how London playhouses embraced Jewishness as a productive means of exploring difference and likeness at a time when economic transformation and globalizing influences were renegotiating the terms of communal belonging. She is currently working on her first monograph, The Jewish Body on the Shakespearean Stage.

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