“More plotting yet?”: Rewriting Mariam and Herod and Revising Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam for the Early Modern English Stage
Résumés
The Tragedy of Mariam d’Elizabeth Cary (1613) est souvent considéré comme le seul exemple d'adaptation dramatique de l’histoire du roi Hérode le Grand et de sa seconde épouse Mariamne dans le théâtre anglais de la première modernité : dans cette pièce qui ne connut aucune représentation publique, Cary examine comment la jalousie du roi et « D’autres intrigues encore » (I.3.1) conduisent Mariam à l'échafaud. Deux autres pièces pourtant, Herod and Antipater de Gervase Markham et William Sampson (1622) et The Duke of Milan de Philip Massinger (1623), ont recours à la même source historique, Les Antiquités judaïques de Flavius Josèphe. Nous proposons de montrer dans ce chapitre que ces trois pièces entretiennent une relation plus organique qui dépasse l’intrigue commune trouvée dans l’histoire antique du peuple juif. Des motifs récurrents et des échos stylistiques donnent à penser que Markham et Sampson, et Massinger, empruntent à la pièce de Cary, transformant sa tragédie néo-sénéquéenne en un mélodrame spectaculaire et sanguinolent pour les premiers, et en une tragédie de vengeance jacobéenne pour le second. Une comparaison entre les trois pièces montre comment la pratique d'appropriation littéraire des dramaturges de l’époque transcende les frontières entre le théâtre d'élite et le théâtre populaire, ainsi que celles entre pièces manuscrites, jamais jouées, jouées sans publication, ou imprimées. Elle témoigne aussi de la réception immédiate et de l’héritage littéraire de la pièce de Cary, suggérant que son audience ne fut pas aussi limitée qu’on l’a souvent cru, en raison de son statut et de son genre. Enfin, la façon dont l'histoire de Mariamne et Hérode nous fait entendre la voix publique des femmes est significative : la voix de Mariam résonne haut et fort dans la pièce de Cary, bien plus que sur la scène commerciale, où la reine, ou sa copie dans The Duke of Milan, est réduite à une pantomime ou soumise à un rituel carnavalesque d'exhibition sexuelle et de châtiment corporel.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
Hérode et Mariam, théâtre commercial, théâtre à lire, tragédie de vengeance, sources, circulation, théâtralité, violence, le corps féminin souffrant, voix fémininesKeywords:
Herod and Mariam, commercial stage, closet drama, revenge tragedy, sources, circulation, theatricality, violence, the female suffering body, women’s voicePlan
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- 1 The Tragedy of Mariam is mentioned in the Rogers and Ley catalogue of 1656 (appended to Thomas Goff (...)
- 2 Stephanie Hodgson-Wright lists three other dedications: William Basse’s, in his never published Pol (...)
- 3 See Antonius (1592) by Mary Sidney Herbert; The Tragedy of Cleopatra (1594) by Samuel Daniel; Corne (...)
- 4 Maurice Valency, The Tragedies of Herod and Mariamne, New York, Columbia University Press, 1940, p. (...)
- 5 Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (eds), The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry with Th (...)
- 6 K. Kacka, op. cit., p. 123.
- 7 All references to Cary’s play are from The Tragedy of Mariam, ed. Ramona Wray, Arden Early Modern D (...)
- 8 Markham published a prose sequel to Philip Sidney’s Arcadia in 1613, and in the epistle to his seco (...)
- 9 All references to The Duke of Milan are from The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, ed. Philip Ed (...)
- 10 Massinger’s play is often compared unfavourably to Shakespeare’s Othello: “Despite the similarities (...)
- 11 Janet Clare, Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theat (...)
- 12 Sandra K. Fischer, “Elizabeth Cary and Tyranny, Domestic and Religious”, in Margaret Hannay (ed.), (...)
1Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam stands apart in early modern English drama on several grounds: it is the first original play authored by a woman which was not only printed but granted a certain recognition in her time, as attested by its inclusion in different play lists1 and several dedications to its author. Michael Drayton praises Cary’s wisdom, judgment and learning as early as 1597 in his Englands heroicall epistles; John Davies of Hereford makes her a rival of the goddess Minerva and a student of the goddess Melpomene in his The Muse’s Sacrifice (1612); Richard More’s dedication in Englands Helicon, or, The Muses Harmony (1614) hails her as “England’s happy Muse”.2 Though Cary’s tragedy turns to ancient history like so many neo-Senecan plays of the period, its plot focuses on Jewish history and the margins of the Roman Empire rather than on the figureheads of the Roman Republic.3 Elizabeth Cary’s choice of the story of King Herod the Great and his second wife Mariamne is singular: the date of composition (1604-1607) places her as the second author of a Mariamne play in Europe, after Lodovico Dolce’s Marianna in 1565, or possibly third after Alexandre Hardy’s Mariamne which may have been performed as early at 1600.4 Her use of the Mariam and Herod plot has been deemed circumstantial: critics have surmised that Cary was drawn to the story of a strong-willed woman condemned by her tyrant husband because of her own personal situation as the young bride in a transactional arranged match;5 or she may have been inspired by the recent publication of Thomas Lodge’s translation of Josephus’s works in 1602, all the more so since Michael Drayton, possibly her tutor, was an acquaintance of Lodge’s.6 Regardless of her motivation, the play’s increasing popularity in academe and on the stage since the 1990s has proved the Mariam and Herod plot to be a perfect vehicle to tell the tragedy of a female hero and explore issues of oppression, free will, male power and female voice. Following the publication of Cary’s play in 1613, the story of Herod and Mariam’s marriage produced “More plotting yet” – to borrow Salome’s line when she accuses Mariam of conspiring against her (I.3.1).7 The same year The Tragedy of Mariam was published, Gervase Markham wrote a play, Herodias,8 which he later revised with William Sampson and which they published in 1622 as The true Tragedy of Herod and Antipater, with the death of Faire Marriam – a play “divers times publiquely Acted (with great Applause) at the Red Bull by the Company of his Maiesties Revels”, as advertised on the titlepage. At about the same time, The Duke of Milan by Philip Massinger, “often acted by his Maiesties servants at the Blacke friers” and printed in 1623, closely follows the Mariam and Herod storyline though it transposes it in an Italian and contemporary setting: before he leaves for war, Sforza, Duke of Milan, orders that his wife be murdered should he himself be killed by the Emperor Charles V; his wife mourns his absence “widow-like” (II.1.38) but shows a cold temperament when he returns and refuses to share his bed; tricked by an ambitious favorite, the husband kills his innocent wife before he falls into a maddening melancholy.9 The plays of Cary, Markham and Sampson, and Massinger show how inspiring and malleable the story of Mariam and Herod was. A plot built on a close interweaving of jealousy, tyranny and melancholy produced three very different plays: in the case of The Tragedy of Mariam, a neo-Senecan closet drama consisting of long soliloquies where the action is compressed into one day in accordance with the unities of time and place of the classical tradition; a rambling melodrama verging on farce with Herod and Antipater; and a moral and satirical tragedy with The Duke of Milan.10 Our purpose in this article will be to show that these different modes demonstrate the circulation of genres and plays in the early modern period. Imitation, borrowing, adaptation were common practices in the early modern theatre, fostered by education methods and the commercial set-up of companies. Play-writing took place in a dense network of traffic and exchange where a play was the result of an “interweaving of text, context, and performance event”.11 What the Mariam and Herod story shows with acuity is that this tradition crossed the distinction between commercial theatre and elite drama meant for private reading or performance. Far from a “genre of marginality”,12 Cary’s closet drama disseminated ideas regarding male madness and the suffering female body which male playwrights picked up on in their own plays and adjusted to their own agendas.
From Senecan Tragedy to Sensational Tragicomedy: Herod and Antipater
2With the observance of the unities of time and place and a plot unfolding within “twice six hours” (5 Cho. 6), Cary’s play favours long speeches of self-scrutiny and harangues like Constabarus’s misogynistic rant or Herod’s final descent into a raving melancholy. The two events that frame the storyline, Herod’s journey to Rome which prompts his fateful decision to have his wife killed in the event of his own demise, and Mariam’s execution, are pushed outside of the play’s margins, either temporarily, as Herod’s departure for Rome takes place before the play begins, or spatially, with Mariam’s death taking place offstage and being reported in act V by the Nuntio. By contrast, Cary’s plot over the first four acts explores the hopes, doubts and hesitations of the characters as they ponder what momentous changes lie ahead for them.
3Markham and Sampson’s play turns the conventions of neo-Senecan drama on their heads. The first act is filled with twists and turns, with Alexandra (Mariam’s mother) and Aristobulus her son, both in their night-gowns, fleeing the palace in the middle of the night. The fugitives are soon arrested, Herod himself is about to kill them but in an unexpected turnaround he pardons them; he then departs to Rhodes where Augustus orders his execution before changing his mind just as unexpectedly and pardoning his vassal; in the meantime, Antipater, Herod’s illegitimate son, conjures up supernatural spirits in a dumb show to devise a plot against his father, artisans proceed to build the temple, an apothecary promotes his remedies against all ills including syphilis, Aristobulus drowns in an act of foul play, and Josephus, Salome’s husband, reveals to Mariam Herod’s fatal command to have her poisoned should he perish in Rhodes – and all of this in the first act alone.
- 13 All references to Herod and Antipater are from G. Markham and W. Sampson, A Critical Edition of The (...)
- 14 The full title is The Tragedy of Herod and Antipater with the death of faire Mariam, According to J (...)
- 15 J. B. Fletcher, “Herod in the Drama”, Studies in Philology, 19.3, July 1922, p. 292-307, here p. 29 (...)
- 16 The latter detail is present in Josephus’s history: Flavius Josephus, The Famous and Memorable Work (...)
4The play is a revenge tragedy, with Antipater a vice-like figure at its center (“By birth I am a bastard, yet my wit / Shall bear me ’bove the true-borne”, I.2.33-34),13 spiced up with supernatural spirits who are either “hellish counsellors” or the ghosts of the many victims of this homicidal frenzy. Herod’s story, as announced in the prologue, is “Fam’d then as well for Vertues as Blacke Crimes” (l.4): Mariam, who has the honour of featuring on the title page, just above the literary authority of Josephus announced as the source of the story,14 is the virtuous stamp of approval who justifies an outpouring of violence. She dies in act II but appears in act V as a ghost before her husband, who then tries to kill himself to join her. The ending only pays lip service to a project of edification (“Make Vertue thy Companion: for we see / She builds their ruines, spring from Tyrannie”, V.2.328-329) but the prologue makes the play’s purpose clear: this history, “though her scoenes seeme grave and hie / She heere and there with a loose wing doth flye; / Striving to make you merry” (Prologue, l. 19-21). The play has been described as “a competition in family murder”.15 Indeed, this murder extravaganza counts at least six offstage and eight onstage murders, carried out in a wide variety of ways, with in order of appearance, death by drowning, decapitation, strangulation, hanging, quartering, poison, starvation, sickness and grief. Suicide is a common recourse, but is not always successful: Herod stabs himself but survives in act V; similarly, Adda, Pheroas’s wife, throws herself from the top of a tower to escape her assailants and survives (though she causes the death of several soldiers who are crushed under her weight when she jumps) and she returns “disabled” to be tortured on stage (“They racke Adda”, IV.2.154 SD). In addition to bloody violence, Markham and Sampson inject a dash of the burlesque with low undignified details, like the barber Tryphon falling in love with Salome and worshipping the toothpick and earpick she uses (III.1.116-122) or Herod peeling an apple before he stabs himself.16
5In spite of this striking difference of treatment between Cary’s Senecan composition and Markham and Sampson’s crowd-pleasing economy, the two plays are not entirely disconnected. In Herod and Antipater, the death of Mariam’s sons Aristobulus and Alexander, strangled on stage by Herod’s guard following accusations by Salome and Antipater, is faithful to Josephus’s account, but it also creates a link with Cary’s play as their brutal murder fulfills Doris’s (Herod’s first wife’s) prophecy in The Tragedy of Mariam. In the earlier play, Doris, meeting Mariam who is being taken to the scaffold, predicts that her son Antipater will later kill Mariam’s son Alexander, a prophecy absent from the historical chronicle:
And, Mariam, I do hope this boy of mine
Shall one day come to be the death of thine. (The Tragedy of Mariam, IV.8.99-100)
- 17 See Shakespeare’s two tetralogies or the trilogy of “directional plays” written by Dekker and Webst (...)
6To an audience of readers and playgoers used to reading and watching plays independently but also as a sequence,17 like twenty-first century audiences binge-watching their favourite TV shows, Markham and Sampson’s play, especially with its emphasis on “the death of Faire Mariam”, could have been perceived as both a palimpsest and a sequel to Cary’s play.
7Though her tragedy never elicits outright laughter, Cary does not completely elude physical comedy or verbal humour. Mariam shows her scathing wit when, to cut short Herod’s long and unconvincing protestations of his love for Aristobulus, she retorts effectively: “I know that, moved by importunity, / You made him priest – and shortly after die” (IV.3.51-52). Once Herod accepts the possibility of Mariam’s treason, his indecision is rendered in dramatic terms with the back and forth of the guards who are to take her to her death:
Here, take her to her death. Come back, come back,
What meant I to deprive the world of light[?]
[…]
And therefore bear her hence: and, Hebrew, why
Seize you with lion’s paws the fairest lamb
Of all the flock? She must not, shall not, die.
[…] Away, away,
But bear her but to prison, not to death:
And is she gone indeed? Stay, villains, stay! (The Tragedy of Mariam, IV.4.77-95)
- 18 F. Josephus, tr. Th. Lodge, op. cit., book XV, ch. XI, p. 398. Both Hardy and Tristan L’Hermite’s p (...)
- 19 Boyd M. Berry, “Feminine Construction of Patriarchy; Or What’s Comic in The Tragedy of Mariam”, Med (...)
8Like Cary, Markham and Sampson discard the trial scene mentioned in Josephus’s history18 and use instead a pattern very similar to the above scene. Their Herod, after sending Mariam to her death, is however firmly set on sparing her after all: four times does the king command Antipater to go “stay the execution”, and four times does Antipater offer to go but returns with a different pretense so as to delay the counterorder which is to suspend Mariam’s execution (II.1.460-475). Antipater’s use of the adverb “Yet” repeated four times to mark his supposed change of heart, creates comedy in spite of the fatal delay it generates: the news of Mariam’s death is indeed announced immediately after Antipater’s fourth fake exit. The similarity in the two scenes, down to the number of times (4) Herod changes his mind in Cary’s play and Antipater fakes his exit in Markham and Sampson’s play, could suggest that the latter borrowed the scenic development from Cary’s play. More importantly, it clearly signals an ideological divergence between the two plays: while Cary produces a comic and feminine critique of patriarchy, focusing on the vagaries of Herod’s passion, “at times laughable as well as monstrous”,19 Markham and Sampson partly exonerate the king who changes his mind only once and is then determined to save Mariam. Their Herod recovers his spirits (“O then me thinks, I might at least have breath’d, / Before I had condemned her”, II.1.454-455), he is the victim of a malicious Antipater, and comedy at such a crucial moment contributes to turning him into a sympathetic if slightly idiotic figure.
- 20 Mariam in her opening speech expresses the “wish the news may firmly hold” (I.1.52); the first son (...)
9Rumour is another element that suggests Markham and Sampson’s knowledge of Cary’s tragedy: it is absent from either F. Josephus’s history or Morwenn’s account, which have Josephus (Salome’s first husband) reveal his fateful order to Mariam, hoping to ingratiate himself to the queen and her mother, but it is an essential part in the build-up of dramatic tension in The Tragedy of Mariam. The news of Herod’s death is a radical turning point for all characters, a “reversed state” as Alexandra puts it (I.2.126), with major personal and political consequences. The possibility that this could be false information is held at bay at first but progressively gains strength,20 to the point that the chorus warns about its danger:
’Tis that we see
That makes false rumours long with credit passed,
Though they, like rumours, must conclude at last. (The Tragedy of Mariam, 2 Chorus, 16-18).
10Markham and Sampson also use the rumour of Herod’s death in their last act: Antipater rejoices at the news and expects to be crowned as the new king of Judaea, but when he arrives triumphant to the sound of trumpets he is greeted by Herod himself, and instead of a throne, a scaffold is revealed where he is executed. Rumour in Cary’s play introduces a tragic reversal of state which is only temporary and prefigures the larger issue of evidence and uncertainty central to the question of Mariam’s virtue. In Markham and Sampson, it is removed to act V and provides the play’s last tragi-comic twist: Antipater’s villainy is revealed to all and the emblem-like substitution of the scaffold for the throne is the last moral advice against the precariousness of power and the perils of ambition.
- 21 Cary’s connections to the Sidney circle are based on her indebtedness to Sidnean closet drama and o (...)
11All together, narrative continuity, paratextual reference, comic construction and identical edits in their treatment of their source all point to the likely circulation of Cary’s play either as a manuscript or as a printed text among her fellow playwrights on the London scene. This hypothesis is not implausible considering that Markham, the primary author of the play, was also connected to the Sidney circle, which possibly included Cary herself:21 after publishing a popular treatise on horses, A Discourse of Horsemanship, in 1593, Markham took a more literary turn in his career with The Poem of Poems, or Syon's Muse, dedicated to Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Philip Sidney, in 1595, and a prose sequel to Sidney’s Arcadia entitled The English Arcadia with a first part published in 1607 and the second in 1613. Whether such a connection existed, several passages in Herod and Antipater may be read as indirect meta-dramatic comments on Cary’s earlier play. Audiences at the Red Bull may have been ignorant of the play’s Senecan predecessor published a decade earlier, but readers of Markham and Sampson’s play in 1623 are more likely to have seen a filiation between the two plays, guided by the names of Mariam and Josephus on the title page. Immediately after Antipater conceives his “plot” to overthrow his father, the artisans arrive and discuss their own plot, where the new temple is to be built:
Handsaw. Tis a good handsome plot, and full of art;
But how like you my modell for the timber-worke?
Lime. Pretty, pretty, if the seates be not too spacious.
Durt. O, tis much the better, and fitter for the Scribes &
Pharisies to sleepe vpon: but here comes the Lord Joseph. (Herod and Antipater, I.4.1-5)
12The “handsome plot” Handsaw the carpenter admires is also the intricate plot that has just unfolded in this first act, filled with action, danger and excitement; the remark on the comfortable seats where priests and scribes will doze off is a wink at the spectators’ harder seats in the London playhouse – when they are lucky (or rich) enough to have one. To some extent, Markham and Sampson advertise the tricks of their trade, that rely on a frenzy rhythm and much art to keep their spectators well awake – in opposition perhaps to an earlier literary “model” targeting a more learned audience who had better seats?
13The epilogue, as expected, adopts a rhetoric of humility asking for the audience’s kind patience, but the authors also pride themselves on their creation, which brings a flamboyant style and action to a story that was new on the commercial stage:
Y’aue heard a tale, which not a noble eare
But has drunke with devotion; and how ere
It scant in phraze or action; yet it may
Ranke with some others, and be held a play,
Though not the best, nor worst; (Herod and Antipater, Epilogue, 1-5)
- 22 Emily Smith convincingly argues that epilogues not only formed a genre in themselves but that they (...)
14Allusions to earlier versions “scant in phraze or action” could either refer to Josephus’s history – though the three books devoted to Herod’s reign hardly lack action – or in a distant allusion, to Cary’s tragedy. Markham and Sampson’s claim that their play be worthy of being ranked with others attests to the competition between commercial theatres in London, but their epilogue also conventionally engages with the generic nature of their play, a common feature of early modern dramatic epilogues:22 Markham and Sampson thus remind their readers or spectators who were familiar with Cary’s tragedy that many varied forms could “be held a play”.
Rewriting The Tragedy of Mariam as a Jacobean Revenge Tragedy
- 23 The Double Marriage, jointly written by John Fletcher and Massinger (c. 1621) is also set in Italy; (...)
- 24 The Virgin Martyr, in The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, ed. cit., vol. 1.
- 25 The Duke of Milan, ed. cit., “Introduction”, p. 202-203.
- 26 See Thorssen, art. cit.
- 27 See Laura Tosi, “After Elizabeth: Representations of Female Rule in Massinger’s Tragicomedies”, Ren (...)
15The Duke of Milan unfolds a story of jealous passion, power and madness that precisely follows the Mariam and Herod plot, except for its setting. The relocation to Italy is unremarkable in Massinger’s writing of the period23 but the concurrent publication of Markham and Sampson’s Herod and Antipater a year before in 1622, which though it focuses on the rise and fall of Herod’s bastard son and vice-like figure Antipater, still deals with the passionate and frustrated relationship between the king and his “fair Mariam”, was certainly an incentive to transpose the action to Milan. Massinger had also published The Virgin Martyr, written with Thomas Dekker, in 1622, which was performed like Herod and Antipater at the Red Bull Theatre: set in Caesarea in Judea, the play celebrates another epitome of “Beauty and chastity” (II.3.65), Christian Dorothea who refuses to convert to paganism and is beheaded at the end of act IV.24 The change of scene to Italy thus ensured The Duke of Milan would spark fresh interest in a theme which had already attracted “great applause” among playgoers. Editors and critics have identified among Massinger’s sources for The Duke of Milan book XV of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews for the plot (Thomas Lodge’s English translation was reprinted in 1620) and Geoffrey Fenton’s translation of Guicciardini’s Historia d’Italia (1579, reprinted in 1618) for the transposition of King Herod into Massinger’s tragic hero Ludovico Sforza, a blend of historical Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan between 1494-1500, and his son Francisco II, last Duke of Milan (1521-1535).25 In addition, the influence of Shakespeare’s Othello has been duly noted: the peaceful and righteous characters of Josephus (Salome’s husband) and Sohemus (a faithful counsellor to the king) who both reveal Herod’s fateful order to his unsuspicious wife in both The Jewish Antiquities and Cary’s play, have been replaced by a conniving and malicious favourite, Francisco, whose revenge scheme on the Duke is discovered in the last act.26 Critics have observed a convergence of interests between Cary’s play and Massinger’s The Duke of Milan, similarly focused on issues related to female rule, the representation of royal couples and women’s outspokenness, but the influence of Cary’s play has not been established.27
16Massinger adapts the Mariam and Herod story to the stage of the commercial theatre, emphasizing spectacular action and a brisk course of action. While Cary’s classical drama unfolds during a single day, from Mariam’s affliction, torn as she is between joy over the (supposed) death of her husband and the remembrance of her past love, to her execution when he returns, Massinger’s plot covers an extended period of time. The play starts with a prolonged description of the Duke’s passionate love for his wife Marcelia: on her birthday, “the Duke is not his owne, but hers: / Nay, every day, indeed, he is her creature” (I.1.101-102). The Duke’s subsequent decision to order her death in the event of his demise, his servant Francisco’s disclosure of the fatal order to his unsuspecting wife, the Duke’s meeting with the Emperor in Pavia, and the Duchess’s death (elements of plot which are either presented in the Argument or reported in Cary’s play), are all staged in Massinger’s play (I.3, II.1, III.1, IV.3) and give way to spectacular action: Francisco agrees to perform his fatal charge “though with unwillingness and horror” (I.3.373), the Duchess swoons when she learns of the Duke’s order and Francisco revives her with a kiss (II.1.377-380), the Emperor’s hate turns into brotherly love when he hears Sforza’s suppliant yet dignified speech (III.1.212-214), and Marcelia is stabbed by an incensed Duke, dying in his arms as they both realize Francisco has manipulated them all along. Instrumental to Mariam’s demise in Cary’s play is her sister-in-law Salome’s hatred. Her counterpart in Massinger’s play, Mariana, the Duke’s sister, expresses her resentment at her sister-in-law with the confidence Salome displays in Cary’s tragedy: Mariana’s first line, “I scorn to be a spot / In her proud train” (The Duke of Milan, I.2.1-2) echoes Salome’s opening lines in her first soliloquy in The Tragedy of Mariam:
Lives Salome to get so base a style
As ‘foot’ to the proud Mariam? (The Tragedy of Mariam, I.4.1-2)
- 28 “But Mariamme upbraided and publikely reproched both the kings mother and sister, telling them that (...)
17The class hatred between the Queen and Salome in Josephus’s history28 becomes in The Tragedy of Mariam a racial opposition between the queen’s Hasmonean line and Salome’s Edomite origins: “You are to her a sunburnt blackamoor. / Your paintings cannot equal Mariam’s praise” (IV.7.106-107). Though nothing in Massinger’s play, either in the plot or in the list of characters, indicates racial diversity among the Milanese court, and the proximity between the two women’s names, Marcelia and Mariana, seems to stress their affinal kinship, Mariana yet expresses her scorn towards the Duchess in racial terms reminiscent of Cary’s play: “I had rather be a slave unto a Moor,/ Than know thee for my equal” (The Duke of Milan, II.1.167-168). Where Cary sets up a heated exchange between Salome and Mariam in which scorn leads to abuse and then accusations, Massinger complements the altercation between the two women with music requested by Mariana “loud enough but to torment her, / And we will have rare sport” (II.1.119-121) and reciprocal insults at their respective size:
Marcelia. For you, puppet −
Mariana. What of me, pine-tree? (The Duke of Milan, II.1.157-158)
- 29 Massinger’s names for the Duchess and her rival, Marcelia and Mariana, seem to acknowledge the ghos (...)
18The two women eventually come to blows and have to be separated (II.1.183-186).29
19Massinger also tweaks his historical source to quicken the pace of his plot. In Josephus’s history, Herod’s tragedy follows a repetitive structure: he is summoned twice to meet the Roman conquerors (Antony and then Caesar), twice does he order a counsellor to kill Mariam in the event of his death (Josephus and then Sohemus), and both reveal their grim assignment to Mariam and die for it on Herod’s return. Both Cary and Massinger anticipate the potential impediment such a repetition can be. Cary underlines the repetition of the plot in the argument of her play, but focuses only with the second iteration. As for Massinger, he conflates the two lines of action into one: the Duke is summoned to Pavia to meet the emperor Charles, whom he calls Caesar, only once, and his counsellor Francisco, combines the two historical characters, as he is both Mariana’s husband (like Josephus, Salome’s first husband) and a devoted counsellor (at least initially), like Sohemus.
20The chorus in Cary’s play, a constant presence who reflects on Mariam’s virtue and responsibility at the end of each act, is replaced in Massinger’s play by a group of counsellors, Tiberio and Stephano, who serve in the same capacity. They warn from the onset that the Duchess is not flawless (I.1.110-113) and comment on the action in a didactic way, as when the Duke returns and is greeted by a disgruntled Marcelia:
Tiberio. All happiness to the duchess, that may flow
From the duke’s new and wished returne!
Marcelia. He’s welcome.
Stephano. How coldly she receives it.
Tiberio. Observe their encounter. (The Duke of Milan, III.3.86-88)
21Like Cary’s Chorus, they adopt a moralist and conservative stance, excusing the Duke’s “furie” and “hastie language” (IV.2.2-9) and lamenting Marcelia’s scorn for her husband and head of state “As she were a victorious enemie” (IV.3.75).
- 30 For instance, “my body’s parting with my soul” in Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI (II.6.4); see also Henry (...)
- 31 There are six occurrences of the word “divorce” in The Tragedy of Mariam: “Mariam has usually been (...)
22Massinger, imprinting the Jewish history of Herod and Mariam with heightened emotions and brisk action, transforms it into a revenge tragedy, in the wake of other Jacobean plays loosely based on Italian history, like John Webster’s The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (performed in 1613 and printed in 1623). The playwright was associated with the King’s Men throughout his career, yet Cary’s neo-Senecan closet drama may have partly made a mark on The Duke of Milan. Two lexical echoes suggest as much. Though Massinger’s Duke stabs his wife Marcelia in a fit of jealousy, as opposed to the capital sentence pronounced by Herod on the Queen, he earlier imagines her death as a divorce between her body and her soul: “had sickenesse, / Or any other accident, divorc’d / Her purer soule from her unspotted body” (I.3.358-360). The image of death as the parting of body and soul is fairly common30 but Sforza’s use of the word “divorce”, a key issue in Cary’s play,31 interconnects the two plays beyond their immediately apparent narrative correspondence. Later, when the Duke returns and is reunited with his wife, his disappointment at her tepid welcome brings up an image of the temple (“nor durst I stay / In any Temple, or to any saint / To pay my vowes and thankes for my returne, / Till I had seene thee”, III.3.97-100), which recalls Herod’s words in Cary’s play when he attempts in the same circumstances to rekindle the love of his too distant wife (“And I for thee will make the temple bare”, IV.3.22) – a detail not found in Lodge’s Antiquities of the Jews. Though semantic or verbal parallels should be used with caution in the culture of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic writing, the examples above suggest Massinger’s awareness of Cary’s play at the very least, or even more direct influence bypassing Josephus’s history.
- 32 The Sidnean closet drama owed much to the French playwright Robert Garnier: see Marie-Alice Belle a (...)
23Beyond the occasional turn of phrase or image, Massinger possibly found elements of dramaturgy in Cary’s play. Though indebted in her play to the neo-Senecan model with long deliberative monologues and limited stage action that was favored among the Sidney circle,32 Cary uses stagecraft, such as embedded stage directions, dynamic exits and entrances, to intensify the tension between her characters – which could suggest that she thought of her play in terms of performance in a private setting, and not only as a recitation or reading. Cary’s attention to costumes is another case in point. Alexandra, Mariam’s mother, scolds her daughter for her tears and “mourning habit” (I.2.78) when she finds her irresolute and conflicted upon learning of the king’s death. Mariam keeps her outfit when she greets Herod on his return but her “mourning habit”, the dress of a supposed widow, has now become a “dusky habit” which expresses Mariam’s sombre mood:
Herod. What ails my dear?
Thou dost the difference certainly forget
’Twixt dusky habits and a time so clear.
Mariam. My lord, I suit my garment to my mind,
And there no cheerful colours can I find. (The Tragedy of Mariam, IV.3.2-6)
- 33 “his displeasure increased, and was inflamed more and more against her, for that neither she could (...)
- 34 Cary’s attention to costume is perceptible also when a distracted Herod, forgetting his wife is dea (...)
24Her indecision has now given way to hate. Mariam’s dress shows Cary’s theatrical flair: the playwright stays close to Lodge’s translation which uses the term “colour” metaphorically to note Mariam’s changed feelings33 but she gives her costume, her mourning dress, a rich significance as it reflects the shifting psychology of her heroine – and also sadly foreshadows her tragic fate.34 Massinger uses a black dress for his Duchess in a very similar way. Marcelia initially wears black to mourn her husband’s absence, cutting a striking figure when she appears at the balcony “widow-like” (II.1.38), “in blacke” (II.1.121 SD), to confront Sforza’s sister and mother, Mariana and Isabella: “[The Duchess] frowns as if / Her looks could fright us” (II.1.121-122). When the Duke returns, she offers him a cold welcome and likely wears the same outfit, though, as she explains, her mourning habit now conveys a different meaning:
And some thing I may doe to try his temper,
At least, to make him know a constant wife
Is not so slav’d to her husband’s doting humors,
But that she may deserve to live a widow,
Her fate appointing it. (The Duke of Milan, III.3.78-82)
- 35 “‘Seems’, madam? Nay it is. I know not ‘seems’. / ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, cold mother, / Nor (...)
- 36 R. V. Holdsworth argues that Middleton could also have had access to Cary’s play: in The Second Mai (...)
25Marcelia’s black dress, a symbol of her chastity during the duke’s absence (she has kept to her private chamber and imposed silence on her servants and sadness on her court, II.1.100-103), is now that he has returned a symbol of her independence. Her dress implies that a wife is not to be chained to her husband’s fate: Marcelia in effect claims the right for a loving wife to become a widow. Mourning dress on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage is a rich element of dramaturgy: Hamlet wears his “inky cloak” in defiance of the new reign and his habit also introduces from the onset the theme of the inaccessible inwardness of the self.35 Cary and Massinger place themselves within this tradition, but the close correspondence in their use of their heroine’s mourning habit, from a social convention denoting grief and respect for the deceased, to outward defiance towards an abusive husband, suggests the latter playwright was inspired, beyond his historical source and the repertoire of the commercial theatres, by Cary’s play.36
Mariam’s “heavenly show” (The Tragedy of Mariam, IV.4.46)
- 37 Michelle M. Dowd, “Dramaturgy and the Politics of Space in The Tragedy of Mariam”, Renaissance Dram (...)
- 38 Fiona Martin,“‘O die a rare example’: Beheading the Body on the Jacobean Stage”, Early Modern Liter (...)
26In The Tragedy of Mariam and Herod and Antipater, the queen dies martyr-like, unmoved: “And thus to heaven her heavenly soul is fled” (The Tragedy of Mariam, V.1.86); “So Saint-like hence she went” (Herod and Antipater, II.1.506). Her beheading takes place offstage in both plays, though for very different reasons. Cary’s removal of Mariam’s death offstage between acts IV and V is less a reluctance to portray violence directly – she stages a fight between Salome’s husband and her lover, blood is shed (II.4.67) – than a way of showing the power of female resistance: this allows to stage “Herod’s lack of power in powerfully spatial terms”, as the king and the Nuntio are left to compete for control over Mariam’s story in act V.37 In Herod and Antipater the decision to remove Mariam’s death offstage is motivated by the necessity to preserve the climax of Antipater’s own onstage decapitation in the last moments of the play: the replication of an onstage beheading for both the virtuous Mariam and the evil Antipater would obscure the moral balance of the play, not to mention the practical difficulty of one, let alone two, onstage decapitations, a trick “too labour-intensive and too costly in terms of the extra materials required for successful staging”.38 Antipater’s execution remains a moment of comedy until the end (the proud villain refuses to kneel, preventing the executioner from doing his office) and offers a satisfying sense of excitement when he falls unrepentant: “For but we [himself and Salome], / Never two reacht the height of villainy” (V.2.311-312).
27Markham and Sampson thus report rather than show Mariam’s death, like Cary before them; but the same dramatic convention serves very different purposes. In The Tragedy of Mariam, the queen maintains the “public voice” with which she had opened the play (I.1.1) until the end. She cuts a silent figure when confronted to Herod’s accusations in act IV, dignifying him only with a few terse answers. Yet before she is taken to her death, she pronounces a soliloquy in which she reasserts her innocence and freedom, “My soul is free from adversaries’ power” (IV.8.46), and later on the scaffold, she lets us hear her public voice one last time. She picks the Nuntio in the crowd and makes him the recipient of her last message to Herod, and her speech, heard through the Nuntio’s voice, is also heard by the crowd who gather to see her execution. It is furthermore a prophecy (predicting Herod will repent after three days), thus ensuring that the performativity of her voice lives on beyond her death. In stark contrast, Markham and Sampson’s Mariam is truly silenced. When Herod asks her how she responds to accusation of treason, she answers “Silently”. She also fails to see that Alexandra’s railing against her is the opportunistic strategy of a mother who wants to save herself rather than comfort her daughter at death’s door, exclaiming “Then be dumbe, / Be dumbe for ever Marriam” (II.1.383-384) and acknowledging her defeat in her last words: “I am conquered” (II.1.394). Down to her very last moments on the scaffold, she remains this silenced figure. Unlike the Nuntio who in the last act of The Tragedy of Mariam switches from reported to free direct speech, delivering Mariam’s words just as a boy actor would have played her on a commercial stage, Pheoras, who reports her death, preempts her last speech and describes a pantomime:
she assends
Up to the fatall Scaffold; and but once
Lookt round about the people: then lifts up
Her snow-white hands to Heauen;
Talkes to it as if she had beene in it: then fals downe
Upon her humble knees; […]
And round about her, Maiestie did hang,
And cloath her as a garment: to be briefe,
Shee tooke the stroke, not as a punishment;
But a reward; so Saint-like hence she went. (Herod and Antipater, II.1. 454-506)
- 39 Jeremy Lopez, “Dumb show”, in Henry S. Turner (ed.), Early Modern Theatricality, Oxford, Oxford Uni (...)
28Mariam’s last words are a whisper spoken to heaven rather than to the crowd. Pheroas, using the present tense in his description of her choreographed silent action, is akin to the chorus or presenter who would often introduce a dumb show.39 Mariam’s death on the commercial stage of the Red Bull theatre, a silent (unseen) play within a play, is thus nostalgic both in its appeal to a piety based on images that have been safely emptied of their spiritual content, and in its reference to a highly stylized and edifying theatrical form. In The Tragedy of Mariam, the Nuntio is certainly an old-fashioned device typical of Senecan drama but it lacks the static quality that Pheroas exemplifies in a scene redolent of the old pantomime: on the contrary, like a male actor on the commercial stage, the Nuntio lends his voice to Mariam rather than substituting his to hers as Pheroas does and lets us hear the complexity of a woman’s public voice.
- 40 Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt was banned by the Bishop of London; about Massinger’s interest in cont (...)
- 41 The corpse’s poisoned kiss appears in two earlier plays, The Revenger's Tragedy (1606) and The Seco (...)
29Massinger inserted an onstage beheading in two earlier plays, Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt (a collaboration with Fletcher performed in 1619) and The Virgin Martyr (a collaboration with Dekker, performed in 1620 and published in 1622), but decided to steer clear of it in his next play, The Duke of Milan – the beheading of a female protagonist in a play set in the sixteenth century was indeed a politically charged ending.40 His Duchess is stabbed by her jealous husband in act IV. Marcelia, who had expressed anger and resentment towards her cruel husband, eventually turns into a compliant figure in death. She forgives him in her last breath (IV.3.311-312) and her cold welcome which earlier had so antagonised the Duke is forgotten. She is now a cold and dead body that he can freely hold in his arms: “in this temper, she is all perfection” (V.2.66), where “temper” refers both to the coldness of her body (OED, II.7) and her new docile temperament. To complete this conquest of her being, her body is desacralized. Massinger breaks with the dichotomy Cary developed in her play between Salome’s black nature and Mariam’s fair and virtuous character. Mariana, who is to the Duchess what Salome was to Mariam in Cary’s play (a mean, jealous and conniving sister-in-law), fades away in the last act, but the Duchess, now perfect in death, literally becomes the “painted sepulchre” that Constabarus accused his wife Salome of being in The Tragedy of Mariam (IV.2.41). Act V in The Duke of Milan proposes an alternative ending to Cary’s play: in a final twist possibly inspired by Herod’s desperate question after Mariam’s death, “Is there no trick to make her breathe again?” (V.1.89), Francisco disguised as a Jewish doctor pretends he can revive the Duchess to assuage the Duke’s mad despair. He paints her cheeks, lips and hands, perfumes her breath to cover the rotten smell of her mouth and delivers her body to the greedy kisses of the Duke: “I could ever feed / upon these roses” (V.2.210-211).41 But Francisco’s cosmetics are poisoned and the Duke is consumed internally until he expires. Though Marcelia’s innocence and virtue have been restored, her body is “tirannize[d]” in an inhuman way (V.2.198): she is killed twice (stabbed and then poisoned) and then erased from memory. In his last words, the Duke asserts his proprietary rights over his wife for eternity and sets out to compose his own epitaph, as Herod had done in Cary’s tragedy:
Herod. A stone upon the vault someone shall lay,
Which monument shall an inscription have,
And these shall be the words it shall contain:
Here Herod lies, that hath his Mariam slain. (The Tragedy of Mariam, V.1.255-258)
Sforza. Bury me with Marcelia,
And let our epitaph be − [Dies.] (The Duke of Milan, V.2.263-264)
30With this abrupt ending, Massinger the moralist denies his tyrannical Duke a right to posterity; but the Duke also absorbs with him the proud independent and virtuous Marcelia, who is likewise deprived of an epitaph.
- 42 Lisa Hopkins, The Female Hero in English Renaissance Tragedy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002 (...)
- 43 Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, “Not kissing the (He)rod: Marian moments in The Tragedy of Mariam”, in Ma (...)
31The Tragedy of Mariam, Herod and Antipater, and The Duke of Milan attest to the popularity of the Mariam and Herod plot, which provides a storyline interweaving the themes of marriage and divorce, domestic violence, political power and resistance to patriarchy which are so prominent in the drama of the period, from Shakespeare’s Othello, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi to Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Recurring images, semantic echoes or intertextual references are hardly surprising in the recycling tradition of Jacobean writing and they confirm the permeability of the different types of drama. However, their number, consistency and variety, especially in their use of elements of theatricality, emboldens us to render unto Cary what she first developed in her original drama and to stress the centrality of her work. Mariam’s incarnations on the commercial stage show the resonance of Cary’s closet tragedy in the decade following its publication. What Markham and Sampson’s and Massinger’s plays also show is that the appeal for strong female protagonists, tragic heroines who are increasingly from 1610 “active agents in their own fate”,42 did not go unchallenged. Markham and Sampson and Massinger made some elements of Cary’s dramaturgy their own but they considerably limited Mariam’s final elevation. The reduction of Mariam’s death to a popular form, the old pantomime in Herod and Antipater, and a carnivalesque ritual of sexual exhibition and corporal punishment, akin to the cucking-stool or the scold’s bridle, in The Duke of Milan, confirms in hindsight the political ambition of Cary’s drama and the theatricality of her play. In The Tragedy of Mariam, Mariam’s death can be read either as a Marian moment because of the celestial imagery linking her to the Virgin Mary,43 or as a stoic apotheosis of abnegation and liberation. With Mariam suiting the word to the action and the action to the word, Cary’s readers may even have entertained both interpretations simultaneously.
Notes
1 The Tragedy of Mariam is mentioned in the Rogers and Ley catalogue of 1656 (appended to Thomas Goffe's play The careles shepherdess), in the Archer’s catalogue the same year (appended to Middleton, Rowley and Massinger’s The Old Law), in Francis Kirkman's True, perfect, and exact Catalogue of 1661 and 1671, and in Edward Phillips’s Theatrum Poetarum, or a Compleat Collection of the Poets in 1675. See https://lostplays.folger.edu/Documents.
2 Stephanie Hodgson-Wright lists three other dedications: William Basse’s, in his never published Polyhymnia (c. 1622), in which he laments Cary’s relocation to Ireland; Richard Belling’s in The Sixthe Booke to the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1624), published in Dublin; and William Sheare’s, printer of The Workes of Mr John Marston (1633). S. Hodgson-Wright, A Biographical and Critical Study of the Life and Works of Elizabeth Carey, 1st Viscountess Falkland (1585-1639), Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds, 1994, Appendix, p. 254-260. For an estimation of Cary’s role in the literary circle of her time, see Katarzyna Kacka, “When she hath spacious ground to walk upon, Why on the ridge should she desire to go?”: The influence of the Herod-Mariamme myth on Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Tesi di dottorato, University of Padua, 2016, p. 46-47.
3 See Antonius (1592) by Mary Sidney Herbert; The Tragedy of Cleopatra (1594) by Samuel Daniel; Cornelia (1594) by Thomas Kyd; The Tragicomedy of the Virtuous Octavia (1598) by Samuel Brandon; and Julius Caesar, one of the four Monarchicke Tragedies (1607), by William Alexander. The other closet dramas of the period turned to ancient Greece (Philotas [1604] by Samuel Daniel; Croesus [1604] and The Alexandrean Tragedy [1607] by W. Alexander), Persia (Darius [1603] by W. Alexander) and the Ottoman Empire (Mustapha [1596] and Alaham [1601] by Fulke Greville).
4 Maurice Valency, The Tragedies of Herod and Mariamne, New York, Columbia University Press, 1940, p. 71. A. C. Dunstan and W. W. Greg note similarities in Hardy’s and Cary’s plots, like their use of Pheroras, Herod’s brother, who does not appear in Dolce’s tragedy (The Tragedy of Mariam, ed. A. C. Dunstan and W. W. Greg, printed for the Malone Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1914, “Introduction”, p. xiii). Hardy’s Mariamne was printed in 1625, so the possibility that Cary heard of the French play, let alone read it when she was writing her own play, remains unlikely. In his chronological list of the “Mariamne Plays”, M. Valency includes three other earlier examples (M. Valency, op. cit., p. 291) which in our opinion belong to the category of “Herod plays” rather than “Mariamne plays”: their focus is either almost exclusively on Herod – Hans Sachs’ Tragedia der Wütrich König Herodes (1552) and an English university play, Herodes Tragoedia by W. Goldingham (c. 1567) – or, in the case of Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola’s La Alejandra (c. 1585), on a love triangle set in Egypt which is only loosely based on the Herod and Mariam plot, since the eponymous character is an adulterous wife.
5 Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (eds), The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry with The Lady Falkland: Her Life By One of Her Daughters, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994, p. 188; Elaine Beilin, “Elizabeth Cary and The Tragedie of Mariam”, Papers on Language and Literature, 16.1, 1980, p. 45-65, here p. 61-62. Elizabeth Tanfield married Sir Henry Cary in 1602 at age 17.
6 K. Kacka, op. cit., p. 123.
7 All references to Cary’s play are from The Tragedy of Mariam, ed. Ramona Wray, Arden Early Modern Drama, London, Bloomsbury, 2012.
8 Markham published a prose sequel to Philip Sidney’s Arcadia in 1613, and in the epistle to his second volume, The Second and Last Part of The First Booke of the English Arcadia, he asks for the patronage of master Francis Darlow advertising his play Herodias: “I hope [you] have not noted myne Herodias, to bee either detraction or slander” (sig. A3v).
9 All references to The Duke of Milan are from The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, ed. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, vol. 1, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1976 (Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, 2012).
10 Massinger’s play is often compared unfavourably to Shakespeare’s Othello: “Despite the similarities in basic plot, The Duke of Milan is a tragedy written by a moral problematist, while Othello is a tragedy written by a poet”, M. J. Thorssen, “Massinger’s Use of Othello in The Duke of Milan”, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 19.2, 1979, p. 313-326, here p. 326. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/450211.
11 Janet Clare, Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 24. Imitation is also a corollary of collaborative authorship: see Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama, Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997; Anne Hirschfeld, Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater, Amherst and Boston, University of Massachusetts Press, 2004; Bart van Es, Shakespeare in Company, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013; Gary Taylor, “Why Did Shakespeare Collaborate?”, Shakespeare Survey, 67, 2014, p. 1-17.
12 Sandra K. Fischer, “Elizabeth Cary and Tyranny, Domestic and Religious”, in Margaret Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, Kent, Ohio, Kent State University Press, 1985, p. 225-237, here p. 228.
13 All references to Herod and Antipater are from G. Markham and W. Sampson, A Critical Edition of The True Tragedy of Herod and Antipater, ed. G. N. Ross, New York and London, Garland Publishing, 1979. Antipater’s self-introduction has distinctive Shakespearean echoes, blending Richard of Gloucester’s first-person determination (Richard III, I.1.30) with Edmund’s plan of action when he opposes “birth” and “wit” (King Lear, I.2.147-148). All references to Shakespeare’s plays are from The New Oxford Shakespeare, ed. G. Taylor, J. Jowett, T. Bourus and G. Egan, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016 (Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, 2016).
14 The full title is The Tragedy of Herod and Antipater with the death of faire Mariam, According to Josephus, the learned and famous Jewe. G. N. Ross notes that the main source was actually not Josephus but Peter Morwen’s History of the Latter Times of the Jewes Commune Weale (1558), a translation from a sixteenth-century Latin version of the Josippon, a chronicle of Jewish history composed in the tenth century in Southern Italy (A Critical Edition of The True Tragedy of Herod and Antipater, ed. cit., p. vii-xii). Peter Auger suggests that the reference to Josephus, on the titlepage and in the text, was meant to elevate the play’s status “as a Jacobean drama for its readers once the relevance to current affairs [like Francis Howard’s role in T. Overbury’s murder in 1613] had faded”, P. Auger, “Playing Josephus on the English Stage”, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 23.3, 2016, p. 326-332, here p. 330.
15 J. B. Fletcher, “Herod in the Drama”, Studies in Philology, 19.3, July 1922, p. 292-307, here p. 294.
16 The latter detail is present in Josephus’s history: Flavius Josephus, The Famous and Memorable Works of Josephus, a Man of Much Honour and Learning among the Jews. Faithfully Translated Out of the Latine and French by Tho. Lodge [1602], London, 1670, book XVII, ch. IX, p. 450.
17 See Shakespeare’s two tetralogies or the trilogy of “directional plays” written by Dekker and Webster (Westward Ho and Northward Ho) and Chapman, Jonson and Marston (Eastward Ho).
18 F. Josephus, tr. Th. Lodge, op. cit., book XV, ch. XI, p. 398. Both Hardy and Tristan L’Hermite’s plays keep the trial as a key moment in the confrontation between Mariamne / Mariane and her tyrannical husband.
19 Boyd M. Berry, “Feminine Construction of Patriarchy; Or What’s Comic in The Tragedy of Mariam”, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 7, 1995, p. 257-274, here p. 265.
20 Mariam in her opening speech expresses the “wish the news may firmly hold” (I.1.52); the first son of Babas is more cautious, fearing “this tale of Herod’s death / At last will prove a very tale indeed” (II.2.61-62).
21 Cary’s connections to the Sidney circle are based on her indebtedness to Sidnean closet drama and on M. Drayton and J. Davies of Hereford’s dedications which suggest a network of common acquaintances, “however loosely conceived”: see Marta Straznicky, “‘Profane Stoical Paradoxes’: The Tragedie of Mariam and Sidneian Closet Drama”, English Literary Renaissance, 24.1, 1994, p. 104-134, here p. 104-108.
22 Emily Smith convincingly argues that epilogues not only formed a genre in themselves but that they also positioned themselves in relation to theatrical genre: “‘His Comedie unto his Theatre’: Genre in the Early Modern Dramatic Epilogue”, Sillages critiques, 34, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.14398.
23 The Double Marriage, jointly written by John Fletcher and Massinger (c. 1621) is also set in Italy; a location Massinger chooses again in three later plays, The Duke of Florence (licensed in 1627), The Guardian (licensed in 1633) and The Bashful Lover (licensed in 1636).
24 The Virgin Martyr, in The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, ed. cit., vol. 1.
25 The Duke of Milan, ed. cit., “Introduction”, p. 202-203.
26 See Thorssen, art. cit.
27 See Laura Tosi, “After Elizabeth: Representations of Female Rule in Massinger’s Tragicomedies”, Renaissance Studies, 25.3, 2011, p. 433-446, here p. 438-437; Tina Krontiris, “Reading with the Author’s Sex: A Comparison of Two Seventeenth-Century Texts”, Gramma, 1, 1993, p. 123-136. The editors of The Duke of Milan acknowledge that Massinger’s sensational ending (where the Duke dies of a poisoned kiss) is derived from the Second Maiden’s Tragedy, a play licenced in 1611, based on verbal parallels and correspondence of action but fail to mention Cary’s play (The Duke of Milan, ed. cit., “Introduction”, p. 202).
28 “But Mariamme upbraided and publikely reproched both the kings mother and sister, telling them that they were but abiectly and basely borne. Whereupon there grew a great enmitie and vnrecouerable hatred betweene the Ladies”, F. Josephus, tr. Th. Lodge, op. cit., p. 398.
29 Massinger’s names for the Duchess and her rival, Marcelia and Mariana, seem to acknowledge the ghostly presence of Cary’s Mariam in the play: in particular, keeping a variant of Mariam for the Duke’s sister Mariana could be seen as a nudge to the educated audience who would have recognized the Herod and Mariam story – or even a playful allusion to Cary’s play in which Herod at one point mistakenly calls Salome Mariam (IV.2.42).
30 For instance, “my body’s parting with my soul” in Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI (II.6.4); see also Henry VIII, II.3; King John, V.4; Antony and Cleopatra, IV.13.
31 There are six occurrences of the word “divorce” in The Tragedy of Mariam: “Mariam has usually been read as dealing with the obligations and duties of marriage, but the play repeatedly points to the grounds of marital dissolution”, Danielle Clarke, “‘This Domestic Kingdome or Monarchy’: Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam and the Resistance to Patriarchal Government”, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 10, 1998, p. 179-200, here p. 182. See also Cristina León Alfar, “Elizabeth Cary’s Female Trinity: Breaking Custom with Mosaic Law in The Tragedy of Mariam”, Early Modern Women, 3, 2008, p. 61-103.
32 The Sidnean closet drama owed much to the French playwright Robert Garnier: see Marie-Alice Belle and Line Cottegnies (eds), Robert Garnier in Elizabethan England. Mary Sidney Herbert’s ‘Antonius’; Thomas Kyd’s ‘Cornelia’, MHRA Tudor & Stuart Translations, vol. 16, Cambridge, Modern Humanities Research Association, 2017.
33 “his displeasure increased, and was inflamed more and more against her, for that neither she could colour her cares and discontents, nor he containe himselfe from exchanging his loue into hatred” (our emphasis), F. Josephus, tr. Th. Lodge, op. cit., book XV, ch. XI, p. 397.
34 Cary’s attention to costume is perceptible also when a distracted Herod, forgetting his wife is dead, calls her to appear before him: “Bid her now / Put on fair habit, stately ornament” (V.1.141-142).
35 “‘Seems’, madam? Nay it is. I know not ‘seems’. / ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, cold mother, / Nor customary suits of solemn black, / […] That can denote me truly” (Hamlet, I.2.76-83). See also Bridget Escolme, Shakespeare and Costume in Practice, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, “Hamlet, Mourning and the Disappearing Costume: Inky Cloaks and Solemn Black”, p. 25-78.
36 R. V. Holdsworth argues that Middleton could also have had access to Cary’s play: in The Second Maiden's Tragedy (performed by the King’s Men in 1611), the lady wears “a funeral garment” before the tyrant to signify her refusal to marry him, and explains that any other outfit would be to “wear strange colours” (I.1.125). R. V. Holdsworth, “Middleton and The Tragedy of Mariam”, Notes and Queries, 33.3, 1986, p. 379-380.
37 Michelle M. Dowd, “Dramaturgy and the Politics of Space in The Tragedy of Mariam”, Renaissance Drama, 44.1, 2016, p. 101-122, here p. 119. See also Alison Findlay’s reading of Mariam as a “feminized Christ, martyr to a short-sighted and insecure patriarchal tyranny” – A. Findlay, Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 39.
38 Fiona Martin,“‘O die a rare example’: Beheading the Body on the Jacobean Stage”, Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 19, 2009, art. 8, par. 1-24, here par. 5. URL: https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/si-19/martodie.html. Margaret Owens finds only four plays associated with the commercial theatre that explicitly mention an onstage beheading: Marston’s The Insatiate Countess (first published in 1613), Fletcher and Massinger’s Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt (1619), Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr (1620), and Markham and Sampson’s Herod and Antipater – M. Owens, Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2005, p. 138, quoted by F. Martin, art. cit., p. 1.
39 Jeremy Lopez, “Dumb show”, in Henry S. Turner (ed.), Early Modern Theatricality, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 291-305, here p. 294 (online edition, Oxford Academic, 2017).
40 Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt was banned by the Bishop of London; about Massinger’s interest in contemporary history and political allusions in his plays, see Gilles Bertheau, “Philip Massinger et le théâtre historique: trouver la bonne distance”, Sillages critiques, 31, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.11900.
41 The corpse’s poisoned kiss appears in two earlier plays, The Revenger's Tragedy (1606) and The Second Maiden's Tragedy (1611), both probably the work of Thomas Middleton. See Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theatre in Early Modern England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 21, 82, 101-102.
42 Lisa Hopkins, The Female Hero in English Renaissance Tragedy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p. 2.
43 Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, “Not kissing the (He)rod: Marian moments in The Tragedy of Mariam”, in Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama, ed. Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, p. 161-173, here p. 164-167: the Marian imagery leads Hodgson-Wright to see the play as a commentary upon the threat of Protestant tyranny after Elizabeth’s execution of Mary Queen of Scots.
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Sophie Lemercier-Goddard, « “More plotting yet?”: Rewriting Mariam and Herod and Revising Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam for the Early Modern English Stage », Études Épistémè [En ligne], 45 | 2024, mis en ligne le 06 novembre 2024, consulté le 16 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/18300 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12v7h
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