THE TRAGEDY OF MARIAM

Herod of the Corpus Christi

Herod's lament in the final act of Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariamechoes the language of the Herod found in the medieval Corpus Christi play The Massacre of Innocents (Chester Mystery Cycle). As did the medievalists, Cary combines biblical and historical Herods into a single character. While Cary bases her plot on the historical but non-biblical figure Herod the Great (29 B.C.), allusions to biblical Herods permeate characterization in The Tragedy of Mariam. Like Herod the Great, biblical Herods share thecommon characteristic of mercilessly killing innocents. Cary's character of Herod most resembles the biblical Herod known as "The Slaughterer of Innocents" readily depicted in Corpus Christi plays. This character is a favorite among medieval audiences. Weller and Ferguson write, "Herod as 'Slaughterer of Innocents' became a major character in...religious drama, and this identification of Herod may contribute, associatively, to the definition of the character who bears his name in Cary's Mariam, especially in the play's final act in which the dying Mariam aquires symbolic features of Christ and his precursors, the Slaughtered Innocents and the beheaded John the Baptist....Among the reasons to see connections between the Corpus Christi pageants representing Herod ...is the play's suggestion that when she meets her death, she is a figurative Innocent..... Herod's raving expressions of regret for having ordered Mariam's death recall the ironic turn of plot in the Chester play of the Innocents in which Herod desperately laments the death of a child he has learned, too late, was his own son. Herod berates the child's foster mother as Cary's Herod berates Salome, for failing to prevent him from doing what he had once wanted to do" (Weller 21-23). Herod's lines to the Second Woman of the Chester Mystery cycle, parallel Herod's above quote to Salome:

Fie, whore, fie! God give thee pine!
Why didst thou not say the child was mine?
But it is vengeance, as I drink wine,
and that is now well seen.
(Play 10: The Massacre of the Innocents: 393-96)

Critics and theorists give several reasons as to why the story of Herod remains popular in the sixteenth century, Williard Farnham in his book Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy writes," Where humanistic secular didacticism copies the dramatic methods of religious didacticism....the result is an amusing and instructive record of new interests in an age of rapid intellectual growth..."(213). The literary elite of the sixteenth century areno longer interested in telling the story of Everyman's journey toward salvation, but lookto more humanistic, domestic and political themes on which to write. In relation to tragedy, Farnham suggests that themes extend to the catastrophes brought about the struggles between earthly, as opposed to heavenly, justices and injustices. Happiness and suffering are no longer limited to inner-spirituality, but extend to the community or state. A formal effect of this upon evolving medieval models is the changing abstraction of the central character from the abstraction of humanity to the abstraction or typical representation of class; a dwelling upon mundane suffering and a consciousness of a lawful order; and protagonists taken from true historical accounts (246-47). The Tragedy of Mariam fits into Farnham's theoretical model as Mariam's representation is not of a universal character of humanity, but a typical representation of a woman in the royal class; the tragedy dwells upon the "mundane suffering" of an unhappy wife at the oppression of a lawful order set by her husband ; and the protagonist is drawn from a factual account of history.

The Corpus Christi play about Herod similarly fits this model and may indicate why the character and story remain popular in Renaissance literature. Herod is not an abstraction of humanity, but a very specific abstraction of a political and social tyrant who brought upon the suffering of an entire race. In her book Tragedies of Tyrants, Rebecca Bushnell explains Herod's popularity as a medieval precedent for the historical tragedy, "As a figure who survived in the the theatrical imagination well past his heyday, Herod established a theatrical precedent for representing tyranny that corresponded with the statecraft and antityrranical tracts....The mysteries' Herod echoes contemporary images of rulers, as well as biblical tradition"(84). The divorce of Henry VIII and the subsequent Protestantizing of the crown fostered distrust of and tyrannical musings about the royal court. This was especially true for those, like Cary, with Catholic sympathies. The story of Herod in the Corpus Christi play provided a tradition and model for which dramatists could allegorize contemporary politcs. Bushell outlines the Herod formulaic of medieval drama: the tyrant almost always calls for a rabble's silence; this demand is followed by an act of absolute power and violence; Herod lapses into nonsense or babble when confronted with the silent martyr; in his passion, the villian's body deteriorates unto his death; Herod's rhetorical ravings reveal an uncontrollable passion; the ruler is revealed as a liar and deceiver (84-87). Similarities can certainly be seen in the plot of the Tradegy of Mariam.Herod, calling for the silence of his rebellious wife orders her death, which upon he breaks into a one-hundred- and-five line sililoquy of regret revealing a lack of control over his passions. After making nonsensical accusations of jealousy and demands upon the heavens to stop the light of the moon and sun from shining on the injustice of Mariam's death, Herod reveals his wronged passion and callls punishment upon himself saying:
 

But these are fictions, they are void of sense;
The Greeks but dream, and dreaming falsehoods tell:
They neither can offend nor give defence,
And not by them it was my Mariam fell.
If she had been like an Egyptian black,
And not so fair, she had been longer liv'd:
Her overflow of beauty turned back,
And drown'd the spring from whence it was deriv'd
Her Heav'nly beauty 'twas made me think
That it with chastity could never dwell:
But now I see that Heav'n in her did link
A spirit and a person to excel.
I'll muffle up myself in endless night,
And never let mine eyes behold the light.
Retire thyself, vile monster, worse than he
That stain'd the virgin earth with brother's blood.
Still in some vault or den enclosed be,
Were with thy tears thou mays't beget a flood,
Which flood in time may drown thee: happy day
When thou at once shalt die and find a grave;
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 [exit]
(V: 235-58)

He was right and sicker in silk array,
in gold and perry that was so gay.
They might well known by this day
he was a king's son.
What the Devil is this to say?
Why were thy wits so far away?
Could thou not speak? Could thou not pray,
and say it was my son?

Alas, my days been now done!
I wot I must die soon.
Bootless is me to make moan,
for damned I must be.
My legs rotten and my arms,
that now I see of fiends swarms --
I have done so many harms--
from Hell coming after me.

I have done so much woe
and never good sith I might go;
therefore I see now coming my foe
to fetch me to Hell.
I bequeath here in this place
my soul to be with Santanas.
I die now.  Alas, alas!
I may no longer dwell!

(Play 10: The Massacre of the Innocents:409-432)

Despite these similarities, Bushnell reveals differences between the medieval and Renaissance adaptations of the Herod narratives, the latter develops Herod in a plot of romantic love and lust which precipitates his passion and downfall, "The morality play interprets the commonplace of tyrannical desire by dramatizing the tyrant's desire for a particular woman, whether a personification of sensuality or lust, or (as in hybrid plays) a named female character. In staging and particularizing tyrannical desire and giving the tyrant a lover's voice, the morality plays thus foreground the notion of the tyrant's uxoriousness and demonstrate the contradictions implicit in it. The tyrant's relationship with women generally take two forms: 1)his lust for a chaste young woman; 2)or his marriage to a woman who overpowers him. Both forms suggest the tyrant's vulnerability to the power of woman, occaisioned by his violent desire for her" (90). The Herod of the medieval Corpus Christi play only partially fits this model; Herod's plan is overpowered by the actions of the Second Woman. However, the Herod of the "Slaughter of Innocents" has no lustful feelings toward the female character. While absent in the example from the medieval play,this element of lust is explicitly expressed in Cary's Herod tragedy. Herod both lusts after the chaste example of his wife and is, in the end, overpowered by her virtue. Doubting his wife's chastity after she has refused his advances, Herod is launched into a violent passion ending in her beheading.

Cary's departure from the medieval model directly correlates to the political atmosphere of the early Renaissance and the Protestant crown. Cary chooses to use the Jewish narrative within the Corpus Christi model as a metaphor for the social context of Henry's divorce and his resultant conversion to the Church of England. Critics have made direct connections between the characters of the Jewish narrative, the characters of the English monarchy and the characters of Cary's play, these include: Catherine of Aragon paralled to Doris, Herod's first wife; Anne Boleyn, Henry's subsequent wife, compared to both Salome and Miriam; and Henry,the king paralleled by Herod, the tyrant. Henry VII had manipulated the religious state of the day to accommodate his divorce from his first wife Catherine in order to marry his second, Anne Boleyn. Anne Boleyn was later beheaded, like Mariam, by the king because of accusations of infidelity and in order to make room on the throne for yet another of Henry's mistresses. The parallel between Doris and Catherine, the first wives of Herod and Doris respectively, is obvious. Other than the apparent connection of beaheading, the association between Anne, Salome and Miriam requires more explanation.

Nicolas Sanders, a sixteenth century Catholic writer argues that Anne and Henry were an incestuous couple. Some had suspected Anne to be Henry's daughter as a result of his affair with Anne's mother. In the biblical story, Herod has also been tempted in an incestuous relationship with Salome, his step-daughter. Sanders also notes that Anne was 'amusing in her ways' and a 'good dancer' much like Salome who was famous for her dance of veils (Weller 32). Cary may well exploit Sander's metaphor in her play. Weller and Ferguson further argue that,"Anne Boleyn, like Cary's characters Mariam and Salome, broke the cardinal rule for women to be chaste, silent, and obedient; and Anne, like Mariam a second wife abhorred and openly denounced by the cast-off first wife, was executed for adultery by her 'tyrranical husband'...Cary places an overt demand for women's rights to divorce in the mouth of the lustful and villainous Salome, while making a more oblique, and equally interesting, argument that, if the occasion demands principled disobedience, a 'virtuous woman like Miriam should be able to follow her conscience...rather than the orders of a king" (Weller 33-35). Cary's metaphor comparing the Doris, Herod, Salome and Miriam narrative to the political events concerning Catherine, Henry VIII and Anne make both feminist and political statements. Cary portrays King Henry VIII as a merciless tyrant as religiously incorrigible and indictable as Herod while making the statement that women are martyrs of domestic life in that they are punished when enacting their freedom and likewise prevented from divorce. Themes of lust and the story of Herod the Great may be adapted into the Renaissance Herod history play because of their political and social, versus religious, relevance. Cary's use of the evolving Herod formulaic proposed by Bushnell illustrates that Renaissance writers cling to the medieval model of tyrant in retelling stories of Herod, but adapt the model to fit contemporary politics. Renaissance writers also circumvent the outlawed Corpus Christi plays by choosing hisorical sources such as the Josephus Herod narrative. As was the trend in Renaissance and closet drama of the sixteenth century, Cary moves away from salvific themes and toward humanist, political themes of justice while retaining relgious dramatic models.

Other differences between the medieval Corpus Christi play and the Renaissance Herod play as represented by Cary's tragedy extend beyond political symbolism and into the very style of the genre itself. Looking back at the examples of the exit speeches of Herod and Herod the Great, some of these differences can be noticed. While the medieval cycle does make an attempt at poetics, its rhyme and metre never fully realize a sophisticated pattern. Cary's tragedy, however, is written almost as an experiment in poetics, making use of such tehniques as iambic pentmeter, rhyme patterns, and rhyming couplets to create or emphasize the meaning of her work through structuralism. The difference of sophistication in Cary's work is also noticeable in regard to language, while the medieval text makes use of the venacular language exploiting its vulgarity with lines such as, "And thou this! And thou this!/ Though thou both shit and piss," both royal and underling characters, including a chorus which is absent in the cycle, in the Cary's tragedy speak with a formal decorum. The structure of The Tragedy of Mariam also deviates from the structure of the cycle play. Cary's play is a five act tragedy while "The Massacre of the Innocence" is at best a one-act within a cycle of twenty-four plays to be performed over a number of days. Finally, while the villian of the earlier work suffers and dies physically and spiritually, the Herod of Cary's play suffers out his existence in guilt and shame but nonetheless survives. These formal differences have been debated among critics as to their influence of origin. While some critics see the sophistication of the Renaissance tragedy as the progression of the medieval cycle into a more intellectual age, others see it as evidence of Senecan influence and neo-classicim.

One critic which emphatically denies the impact of Senecan influence is Howard Baker who cites the pyramidal structure (the rise an fall of a person of stature), narrative action, dramatic exposition, dominant motive, a strong protagonist, self-examination, the wholly wicked character and the catastrophe, as well as other differences between the Chester and Cary texts, as medieval influences on the Renaissance history play. Baker in the book Induction to Tragedy argues, "...the five acts, chorus, messenger, and ghost, are, as I think it has been shown, either historically independent or dependent on enormously complicated issues. The most significant of the structural principles in the great English tragedy seem to be developed fairly directly from the medieval metrical tragedy" (154). While it is true that the development of the Renaissance history play grew out of "enormously complicated issues," it is hard to deny the presence of a classical structure and Greco-Roman allusions in Cary's tragedy. While it is important to give medieval drama such as the Corpus Christi play its due in the development of Renaissance literature, it is erroneous to deny Senecan influence as well.

Senecan influence dominate drama in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, George Buchanan in 1576 documented the changing influence of medieval to Roman models stating that James VI's Baptistes ' calls young persons away from the popular taste for theatrial allegories towards the imitation of aniquity as well as endeavouring vigorously to incite in them a zeal for true religion, which at that time was everywhere persecuted' (Bushnell, 103). Elizabeth Cary was one such "young person" who at age twelve translated Seneca's Epistles and who no doubt endeavoured in the language of her "true religion," Catholicism, through Latin. This, coupled with the fact that Cary writes The Tragedy of Mariam after joing the reading circle of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, who had published her own Senecan tragedy Antonius: a tragedie (1592) later printed as The Tragedie of Antoine (1597), no doubt alludes to a certain possibility of Senecan influence in Cary's work.  Indeed, just as influences of the saint and Corpus Christi plays may be traced in Cary's tragedy, Senecan imitation, particularly in terms of poetics, dramatic structure and the characterization of Herod are evident in The Tragedy of Mariam.