THE TRAGEDY OF MARIAM

A Critical Argument: TheClassical Religious Drama - Medieval, Senecan and Renaissance Elements in Cary's Tragedy

2.  In his article Seneca and the Elizabethans, G.K. Hunter states, "it is only in the compost-heap of history that new literatures breed" (171, 164).  Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariamprovides fertile soil to cultivate this idea planted by Hunter.  Cary wrote at a time when history, via the Protestant crown, uprooted traditional religious drama and buried its saint plays along with other Catholic relics.  In its decomposition, however, the corpus of medieval drama's religious roots, at the labor of dramatic poets such as Cary, became tilled with ancient forms such as Greek and Roman tragedy and created fertile soil for high Renaissance drama.  Cary's tragedy reflects the blending of medieval, neo-classic and emerging Renaissance styles.  While religious drama seemed to have waned following the censorship of the sixteenth century, Cary's work illustrates how medieval forms were transplanted into new breeds of literature which, while not explicitly religious, matured into sophisticated forms and retained religious symbolism and meaning. 

 3. Elizabeth Cary wrote The Tragedy of Mariam during a transitional period in dramatic literature.  A transition, in part, propelled by the changing religious climate. Censorship laws invoked by the Protestant religious state changed the identity of the dramatist.  Drama was no longer a didactic vehicle for the church, but an intellectual exercise for the elite. The scenario of a monk writing for the illiterate masses disappeared.  Instead, drama survived as part of an elite literary culture sheltered by the court.  Closet dramatists of the seventeenth century, banned from using various forms of Catholic medieval drama, turned to Roman and Greek models . Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a Roman tragedian writing c. 86 B.C., provided a popular prototype for dramatists experimenting in neo-classicism. In The Tragedy of Mariam,Cary followed the Senecan model differing radically from the vernacular prose of medieval drama and Corpus Christi plays from which she borrowed both theme and character.   While medieval themes, plots and characters were familiar to early seventeenth century drama, they became "classicized"  into Renaissance literature .

4. Elizabeth Cary's tragedy contains both medieval and classical influences as as it subverts characters, themes and elements of Catholic saint and Corpus Christi plays into neo-classic Senecan tragedy.  Overtly, or arguably covertly, religious, The Tragedy of Mariamveils  biblical characters such as Herod (the popular character of the banned Corpus Christi plays) and Salome (the daughter of the biblical Herod who ordered the death of  John the Baptist) under their historical, but non-Biblical counterparts, Herod I and his sister Salome.  If it were not for the precedence of other Renaissance Herod dramas, Cary's tragedy might appear as a brave renunciation of censorship as it subverts characters, themes and elements of Catholic saint and Corpus Christi plays into the more acceptable form of neo-classic Senecan tragedy. 

5.  Herod plays proliferated Renaissance dramatic literature: Der Wueterich Herodes by Hahn Sach (Germany, 1552); Marianna by Lodovico Dolce (Italy, 1565); The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry by Lady Elizabeth Cary (England 1613); The True Tragedy of Herod and Antipater: with the Death of Faire Marriam by Gervase Markham and William Sampson (London, 1622); Herod and Mariamna by Samuel Pordage (1673); Mariamne by Alexandre Hardy (France, 1610); Herodes  infantcida by Daniel Heinsus (Leiden, 1632); El mayor monstruo, los zelos by Pedro Caledron de la Barca; Mariane by Tristan L'Hermite (France, 1635); Herodes by Andreas Gryphius (Germany, 1663) and continued into the eighteenth and through the twentieth centuries. 

6.  The story of Herod, King of Judea and his wife Mariam serves as a prime example of the classicization of medieval drama.  Renaissance authors, rather than abandoning the medieval character, looked back into antiquity, to 39 B.C., for a more classical model. Gordon Braden in his book Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition writes, "On the medieval stage a raging Herod traditionally figures in the Slaughter of Innocents; the Renaissance stage, in what seems to be a largely independent development, gives much more space to the story from Josephus of Herod's frenzied and ultimately murderous suspicion of his wife Mariamne" (158).  This "largely independent development" may have been largely dependent on laws forbidding the representation of biblical characters upon the stage.   The Herod of Josephus provided a classical character who could take on the association and symbolism of the biblical Herod without threat of censorship. 

7. According to Barry Weller and Margaret Ferguson in their book The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry with The Lady Falkland: Her Life, Cary may have been familiar with Hahn Sach's Der Wueterich Herodes (1552) and Lodovico Dolce's Marianna (1565) (23). As an author of religious poetry and a translator of Latin texts, Cary may have been attracted by Sach's and Dolce's use of religious and classical materials, as well as the story's biographical connection to her life.  Queen Mariam's domestic situation, that of a woman imprisoned by her husband while off at war, surely connected with Cary who was separated from her spouse and prevented by his family from exercising her creative and intellectual freedoms.  Another probable attraction to the story of Herod and Mariam was its historical origin.   Weller and Ferguson cite  Josephus' Jewish War (A.D. 69-79) and Antiquities of the Jews (ca. A.D. 93) as primary sources for Cary's work.  The texts were especially popular in the early Renaissance being "among the first authors printed " in 1470.  Weller and Ferguson further suppose that Cary, not fluent in Greek, may have read an English translation of Josephus' texts by  Thomas Lodge, a Catholic convert, and have been particularly interested in "his accounts of Jewish oppression under the Romans offer[ing] rich allegorical resources for representing problems experienced by Catholics in Elizabethan England" (18).  For a religious author with Catholic sympathies, the story of Herod, King of Judea and his queen Mariam, was fertile ground for exploration of religious, neo-classic and political themes.  While it is dangerous to read Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam as a blatant exercise of defiance against censorship, it is equally erroneous to assume that she chose to join in the proliferation of the story of Mariam and Herod without any ulterior motive.  Elizabeth Cary's motivations to write The Tragedy of Mariam were most likely artistic, personal, political and religious. 

8. Indeed, Cary made the most out of the tragedy of religious censorship as she classicized the themes and characters of medieval saint and Corpus Christi plays into her Senecan drama.  Cary and her contemporaries illustrate that despite religious censorship, dramatists did not abandon Christian influence, but instead assimilated religious drama into more sophisticated and classical forms.  This cultivation of the medieval and classical hybrid conceived a new breed of Renaissance drama that would mature in the works of masters such as William Shakespeare. 

9. Opening the closet drama of The Tragedy of Mariam to Herod's final monologue , a reader may see how religious drama in the Renaissance came out of the closet  transformed from saint to Senecan as an early form of the Renaissance history play.