Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700

Volume 6: Elizabeth Cary

Karen Raber, Karen Raber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351964906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, the first original drama written in English by a woman, has been a touchstone for feminist scholarship in the period for several decades and is now one of the most anthologized works by a Renaissance woman writer. Her History of... Edward II has provided fertile ground for questions about authorship and historical form. The essays included in this volume highlight the many evolving debates about Cary's works, from their complicated generic characteristics, to the social and political contexts they reflect, to the ways in which Cary's writing enters into dialogue with texts by male writers of her time. In its critical introduction, the volume offers a thorough analysis of where Cary criticism has been and where it might venture in the future.

Part I

The Life and/in the Work

1

Elizabeth Cary and The Tragedie of Mariam

Elaine Beilin

TO READ A PLAY AS THE EXPRESSION of an author’s inmost feelings and ideas is always to risk misinterpretation. Even in the relative privacy of Elizabethan and Jacobsen closet drama, the presentation of personal feeling does not seem to be the playwright’s central concern: the genre is by nature impersonal.¹ Yet, in the case of the first English play known to be by a woman, playwright and play seem to have an unusually close relationship. The Tragedie of Mariam, The Faire Queene of Jewry by Lady Elizabeth Cary is the first English play, outside of translations, which we may definitely attribute to a woman; fortunately, we also possess an intimate biography of the playwright by her daughter. While the play is neither simple confession nor mere autobiography, when read in the light of Lady Cary’s life, Mariam appears to be an extraordinary attempt at self-expression.

In this essay, I shall consider some previously unremarked aspects of The Tragedie of Mariam, and speculate that its content and structure are in part attributable to the playwright’s life as a woman, and more particularly as a wife, in the early seventeenth century. Although the source of the play and comparisons to contemporary works also shed light on the origins of Mariam, I will suggest that we may better understand the spirit of the play as one directed by Lady Cary’s own experiences. Mariam indeed seems to be atypical of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama because of the playwright’s personal involvement in the outcome of the play.

Mariam is unique in at least two other respects: it is the first English play about the private lives of King Herod the Great and Queen Mariam and it is the only early play on the subject in which the drama centres on Mariam’s tragedy.² Lady Cary drew her material from Lodge’s 1602 translation of Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities, which provides a detailed account of Herod’s career; since Cary’s protagonist is Mariam, not Herod, she was clearly most interested in developing a female character. But Mariam is not merely a study in historical character, for the real drama of the play resides in an issue relevant to Lady Cary’s own time and indeed to her own life. With countless other writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Cary treats the question of obedience to authority, and in particular, the obedience of a wife to the authority of her husband. Through the characters and choruses, she presents both the orthodox view of wifely obedience and a challenge to that tradition. In the end, this conflict gives way to a Christian allegory, by which the drama is resolved.

To understand the importance of Lady Cary’s unwillingness merely to endorse accepted attitudes, we should first briefly recall how much the weight of social theory, law, religion, and custom upheld a husband’s authority. In Renaissance England, the authority of a husband over his wife was a principal constantly uttered in pulpit and press. Indeed, a wife’s obedience was as strongly urged as the subject’s obedience to the monarch or the Christian’s to the church. The Elizabethan additions to the Homilies included one “Of the state of matrimony” advocating wifely obedience, and in Basilikon Doron, James I instructed his son in the authority of a husband as in the authority of a king.³ In the early seventeenth century, the two famous divines, Dr. William Gouge and William Whately, preached and afterwards published their advice on marriage which centred on the wife’s duty to obey.⁴ St. Paul was everywhere quoted as the authority for domestic arrangement: “Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands, as unto the Lord.” Even in an age when some upper-class women were allowed education and a measure of independence, and even when queens ruled, male authority dominated.

Such a cultural context is necessary for understanding not only Mariam but also the life of Elizabeth Cary, the future Viscountess Falkland. Her biography, The Lady Falkland: Her Life (c. 1655), written by a daughter, reveals that Lady Cary struggled all her life with established authority, whether it was that of her parents, the Protestant church, her mother-in-law, or her husband.⁵ She wrote Mariam sometime during the first decade of her marriage, when she was beginning to live under her husband’s authority; juxtaposed to The Lady Falkland: Her Life, The Tragedie of Mariam seems to be closely related to the experiences of its author as a young married woman.⁶

No contemporary notice of Mariam survives. In this century, little critical attention has been given to the play from this or other points of view, and none of its few critics has really liked it. A. C. Dunstan described the elements of the play in minute detail, and then concluded that “the dramatist is no mean workman as far as construction is concerned, but is no poet.” A. M. Witherspoon, whose chief interest in the play was the influence of Garnier, thought that “the play as a whole is singularly uninspired and deficient in interest.” In his literary history of the period, Douglas Bush remarked briefly that “Lady Falkland wrote a juvenile play or two.…” And most recently, Leonora Brodwin confined to a note the mixed judgment that “however inferior her poetic and dramatic talents may be, Lady Cary’s treatment of Herod does show a remarkable perception of one of the most complex of psychological types.”⁷ None of these critics has noted the most remarkable elements of Mariam: the unusual prominence given to a virtuous woman’s psychological conflicts, the polemic on the question of woman’s place, and the extraordinary fifth act in which the female protagonist becomes a type of Christ. In its comprehension of Mariam’s problems, Mariam is not entirely the work of youth, and it is not centred on the psychology of Herod. If not a great work, if not poetically accomplished, The Tragedie of Mariam is created from a strong conflict intelligently understood and sometimes eloquently expressed.

Elizabeth Cary was brilliant, pious, energetic and talented. Before she was seventeen, she translated Ortelius, and later wrote two plays and a life of Tamburlaine, translated Cardinal du Perron, and composed verse lives of St. Mary Magdalen, St. Agnes Martyr, and St. Elizabeth of Portugal, as well as many lesser verses. At the same time, she led the life of a daughter of the upper gentry: she married the man chosen by her parents and had eleven children. If it were not for her daughter’s biography of her, we might think of Lady Cary as another model of the well-born, well-educated Renaissance woman who was a wife and mother and author of classical and pious works as well—a woman like Margaret More Roper, Anna Cooke Bacon, or Mary Sidney Herbert. But The Life is a disturbing document that details the many conflicts and emotional crises that Elizabeth Cary experienced during much of her life. Many of her troubles came from an early attraction and final conversion to Catholicism, an act causing spiritual, familial, and political struggles. From some of the biographer’s information we may be led to speculate that certain of Lady Cary’s problems also stemmed from the continual, internal clash between her desire for intellectual independence and achievement and the requirements of her position as daughter, wife, and mother.

She was the only child of Sir Laurence and Lady Elizabeth Tanfield of Burford Priory, Oxford. Her stern parents bore a reputation in the county for hardness and arrogance. Lady Tanfield in particular was disliked by the inhabitants of Great Tew who complained that “she saith that we are more worthy to be ground to powder than to have any favour showed to us.…”⁸ Whether Elizabeth Cary’s mother was harsh at home, the biographer does not say; but Cary seems to have been an isolated child who without teachers learned French, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, and Latin, and who “was skilful and curious in [needle] working, never having been helped by anybody.”⁹ Elizabeth, without siblings “nor other companion of her age, spent her whole time in reading, to which she gave herself so much that she frequently read all night” (6). In an attempt to discipline this intellectual thirst, her mother forbade the servants to give her candles, but Elizabeth bribed her attendants to bring her the necessary light. Her father was totally devoted to his work as a judge, and is mentioned in other contexts in the Life only when he gave twelve-year-old Elizabeth Calvin’s Institutes (the biographer claims she found Calvin wanting) and when he married her to Sir Henry Cary. Although our biographer’s glimpse of Elizabeth Cary’s childhood is brief, we see a solitary, precocious, independent spirit who would circumvent or even challenge authority when her quest for knowledge demanded it.¹⁰

The Tanfields contracted the alliance to Sir Henry Cary in June, 1602, the marriage took place in the autumn, and the seventeen-year-old bride continued to live at home for the first year or more—perhaps until the autumn or Christmas of 1603. The biographer claims that “about that time” Henry Cary went to Holland “leaving her still with her own friends.” It was the conventional arranged marriage, for the Life records that Henry Cary married Elizabeth “only for being an heir, for he had no acquaintance with her (she scarce even having spoken to him) and she was nothing handsome, though then very fair” (7). The biographer does not directly reveal Lady Cary’s attitude except to note that while living at home and separated from Sir Henry, her letters to her husband were written by others under her mother’s orders. In view of Cary’s precocious ability to write, it is possible that her mother did not approve of what she would send to Sir Henry.

Sometime in the second year of marriage, Sir Henry’s mother insisted that Elizabeth come to live with her. The young bride did not agree at all well with her mother-in-law and Lady Katherine Cary, vested with the power of a parent, treated her daughter-in-law strictly. Lady Katherine was

one that loved much to be humoured, and finding her not to apply herself to it, used her very hardly so far as at last to confine her to her chamber, which seeing she little cared for, but entertained herself with reading, the mother-in-law took away all her books, with command to have no more brought her. [8]

Those books, catalogued near the end of Life, reveal Cary’s prodigious appetite for learning:

She had read very exceeding much; poetry of all kinds, ancient and modern, in several langauges, all that ever she could meet; history very universally, especially all ancient Greek and Roman historians; all chroniclers whatsoever in her own country, and the French histories very thoroughly; of most other countries something, though not so universally; of the ecclesiastical history very much, most especially concerning its chief pastors. Of books treating of moral virtue or wisdom (such as Seneca, Plutarch’s Morals, and natural knowledge, as Pliny, and of late ones, such as French, Mountaine, and English, Bacon), she had read very many when she was young, not without making her profit of them all.… [113]

So habitual and dedicated a reader would find peculiar frustration in the removal of her books, and at this point the Life notes that Lady Cary “set herself to make verses” (8).

Again, she appears as an isolated figure, persecuted by her mother-in-law, and visited only in secret by one of her husband’s sisters and a waiting gentlewoman. But Sir Henry’s return ended her captivity and “from this time she writ many things for her private recreation, on several subjects and occasions, all in verse…” (9). Life with Sir Henry was difficult, however. Later summing up her parents’ relationship, the biographer presents her father as a stern figure whom her mother was able to please only through the exercise of enormous self-discipline. Like many other young women of her time, Elizabeth Cary, joined to a man she did not know, had to curtail her independent impulses to suit his wishes:

He was very absolute; and though she had a strong will, she had learned to make it obey his. The desire to please him had power to make her do that, that others could have scarce believed possible for her; as taking care of the house in all things (to which she could have no inclination but what his will gave her), the applying herself to use and love work. [14]

For his sake, although she feared horses, she rode; she dressed well, although “dressing was all her life a torture to her” and in fact, she went only so far as to let others tend her “while she writ or read.”

Even after her marriage, Cary still sought free scope for her intellect and actions. For example, the biographer records that “when she was about twenty years old, through reading, she grew into much doubt of her religion” (9). The biographer thinks that Hooker in particular caused her to question her Protestant faith. She was of course unable to explore her conscience or to learn openly about Catholicism, nor could she challenge her Protestant upbringing.

It is important to realize, however, that Elizabeth Cary was very much a woman of her time, with a strong sense of duty as a wife and later as the mother of eleven children. The biographer describes her as a woman of strict principle:

… she did always much disapprove the practice of satisfying oneself with their conscience being free from fault, not forbearing all that might have the least show or suspicion of uncomeliness or unfitness; what she thought to be required in this she expressed in this motto (which she caused to be inscribed in her daughter’s wedding-ring): Be and seem. [16]

This insistence on the confor...