“More plotting yet?”: Rewriting Mariam and Herod and Revising Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam for the Early Modern English Stage

Abstract

Elizabeth Cary’s closet play The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) which recounts how King Herod’s jealousy and “More plotting yet” (I.3.1) led Mariam to a noble death on the scaffold is often thought to be the only example of a dramatic adaptation of the story of King Herod the Great and his second wife Mariamne in early modern English drama. Two other plays however, Gervase Markham and William Sampson’s Herod and Antipater (1622) and Philip Massinger’s The Duke of Milan (1623), used the same historical source, Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews. More importantly, they entertain a closer connection with the earlier play, beyond the common narrative arc found in Jewish history: borrowed motifs and verbal echoes suggest the male playwrights remodelled Cary’s neo-Senecan tragedy into a spectacular gruesome melodrama for the first, and a Jacobean revenge tragedy for the latter. A comparison between the three plays shows how the appropriative practice of early modern playwrights transcended the supposed boundaries between elite and popular drama, and between manuscript, printed, never performed or performed without a publication, plays. It also testifies to the immediate reception and legacy of The Tragedy of Mariam, a play which is often believed to have had a very limited audience at the time due to its status as closet drama. Of particular interest is the way the Mariam and Herod story brings out the public voice of women: Mariam’s voice resonates more clearly and defiantly in Cary’s tragedy than it does on the commercial stage, where the queen, or her stand-in character in The Duke of Milan, is reduced to a dumb-show or subjected to a carnivalesque ritual of sexual exhibition and corporal punishment.

Keywords

• sources
• Herod and Mariam
• commercial stage
• closet drama
• revenge tragedy
• circulation