The English theater world was deeply hostile to women, possibly until quite recently, but the late 16th and early 17th century period went a step beyond, when even female characters are played by males. Everything with any status except, oddly, supreme sovereign of the nation is closed to women.
Feminist scholars have, in the last fifty years, done
enormous work on the handful of surviving works by women writers. I am looking at Three Tragedies by
Renaissance Women, a 1998 Penguin edition with three plays: a translation
of Euripides by Jane, Lady Lumley, a translation of Robert Garnier by Mary
Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and the play at issue here, The Tragedie of
Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (written let’s say 1604, published 1613) by
Elizabeth Cary, eventually Viscountess Falkland, the first extant original
English play by a woman, and as far as I know the only such surviving play
before the Restoration.
The Tragedie of Mariam has understandably gotten a
lot of attention. It is a Senecan closet
drama, removed from the world of the commercial theater, although it has its
dramatic moments. That Mary Sidney
translation of Garnier’s The Tragedie of Antonie is a marvelous piece of
English poetry, but static beyond belief, a version of the Antony and Cleopatra
story where the protagonists never have a scene together. Cary had at least seen some plays. She has swordfights and so on.
The story is from Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews,
newly translated into English in 1602. King
Herod, visiting Rome, is rumored to be dead, kicking off a scramble for power
among the women of his court – his wife Mariam, who hates him, his ex-wife, who
hates Mariam, and his sister Salome, who everyone hates. Herod is not dead, so his return in Act III
upends everyone’s crazy schemes; Herod restores order by having most of the
characters executed.
Salome makes a good over the top villain, with a number of
enjoyable speeches, although many of my favorite parts of the play are attacks
on her.
CONSTABARUS: She meerly is a painted sepulcher,
That is both faire, and vilely foule at once:
Though on her out-side graces garnish her,
Her mind is fild with worse than rotten bones.
…
Her mouth though serpent-like it never hisses,
Yet like a serpent, poysons where it kisses. (II.4, 127)
She is a tomb full of rotten bones, not bad. Here we see the verse, built out of four-line
ABAB blocks with occasional couplets to round things off. In this chunk Herod is describing – and speaking
directly to – his own sister:
HEROD: Your selfe are held a goodly creature heere,
Yet so unlike my Mariam in your shape:
That when to her you have approached neere,
My selfe hath often tane you for an Ape. (IV.7, 152)
Herod, in the last couple of acts, is hilarious, although
this may be the peak, saying, to Salome’s face, that she looks like an ape. He cannot decide if he should have poor
Mariam executed or not, and swings wildly back and forth in what ought to be a
comic performance, or I guess tragicomic.
I will pick one more attack on Salome, this one less
personal although again addressed to her.
This character, Constabarus, is given, on his way to the chopping block,
the most misogynistic speech in the play.
This earlier bit is mild by comparison, but I want it for my title:
CONSTABARUS: Are Hebrew women now transform’d to men?
Why do you not as well our battels fight,
And weare our armor? suffer this, and then
Let all the world be topsie turved quite. (I.6, 114)
I can see how the plot based on women scheming against each
other, and the open misogyny of many of the men, could make this play work well
with advanced undergraduates. On stage,
I have my doubts.
After this Senecan excursion into Roman history, the next
play is again Roman. It is George
Chapman’s All Fools, or All Fooles (likely 1604), a mashup of two
Terence comedies. I remember it, vaguely,
as good fun.
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