ABSTRACT
She was the only child of a rich lawyer; she was precociously bright but not beautiful; she was married at 15 to an aristocrat who wanted an heiress’s dowry. He was Protestant, as were her parents; she converted secretly to Catholicism in the early years of what proved a stormy marriage. Most of what we know about this female contemporary of Shakespeare (she was born around 1585 and died in 1639) comes from a biography written (anonymously) by one of her daughters who became a Catholic nun in France. This daughter does not however mention the fact about her mother that contributes most to her claim on the attention of modern literary critics, namely that she was evidently the first of her sex in England to write an original published play. Her name was Elizabeth Cary and her play, printed in London in 1613, was entitled The Trogedie of Mariam, The Faire Queene of Jewry. Mary Sidney Countess of Pembroke had translated Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine in 1592, and Cary’s play is clearly indebted to that aristocratic experiment in Senecan closet drama.1 But Cary’s interest in the drama and in women’s relation to that genre goes far beyond that of any female English writer we know before Aphra Behn. According to her daughter, Cary loved plays ‘extremely,’2 and for a time at least managed to go occasionally to the London theater. Her authorship of Mariam, along with an early play now lost, makes her the first woman in England to attempt substantial original work in the drama, a genre socially coded as off-bounds to women, authors and actresses alike.3
