ABSTRACT
Hailed as the first drama published by an English woman writer, Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam has garnered a great deal of attention from critics in the past decade. Dymphna Callaghan’s seminal essay, “Re-reading The Tragedie of Mariam,” the first to discuss race as part of the “manifest content” of the play, did much to bring to light some of the complex workings of racial difference, particularly in relation to the play’s central female characters. While The Tragedy of Mariam takes place in a pre-Christian and pre-Islamic world, in Cary’s time, Palestine had long been an important site of contact between and intermingling among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In Alexandra Bennett’s analysis, both Mariam and Salome are “speaking and performing agents” whose decisions to dissemble or not reveal Cary’s “remarkable awareness of the possibilities afforded to women by different tactics of self-representation”.
