ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the extent to which feminist criticism has proceeded with what Tania Modleski calls “business as usual” even as it endeavored to change the structure of patriarchal canonicity by attending to the work of the first original play in English by a woman, Elizabeth Cary’s closet drama, The Tragedie of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry. “Race” is actually part of the manifest content of Mariam. The principal characters, Salome and Mariam, have been read as Cary’s personal psychomachia, and the play’s themes have been addressed in terms of their “psychological roots” in the author’s consciousness. By positing Mariam as frustrated self-expression, the critic entirely evacuates the specificity of the text and domesticates the play’s radical otherness. “Race” enables Cary to stage some of the contradictions that constitute the Renaissance condition of femininity, and by exploring femininity through it The Tragedie of Mariam gains a double focus on the otherness of woman.
