ABSTRACT
In Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, nearly everyone’s mouth—women’s and men’s—is open. In The Tragedy of Mariam, the moving tongues of several characters threaten the social and political order, and all literal references to the tongue elicit specifically slander or false information, as opposed to any time the words “mouth” or “lips” are used. In addition, anxieties about the tongue were imaginatively associated with disruptions to social and political orders, and distinctions between categories, such as the social, political, linguistic, and cosmic, breakdown in various “discussions of sins of the tongue. In the final scene, when Herod laments the loss of his wife, his description of Mariam’s hands points to his equally severe political loss, which he suffers at her death. Mariam’s hands also may raise her husband, “crowning” his head, but her hands are useful only as she is passive and compliant with patriarchal dominance, not active or manipulative like Salome.
