ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam, a closet drama first published in 1613, establishes in the figure of Mariam an early paradigm for the valorization of female conscience. Cary’s and John Milton’s depictions of female conscience can be properly assessed only in their cultural context: in early modern England, even excluding those women persecuted as witches, many respectable women were fined, imprisoned, or executed for maintaining their religious beliefs in the face of spousal or ecclesiastical prohibition. The politics of divorce encoded in Milton’s closet drama surely coalesced from his desire to suppress women’s ever-more public demands to count for more than the “other half.” The correlation between Cary and Milton’s mutual interest in divorce and female conscience bespeaks a literary link unacknowledged by Milton: both texts daringly posed a challenge to English civil law that was far more restrictive than ancient Jewish divorce law.
