ABSTRACT
Elizabeth (Tanfield) Cary, Viscountess Falkland (1585-1639), was the first Englishwoman to write a tragedy, the Senecan Tragedie of Mariam (1613).1 She was also the first Englishwoman to write a full-scale history, the Tacitean History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II (c.1627-8).2 Those works engage issues important in her own life and also in the Jacobean state: the claims of conscience, the analogy of domestic and state tyranny, the powers of kings and husbands, the rights and duties of subjects and wives, the justifications for resistance to tyrants, the role of counselors and favorites, and, most interesting, the possibility and power of nonviolent or passive resistance. Some critics find Mariam distressingly (or at its cultural moment necessarily) contradictory, especially in regard to the issue of women’s silence; others interpret it from the chorus’s vantage point, as denying to wives and subjects any right of resistance (even internal) to their lords.3 But though the work’s contradictions reflect gender anxieties, they find close parallels in contemporary Senecan dramas and histories written in the Tacitean mode-genres often perceived as dangerous by Elizabethan and Jacobean censors precisely because they allow for the clash of ideological positions and for the sympathetic representation of resistance and rebellion. Cary, like Samuel Daniel and Fulke Greville, chose genres and took over generic strategies which allowed her to explore dangerous political issues, focused in her case by the situation of queen-wives subjected at once to domestic and state tyranny.
