ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some previously unremarked aspects of The Tragedie of Mariam, and speculates that its content and structure are in part attributable to the playwright’s life as a woman, and more particularly as a wife, in the early seventeenth century. Mariam indeed seems to be atypical of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama because of the playwright’s personal involvement in the outcome of the play. Whether Elizabeth Cary’s mother was harsh at home, the biographer does not say; but Cary seems to have been an isolated child who without teachers learned French, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, and Latin, and who “was skilful and curious in working, never having been helped by anybody.” Elizabeth, without siblings “nor other companion of her age, spent her whole time in reading, to which she gave herself so much that she frequently read all night”.
