ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a mode of female literacy that relies on several types of equivocation to articulate a critical perspective on England as an imperial nation. The critique emerges through an implied comparison between two imperial locales in which some subjects are distinctly dissatisfied with their rulers. The first locale, the setting of Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam, is ancient Judea in the years before Christ’s birth when it was part of the Roman empire and ruled by Herod. The second locale, never explicitly mentioned, is Tudor-Stuart England. Both the setting and the plot of Cary’s play suggest an analogical relation between Judea in the years just before Christ’s birth and England in the years after its traumatic break from the Church of Rome. Cary’s heroine Mariam, who is accused of plotting to poison a monarch, her own husband to boot, resembles Roderigo Lopez in being ambiguously guilty.
