ABSTRACT
Emphasis on patriarchal power has dominated criticism of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry. The play’s first critics emphasized Herod’s tyranny when they saw Mariam as one of a series of “Herod” jealousy plays. Far more powerful than Mariam’s insipid Chorus, whose social platitudes Mariam gives no sign of accepting, Doris curses from the conscience. In Cary’s Mariam, the female villain Salome, who acts out Mariam’s repressed rebellion, is marked as evil not only because she fights men but also, significantly, because she is rude to Mariam’s mother—a crime against family as well as treason against royalty. In Josephus’s chronicle, Herod’s and Doris’s association with Alexandra’s, rather than with Mariam’s, generation is facilitated by the repetition of the same names in each generation, encouraging dreamlike confusions between Mariam’s grandmother Alexandra and Mariam’s mother, Alexandra; or between Aristobolus, Mariam’s grandfather, and Aristobolus, her brother.
