ABSTRACT
As Elizabeth Cary explores a Jewish queen's sexual purity in The Tragedie of Mariam, she does so by concentrating on questions of performance. Cary's title character explicitly abjures theatricality even as she embraces chastity, creating a fissure in Renaissance discourses on women that threatens to swallow up the antifeminist idea that female chastity is always an act. Laurie Shannon's superb analysis of Cary's play prepares us to see how profoundly Mariam's approach to virtue unsettles the androcentric orthodoxies of early modern Europe. Shannon points out that Cary's closet drama pits several competing notions of chastity against one another, and among these competing notions Mariam's is most radical. The all-too-familiar command that women be chaste, silent, and obedient does not insist upon real female virtue but only adumbrates a preferred performative role, one that enables women to simulate the virtuous condition that is beyond their capacities and constitution.
