ABSTRACT
As with so many of the plays in this collection, the terms, meanings and limits of femininity can be seen to lie at the heart of The Tragedy of Mariam. What is striking about The Tragedy of Mariam, however, is the complexity and the ambiguity of its representation of gendered power relations. For example, the apparently simple polar opposites, such as the good and the bad woman, around which the play is structured turn out to be rather more complicated than they at first seem. Equally ambiguous are the representations of women’s relationships to speech and silence. Reproducing conventional early modern ideological wisdom that women’s honour depended in large part on their docility and obedience, characterised by a deferential silence, Sohemus suggests that Mariam’s refusal to constrain her ‘public voice’. The Tragedy of Mariam occupies an important position in the histories both of English women’s writing and of Renaissance drama.
