In my Artistic Research Fellowship with the Folger Shakespeare Library, I am adapting Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam, The Faire Queene of Iewry. I love this play, I hope you read it. My Mariam will be a proto-punk rock opera adaptation of Cary’s original, relocating the telling of Mariam’s story from early 17th century Britain to 1960s suburban New Jersey. My adaptation will follow Betty, a Jewish woman stuck in an unhappy marriage, who, after years of struggling to conceive a child with her husband, conceives a rock band with her sister and her enigmatic new neighbor instead. With sounds inspired by The Pleasure Seekers, Denise and Company, The Shags, and other women pioneers of punk, my adaptation will collide closet play and garage band in an electric, screeching prayer for women’s liberation, bodily autonomy, and queer love.
This is not that adaptation.
On October 7 of this year, I was finishing up a month of intensive research on Elizabeth Cary and her play set in Judea/Palestine, and I was beginning work on an as-yet-unfinished essay reconsidering Mariam’s status as the first original play by a woman writing in English and arguing for the play’s artistic value outside of its claims to first-ness or originality. Also on October 7, war broke out in the very real land I had been imagining through the eyes of Elizabeth Cary, just as she had imagined it through the eyes of Thomas Lodge. I tried to keep writing my essay. I really did. This play came out instead. It is a personal response, written five weeks into the war, and already, it is as much a period piece as its source. Summing up the lesson Mariam leaves us with, Ilona Bell writes: “we must beware definitive truths…every character in this Senecan closet drama…expresses only one limited, and thus fallible, point of view.”1 I have no truth to speak. I have only my fallible point of view.
How to read a closet play: Aloud, or silently. In a group, or alone. Refusing to substitute, for your own conscience, the voice of “king or prelate or husband”2 or playwright. Resisting tyranny, knowing that one day we will, all of us, be free.3
ACTUS PRIMUS:
On a warm day in October, THE PLAYWRIGHT, a Jew, is considering Originality: is Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam an original play?
Enter ELIZABETH CARY, a playwright.
ELIZABETH CARY
The Tragedie of Mariam, The Faire Queen of Iewry, written by that learned, vertuous, and truly nobly Ladie, E. C., Elizabeth Cary, me, is widely called4 the first extant original play written by a woman in English. I’m quoting Wikipedia, that vast depository of our common knowledge, to demonstrate consensus.
Enter MARY SIDNEY, a translator.
MARY SIDNEY
The Tragedie of Antonie, doone into English by me, came first, but I was only translating.
ELIZABETH CARY
But we didn’t think of translation then as we think of it now, did we? Collation, imitation, disposition, derivation, transmutation, transformation—this was the stuff of all writing.5 Josephus was done into English by Lodge, but surely Lodge was done into drama by me.
MARY SIDNEY
And in a form I invented.
ELIZABETH CARY
Invented in that you transposed the French closet drama, itself transposed from Seneca, onto English soil.
MARY SIDNEY
Invented, yes.
Enter EDWARD SAID, a critic.
EDWARD SAID
Most humanistic scholars are, I think, perfectly happy with the notion that text exists in contexts, that the pressures of conventions, predecessors, and rhetorical styles limit what Walter Benjamin once called—
Enter WALTER BENJAMIN, a critic.
WALTER BENJAMIN
—the overtaxing of the productive person in the name of the principle of creativity—
EDWARD SAID
—in which the writer is believed on his own—
ELIZABETH CARY
or her own—
EDWARD SAID
—and out of his pure mind—
ELIZABETH CARY
or her pure mind—
EDWARD SAID
—to have brought forth his—
ELIZABETH CARY
her—
EDWARD SAID
—work.6
ELIZABETH CARY
We know Shakespeare copied, wrote from originals, did into English or did into drama or did into his own voice and meter.
MARY SIDNEY
I remember more than a little of my Antonie creeping its way into his.
EDWARD SAID
The best way to consider originality is to look not for first instances of a phenomenon, but rather to see duplication, parallelism, symmetry, parody, repetition, echoes of it.7
MARY SIDNEY
So if Shakespeare is original, and Elizabeth Cary is original—
ELIZABETH CARY
Why not Mary Sidney?
MARY SIDNEY
And if Mary Sidney is original, then Elizabeth Cary can’t be first.
ELIZABETH CARY
They call me original to make me first, and they only remember me, when they remember me, as first. Mariam wasn’t even my first play.8
MARY SIDNEY
But it’s the play you published. Extant is key.
WALTER BENJAMIN
That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art, its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.9
EDWARD SAID
Originality in one primal sense, then, has to be loss, or else it would be repetition.10
ELIZABETH CARY
We were writing drama at a time when women weren’t allowed on the English stage, not as players, not as writers. I don’t want to be the exception to silence. I want to be sound.
Then: an earth-shaking sound. War breaks out on the other side of the world, in the land where Mariam was the doomed queen of Jewry and Herod the puppet tyrant of the Judean client kingdom of the Roman Empire, in the land ELIZABETH CARY styled “now-obscured Palestine.”11 THE PLAYWRIGHT abandons their considering.
CARY turns to SAID and BENJAMIN.
ELIZABETH CARY
Isn’t it funny, you two were already here.
A short intermission for us to stare at the bright-lit windows of our phones and scroll. A short intermission for the stream of content to dissolve into our streams of conscious thought like salt in water. A short intermission for us to live-stream the dead.
ACTUS SECUNDUS:
Enter MARIAM, a queen.
MARIAM
How oft have I with publike voyce runne on?
To censure Romes last Hero for deceit:
Because he wept when Pompeis life was gone,
Yet when he liv’d hee thought his Name too great.12
Enter MONTAIGNE, a philosopher.
MONTAIGNE
When Pompey’s Head was presented to Caesar, the Histories tell us, that he turn’d away his Face, as from a sad and unpleasing Object.13
THE PLAYWRIGHT, a Jew, turns away their face.
MARIAM
When Herod liv’d, that now is done to death,
Oft have I wisht that I from him were free:
Oft have I wisht that he might lose his breath,
Oft have I wisht his Carkas dead to see.14
MONTAIGNE
We have resolutely pursu’d the Revenge of an Injury receiv’d, But we shall Weep.15
THE PLAYWRIGHT weeps.
MARIAM
Had I rather much a milke-maid bee,
Then be the Monarke of Judeas Queen.16
Enter ELIZABETH I, a queen.
ELIZABETH I
If I were a milkmaid with a pail on my arm, I would not forsake that poor and single state, to match with the greatest monarch.17
MARIAM
Then why grieves Mariam Herods death to heare?18
MONTAIGNE
When Timoleon laments the murther he had committed upon so mature, and generous deliberation, he does not lament the liberty restor’d to his Country, he does not lament the Tyrant, but he laments his Brother.19
THE PLAYWRIGHT weeps.
Enter ALEXANDRA, a mother.
ALEXANDRA
What meanes these teares? My Mariam doth mistake,
The newes we heard did tell the Tyrants end:
What weepst thou for thy brothers murthers sake?20
THE PLAYWRIGHT abandons their scene. The metaphor is clumsy. The comparison cheap.
Enter WALTER BENJAMIN, a Jew.
WALTER BENJAMIN
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th—
Enter ELIZABETH CARY, a playwright.
ELIZABETH CARY
Or 21st—
WALTER BENJAMIN
—century are “still” possible is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.21
Enter EDWARD SAID, a Palestinian.
EDWARD SAID
Written history is a countermemory, a kind of parody of Platonic recollection, that permits the discernment by contemplation of true, first, original things. It is dissociative. It is destructive.22
WALTER BENJAMIN
There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another.23
ELIZABETH CARY
Collation, imitation, disposition, derivation, transmutation, transformation…
EDWARD SAID
Literature belongs to the future, and the future, as Mallarmé said—
MONTAIGNE transmutes and transforms through time into MALLARMÉ, a critic.
MALLARMÉ
—is never more than the shock of what should have been done prior to or near the origin.24
ELIZABETH CARY
Where do we come from?
WALTER BENJAMIN
Are we not touched by the same breath of air which was among that which came before?
ELIZABETH CARY
What comes from us?
WALTER BENJAMIN
Is there not an echo of those who have been silenced in the voices to which we lend our ears today?25
EDWARD SAID
Originality in one primal sense, then, has to be loss, or else it would be repetition.
A short intermission for us to call our representatives. A short intermission for us to march in the streets. A short intermission for arrests because the administrator has to lock up the senator’s office now, because the businessman has to catch his train back to Connecticut now, because, because, because…
ACTUS TERTIUS:
Enter MEDVEDENKO, a schoolteacher.
MEDVEDENKO
How come you always wear black?26
Enter HAMLET, a prince, wearing all black.
HAMLET
I have within that which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.27
Enter MARIAM, a queen, wearing all black.
MARIAM
I suit my garment to my minde,
and there no cheerfull colours can I finde.28
Enter MASHA, a daughter, wearing all black.
MASHA
I’m in mourning for my life. I’m unhappy.29
HAMLET seeks revenge and dies. MARIAM is revenged upon and dies. MASHA takes snuff. MASHA offers the snuffbox to MEDVEDENKO. He declines.
Enter ELIZABETH CARY, a playwright.
ELIZABETH CARY
When I’m unhappy, I sleep.30
THE PLAYWRIGHT, a Jew, cannot sleep. Enter LADY MACBETH, a queen, with blood on her hands. She takes THE PLAYWRIGHT’s hands and covers them in blood.
Enter EDWARD SAID, a Palestinian.
EDWARD SAID
Originality is the difference between primordial vacancy and temporal, sustained repetition.31
A short intermission for us to consider the word “extant.”
ACTUS QUARTUS:
Enter HEROD, a tyrant, with a paper crown on his head and sign around his neck that reads: I AM EMPIRE. He is surrounded by soldiers. MARIAM, a queen, is dead. She holds her severed head in her hands. HEROD covers her in honey.
HEROD
I will not speake, unles to be beleev’d.32
Enter WALTER BENJAMIN, a Jew.
WALTER BENJAMIN
With whom does the historical writer actually empathize? The irrefutable answer is with the victor.
HEROD
I will not speake, unles to be beleev’d.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Those who currently rule are the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious.
HEROD
I will not speake, unles to be beleev’d.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Empathy with the victors thus ends up benefitting the current rulers every time.33
HEROD
I will not speake, unles to be beleev’d.
Enter EDWARD SAID, a Palestinian.
EDWARD SAID
The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.34
HEROD
I will not speake, unles to be beleev’d.
EDWARD SAID
For a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second.35
HEROD
I will not speake, unles to be beleev’d.
EDWARD SAID
What sorts of intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly, and cultural energies went into the making of an imperialist tradition like the Orientalist one? How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism’s broadly imperialist view of the world?
HEROD
I will not speake, unles to be beleev’d.
EDWARD SAID
What is the meaning of originality, of continuity, of individuality, in this context?36
HEROD
I will not speake, unles to be beleev’d.
EDWARD SAID
What is the meaning of originality?
HEROD
I will not speake, unles to be beleev’d!
MARIAM tries to speak, but her mouth is full of honey. And she is dead.
EDWARD SAID
The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist.37
HEROD
I will not speake, unles to be beleev’d.
A short intermission for us to weep and for the waters to rise.
ACTUS QUINTUS:
On a cold day in November, THE PLAYWRIGHT, a Jew, drives to the ocean. At the shore they meet their ancestors. ESTHER, a grandmother, offers THE PLAYWRIGHT her raccoon fur coat. HELEN, a grandmother, offers THE PLAYWRIGHT two silver candlesticks.
Enter ELIZABETH CARY, a playwright.
ELIZABETH CARY
“Origin,” from the Latin “oriri,” to rise.38
THE PLAYWRIGHT wades into the water, then dives. They float on their back, the raccoon fur coat spread behind them like wings, the silver candlesticks across their middle like ribs. They close their eyes and hear a timbrel.
Enter, MIRIAM a prophet, who parts the water. A CHORUS of ten thousand ghosts rise from the ocean floor and exhale.
Enter WALTER BENJAMIN, a Jew.
WALTER BENJAMIN
The time of the soothsayers, who divined what lay hidden in the lap of the future, was experienced neither as homogenous nor as empty. Jews were forbidden to look into the future. Instead, the Torah and the prayers exhorted them to remember. This disenchanted those who sought advice from the soothsayers, falling prey to the future. Yet the future did not turn thereby into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.39
Enter EDWARD SAID, a Palestinian.
EDWARD SAID
Originality, then, has to be loss, or else it would be repetition.
MIRIAM, playing her timbrel, leads the CHORUS of ten thousand ghosts through the ocean, to another world, to another future, somewhere beyond the shadow of tyranny. ESTHER and HELEN and WALTER BENJAMIN and EDWARD SAID follow them, singing.
The waters rise and rush together and the ocean floor is under the ocean again and THE PLAYWRIGHT holds their breath as they are hurled into the water.
END OF PLAY
- “Private Lyrics in Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam,” in The Literary Career & Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1618, edited by Heather Wolfe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 31
- Donald W. Foster, “Resurrecting the Author: Elizabeth Tanfield Cary,” in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700: Volume 6, Elizabeth Cary, edited by Karen Raber (New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 45.
- Nancy A. Gutierrez characterizes early modern closet drama: “Exactly what is closet drama?…For the most part, these plays are tragedies of state, focusing on…the problem of tyrannous authority. The primary issue is that of self-definition, of discovering and maintaining personal integrity when faced with a repressive state…As a rule, issues of government are addressed not only in the public world of the state but also in the private world of the family, so that the questions of duty and responsibility, loyalty and devotion have both political and domestic ramifications.” from “Valuing Mariam: Genre Study and Feminist Analysis,” in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700: Volume 6, Elizabeth Cary, pp. 101-120.
- Elaine V. Beilin, “Elizabeth Cary and The Tragedie of Mariam,” Papers on Language and Literature 16 (1980), p. 45; S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, Introduction, in Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents, edited by S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 4; Margaret W. Ferguson and Barry Weller, Introduction, in The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson and Barry Weller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 1; Helen Hackett, A Short History of English Renaissance Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 184; Nancy Cotton Pearse, “Elizabeth Cary, Renaissance Playwright,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 18, no. 4 (1977), pp. 601–8; Deborah Uman, “Translation and Community in the work of Elizabeth Cary,” Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing, edited by Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 78; Heather Wolfe, Introduction, in The Literary Career & Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1618, edited by Heather Wolfe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 1; Ramona Wray, Introduction, in The Tragedy of Mariam by Elizabeth Cary, edited by Ramona Wray (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2012), p. 1.
- For more on this subject see John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Originality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018
- Edward Said, Introduction, in Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 13.
- Said, “On Originality,” in The World, The Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 135.
- Donald W. Foster catalogues Cary’s lost and surviving works: “Cary published a translation of Davy du Perron’s [Reply]…But the entire impression, printed at Douay and smuggled into England, was seized and burned by Archbishop George Abbot. Only a few copies escaped the flames. Undaunted, Cary pushed on with a translation of Perron’s complete works…but she was never able to print it…no manuscript copy is extant. Nor do we have a surviving copy of Cary’s earliest drama, a Sicilian tragedy. The Life of Tamburlaine, said to have been her best work, is lost as well. So, too, are Cary’s verse biographies of St. Magdalene, St. Agnes Martyr, and St. Elizabeth of Portugal, along with countless devotional verses. Also lost is a volume of moral precepts written for her children, a theological discourse, most of her private correspondence…I have recently discovered a funeral elegy on the Duke of Buckingham that was written by Cary, as well as her lost translation of Blosius and what I think may be her lost translation of Seneca’s Epistles. Otherwise, the only original literary works to have survived are [Mariam] and [Edward II]. Nothing more remains, apart from her translation of Reply…and a juvenile translation of a geographical treatise.” from “Resurrecting the Author: Elizabeth Tanfield Cary,” in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700: Volume 6, Elizabeth Cary, edited by Karen Raber (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 43-44.p
- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (Boston: Mariner Books, 2019), pp. 169-171.
- “On Originality” 133
- From Cary’s dedicatory poem that precedes the play, “missing from all but two copies (Houghton and Huntington) and…reproduced as an erratum insert to be belated slipped inside the 1914 Malone Society Reprints edition” (Wray 56, 73). See also the Malone Society edition available at The Folger.
- Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, edited by Ramona Wray (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2012), 1.1.1-4.
- Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Michael, seigneur de Montaigne in three books, with marginal notes and quotations of the cited authors, and an account of the author’s life, translated by Charles Cotton (London: T. Basset, M. Gilliflower, and W. Hensman, 1685-1686; Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership), 419.
- Cary 1.1.15-18
- Montaigne 423
- Cary 1.1.57-58
- Elizabeth I qtd. in Foster 30
- Cary 1.1.38
- Montaigne 424
- Cary 1.2.1-4
- Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” translated by Dennis Redmond (2020), p. 3.
- “On Originality” 134
- “On the Concept of History”
- “On Originality” 135
- “On the Concept of History” 1
- Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, translated by Laurence Senelick (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), p. 71.
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, Rebecca Niles (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, n.d.), 1.2.88-89.
- Cary 4.3.5-6
- Chekhov 71
- “Her greatest sign of sadness…was sleeping, which she was used to say she could do when she would, and then had most will to when she had occasion to have sad thoughts waking; which she much sought to avoid” from “The Lady Falkland: Her Life, by One of Her Daughters,” in The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson and Barry Weller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 196.
- “On Originality” 133
- Cary 4.3.139
- “On the Concept of History” 3
- Orientalism 1
- Orientalism 11
- Orientalism 15
- Orientalism 27
- Kerrigan 10
- “On the Concept of History” 8
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