Running On with Almost Public Voice: The Case of 'E.C.'
[An American educator and critic, Ferguson has written and co-written a number of studies of Renaissance literature, including Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (1983) and Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (1986). In the following essay, Ferguson assesses "the feminist political significance" of The Tragedie of Mariam and explores the work's "extremely ambivalent ideological statement about women as male 'property.'"]
She was the only daughter of a rich lawyer; she was precociously bright but not beautiful; she was married at fifteen to an aristocrat who wanted an heiress's dowry. He was Protestant, as were her parents; she converted secretly to Catholicism in the early years of what proved a stormy marriage. Most of what we know about this female contemporary of Shakespeare (she was born around 1585 and died in 1639) comes from a biography written (anonymously) by one of her daughters who became a Catholic nun in France. This daughter does not, however, mention the single fact about her mother that might be of greatest interest to modern feminist critics and historians—namely, that this woman was evidently the first of her sex in England to write an original, published play. Her name was Elizabeth Cary and her play was entitled The Tragedie of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry. It was printed in London in 1613. Mary Sidney, countess of Pembroke, had translated Robert Garnier's Marc Antoine in 1592, and Cary's play is clearly indebted to that aristocratic experiment in Senecan closet drama. But Cary's interest in the drama and in women's relation to it goes far beyond that of any female English writer we know before Aphra Behn. According to her daughter [who wrote The Lady Falkland: Her Life, 1861] Cary "loved plays extremely" and for a time at least managed to go occasionally to the London theater. Her authorship of Mariam, along with an early play now lost and a later one on the history of Edward II, makes her the first woman in England to attempt substantial original work in a genre socially coded as off-bounds to women, authors and actresses alike.
Cary's play was never performed on stage. Whether or not it was published with her permission, much less at her active request, is a question I wish I, or anyone, could answer. Having that information would make it considerably easier to accomplish one of my chief aims in this essay: to assess the feminist political significance of this play, both in its own time and in ours. More empirical information about the circumstances of the play's publication would be useful because the question of a woman's right to assume a "public" voice is both central to the drama and unanswered within it. That unanswered question, central not only to this play but also to Renaissance debates about the nature and proper behavior of womankind, underlies the lack of consensus among the play's (few) readers about its ideological statement. Mariam seems at times to mount a radical attack on the Renaissance concept of the wife as the property of her husband; but the play also seems—or has seemed to some of its readers, both feminist and nonfeminist—to justify, even to advocate, a highly conservative doctrine of female obedience to male authority. I don't intend to make a case for or against either of these interpretations; I hope, rather, to show how, and to begin to show why, the play's ideological statement is so mixed, so contradictory.
The Tragedie of Mariam tells the story of the marriage between King Herod and his second wife, the royal-blooded Jewish maiden Mariam. Like many other Renaissance dramas about this ill-fated match, Mariam is based on a narrative in Josephus's Jewish Antiquities (ca. 93 A.D.), which was published in an English translation by Thomas Lodge in 1602. Evidently following Lodge's Josephus quite closely, the author nonetheless revises her source significantly. She compresses, amplifies, and transposes material in order to observe the dramatic unities; and she alters the characterization of the heroine and other female figures, as well as the portrait of the troubled marriage between Mariam and Herod, in ways that are both more extensive and more ideologically charged than critics have noted.
The prefatory Argument [of Mariam] describes the events which occur prior to the play's action: "Herod the sonne of Antipater (an Idumean), having crept by the favor of the Romanes, into the Jewish Monarchie, married Mariam the [grand]daughter of Hircanus, the rightfull King and Priest and for her (besides her high blood, being of singular beautie) hee reputiated Doris, his former Wife, by whome hee had Children." The play opens at the moment in Josephus's narrative when Herod has been summoned to Rome by Caesar to answer for his earlier political association with Mark Antony, who had helped him acquire Judea. Having overthrown Antony, Caesar is likely to punish Herod, and indeed a rumor of his execution reaches Jerusalem, bringing joy to many who had suffered under his tyranny and bringing relief mixed with sorrow to his wife. Her ambivalent reactions to the news of Herod's death become even more complex when she learns from Sohemus, the man charged by Herod to guard her during his absence, that orders had been given that she should be killed in the event of Herod's death. Outraged by Sohemus's revelation of her husband's jealous possessiveness and grieving still for the brother and grandfather Herod had murdered in order to secure his claim to the Judean throne (as Mariam's mother, Alexandra, continually reminds her), Mariam is unable to rejoice when Herod does unexpectedly return from Rome at the beginning of Act 4. She not only fails to show the proper wifely pleasure at seeing him but she also refuses to sleep with him. His sister Salome, who hates being placed in a subordinate position both by Mariam and by the Jewish marriage laws which prevent women from suing for divorce, schemes to get rid of her husband, Constabarus, and Mariam too. Fanning Herod's anger at his unresponsive wife by "proving" that Mariam is engaging in adultery with Sohemus and is at the same time plotting to poison Herod, Salome convinces the still-infatuated king to order Mariam's death by beheading. After the execution, which is described by a messenger, Herod spends most of the final act regretting, as Othello does, the loss of his "jewel." Unlike Othello, however, this jealous husband created by a female playwright laments not only his innocent wife's death but, specifically, the loss of her too lately valued powers of speech.
According to its first printer, The Tragedie of Mariam was written by a "learned, vertuous, and truly noble Ladie, E. C." The scholarly detective work done by A. C. Dunstan for the 1914 Malone Society reprint of the play (there was only one edition) persuasively identified E. C. as that Elizabeth Cary whose father was a wealthy lawyer named Lawrence Tanfield and whose husband, Sir Henry Cary, became Viscount Falkland in 1620. According to the biography of Cary by her daughter, Sir Henry married his wife (in 1602), "only for [her] being an heir, for he had no acquaintance with her (she scarce having spoken to him), and she was nothing handsome." The same text traces Elizabeth's gradual conversion to Catholicism and its drastic consequences on her status as a social and economic subject. The biography is a crucial but problematic document in my case; a rhetorically complex instance of didactic religious discourse (the "exemplary Catholic life"), the biography, like Cary's play, raises questions by its very mode of material existence about the effects of gender as well as class on the social construction Michel Foucault has called "the author function." The text of the Life, according to its nineteenth-century Catholic editor, was "corrected" by the unnamed female author's brother; his name is given to us (Patrick Cary) and he is said to have "erased" from his sister's biography of his mother "several passages which he considered too feminine."
This enigmatic mark of censorship is one of many reasons why we need to approach both Cary's play and the Life as parts of a larger social text that can be only very partially reconstructed—and interpreted—by the modern reader. The traces of the social text which impinge most insistantly on Cary's writing, and her daughter's, pertain to the set of prescriptive discourses and legal, economic, and behavioral practices surrounding the concept of female chastity and epitomized in the famous Renaissance formula that wives should be "chaste, silent, and obedient." This triple prescription, the core of a set of theories richly elaborated, and also variously challenged, in texts ranging from domestic conduct books and educational treatises to sermons and works of (so-called) imaginative literature, might be called an ideological topos. The topos that Cary's play at once summons into formal being and reacts against manifests itself in Renaissance texts both as abstract opinions about women's proper behavior and as "protonarrative" material fashioned into ballads ("The Cucking of a Scold," for instance), prose fictions like Deloney's The Pleasant and Sweet History of Patient Grissell, and numerous plays ranging from Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and Othello to the anonymous Lingua; or, The Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority (1607), in which Lingua, dressed as a woman, sows deceit until she is imprisoned in the house of Gustus (Taste), where "thirty tall watchmen prevent her from wagging abroad."
The "chaste, silent, and obedient" topos also informs the English common law doctrine of the feme couvert as elaborated, for instance, in a handbook entitled The Womans Lawyer [1632]: "Women have no voyse in Parliament, they make no lawes, they consent to none, they abrogate none. All of them are understood either married or to be married." The normative woman thus constructed in legal discourse was also the object of Juan Luis Vives's influential educational program for young women. In his De Institutione Feminae Christianae, written in 1523 for Mary Tudor and printed eight times in English translation before 1600 as The Instruction of a Christian Woman, Vives invokes the authority of Saint Paul to support the view that "it neither becometh a woman to rule a school, nor to live amongst men or speak abroad, and shake off her demureness and honesty, either all together, or else a great part; which if she be good, it were better to be at home within and unknown to other folks, and in company to hold her tongue demurely, and let few see her, and none at all hear her. The Apostle Paul … saith: Let your women hold their tongues in congregations. For they be not allowed to speak but to be subject as the law bideth." As this passage suggests, Vives is more concerned with a woman's conduct than with her education; "the notion that a woman's chastity is constantly endangered," as Gloria Kaufman observes [in "Juan Luis Vives on the Education of Women," 1978], "occupies most of Vives's attention and delimits his view of the formal education girls should receive."
It seems both important and difficult to analyze this ideological topos of gender, which constitutes "woman," with particular reference to the property of chastity, as a class or group opposed to "man," in relation to the marxist conception of opposing social classes. The difficulty derives partly from the fact that this topos serves the interests of different classes and groups in the early modern period—particularly the aristocracy, the gentry, and the urban middle classes—in rather different ways and by means of a differential social positioning of men and women within each class. Moreover, the ideological topos works in still different ways when cross-class marriages are at issue. The economic and ideological value of female chastity varies accordingly, with the result that certain logical fissures open in the very concept of chastity. These fissures may have been particularly visible to those who, like Cary, experienced a change in their social status.
The Tragedie of Mariam subjects the concept of female chastity to severe scrutiny and goes a long way toward unraveling the logic which binds "chastity" to "silence" and "obedience." That unraveling owes much to the ambiguity of Cary's class position, an ambiguity intensified in her case, as in many women's, by the institution of marriage. The only daughter of a lawyer who rose in social status to become Chief Baron of the Exchequer and his wife, Elizabeth Symondes, evidently a member of the lower gentry, Cary was married to a nobleman who, like many of his kind, needed funds to pay his debts and maintain his family's estate. Marriage in the Elizabethan and Stuart periods was generally a prime avenue for the interpenetration (if not the harmonious blending) of what we may loosely call "aristocratic" and "bourgeois" economic interests and values. Cary's marriage was a paradigmatic instance of such interpenetration, illustrating it, indeed, in complex double measure because Cary's mother had apparently come down the social ladder by marrying Tanfield. Elizabeth herself, following the more common social pattern for women, rose through her marriage to Sir Henry. The son of the Master of the Royal Jewel House, Sir Henry was, according to Kenneth Murdock [in The Sun at Noon, 1939], "a 'compleat courtier' of the new type soon to flourish under James I and Charles I. Such men observed the external forms of the old chivalric supporters of the throne, but their motives smacked of the increasingly capitalistic atmosphere of the time, and service at court was for them as much a profit-making enterprise as a duty imposed by family or tradition."
The marriage between Elizabeth and Henry brought increased social prestige to her father and a valuable dowry—as well as the prospect of a large future inheritance—to her husband. Rightly anticipating, however, that his son-in-law would lack bourgeois virtues of self-restraint (Sir Henry was constantly in financial straits, and part of his wife's dowry may have been spent on ransoming him home from the Netherlands, where he had been taken prisoner early in the marriage), Lawrence Tanfield supplemented the dowry payment by settling a jointure on his daughter as an independent provision for her and her children. Such jointures, usually settled on a bride by the groom's father to provide income in the event of the husband's death, occasionally worked to give not only widows but wives some control of property, even though the common-law doctrine of coverture forbade it. When, however, Elizabeth Cary sought to exercise control over her jointure later in her marriage—ironically, by mortgaging it to help her husband, who needed funds to take up the post of Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1622—her father was evidently outraged: he disinherited her. His decision, which dramatizes the extent to which daughters were tokens in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called "homosocial" exchanges between men, may have been reinforced by the fact that he learned of Elizabeth's secret conversion to Catholicism at about this time. She had evidently been brooding about that conversion since the early years of her marriage; her daughter writes that "when she was about twenty, through reading, she grew into much doubt of her religion." At about the same time, according to the Life, she "writ many things for her private recreation, on several subjects and occasions, all in verse." A "Life of Tamberlaine" (now lost) is mentioned as the best of these literary endeavors; Mariam, however, is not mentioned at all.
When Cary wrote Mariam (sometime between 1603 and 1612, during the early years of her marriage), she chose a plot in which the husband is of a different religion and a somewhat lower birth than the wife. Cary, however, stresses much more than Josephus does the discrepancy between the husband's bloodline and the wife's. Mariam's mother indignantly insists, for instance, that Herod "did not raise" her sons' status by marrying Mariam because "they were not low, / But borne to wear the Crowne in his despight" (1.2.154-55). And Mariam taunts Salome with her "baser" birth, prompting her to protest, "Still twit you me with nothing but my birth" (1.3.241, 48). Cary's choice of plot, especially when seen in conjunction with these and other changes she makes in Josephus's narrative to emphasize Mariam's queenly status and also her possible political ambitions (Cary's Herod, unlike his prototype, fears that his wife may aspire to usurp his place on the throne [4.4.1494]), suggests that the play represents a gender-marked version of a common Renaissance fantasy, itself a species of what Freud called the "family romance": the dream of being more nobly born than one actually is. The class relation between Mariam and Herod is in fact an inversion of that which really obtained between Cary and her husband, and the inversion provides a historically specific fictional frame for the play's central conflict, which arises from the heroine's refusal to become wholly the "property" of her lord. The frame is historically specific not only because it is arguably shaped by the author's dissatisfaction with her subordinate position in her own marriage but also because Mariam's exceptionally noble birth, which is pointedly described in Cary's prefatory Argument as bringing Herod "in his wives right the best title" to the Judean throne (my emphasis), obliquely allies Mariam with those royal women of recent English history—Elizabeth and Mary Tudor and Mary, queen of Scots—who were political figures in their own right and who were legally exempted from the rule of female "coverture" even if they married.
Cary's play therefore might be said to "rewrite" the class story of her own marriage without, however, directly challenging the fundamental concept of class hierarchy; indeed, she explicitly ratifies that concept by equating Salome's baseness of birth with baseness of character. The rewriting, which also stresses the problem of an interfaith union, allows Cary to explore the dilemmas of an allegorical version of herself, a woman who desires at once to obey and to defy that code of wifely duty which subtended the property and class system of seventeenth-century English society. Although Mariam challenges that system much more ambivalently than Herod's sister Salome does when she forcefully protests the sexual double standard with regard to divorce, it is worth noting that Salome's insistance on women's right to pursue their desires is not simply condemned by the play but is instead recast, with its "lustful" motives expunged, by Mariam's ultimate insistance on dying rather than breaking an oath she has made not to sleep with her husband.
Before turning to look closely at the play itself, I should comment briefly on the fact that its very existence in the world—its existence as an ambiguously "public" object, printed but not perhaps by the author's will, and written in the oxymoronic and elitist subgenre of Senecan closet drama—points to Cary's problematic relation to dominant ideologies of both class and gender. Noblemen of Cary's era did not, by custom, write for the public, or for money. The custom existed, however, in some tension with one of the prime tenets of humanist ideology—namely, the "nobility" of the classical ideal of literary fame. For noble-women, the custom discouraging publication was even more binding than it was on men; but a classical education, however altered to suit the alleged needs and capacities of the weaker sex, instilled in some women, as it did in some men too, a desire for fame that conflicted with the rules of social decorum. Cary, who according to her daughter learned early to read Latin and Hebrew as well as numerous modern European languages, was clearly vulnerable to the contradictions which pertained to the act of publication throughout this period. An insight into this arena of contradiction is afforded by Sir John Davies, who evidently served as Cary's childhood handwriting instructor and who in 1612 urged her and two other ladies to publish their work. In a poem dedicating his Muses Sacrifice; or, Divine Meditations to "The Most Noble, and no lesse deservedly-renowned Ladyes, as well Darlings, as Patronesses, of the Muses; Lucy, Countesse of Bedford; Mary, Countesse-Dowager of Pembroke; and Elizabeth, Lady Cary, (Wife of Sr. Henry Cary)," Davies praises the last named as the creator of a drama set in Palestine and encourages her—or so it initially appears—to show her work to the public and to posterity:
The problem inherent in the logic of Davies's encomiastic rhetoric is that by praising a member of a class at the expense of that class (the "weaker Sexe") he implicitly places the exceptional woman in the double-bind situation so often discussed by modern feminists: achievement is bought at the price of dissociation from what the culture considers to be one's nature. Moreover, by erasing the fact of prior female achievement even as he urges Cary to publish so that history will not forget her, Davies testifies to a problem wryly noted by the seventeenth-century American poet Anne Bradstreet [in "The Prologue"]. Evidence of female achievement, she suggests, may well be simply ignored in an ideological climate that presupposes female inferiority:
For such despite they cast on Female wits:
If what I do prove well, it won't advance,
They'll say it's stoln, or else it was by chance.
Davies further complicates his exhortation to female publication by suggesting that it may involve a derogation of noble status in general and, in particular, a danger to female chastity. "You presse the Presse with little you have made," he chides his "Three Graces," but the phrasing surrounds publication with an aura of unseemly sexual importunity which thickens when Davies goes on, in the next stanza, to personify the Press both as a noble damsel in distress, in need of rescue from the low-born versifiers who have "wrong'd" her, and as a woman already so sullied that she is by implication worthy only of scorn from "great hearts":
[Y]ou well know the Presse so much is wrong'd,
by abject Rimers that great Hearts doe scorne
To have their Measures with such Nombers throng'd,
as are so basely got, conceiv'd, and borne.
The syntax creates a momentary ambiguity about whether "great Hearts" are the object or subject of "scorn" when they approach the press, and the stanza also conjures visions of sexual danger or blood-line contamination. The lines can therefore hardly be read as unequivocally encouraging a noblewoman to "presse the press" with her writing, since in so doing she is implicitly linked either with a fallen woman or with one who has deserted her sex altogether to assume the aggressively masculine sexual role suggested by the verb press. The advice to publish is tied to a covert argument for remaining aloof from a scene of illicit sexual traffic: she who submits her creative off-spring to the press is likely to be taken for an adulterous mother of bastards. Better to let the poetic children go to the grave unknown to the world than to allow one's noble (and by implication restrained, controlled) "Measures" be "throng'd" by "basely got" Numbers.
Davies's message to his noble female readers is not utterly distant in spirit from that which Sir Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham, sent to Lady Pembroke's niece, Mary Wroth. Outraged because he suspected an unflattering allusion to himself in Wroth's prose romance Urania, published in 1621 when the widowed author was in great need of money, Denny wrote her an insulting poem. Unpublished but widely circulated among his friends, it portrayed the female author as a monstrous creature:
Denny's harsh advice to Lady Mary that she should cease writing for public consumption evidently had an effect: she soon promised to withdraw her book from circulation.
We have no way of knowing whether Davies's ambiguously encouraging verses contributed in any way to the publication of Cary's play in 1613. Indeed, we can't even discover whether it was Cary herself or one of her friends or relatives who made the decision to publish. There is a cryptic remark in the Life about some verse by Cary "stolen" from her sister-in-law's bedroom, printed, and after-ward by the author's "own procurement called in." Elaine Beilin has speculated [in "Elizabeth Cary and The Tragedy of Mariam, 1980] that the "stolen" item may be the prefatory sonnet found in only two known copies of Mariam, the sonnet addressed to Cary's "worthy Sister, Mistris Elizabeth Carye" and hence an item which could identify the play's author to the public. If Beilin's hypothesis is right, it is interesting that Cary would have recalled the sonnet but not the play; perhaps she wanted it published but was unwilling to go so far in defying custom—and her husband's strong views on women's proper behavior as "private" beings—as she would have had she publicized her authorship.
The absence of any mention of Mariam at all in the Life of Cary and her daughter's obvious unwillingness to be known herself as a named author testify to the force of cultural strictures against women's publishing. And ideologies of gender were evidently often reinforced by those of class and religion to maintain the taboo against a privileged woman's "pressing the Press" with her writing. In rare cases such as Cary's, something might be published despite the taboo. But it probably affected the literary work's mode of material existence more often, and more substantially, than modern critics have tended to acknowledge. Recall that Cary's son Patrick "erased" certain passages from his sister's biography of his mother because they were "too feminine." What might Cary herself have "erased" from her play, following her conscious or unconscious judgment or that of other readers during the years when the play was evidently circulating in manuscript? The question can't, of course, be answered, but it's not altogether idle: the problem to which it points is that of censorship—a major theme in Cary's play.
The heroine of Cary's play is torn between the demands of wifely duty, which coincide at least intermittently with her feelings of love for the tyrannical but infatuated Herod, and the demands of her conscience, which are initially defined in terms of family loyalty and voiced through the figure of Mariam's mother, Alexandra. She hates her son-in-law because, to secure his claim to the throne of Judea, Herod had not only married the royalblooded Mariam but murdered her brother and grandfather. The nature of Mariam's dilemma shifts, however, as the play progresses, partly because her long soliloquies, like Hamlet's, work to dissolve binary oppositions. Also like Hamlet, Cary's play gives us characters who mirror certain aspects, and unrealizable potentials, of the central figure. At first glance, Cary's two major foil characters seem to come from a medieval morality play: on the one hand, there is Salome, Herod's wicked sister who works, Vice-like, to plot Mariam's death; on the other, there is Graphina, a slave girl loved by Herod's younger brother, Pheroras. Virtuous, humble, obedient, she seems to embody the ideal of womanhood prescribed in Renaissance conduct books.
The ethical opposition symbolized by these two characters—an opposition that emerges, specifically, as one of different modes of speech—is, however, also shot through with complexities. Salome's structural resemblance to the morality Vice figure is partly occluded when she is made to speak crudely but eloquently against the injustice of Jewish law, which gives (rich) men but not women the right to divorce (1.4); and Graphina—the only character whose name is not found in Josephus's text or in Lodge's translation of it—becomes more opaque the more one studies her brief appearance in Cary's text (2.1). She is strongly associated with the feminine virtue of modest silence, but the dramatic presentation prevents us from conceiving of that virtue as a simple alternative to the "vice" of female speech, either Salome's or Mariam's. Pheroras tells Graphina that he prefers her to the bride Herod had designated for him because that "baby" has an "Infant tongue" which can scarcely distinguish her name "to anothers care" (2.1.562-63). The "silent" Graphina evidently has won her lover's admiration for her powers of speech: "move thy tongue," he says, "For Silence is a signe of discontent" (2.1.588). She obeys. The strange little scene queries the logic of the "chaste, silent, and obedient" topos by suggesting first that womanly "silence" may function just as erotically as speech in a nonmarital relation (the conduct books never consider this possibility) and second that a certain kind of speech signifies the same thing that "silence" does in the discourse of wifely duty—that is, compliance with the man's wishes: Graphina tells her lover only what he wants to hear, when he wants to hear it. She may therefore be said to figure a mode of "safe" speech, private speech that neither aims at nor produces offense. Cary's invented name for this character might, on this line of interpretive speculation, be significant: the name evidently plays on the Greek word for writing, graphesis.
If the figure of Graphina represents for Cary the possibility of both a nontransgressive mode of discourse (like private writing?) and a mutually satisfying love relation, neither of those possibilities is available to the play's heroine. The first words Mariam speaks, which are also the play's first words, epitomize the problem:
How oft have I with publike voice run on?
To censure Rome's last Hero for deceit:
Because he wept when Pompeis life was gone,
Yet when he liv'd, hee thought his Name too great.
These lines, which are spoken in soliloquy and initiate a complex parallel between Mariam's situation and that of Julius Caesar, link the theme of female public voice immediately with the idea of transgression ("run on") and the idea of "censure." The question mark after the first line seems at first merely an oddity of seventeenth-century "rhetorical" punctuation. But the question itself, voiced at the play's threshold moment by a female character whose "unbridled speech" eventually plays a major role in her husband's decision to censor her voice definitively, is not by any means simply rhetorical. It is, we might say, complexly rhetorical—for several reasons. To make it the kind of question that obviously requires the affirmative answer "very often," the reader must "run on" over the line's end and its punctuation. The structure of the verse creates for the reader a slight but significant tension between pausing—to respect the seemingly self-contained formal and semantic unit of the first line—and proceeding, according to the dictates of the syntactic logic which retrospectively reveals the first line to be part of a larger unit. The verse thereby works to fashion a counterpoint between formal and semantic strains. We pause on the theme of "running on," we run on to encounter the theme of censure (as "censorship" and "critical judgment" both). The lines work not only to anticipate the drama to come (deploying the strategy of the "pregnant" opening most famously used in Hamlet) but also to mark the play, for Cary herself and perhaps for her first "private" readers, with something we might call the woman author's signature.
That signature consists not of a name but of a Chinese box set of questions about the logic of the Pauline injunction against female public speech and the cultural rule of chastity that injunction ostensibly supported. Like a lawyer presenting ambiguous fact situations to a judge, in the opening speech Cary invites us to consider whether the play text itself is "covered" by the law: Is writing a form of "public voice"? Is a drama not necessarily intended for performance on the public stage a legitimate form of female verbal production? Is a soliloquy—by theatrical convention, a "private" speech overheard (overread?) by an audience—legitimate? In short, the play opens in a way that seems designed to test, but not overtly to disobey, the rule proscribing "public voice" for women. Here we have a written representation of a female character soliloquizing, as if in private, about a prior event of (ambiguously) culpable public speech—ambiguously culpable because the comparison with Caesar's speech "degenders" Mariam's prior speech act, although the issue of gender, and a potential male audience's response to the speaker's gender, is clearly on the heroine's (and the author's) mind. Mariam goes on to transform the figure of Caesar from an (imperfect) model for a speaker to an authoritative model for an audience or judge. She suddenly apostrophizes the "Roman lord" with an aggressively defensive apology for exhibiting a fault (rash judgment) commonly ascribed to the daughters of Eve but also characteristic of many male rulers, including Julius Caesar:
But now I doe recant, and Roman Lord
Excuse too rash a judgment in a woman:
My sexe pleads pardon, pardon then afford,
Mistaking is with us, but too too common.
(1.1.5-8)
Mariam's opening lines arguably address a problem that has to do not only with female speech in general but with the play's own mode of material existence—indeed, its right to exist in the world. The act of writing, for oneself or for an audience of family and friends, would seem—like the dramatic form of the soliloquy—to occupy a shady territory between private and public verbal production. Because of the ambiguous status of writing, Cary could in one sense have applied Mariam's opening question to herself and answered it with a decorum the fictional character lacks. "How oft have I with publike voice run on?" "Never." But that answer would not have satisfied the culturally constructed censoring power that the play text ascribes chiefly to the figure of the tyrant-husband but also to the chorus and, at certain moments, to the heroine herself, speaking, evidently, for an aspect of the author's own conscience or superego.
According to her daughter, Cary "did always much disapprove the practice of satisfying oneself with their conscience being free from fault, not forbearing all that might have the least show or suspicion of uncomeliness or unfitness; what she thought to be required in this she expressed in this motto (which she caused to be inscribed in her daughter's wedding ring): Be and seem." This passage, which attributes to Cary a rule of spiritual and social conduct as fraught with problems as the rules Hamlet formulates for himself, might be paraphrased as follows: never be satisfied that you really are as virtuous as you may seem to yourself—but always be what you seem. The difficulty of putting such a principle into practice is dramatized, in Cary's play, by the fact that the chorus formulates one version of this rule in order to condemn Mariam for following (and articulating) another version of it.
The chorus's speech occurs at a pivotal moment in the plot: at the end of Act 3, just before Herod's first appearance on stage and just after Mariam learns, through her guardian, Sohemus, that Herod is alive. The rumor of his death in Rome had prompted Mariam's opening soliloquy detailing her mixed emotions about him and had also prompted the various intrigues—by Salome, by Mariam's mother, Alexandra, and others—which are described and partly enacted in the first half of the play. Through talking with Sohemus, Mariam has just learned of Herod's secret orders that she should be killed if he dies. Sohemus has both disobeyed those orders and broken his oath to keep silent about them—a double transgression that Salome will subsequently exploit to fulfill her desires to rid herself of her husband, Constabarus, and to bring about Mariam's downfall. In this same scene, Mariam has announced to Sohemus her "solemne vowes" to abandon Herod's bed (3.3.1136). Despite Sohemus's prudential advice to the contrary, she refuses to be reconciled sexually with her husband. Mariam's oath arises from her commitment to an ethic of uniting her "being" with her "seeming": she has told Sohemus that she will not use sexual wiles to disguise her true feelings about Herod, nor will she speak in a way that hides her thoughts: "I scorne my looke should ever man beguile, / Or other speech, then meaning to afford" (3.3.1168-69). It is such words of principle—and the principle that generates such words—that Sohemus laments thus after Mariam has left the stage:
Poor guiltles Queene! Oh that my wish might place
A little temper now about thy heart:
Unbridled speech is Mariam's worst disgrace,
And will indanger her without desart.
(3.3.1184-87)
His lines anticipate, albeit with more sympathy for Mariam, the chorus's criticism of her in the subsequent speech, which I shall quote in full:
Tis not enough for one that is a wife
To keep her spotles from an act of ill:
But from suspition she should free her life,
And bare her selfe of power as well as will.
Tis not so glorious for her to be free,
As by her proper selfe restrain'd to bee.
When she hath spatious ground to walke upon,
Why on the ridge should she desire to goe?
It is no glory to forbeare alone,
Those things that may her honour overthrowe.
But tis thanke-worthy, if she will not take
All lawfull liberties for honours sake.
That wife her hand against her fame doth reare,
That more then to her Lord alone will give
A private word to any second eare,
And though she may with reputation live.
Yet though most chast, she doth her glory blot,
And wounds her honour, though she killes it not.
When to their Husbands they themselves doe bind,
Doe they not wholy give themselves away?
Or give they but their body not their mind,
Reserving that though best, for others pray?
No sure, their thoughts no more can be their owne,
And therefore should to none but one be knowne.
Then she usurpes upon anothers right,
That seekes to be by publike language grac't:
And though her thoughts reflect with purest light,
Her mind if not peculiar [i.e., "private"] is not chast.
For in a wife it is no worse to finde,
A common body, then a common minde.
And every mind though free from thought of ill,
That out of glory seekes a worth to show:
When any's eares but one therewith they fill,
Doth in a sort her purenes overthrow.
Now Mariam had, (but that to this she bent)
Beene free from feare, as well as innocent.
(3.3.1219-54)
[As she notes in "Two English Women in the Seventeenth Century: Notes for an Anatomy of Feminine Desire," 1985,] Angeline Goreau finds in this speech testimony to the "social hegemony" of the idea of female modesty in seventeenth-century England. Assuming that the chorus speaks unequivocally for the author's own opinions, Goreau concludes that Cary here ratifies a definition of chastity not only as abstinence from illegitimate sexual activity but also as a virtue that involves divesting oneself of "power as well as will." By thus reinterpreting chastity as passivity, [Goreau, in The Whole Duty of a Woman: Female Writers in Seventeenth-Century England, 1985, claims that] Cary "sets up an infinitely expanding architecture of self-restraint, often more far-reaching and effective than any form of external censorship might be."
Goreau is right to stress this feature of the chorus's speech, but she fails to consider the ways in which both the rhetoric of the speech and its larger dramatic context render this extreme prescription of wifely self-censorship problematic. The chorus, indeed, offers contradictory statements about the precise nature of the error Mariam has committed. According to the second stanza, the error involves indulging in, rather than refraining from, something that is characterized as "lawfull" liberty. When the chorus goes on to specify the error as a fault of speech, however, its "lawfull" status seems to disappear. By stanza five, the error is the distinctly illegitimate and usually masculine political one of "usurping upon anothers right." There is a corresponding contradiction in the chorus's views of the "virtue" it is advocating. In the third stanza, which stresses the duty of relinquishing desires for speech and fame, the virtue being advocated is quite distinct from the possession of physical chastity; the woman may be "most chast" even if she does grant a "private word" to someone other than her husband. By stanza five, however, the "redefinition" of chastity that Goreau remarks has occurred: "her mind if not peculiar [private] is not chast." Which formulation about chastity are we to take as authoritative?
Interpreting the chorus's speech becomes even more difficult when we try to read it—as Goreau does not—in its dramatic context, as an ethical prescription for this particular heroine. The final lines seem to suggest that Mariam's tragic fate could have been averted had she refrained from speaking her mind to anyone other than her husband. But the play's subsequent development makes this notion absurd: it is precisely because Mariam speaks her mind—not only to others but also, and above all, to her husband—that she loses her life. She articulates in Herod's presence a version of the same principle we have heard her assert to Sohemus: "I cannot frame disguise, nor never taught / My face a looke dissenting from my thought," she says, refusing to smile when Herod bids her to (4.3.1407-8). It is, however, not wholly accurate to say she brings on her death by transgressively speaking her mind. The problem is that she both speaks too freely and refuses to give her body to Herod—its rightful owner, according to the chorus. She censors the wrong thing: his phallus rather than her tongue.
The problem of her sexual withholding is addressed by the chorus only obliquely, in the form of the (apparently) rhetorical question "When to their Husbands they themselves doe bind, / Doe they not wholy give themselves away?" By the end of its speech, the chorus has evidently suppressed altogether the crucial issue of Mariam's denial of Herod's sexual rights. The strange logic of the speech anticipates that of Herod's later accusation of Mariam: "shee's unchaste, / Her mouth will ope to ev'ry strangers eare" (4.7.1704-5). The equation of physical unchastity with verbal license, expressed through the provocative image of the woman's mouth opening to a man's ear, alludes, perhaps, to anti-Catholic propaganda against Jesuit priests as Satanic corrupters of women and of the institution of confession, where male "strangers" received women's secrets. The image of a female mouth promiscuously opening to a male ear rewrites Mariam's fault as one of double excess or "openness," whereas what the play actually shows is that Mariam's verbal openness is a sign of sexual closure. Her behavior entails a "property" crime in certain ways more threatening than adultery is to the ideological conception of marriage because it takes to a logical extreme, and deploys against the husband, the concept of female chastity.
Neither the chorus nor any other character in the drama can clearly articulate this central problem in Mariam's behavior. The chorus concludes by asserting that Mariam would have been "free from feare, as well as innocent," if only she had been willing to forbear filling "any's ears but one" with her words. The pronoun one evidently refers here, as it does in the earlier phrase "none but one," to the husband. If, however, we grant that the play as a whole makes it extremely hard to read the chorus's question about whether women should give themselves "wholly" away in marriage as requiring a simple affirmative answer, then it becomes necessary to ask … whether the term one might alternatively refer to the wife herself. Since Mariam is in danger because she speaks to her husband—and against his sexual will and his property rights—perhaps Cary's point, if not the chorus's, is that if a wife has such thoughts she "would be wiser to keep them to herself, precisely because in marriage they are no longer her own" [Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama, 1985]. But in Mariam's case, such silence or self-censoring would not have any practical efficacy unless it were accompanied by sexual surrender and its psychic corollary: the split between being and seeming which Mariam terms "hypocrisy." The chorus's ethical precepts begin to look at best incoherent, at worst cynical, a dark twisting of the "be and seem" motto into a prescription for wives to seem as others think they should be. Belsey suggests, indeed, that with this speech "the transparency of the text falters as it confronts its own theorization of its challenge to marital absolutism. Although I'm less sure than she is that the text is ever "transparent," I agree that there is a peculiar opacity in the chorus's speech against a wife's right to use "publike language."
That opacity, I think, has something to do with the fact that the chorus's speech is the moment in the drama where Cary most directly interrogates her play's own right to exist. However we construe the injunction that wives should reveal their thoughts to "none but one," it is clear that the chorus draws around the wife a circle of privacy so small that she would err by circulating a manuscript, much less publishing it. Had Cary obeyed the rule of privacy set forth by her chorus, she might possibly have written a play, but we would not be reading it. Even the act of writing, which generally requires some will and ambition, comes under implicit attack in the chorus's portrait of the ideal wife who "bare[s] herself of power as well as will" and who is urged to relinquish in particular all desire for "glory." The chorus's speech exposes the logical implications of the legal doctrine of coverture, which held that "the very being … of the woman is suspended during the marriage."
The Life of Cary by her daughter provides three interesting and ideologically complex glosses on the chorus's speech. "He was very absolute," the Life says of Sir Henry, "and though she [Elizabeth Cary] had a strong will, she had learned to make it obey his. The desire to please him had power to make her do that, that others could have scarce believed possible for her; as taking care of the house in all things (to which she could have no inclination but what his will gave her)." The Life also tells us that Cary often resorted to sleep to cure depression; she could sleep "when she would," which seems a near analogue for the paradoxical ideal of willed willessness projected by the chorus's speech. And finally the Life recounts that Cary gave to her eldest daughter a principle of behavior that contains a significant exception to the absolutist doctrine of wifely obedience: "Wheresoever reason and conscience would permit her, she should prefer the will of another before her own."
Cary's exception has analogues in numerous Protestant works that challenged the doctrine of absolutist royal sovereignty by positing for the individual (male) subject a limited right of passive disobedience to the prince or magistrate on grounds of Christian conscience. Moreover, Cary's statement (as reported by her Catholic daughter) corresponds with certain statements by both radical Protestant and Catholic theorists on the wife's right to disobey her husband—the sovereign's domestic representative and analogue in the little body politic of the family—if his commands should conflict with God's. In ["Recusant Women," 1985], Marie Bowlands mentions the case of Margaret Clitherow, who "asked her confessor whether she might receive priests and serve God without her husband's consent. She was told that the less he knew the better, and that nothing could override her duty to serve God." Bowlands also cites a passage from the Catholic Treatise on Christian Renunciation which advised women that "your husbands over your soul have no authority and over your bodies but limited power."
During this turbulent era of British history, such formulations appear with enough frequency to justify us in saying they comprise an ideological topos of "minority dissent." Articulated by Catholic and Protestant writers, male and female, such statements clearly drive a wedge into the apparently hegemonic social rule linking female chastity with silence and obedience. The dissenting female voice, historical or fictional, invokes religious principles to redefine chastity in a way that dissociates it from obedience to (certain) figures of male authority. Consider, for instance, the speech of Milton's "Lady" to her would-be king and seducer, Comus: "Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind / With all thy charms, although this corporal rind / Thou hast immanacl'd, while Heav'n sees good" (A Maske [1637], 11. 663-65); or consider the speech of a beleaguered heroine in an anonymous play of 1620: "Tho my body be confin'd his prisoner, / Yet my mind is free" (Swetnam the Woman Hater Arraigned by Woman, 2.1.97-98).
The language Mariam uses to justify her course of action—resistance to the sexual demands and other wishes of a husband who is also her king—clearly belongs to this religious tradition of minority dissent: "They can but my life destroy, / My soule is free from adversaries power" (4.8.1843-44), she says after Herod has falsely accused her of adultery and, spurred on by Salome, proclaimed his intention to execute her. Although the chorus continues to argue that Mariam should have submitted to Herod's authority—thereby paying her marital "debt" and winning "long famous life" (4.8.1939)—Elaine Beilin is surely right to argue that the play's final act reconceives (and simplifies) the conflict between the chorus's perspective on wifely duty and Mariam's by presenting the heroine's death as an allegorical version of Christ's crucifixion. Josephus had shown Mariam meeting her death with noble fortitude, but Cary adds to her source numerous details that give Mariam a specifically Christological heroism. The messenger who describes her death to Herod in Act 5 apostrophizes her as "your heavenly self and goes on to compare her to a phoenix, a traditional symbol of Christ. A parallel between Mariam and Christ is also implied by the suicide of the butler who had been suborned by Salome to accuse Mariam of seeking to poison Herod. Cary's butler, like Judas, hangs himself from a tree in remorse for his betrayal; in Josephus, there is no mention of the butler's death.
Cary further revises her source by specifying the mode of Mariam's death. Josephus simply says that Herod ordered her executed, whereas Cary places considerable emphasis on the "fact" that she is beheaded. This detail, unremarked by Cary's critics so far as I know, seems an overdetermined allusion—to Christ's harbinger, John the Baptist, beheaded by Salome; to a recent queen of Scotland, Mary, whose son ruled England when Cary wrote her play and who was in the eyes of many English Catholics a victim of Protestant tyranny; and also, perhaps, to Anne Boleyn, killed by a royal husband who had broken with the Catholic church to divorce his first wife and who was explicitly likened to the tyrant Herod by some of his disapproving subjects. Infused with rich but warily coded theological meanings, Cary's play surrounds Mariam's death with an aura of mysterious sanctification altogether absent from Josephus's narrative.
There is, however, a price for such sanctification, with its implicit justification of the ethical path Cary herself would eventually follow: the path that led her to defy her husband's authority on the grounds of conscience. In the play's final act, Mariam is not only absent from the stage but also represented, through the messenger's account of her last moments, as a woman who has somehow learned to bridle her tongue. On the way to her execution, she is cruelly taunted by her mother, who, after having urged Mariam throughout the play to despise Herod, now suddenly—evidently to save her own skin—condemns Mariam for "wronging" Herod's princely authority (5.1.1986). Enraged at the report of Alexandra's behavior, Herod asks, "What answere did her princely daughter make?" The messenger replies, "She made no answere" (5.1.1992); and he goes on to stress Mariam's new virtue of silence by remarking that she died "as if … she were content" after "she some silent prayer had sed" (2026-27). The wickedness associated with the female tongue and with women in general, according to Constabarus's misogynist tirade against the sex to which Salome belongs (4.6.1578-1619), is here symbolically transferred from Mariam to her mother, who takes Mariam's place as the object of Herod's censoring wrath: "Why stopt you not her mouth? where had she words / to darke that, that Heaven made so brighte?" (5.1.1979-80), Herod asks the messenger; and the reader remembers that Herod has just exercised his power to stop Mariam's mouth. Once he has done so, in what seems to me the play's most complex and ambivalent irony, he suddenly starts to value Mariam's words with passionate desire: "But what sweet tune did this faire dying Swan / Afford thine eare: tell all, omit no letter" (5.1.2008-9), he says; and again, in an exchange that seems designed to effect a kind of wish-fulfilling revenge on the tyrannical censorious husband, he exclaims: "Oh say, what said she more? each word she sed / Shall be the food whereon my heart is fed" (2013-14). To which the messenger replies, reporting Mariam's words, "Tell thou my Lord thou saw'st me loose my breath." "Oh that I could that sentence now controule," Herod responds, ostensibly referring to his own "sentence" of death. His remark might also, however, refer to Mariam's utterance: by killing her, he has after all lost the power to control her speech. His "word," as he says later, made her "bleed," but it cannot bring her back to life.
It seems significant that Cary only imagines Herod coming to value Mariam's voice at the moment when the disputed property of her body is absent both from the stage and from the narrative "present": "Her body is divided from her head," the Nuntio asserts, and the graphic image of the dead and sundered woman (which occurs nowhere in Josephus's text) highlights the price Mariam has paid for her freedom of conscience. Through its characterization of Mariam, the play offers two different models, neither very satisfactory from a modern feminist perspective, for a woman's ability to exercise her will: according to both models, which might be called the domestic and the religious respectively, the will is exercised with the ultimate aim of losing it or, rather, of adopting, as an object of desire, the effacement of personal desire. Cary's heroine, unable to choose the first model by subordinating her will to her husband's, opts instead for an extreme version of the second, a martyr-like death: "Now earth farewell, though I be yet but young, / Yet I, me thinks, have knowne thee too too long" (4.8.1902-3). In so choosing, Mariam, like Richard Wilbur's nuns "keeping their difficult balance," finds an uneasy compromise solution to the conflicting behavioral models provided by Salome on the one hand and Graphina on the other: by the former's example of aggressive rebellion against patriarchal rules and the latter's example of passive subservience to a man (rewarded by his romantic adoration).
How are we to assess Mariam's compromise solution from a modern feminist perspective informed by an awareness of the social and imaginative options open to a woman like Elizabeth Cary? Although Cary's representation of Mariam, like Cary's daughter's representation of her mother, shows us women behaving in ways that anticipate the "principled disobedience" characteristic of some radical Protestant women during the English civil wars, neither of the Cary texts shows a heroine explicitly justifying independent female behavior. The radicalism of these texts, in so far as we may call it that, occurs chiefly in small details of plot and, in the case of the play, through oblique intertextual allusions, moments of rhetorical tension, and the words of female characters such as Salome, Alexandra, and Herod's first wife, Doris; in other words, what is radical must be inferred or teased out by a reader who assumes that an emphatic "no" may mean a "yes"—a reader, in short, sympathetic with psychoanalytic modes of interpretation and also aware that the censorship so often constitutive of the female author's text may derive not only from what we call the "unconscious" but also from direct social pressures or from that combination of the two known as internalization.
Sympathetic though we may be with the covertly radical dimension of Cary's play and her life story, we nonetheless need to remark that other seventeenth-century women, both historical and fictional, were considerably less oblique than Cary and her daughter in arguing for and/or in demonstrating some form of female independence. One has only to think of the lively and complex heroine of Middleton's and Dekker's The Roaring Girl (1611) or the Protestant radical Katherine Chidley; the latter, in her Justification of the Independent Churches of Christ (1641), writes: "I pray you tell me what authority the unbeleeving husband hath over the conscience of his beleeving wife. It is true he hath authority over her in bodily and civill respects but not to be a Lord over her conscience." On the spectrum suggested (very incompletely) by such examples, Cary's play appears quite conservative in its statement about women's social being. That conservatism derives from many sources—above all, I think, from the fact that the ideologies of gender, religion, and (privileged) class worked together, in the case of Cary's play, to limit its potential either to reach a broad audience or to make a clear critique of women's status as a male property category.
Consider again the play's contradictory mode of existence as a published Senecan closet drama. Intriguing as it is that this female-authored play was published at all—and evidently with Cary's acquiescence, if not with her active approval—the fact remains that it had a limited and mainly elite readership. Like the Judith Shakespeare imagined by Virginia Woolf, Cary was barred from significant participation in the world of the London stage. Had she been able to write for the public theater, instead of being simply an occasional member of an audience in the city and a closet dramatist at home, her play itself might have been differently constructed; it would surely have reached a wider audience in her own day and later. As the case of Shakespeare amply testifies, access to the commercial stage bears no necessary relation to the articulation of progressive political positions. Such access, however, which opens a play to scrutiny from members of different classes, did frequently serve in Renaissance England as an enabling condition for the development of certain politically radical interpretations of drama. And such interpretations may or may not have been intended by an individual author.
Cary's gender alone would have served to keep her away from the London stage, but her gender and class aspirations and religious beliefs all worked together to create Mariam's extremely ambivalent ideological statement about women as male "property." That statement concludes with, though it's not fully constituted by, Mariam choosing (under great duress) to turn her critical rebellious energies inward to self-reproach and upward toward a transcendental religious ideal of chaste female martyrdom. Cary thus rejects the option of turning Mariam's energies outward to some form of collective action by allying her heroine's rebellion against Herod with the "base-born" Salome's critique of the sexual double standard in divorce laws. The vilifying of Salome is of course dictated—but only in part—by generic conventions and by the historical plot Cary inherited; I would argue, however, that Cary's own class position and biases contribute substantially to what she does with Salome. Even more than Herod, Salome is implicated in Cary's use of her drama to rewrite the social story of her marriage. For Salome stands in relation to Mariam as Cary stood in relation to her own husband and mother-in-law; the latter's dislike of Elizabeth, vividly recorded in the Life, may well have entailed open or veiled insults about base birth like those which Mariam directs at her sister-in-law. If, as I am suggesting, a desire to ennoble herself and take revenge on the family into which she had been married against her will underlies Cary's identification with the "pureblooded" Mariam, that desire contributes to the play's occlusion of the similarities between Mariam's and Salome's situations as rebellious wives. And the separation between Mariam and Salome, drawn in terms of their social status, contributes in turn to the sharp distinction the play draws between the (religiously valuable) idea of female freedom of conscience and Salome's advocacy of female freedom to pursue one's sexual desires. By vilifying Salome's character and opinions as "base," Cary ultimately ratifies the ideological "truth" proclaimed by the authoritative voices of the Counter-Reformation church (and most Protestant sects as well), by the voices of men in the English middle and upper classes, and by the voices of almost everyone who participated in the Renaissance debates on the nature of womankind. That "truth" is that, whatever one may think about the qualities of a woman's mind or soul, her body is base and in need of governance.
The limits of Cary's choices—and her heroine's—are complex products of a specific set of historical circumstances and of an individual psyche capable, to some degree, of interrogating, and even defying, the "customs" rooted in the material and ideological aspects of gender, religion, and class. The complexes of social facts to which those three abstract terms refer have changed enormously since the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, the heuristic interest of Cary's case for late-twentieth-century feminists may well lie in the challenge it offers for thinking about how modern ideologies of gender, radical or conservative, continue to be formed—and deformed—by forces of class and religion that are partly, but not wholly, within our powers to understand and to alter.
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