Lady Elizabeth Cary's closet drama The Tragedy of Mariam was written around 1602-1604 but was not published until 1613, becoming the first play authored by an Englishwoman to ever be published. She takes the basic plot and characters of her story from the ancient story of evil King Herod and his wife Mariam, chronicled most notably in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews. (Cary uses Thomas Lodge's 1602 translation of Antiquities). While she generally stays faithful to the chain of events chronicled in Josephus, she changes the timeline of the original story and some facets of the characters' personalities, while adding a Christian undertone and a romantic subplot or two to the work.
The events that take place in the story are spread out over the period of about a year in Josephus, but Cary chooses instead to compress the entire tale into the span of one day, thus keeping with the classical tradition of unity in time. Cary also begins the play in medias res, with Mariam and her mother, Alexandra, talking of the news that Herod has been killed on his way back from Rome. The visit to Egypt mentioned in Josephus is placed far back in the past. The quarrels between the women who surround Herod, however, are as apparent here as in Josephus; even though Cary does not go through all of the incidents that heretofore set Mariam against Doris and Salome, the tensions between the women are readily seen. For example, when Alexandra mentions to Mariam that perhaps Herod wants her dead so he can legally reunite with his first wife, Doris, Mariam replies, "Doris, alas her time of love was passed, / Those coals were raked in embers long ago" (I.132-133). Herod divorced Doris many years before in order to marry Mariam, and Mariam acknowledges this event caused the hatred that Doris has against her.
In Josephus, Mariam is at times portrayed as a shrewish, whiny wife who plots against her husband. At the beginning of his account of Mariam and Herod, he writes that, while locked up in the castle during Herod's absence, Mariam is upset that she "neither might make use of other mens, nor enjoy [her] owne goods," thus implying that she is not only complaining for no reason but is an adulteress (Weller 277). In The Tragedy of Mariam, however, she is characterized as an innocent woman torn between being a good wife--that is, chaste, silent, and obedient--and standing up against his tyranny to protest the deaths of her grandfather and brother, both of whom Herod had murdered in order to obtain the throne. The beginning of the play catches Mariam in her soliloquy, lamenting how she once despised Julius Caesar for weeping over Pompey's death (I.1-10). She now mourns her loved ones' deaths openly, wanting to love Herod because he is her husband but hating him because he engineered her grandfather and brother out of the picture.
Josephus writes about the scheming of Salome and Herod's mother to frame Mariam for attempting to poison the king, but only mentions one occasion where there were harsh words exchanged by the two opposing camps of women. Cary writes her own version of some of the ugly exchanges she supposed might have flown between Salome and Mariam; these exchanges make up some of the most lively parts of the play. In one scene, Mariam finally loses her temper and proclaims Salome to be of low birth, scarcely better than her own servants before she became queen (I.223-226). Mariam is, in Cary's work, a woman who is unafraid to speak her mind and eventually is killed for having such audacity in a world where the only good woman is a silent one.
The subplots of the marriage of Graphina and Pheroras and the triangle of Salome, Constabarus, and Silleus are not found in the Antiquities. However, they add interest to the main story and also reflect on Salome's moral character. Salome herself wants to divorce Constabarus and marry her lover, Silleus, an act impossible under Hebrew law, for only men could initiate a divorce from a wife, and only under very specific circumstances such as adultery. Somehow Salome does manage to finagle a divorce from Constabarus and shows the reader that not only does her lust for power send an innocent woman to her death, but her lust for the male body breaks sacred law and likely sends her soul to hell.
Cary's Mariam has Christian undertones, most notably in the martyrdom that Mariam goes through in her death. She is an innocent woman whose only crime was speaking up for herself. In Act III, Sohemus reflects on the troubled Mariam, musing, "Unbridled speech is Mariam's worst disgrace / And will endanger her without desart" (III.183-184). Mariam continues to protest her innocence from Herod's accusation in IV.162-165 until her death, much as did many Christian saints who were tortured and martyred for their faithfulness to Christ.
Although Lady Elizabeth Cary changes details of Josephus' writings to suit her own literary purposes, she basically stays within the lines of the original story of how scheming relatives and a foolish, evil king send an innocent woman to be executed.
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