The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry is a Jacobean closet drama by Elizabeth Tanfield Cary. First published in 1613, it was the first work by a woman to be published under her real name. Never performed during Cary's lifetime, and apparently never intended for performance, the Senecan revenge tragedy tells the story of Mariam, the second wife of Herod. The play exposes and explores the themes of sex, divorce, betrayal, murder, and Jewish society under Herod's tyrannous rule. The wide-ranging introduction discusses the play in the context of closet drama, female dramatists and feminist criticism, providing an ideal edition for study and teaching. This is a major edition of an unusual and provocative play not widely available elsewhere.
Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, Lady Falkland (1585- 1639) was a poet, translator, and dramatist. Cary was associated with the literary circle of Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and a number of writers dedicated various works to her, a testament to her literary reputation. She is best known now for The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry (1613), the first original play in English known to have been written by a woman. Amongst her other works are The History of the Most Unfortunate Prince: King Edward II (1680).
This landmark edition . . . will be invaluable to scholars, teachers, and students."—Carol Thomas Neely, author of Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays
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The Mirror of the Worlde is an important addition to the canon of Elizabeth Tanfield Cary. Best known for her play The Tragedy of Mariam, Cary is revealed here as a sheltered but precocious child who translated the texts accompanying the maps in an early modern atlas when she was no more than twelve. This book identifies the source text and makes widely available for the first time the full transcription of Elizabeth Cary's manuscript translation of L'Epitome du Théâtre du Monde d'Abraham Ortelius (c. 1588). Dedicated to her mother's well-connected aristocratic uncle, Sir Henry Lee, The Mirror of the Worlde - one of the first known English versions of Ortelius - is a rich source of information about her childhood and education, the writers who influenced her, and the emerging themes and preoccupations that would come to inform her later work. Peterson's critical edition illuminates the strategies by which this savvy young writer finds means to comment on the atlas' descriptions, reveals an active and original authorial presence, and suggests a much earlier interest in Catholicism than biographers have hitherto considered. An impressive work of apprenticeship, The Mirror of the Worlde shows Cary honing her poetic craft, mastering the rhetoric of polite resistance, and, above all, thinking critically about the place of women in the wide, wonderful, and often violent world that Ortelius depicted.
This examination of the fate of lost ideas after the Protestant reformation explores what might be called the pathology of the Renaissance. The first part of the book treats Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost, concentrating on vacant cultural spaces and abandoned icons to trace the gap between sacred and secular life, between poetry and belief. The second part focuses on Shakespeare's Hamlet and Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam to investigate the eschatological implications of this gap, the ways that history is disentangled from memory and nostalgia severed from experience. The book challenges readings of Renaissance culture as an increasingly secular one, proposing that sacred symbols and practices still powerfully organized the English moral imagination, oriented behaviors and arranged perceptions, and specified the limits of the known world.
This landmark edition . . . will be invaluable to scholars, teachers, and students."—Carol Thomas Neely, author of Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays
The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry is a Jacobean closet drama by Elizabeth Tanfield Cary. First published in 1613, it was the first work by a woman to be published under her real name. Never performed during Cary's lifetime, and apparently never intended for performance, the Senecan revenge tragedy tells the story of Mariam, the second wife of Herod. The play exposes and explores the themes of sex, divorce, betrayal, murder, and Jewish society under Herod's tyrannous rule. The wide-ranging introduction discusses the play in the context of closet drama, female dramatists and feminist criticism, providing an ideal edition for study and teaching. This is a major edition of an unusual and provocative play not widely available elsewhere.
Classic Plays by Women: an anthology of the best plays by female dramatists from 1600-2000 Staged in theatres by successive generations and proving relevant to contemporary audiences, the plays demonstrate the wit, theatrical skill and innovation of their creators in exploring timeless topics from marriage, morality and money to class conflict, rage and sexual desire. An essential resource for students, playwrights, colleges, universities and libraries, this collection also provides theatres with the opportunity to programme a range of theatrical classics by women. Plays from: Hroswitha’s Paphnutius (extract); Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam(extract); Aphra Behn’s The Rover; Susanna Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke For A Wife; Joanna Baillie’s De Montfort; Githa Sowerby’s Rutherford and Son; Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden; Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (extract); Marie Jones’ Stones in his Pockets.
This book proposes that Jews were present in England in substantial numbers from the Roman Conquest forward. Indeed, there has never been a time during which a large Jewish-descended, and later Muslim-descended, population has been absent from England. Contrary to popular history, the Jewish population was not expelled from England in 1290, but rather adopted the public face of Christianity, while continuing to practice Judaism in secret. Crypto-Jews and Crypto-Muslims held the highest offices in the land, including service as archbishops, dukes, earls, kings and queens. Among those proposed to be of Jewish ancestry are the Tudor kings and queens, Queen Elizabeth I, William the Conqueror, and Thomas Cromwell. Documentaton in support of this revisionist history includes DNA studies, genealogies, church records, place names and the Domesday Book.
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