Between the years 1602 and 1604, the Viscountess Falkland, Elizabeth Cary, wrote the Senecan revenge tragedy, "The Tragedy of Mariam", though it was not published until almost a decade later, in 1613. The play is considered groundbreaking; it is the first known play to be written by a woman and it is also the first play that presents the relationship between King Herod of Judea and his wife, Mariam, in close focus. Although some scholars believe that Cary actually wrote a complete play before this one, there is no definitive proof of this, and so "The Tragedy of Mariam" is given this honor.
The play was printed and published by Thomas Creede specifically for the book-seller Richard Hawkins. Cary's main sources of research were "The Wars of the Jews' and "The Antiquities of the Jews", by Josephys, and typical of Jacobean Senecan revenge tragedies, there is very little violence played out on-stage despite the obvious thematic violence in the story that is being told. It was never really intended to be performed in a theater, but to be read in the script form, either to oneself, or read aloud, and for this reason the characters, and particularly the Chorus, explain the action in dialogue, as there is very little physical performance of the plot.
When the play was published it was to very little fanfare. The story of Herod and Mariam is not one that at the time of its publication the public would have much awareness of, or even much interest in. It was not until the 1970s, and the rise of feminism, that the play was given much consideration at all, when it began to garner attention or its strong female characters and for relationships that clearly intimated that the power within them lay with the women. Writing the play in Jacobean times was also a way for a woman such as Cary to be passive-aggressive in making a stand against the patriarchal social order of the age. This was something very close to Cary's own heart; after converting to Catholicism in 1626, after a trip to Ireland, her husband attempted to divorce her against her wishes. Although he was ultimately unsuccessful in doing this he did manage to prevent Cary from having any contact with her children.
Since early childhood, Cary had found religion captivating, and "The Tragedy of Miriam" was the result of a collision between her anger about the way in which women could be treated by society, and her research into and fascination with the historical characters of Biblical times.
Lady Falkland passed away in 1639 at the age of fifty-three. At the time of her death, she was a renowned and respected translator, writer and poet.
