The Literary career and legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680

Abstract

Heather Wolfe, ed. The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. xiv+258pp. ISBN 978 1 4039 7016 9.1. Slender though it may be, the corpus of Elizabeth Cary's literary works, or at least those works attributed to her, has provoked a large and varied range of critical responses. As Heather Wolfe comments in her introduction to this collection of essays, Cary's former image as 'a nearly forgotten playwright and eccentric Roman Catholic convert' has been replaced with a fresh evaluation of her status as an accomplished 'Renaissance woman historian, playwright, translator, and poet' (1). After a lengthy period of obscurity Cary has provoked a remarkably robust range of criticism in a relatively short space of time to which this collection of essays represents a significant contribution.2. The book is divided into four sections, each focusing upon a specific work or a certain aspect of her literary legacy. The subject of the essays in the first section is Cary's most famous work, the neo-Senecan closet play, The Tragedy of Mariam. Written during the first decade of James I's reign, Mariam is noted as the first printed example of an original dramatic work written by a female author. The first chapter, by Ilona Bell, looks at the way in which the play is influenced by contemporary traditions of lyric poetry, particularly the Petrarchan sonnet. As Bell points out, 'Cary's play is writ all in verse and in rhyme. The iambic pentameter lines, quatrains with alternating rhymes, are punctuated by occasional couplets that produce sonnets, or truncated sonnets, throughout the play' (17). Of particular interest to Bell is the way that the appropriation of poetic forms interrogates social conventions, especially relating to the social status of women. The second chapter, by Erin E. Kelly, examines Mariam's status as Christian martyr, which, as Kelly acknowledges, has become 'a critical commonplace' (35), although 'no one has discussed how Cary's depiction of Mariam fits into the complex history of martyrology' (35), an imbalance Kelly seeks to redress. She argues that Mariam diverges from the typical image of female martyrs through her failure to conform to contemporary models of feminine behaviour yet, paradoxically, it is this subversive non-conformity that seals her status as a martyr. In the third and final chapter of this section, Alison Shell looks at the relationship between Mariam and its principal source, Thomas Lodge's translation of Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews, focusing primarily upon the view of history advanced by the preface rather than the play's fidelity to the source.3. The second, and longest, section of this volume is dedicated to Cary's prose history, Edward II, written during the 1620s but not published until 1680. The first two entries in this section concentrate on the political aspects of the text beginning with Curtis Perry's reading of it against the culture of favouritism, particularly that which he labels 'the Buckingham phenomenon' (71). Mihoko Suzuki also considers the political aspects of Edward II, particularly the way in which it was influenced by, and participated in, a Machiavellian tradition of political writing which included the works of John of Salisbury and John Fortescue. The final two chapters examine the history of the text in print. Jesse G. Swan considers the critical reputation of the octavo version which, he argues, has been unjustly marginalized in favour of the longer folio version. Swan argues that the octavo text can effectively be considered as a separate work with an agenda independent to that of the folio text. …