Access and Agency in Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam: Early Modern Closet Drama and the Spatialization of Power

Abstract

This essay was runner-up in the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Renaissance Section.

Numerous critics have explored the stoic sentiments in Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), especially the ways in which female characters negotiate the demands of patriarchal force, while expressing a conscience contrary to those demands. However, this essay examines the material conditions necessary for pursuing stoic ideals, prompted by the fact that Cary uniquely depicts female resistance of tyrannical conditions in distinctly spatial terms. Her closet drama consistently deploys literary representations of space to ask important questions about gendered subjects: How is space an expression and enforcement of power upon women? How can spatial configurations be manipulated to alter or circumvent the effects of tyranny? This essay argues that Cary's closet drama depicts power as a force that organizes environments; that is, spatial arrangements that regulate characters’ behaviors are also the material manifestations of authority through which the discourses expressing female agency are constructed and contained. Since closet dramas were not written for public performance but for consumption within a domestic setting, spatial arrangements are apprehended through, indeed are never prior to, the act of reading. The reader perceives the play's landscape – the play's space – through the characters’ language. This study tests the reciprocity between space and words, specifically the way spatialization in the play facilitates the processes and practices of female speech.