Staging Female Virtue: Elizabeth Cary and Katharina Lescailje

Abstract

This chapter studies four Herod and Mariam plays produced in England and the Low Countries for what they can tell us about feminine publicity on stage. It begins by analyzing Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam, a complexly “private” text that nonetheless appeared in print. This work is contrasted with Samuel Pordage’s Restoration Herod and Mariamne, a play performed when actresses were allowed on the public stage. For the Dutch Republic, the chapter discusses Daniel Mostart’s Mariamne, composed for the all-male stage, followed by Katherine Lescailje’s translation of Francois Tristan l’Hermite’s La Mariane, which was written when women were acting on the public stage in Amsterdam. These four texts show that women writers were especially concerned with confronting a heroine drawn from an absolutist tradition of playwriting with newly emerging ideologies of domesticity. Female virtue is defined nostalgically in opposition to these ideologies, but a newer form of publicity is not available to the remarkable heroine of the story.