Elizabeth Cary’s Female Trinity: Breaking Custom with Mosaic Law in The Tragedy of Mariam

Giving voice to women who suffer the brunt of masculine anxieties, The Tragedy of Mariam privileges what I call “feminine anxieties” in its depiction of all the female characters, especially in the trinity of Mariam, Doris, and Salome. By depicting women who defy convention, the play stages women’s multiple perspectives on, reactions against, and appropriations of patrilineal systems of law, custom, and power. I emphasize as equal the roles of Mariam, Doris, and Salome under Mosaic law in uncovering feminine anxieties staged in The Tragedy of Mariam, a drama that replays and resists early modern cultural and juridical policies of inequities between husbands and wives and privileges women’s experiences