Elizabeth Cary (c1584-1639)
A Biographical Sketch

By Kerin G. Rose.

Born in 1584 or 1585, Elizabeth Cary became the first woman dramatist to be published in England, when her play The Tragedy of Mariam appeared in 1613. During the years of her childhood, she read voraciously, bribing servants to supply her with candles for night-time study. Having learned to read, write, and speak several languages, Elizabeth translated other writers work as well as composing original texts.

Although she was married to Henry Cary when she was seventeen or eighteen, because they did not establish a shared home for another six years, Elizabeth was able to enjoy a relatively independent time of young womanhood that might have otherwise been focused on householding and familial occupations. It is likely that this is when she wroteThe Tragedy of Mariam, and possibly other plays. (See also: "Dark Moon Rising: Reading the Psychology of The Tragedy of Mariam ".)

Between the ages of 23 and 39, Elizabeth gave birth to, nursed, cared for, and either directly taught or arranged for the education of eleven children (one of whom died in infancy). She was also active in what we would call social work, especially in Ireland where she used her own money to organize a program to train poor children to learn the skills of various trades. She seems to have been prone to periods of depression, the worst episodes occurring during her second and fourth pregnancies when she was in "so deep a melancholy that she lost the perfect use of her reason, and was in much danger of her life" (The Lady Falkland, 195). Her biographer, probably either her daughter Anne or Lucy, notes that having overcome this dark night of the soul:

She seemed so far to have overcome all sadness that she was scarce ever subject to it on any occasion (but only once), but always looked on the best side of everything, and what good every accident brought with it. . . and she could well divert others in occasions of trouble, having sometimes with her conversation much lightened the grief of some, suddenly, in that which touched them nearliest (196).

In 1625, Elizabeth's last child was born and her first child died. She separated herself from her husband and her conversion to Catholicism was publicly announced. The year of her fortieth birthday was a monumental one, a series of cataclysmic events intertwined and inextricably affecting one another. Elizabeth's oldest daughter Catherine, at the age of sixteen, died in her mother's arms, after the premature birth of a baby girl who lived only three hours. In the same year, Elizabeth was formally reconciled to the Church of Rome and put under house arrest by the King until she refuted her conversion. After six weeks, the Crown was convinced that she would not return to the Church of England and she was allowed to come and go at will. Her father disinherited her and her husband refused her financial assistance.

In the years that followed she lived in varying degrees of poverty and though she saw her children frequently, they rarely lived in her house. Nonetheless, she was able to work on a history of Edward II, and publish the translation of a religious treatise as well as attend more increasingly to her inner, devotional life. During the two years before her death, her four youngest daughters were received as nuns into a Benedictine convent in Cambray, France -- with Elizabeth's blessings, encouragement, and assistance. She died in 1639.

The above information is taken from Elizabeth Cary: The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry with Lady Falkland, Her Life, by One of Her Daughters, Barry Weller and Margaret Ferguson, editors. Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1994.

Additional biographical and critical information about Elizabeth Cary and her work, as well as both literary and historical general readings of women's roles in the Renaissance, may be found in the following works.

• Beilin, Elaine V. Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987.
• Ezell, Margaret J. M. Writing Women's Literary History. Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
• Ferguson, Margaret W., "A Room Not Their Own: Renaissance Women as Readers and Writers," in The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes, editors. New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988.
• ------------, Muareen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, editors. Rewriting the Renaissance, The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986.
• ------------. "Running On with Almost Public Voice: The Case of 'E. C.,'" in Tradition and the Talents of Women, Florence Howe, editor. Chicago: Univ. of Illinois, 1991.
• ------------. "The Spectre of Resistance, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613,)" in Staging the Renaissance, Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, edited by David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. New York: Routeledge, 1991.
• Foster, Donald W. "Resurrecting the Author: Elizabeth Tanfield Cary," in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, Jean R. Brink, editor. Kirksville, Missouri: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Inc., 1993.
• Fullerton, Lady Georgiana Charlotte. The Life of Elisabeth Lady Falkland 1585- 1639. London: Burns & Oates, 1883. Quarterly Series, vol. 43.
• Gutierrez, Nancy A. "Valuing Mariam: Genre Study and Feminist Analysis," in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Volume 10 (Fall 1991) 233-51.
• Jardine, Lisa. Still Harping on Daughters, Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, Barnes & Noble Books, 1983.
• Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990.
• Kennedy, Gwynne. "Lessons of the Schoole of wisedome," in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama,Carol Levin and Karen Robertson, editors. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.
• Krontiris, Tina. "Style and Gender in Elizabeth Cary's Edward II," in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print, Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty Travitsky, editors. Amherst: University of Mass. Press, 1990.
• ------------. "Reading with the Author's Sex: A Comparison of Two Seventeenth- Century Texts," in Gramma, Journal of Theory and Criticism, Volume 1 (1993) 123-36.
• Lamb, Mary Ellen. Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. Wisconsin: The Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
• Levin, Carol and Jeanie Watson. eds. Ambiguous Realities, Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987.
• Murdock, Kenneth B. The Sun at Noon, Three Biographical Sketches. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1939.
• Quilligan, Maureen. "Staging Gender: William Shakespeare and Elizabeth Cary," inSexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, texts, images, James Grantham Turner, editor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Rose, Mary Beth, editor. Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1986.
• Shannon, Laurie J., "The Tragedy of Mariam: Cary's Critique of the Terms of Founding Social Discourses," English Literary Renaissance, Winter 1994.
• Stauffer, Donald. English Biography Before 1700. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1930.
• Straznicky, Marta, "'Profane Stoical Paradoxes': The Tragedy of Mariam and Sidnean Closet Drama," English Literary Renaissance, Winter 1994.
• Travitsky, Betty S., "The Femme Covert in Elizabeth Cary's Mariam," in Ambiguous Realities.