Elizabeth Cary’s Historical Conscience: The Tragedy of Mariam and Thomas Lodge’s Josephus

Abstract

The plot of Elizabeth Cary’s closet drama The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry has long been identifi ed as deriving mainly from Thomas Lodge’s translation of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews. However, it has not so far been considered how instrumental Lodge’s approach to Josephus was in determining Cary’s own treatment of her source material. Lodge gives voice to a common Renaissance preoccupation, the moral utility of history, and—more unusually—stresses his readers’ obligation to interrogate their own lives by actively refl ecting upon relevant historical exemplars, both good and bad. He could hardly have wished for a reader more attentive than Cary, and this chapter argues that the close corre­spondence between her life and her works, so often remarked upon by her commentators, derives largely from her imaginative and—quite liter­ally—conscientious reworking of Lodge’s strictures.