The Tragedy of Mariam

Modeled on Roman tragedy, The Tragedy of Mariam is a Senecan revenge play. Typically, such plays mete out justice for wrongs previously committed by individuals who thought they had gotten away with it. This is akin to the set-up of Cory’s play, but events don’t work out in quite the traditional way.

The revenge the play seems to center around involves the murder of Queen Mariam’s brother and grandfather by her husband King Herod. Called to account for his crimes before the Roman Emperor, it seems as if justice might prevail. When the rumors circulate that Herod is dead, the prevailing mood is one of jubilance. The one person who is distressed about Herod’s death, his sister Salome, endures a dressing down by her sister-in-law, Mariam.

Salome vows revenge in response, and from here, the focus of the play shifts. When it turns out that Herod is not dead, only Mariam continues to cling to the idea of forcing him to answer for his actions. In deciding to call her husband out on his crimes, she leaves herself open to the machinations of Salome, who cleverly gets her own revenge on the queen. Meanwhile, Herod discovers what has been happening in his absence and manages to get revenge on a number of other individuals as well, including Constabarus, who defied his orders to execute Babus’s sons. The play thus demonstrates the unpredictable consequences of revenge, which often come back to haunt the person seeking it.

Both the world The Tragedy of Miriam depicts and the world in which it was written were highly patriarchal. Indeed, Cory herself was given in wedlock at age 15 as a sort of financial bargaining chip. Throughout her life, she found herself at the mercy of laws, institutions, and families that were controlled by men and impervious to the wishes of women.

As Cory depicts it, the world of 29 BCE Jerusalem is markedly similar. Although Mariam’s bloodline is the authoritative source of Judean royalty, she has almost no power; she is not ruler in her own right, and as Herod’s wife is in fact expected to defer to a man she views as a usurper. Other female characters experience similar constraints. Before the play even begins, Herod has summarily divorced and exiled his first wife Doris as part of a broader effort to shore up his dynasty—a move Cary’s readers would recognize from their own recent history, since Henry VIII had divorced his first wife for similar reasons. Even Salome is to some extent at the mercy of the men around her; as she bitterly notes, Jewish law prohibits wives from seeking divorce as their husbands can.

Cory’s female characters respond to their powerlessness in a variety of ways. Mariam generally complies with female gender norms, but she eventually rebels against them when she challenges Herod on his role in her brother and grandfather’s deaths. Combined with Salome’s machinations, this is enough to ensure her death. There is thus a powerful incentive for women to conceal their true intentions, and to try to achieve their goals through indirect methods. Salome has of course mastered this kind of manipulation, but it’s an activity that the play’s male characters associate with virtually all women, as Constabarus’s lengthy diatribe demonstrates. The irony of Constabarus’s words, and the many others like them, is that it is precisely because men control all “legitimate” sources of power—the government, religion, etc.—that women have to resort to manipulating them in an attempt to secure their own interests.