Interrogating Genre: Domestic Tragedy, Closet Drama, and the Case of Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry (1613)

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• Interrogating Genre: Domestic Tragedy, Closet Drama, and the Case of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry (1613)
• Barbara Sebek (bio)

At the conference that was the genesis of this special issue, I deliberately discussed tragic plays that deviate from the key features of English domestic tragedy that scholars ordinarily use to describe the genre. With a non-English, non-contemporary setting in ancient Judea and a focus on a courtly milieu and dynastic politics rather than the middling ethos that usually inflects domestic tragedy, Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry (1613) seems at first glance to be a complete outlier to the kind of play that we gathered in Atlanta to discuss, perform, and watch. The impetus to interrogate genre and test the boundaries of domestic tragedy via Cary’s play emerges from a notion of genre as something that is done, both by writers and performers and by critics, readers, and professors. By reflecting on the ways that an outlier-but-adjacent play does and does not align with plays that more fully evince the usual features of a genre, we can enact this notion of genre as a doing rather than a fixed or essential state of being. After all, an intensified interest in experimenting with dramatic genre characterized the early modern period itself, which Jean Howard describes as “one of intense generic theorization and experimentation” (Shakespeare 300). Kim Hall points out that the genre that we’ve come to call “domestic tragedy” emerged at a historical juncture when classic definitions of genre, especially tragedy, “fail to accommodate important groups and concerns” (17). It is with notable self-consciousness that early modern plays that fit the emergent schema for domestic tragedy enter the fray.

Consider, for example, how the prologue to one of the period’s salient examples of domestic tragedy, A Warning for Fair Women (1599), attests to contemporary scrutiny of generic choice and subject matter. In this prologue, personified figures of Tragedy, History, and Comedy engage in what Ann Christensen rightly calls “a vicious insult exchange” (3) as Tragedy resorts to violence to stave off the challenges of the other genres to take over the stage.¹ For early modern writers and audiences, the treatment of what Shakespeare’s Christopher Sly in the opening frame story of [End Page 97] The Taming of the Shrew calls “household stuff” (Induction 2.135) raises particularly pressing questions about genre. In comedies and tragedies alike, “household stuff” disrupts expectations about the appropriate style, theme, and matter of plays and points to the unsettled and unsettling status of the theatre more generally. In an essay arguing that a “crisis of genre” (132) lies at the core of Cary’s play, Rosemary Kegl uses the framing materials of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew to set up her discussion (121). As Kegl notes, Shakespeare’s Page tells Christopher Sly that the “pleasant comedy” (Induction 2.125) that he is about to watch is also a “kind of history” (Induction 2.136). Like the challenge presented by History and Comedy in the Prologue to A Warning for Fair Women, the Page’s description of a “pleasant comedy” about “household stuff” as a “kind of history” illustrates the interest in navigating and testing blurred generic boundaries. As Karen Raber helpfully reminds us, “the difference between history as a distinct genre of writing and other forms of poetry or drama was unavailable or at best unstable” in this period (xxv). The same can be said about domestic tragedy. In this essay, I will focus on Cary’s play as a particularly fruitful case study for interrogating these blurry boundaries and for both delineating the parameters of domestic tragedy and recognizing their fluidity. Like other emergent or newly prolific dramatic subgenres in the early modern period, such as city comedy and closet drama, domestic tragedy is in the process of becoming in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. A distinctive and outlier play like The Tragedy of Mariam resonates powerfully with that becoming.

Despite some substantial deviation from the usual domestic tragedy features delineated by twentieth-century critics, established critics and editors often...