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[T]he semblances and appearances of all things cunningly couched, and the principal supporters of our Philosophy: for such as we seem, such are we judged here.
--Philibert de Vienne
[I]t can never be obvious what a woman has inside her.
--Katharine Eisaman Maus
In recent years, The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, written by Elizabeth Cary sometime between 1603 and 1610 and published in 1613, has been interpreted as supporting a broad spectrum of political and social views.1 While some critics have found the play to be overtly feminist, others see it as an explicit validation of aristocratic male dominance within marriage and the state.2 Despite these contradictory interpretations, there is one notable constant in modern Mariam criticism: with few exceptions, the tragedy is read as an extension or expression of its author's own life and struggles, both within a difficult marriage and involving her conversion to Catholicism. The fact that one of the most popular scholarly editions of the text republishes the play in combination with Cary's extant biography, The Lady Falkland Her Life, simultaneously underscores and encourages this approach.3 The apparent congruence between the play and the Life establishes a "field of conceptual or theoretical coherence" Michel Foucault incorporates into his account of the "author-function," a coherence central to current analyses of her literary production.4 For instance, the consistency of her views about proper female behavior expressed in both the Life and the play has frequently been noted, exemplifeed by her biographer's assessment that "[s]he did always much disapprove the practice of satisfying oneself with their conscience being free from fault, not forbearing all that might have the least show, or suspicion, of uncomeliness, or unfitness; what she thought to be required in this she expressed in this motto (which she caused [to be inscribed] in her daughter's wedding ring): be and seem" (p. 195). Combine this with Mariam's proud assertion that "I cannot frame disguise, nor never taught / My face a look dissenting from my thought," a conviction she reiterates several times, and the assumption that Mariam is a stand-in for the author herself becomes logical (IV iii.145-6). Be and seem appears to be a neat encapsulation of the kind of behavioral rigor and consistency Cary ostensibly...