Dramaturgy and the Politics of Space in The Tragedy of Mariam

e lizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) has long been noted for its elusive dramatic structure: it is a play that evades any clear sense of distinction between stage and closet, public and private, theatrical and untheatrical. On the one hand, Mariam is categorized as a closet drama—a term that has itself been subject to a great deal of critical scrutiny—and, as such, it has often been understood as primarily a reading text and, thus, as untheatrical, self-consciously removed from the life of the public theaters. On the other hand, as Jonas Barish noted over two decades ago, this is not quite the entire story. Compared with contemporary closet plays by Fulke Greville, Samuel Daniel, and others, Mariam “in both its plotting and its language . . . approximates most closely the plays of the public theatre.” Barish, indeed, calls the play an “oddity” within the closet drama tradition. More recently, critics have developed and extended Barish’s insight by drawing attention to the ways in