Cary, Calvin, and the Female Icon in the Tragedy of Mariam Beverly Marshall Van Note

Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal Vol. 9, No. 2 • Spring 2015

“In Sara’s Lap”: Cary, Calvin, and the Female Icon in The Tragedy of Mariam Beverly Marshall Van Note

lizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam draws much of its plot from EFlavius Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews, available to Cary in a 1602 English translation by Thomas Lodge. First published in 1613 but written as early as 1605, Cary’s play compresses Josephus’s tale of Herod the Great’s execution of his wife into a single day and creates sympathy for its heroine by allowing us to envision her perspective. Cary is remarkably faithful to many of Josephus’s plot details, even as she enlarges Mariam’s character: her Mariam relishes her freedom when it is first reported (falsely) that her jealous, controlling husband has been executed by Caesar, draws Herod’s ire by mourning openly and refusing to resume her wifely duties when he returns, and, as recounted in the final act, proceeds to the gallows nobly and silently when Herod orders her execution because he (wrongly) presumes her to be unfaithful. The Chorus’s open criticism of Mariam’s faults derives directly from Josephus’s condemnation of her “womanly imperfection and naturall frowardnesse” and the “great and intemperate libertie in her discourse” with Herod.1 Josephus further damns her with comparably faint praise for her virtues — beauty, faithfulness, nobility, courage — themes that Cary pursues more vigorously, ultimately pronouncing her heroine

1 Flavius Josephus, The Famovs and Memorable Workes of Iosephvs, A Man of Mvch Honovr and Learning Among the Iewes, trans. Thomas Lodge (London, 1602), STC 14809, 398, 399.

71 72 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note

“guiltless” in the final Chorus.2 The religious imagery of Mariam, most noticeable in the heroine’s Christly depiction in Act Five, seems also to have been Cary’s invention.3 Particularly vivid and generally underrepresented in critical discussion of the play’s religious overtones is a striking image of a repentant Mariam at the end of Act Four, resting in the lap of her ancestress Sara. Pondering the death sentence Herod has just imposed, knowing herself chaste, yet openly confessing her lack of humility, Mariam takes comfort in the notion that “In Heav’n shall Mariam sit in Sara’s lap” (4.8.574). In their edition of the play, Barry Weller and Margaret Ferguson note that this image constitutes a “feminine counterpart” of the bosom of the patriarch Abraham, Sara’s husband, where the righteous await salvation in Christian tradition (cf. Luke 16).4 Although a helpful starting point, this gloss does not adequately account for the uniqueness of Cary’s reference to Sara’s lap. Moreover, our contemporary lack of familiarity with the rich iconographic tradition depicting Abraham’s bosom as the resting place of God’s faithful hampers our appreciation of Cary’s transformation of it into a decidedly female icon. Contextualizing the image of Sara’s lap allows us to understand more fully Cary’s early interest in Catholicism, giving us glimpses of her awareness of current theological debates, including those about purgatory and about women’s right to religious dissent. This is of interest because of the assumed bias in claims for Cary’s early Catholic tendencies made in The Lady Falkland: Her Life, the biography written by one of Cary’s

2 Elizabeth Cary, The Lady Falkland, The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 5.1.272. All references are to this edition. 3 Weller and Ferguson, Introduction to The Tragedy of Mariam, 20–22; Elaine Beilin, “The Making of a Female Hero: Joanna Lumley and Elizabeth Cary,” Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 171–75; Frances E. Dolan, “‘Gentlemen, I have one thing more to say’: Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563–1680,” Modern Philology 92. 2 (1994): 163–67; and Margaret W. Ferguson, “Allegories of Imperial Subjection: Literacy as Equivocation in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam,” Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 329. 4 Weller and Ferguson, Mariam, 136, n83. “In Sara’s Lap” 73

four daughters at the Benedictine convent at Cambray. Margaret Ferguson has done the most to challenge this notion. Her fascinating exploration of what she terms the “literacy of equivocation” in Mariam, as well as the use of a printer’s emblem on the title page that had “cultural associations with Catholic dissent,” is indicative of Cary’s active interest in Catholicism long before her 1626 conversion.5 I suggest that Cary’s oblique reference to Abraham’s bosom is another invitation to ponder these Catholic tendencies. In addition, a more thorough contextualization of Cary’s image enables us to better understand the play’s revolutionary empowerment of women. Feminist readings of the play often disagree about the extent and nature of Mariam’s social, political, and/or rhetorical agency, especially because of the tension created by the Chorus’s condemnation of her until her lauded resurrection in Act Five. However, most scholars undervalue the significance of religion as a vehicle for female agency in the play, and even those who recognize such agency have yet to explore the implications of Cary’s substitution of Sara for Abraham.6 Approaching the play with a fuller understanding of its Abrahamic context allows us to see more clearly the full import of Cary’s regendered image. In this essay, I argue that Cary’s implicit allusion to a common Abrahamic trope is informed by religious and iconographic trends that permeated early modern culture, both in the visual and verbal arts. First, I focus on the provocative intersections between Cary’s image and verbal imagery associated with Abraham and Sara in religious texts of the period. Given the claim in the Life that Cary could dispute Calvin at an early

5 Ferguson, “Allegories,” 271, 304–9. 6 Betty S. Travitsky, “The Feme Covert in Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam,” Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Carole Levin and Jeanie Watson (Detroit: Wayne State Universtiy Press, 1987), 184–96; and Diane Purkiss, “Blood, Sacrifice, Marriage: Why Iphigenia and Mariam Have to Die,” Women’s Writing 6.1 (1999): 27–45, maintain that the play reproduces existing patriarchal structures. Others celebrate its possibilities for female agency: Ferguson, “Allegories,” and Alexandra Bennet, “Female Performativity in The Tragedy of Mariam,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 40.2 (2000): 293–309. Readings that value female religious agency include Beilin, “Making of a Female Hero”; Dolan, “Women on Scaffolds”; and Ferguson, “Allegories,” 325–28, who mentions the reference to Sara in discussing Mariam’s constructions of racial inferiority. 74 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note

age, I pay particular attention to his work as representative of dominant Protestant religious discourse regarding the nature and status of women, while briefly setting him in context among other writers, both Protestant and Catholic. Next, I examine representations of Abraham’s bosom in the visual arts — including on household moveables, in illustrated manuscripts, print books, paintings, and statuary — to contextualize Cary’s substitution of Sara’s lap and to argue for the revolutionary force of this regendering. Finally, I bring this fuller contextualization to bear on the play, revealing the powerful agency that Cary claims for the pious woman. Cary’s radical revision of the Abrahamic trope simultaneously encodes an invitation to her audience to participate in her early explorations of Catholicism and proffers a glimpse of a distinctly female theological empowerment.

Abraham, Sara, and the Reading Woman’s Pieties

Cary’s early life coincides with a significant period that witnessed increased agency on the part of religious women. First, as sixteenth-century England moved at a steady, if uneven pace away from Catholicism, the Reformation gradually increased possibilities for women’s independent religious thought and expression. While women lost the potentially empowering feminine model of Marian veneration, Protestant theological views of woman’s equality to man before God, although slow to affect church practice, eventually created new roles for women in lay ministry and evangelization. In addition, a greater number of women were able to read, and increasingly to write, religious texts. As early as Elizabethan times, Puritan sects urged men and women alike to take up daily reading, reflection, and self-examination, a practice illustrated in Margaret Hoby’s diary. By the mid-seventeenth century, women felt sufficiently emboldened to record their religious experiences, producing dozens of extant spiritual narratives, like those of Fifth Monarchist Anna Trapnel, Calvinist Agnes Beaumont, and Quakers Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers.7 This was a

7 Margaret Hoby, The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605, ed. Joanna Moody (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998); Anna Trapnel, Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea, or, A Narrative of her Journey from London into “In Sara’s Lap” 75

particularly charged, exciting environment for the intelligent and thought- ful young Cary. According to the Life, Cary was an avid reader from a young age, and like most young readers at the time, she probably began with the Bible.8 The story of Lazarus and Dives in Luke’s gospel to which Mariam alludes recounts how the unnamed rich man (Latin dives=rich), dined sumptuously while Lazarus was not given even a scrap from Dives’s table. Subsequently, when both die, Dives goes to hell, but Lazarus is taken into Abraham’s bosom (Luke 16:19–31). According to Outi Lehtipuu, the story is built around a structural theme of reversal and the power of the afterlife to act as a “call to repentance.”9 The phrase “bosom of Abraham” identifies the fate of the faithful in the hereafter as a reunion with their spiritual father Abraham and is referenced in Jewish commentary on 4 Maccabees and in the Christian liturgy of the dead and funerary prayers.10 The word bosom (κόλπος), means breast or lap, and occurs only six times in the New Testament. It is often thought to refer to the custom of reclin- ing on couches with one’s head on another’s breast while dining, but Martin O’Kane argues that it more likely derived from parents taking fatigued children into their arms or laps. It might also indicate the folds that formed over the chest or girdle in a loose garment, leading to its translation in the Vulgate as “in sinus Abrahae,” with sinus denoting the pocket-like folds of a

Cornwal (London: for Thomas Brewster, 1654); Agnes Beaumont, The Narrative of the Persecution of Agnes Beaumont, ed. Vera J. Camden (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues, 1992); Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, This is a short Relation of some of the Cruel Sufferings (For the Truths sake) of Katharine Evans & Sarah Cheevers (London: for Robert Wilson, 1662). 8 The Lady Falkland, in Weller and Ferguson, Mariam, 187–88. 9 Outi Lehtipuu, The Afterlife Imagery in Luke’s Story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 123 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 41. 10 See 4 Maccabees 13:17 and 18:23. Pamela Sheingorn, “The Bosom of Abraham Trinity: A Late Medieval All Saints Image,” England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1987), 275–78. The phrase is consistently translated “bosom of Abraham” in English, beginning with the Wycliffe Bible in the fourteenth century. 76 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note toga.11 This single biblical mention of the bosom of Abraham nevertheless has generated a rich vein of religious and artistic expression, as we shall see. Another religious text from Cary’s early reading that may have influenced her imagery in Mariam is John Calvin’s Institution of Christian Religion. Cary’s daughter recounts that Cary’s father, Laurence Tanfield, gave her a copy of Calvin’s most popular text at the age of twelve to encour- age her reading, only to discover that his daughter had “a spirit averse from Calvin.” 12 A 1582 edition of Calvin’s text now in the Cambridge University Library is inscribed on the title page “Anna Henchman her book,” illus- trating the likelihood of this gift to a young, but precocious female reader like Cary (fig. 1). Given her familiarity with Calvin, then, Cary might have recalled this particular passage on resurrection as she contemplated Mariam’s fate:

Whereas the blessed gathering together of holy spirites is called the bosome of Abraham, it is enough for vs after this wayfaring to be receiued of the common father of the faithfull. . . . In the meane time sith the Scripture euery where biddeth vs to hang vpon the expectation of Christs comming, and differeth the crowne of glorie til then: let vs bee content with these bondes appointed vs of God: namely, that the soules of the godly . . . do go into a blessed rest, where with happie ioyfulnesse they looke for the enioying of the promised glorie.13

Cary anticipates a similar joyful reception for Mariam, but by Sara instead of Abraham.

11 William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, sec. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 442; An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford University Press, 1990), 442; Martin O’Kane, “‘The Bosom of Abraham’ (Luke 16:22): Father Abraham in the Visual Imagination,” Biblical Interpretation 15 (2007): 488–89. 12 Cary, Life, 188. 13 John Calvin, Institvtion of Christian Religion, Written in Latine by M . Iohn Calvine And Translated Into English According to the Authors Last Edition, By Thomas Norton (London, 1582), STC 4421, 332v. “In Sara’s Lap” 77

Figure 1. Title Page of John Calvin’s Institution of Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton, 1582. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 78 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note

If Cary was as skeptical about Calvinism and as well read as the Life suggests, she may also have sought out other Abrahamic commentaries. Indeed, her use of this particular image in combination with other indica- tors of her interest in Catholicism imply that she may have been aware of the bosom of Abraham as a key term in religious debates regarding the existence of purgatory. In a commonplace book published in 1581, theologian and musician John Merbecke, best known for his setting of the Anglican liturgy, groups several quoted passages under the heading “What is meant by Abrahams bosome,” identifying the question as one of general interest. Merbecke’s selections from William Tyndale, Josiah Cheeke, and others point to Abraham’s bosom as a place of blessing and enjoyment for the faithful deceased.14 Catholic teaching traditionally followed the early Church Fathers, also familiar to Cary,15 in understanding Abraham’s bosom as a place within purgatory reserved for the patriarchs and saints. In his attempt to combat what he saw as the heretical views of the English sectarians, Gregory Martin, a Reader in Divinity at the English College in Rheims, draws on Tertullian, St. Jerome, and St. Augustine in describing the dis- cernment of a higher room of hell or limbus patrum, “the very brimme or vppermost & outermost part of hel, vvhere the fathers of the old Testament rested.”16 Jesuit Robert Southwell’s popular Marie Magdalens funeral teares (1591) makes a definite distinction between Abraham’s bosom and paradise. Attempting to assuage the grief of Mary Magdalene upon discovering Christ’s absence from the tomb, Southwell says, “if . . . thou thinkest Paradise too high a place to be likely to haue him: the very lowest roome that anye reason can assigne him, cannot bee meaner than

14 Iohn Marbeck [John Merbecke], A Booke of Notes and Common places, with their expositions, gathered out of the workes of diuers singular Writers, and brought Alphabetically into order (London: Thomas East, 1581), STC 17299, 5. 15 Cary, Life, 190. 16 Gregory Martin, A Discoverie of the Manifold Corrvptions of the Holy Scriptvres by the Heretikes of our daies, specially the English Sectaries (Rheems: Iohn Fogny, 1582), STC 17503, 108–11. “In Sara’s Lap” 79

the bosome of Abraham.”17 In reproaching Mary Magdalene for her lack of faith in the resurrection, Southwell also clearly casts Abraham’s bosom as a purgatorial holding place for the elect until their ascent to heaven at the Final Judgment. Rejecting purgatory and therefore limbus patrum, Protestant writers espoused a view of Abraham’s bosom as consonant with paradise instead. Pamphleteer and jurist Sir Christopher Sibthorp’s A Friendly Advertisement to the Pretended Catholics of Ireland (1622) engages the debate directly and articulates the common Protestant interpretation:

when the Rich man died, hee went to Hell, the place of Torments for the Reprobate, & when poore Lazarus dyed, he was carried by Angells into Abrahams Bosome, that is, into Heaven, the place of comfort, ioy, and happinesse. . . . For that Abrahams bosome, must be taken for Heaven (and not for the fained place of Limbus Patrum, which Papists make to be a part of hell) is manifest by this, that . . . it is . . . set in the Text itself, as directlie opposite to Hell. Now, what is so directly opposite to Hell, as Heaven is?18

Elaborating on an antonymic argument that he detects in Luke, Sibthorp argues that the souls of God’s elect ascend directly to paradise, and he attempts logically to dissuade Catholic sympathizers. George Wither is less moderate in his attempt to refute the “loose, corrupt, vniust, and vntrue” marginalia included in a Catholic testament published in 1582 at Rheims. Wither argues vehemently that the papists “wrestle in vain for a third place” and concludes: “How much better had it beene for them [Church Fathers] and you [Catholics] to hold fast that . . . the kingdome of heauen is a place of ioy for the faithfull, and hell a place of punishment for

17 Robert Southwell, Marie Magdalens funeral teares (London, 1591), STC 22950, 36v. 18 Sir Christopher Sibthorp, A Friendly Advertisement to the Pretended Catholickes of Ireland (Dublin: Societie of Stationers, 1622), STC 22522, 130–31. 80 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note infidels and apostates, and that a third place either for rest or punishment is unknowne, and no where found in scriptures.”19 Since the phrase was common among Catholics and Protestants alike, Cary’s oblique reference does not automatically ally her with one side of the debate or another. Her allusion might seem, initially, to con- firm Protestant interpretations: “In Heav’n, shall Mariam sit in Sara’s lap” (emphasis mine). The wording suggests that Mariam is destined not for purgatory, but for heaven, leaving the rich Herod in hellish regret. I will revisit this issue later, but regardless of how this image is read, the use of this allusion combined with Cary’s known interest in theological matters confirms her early awareness of and perhaps participation in Catholic– Protestant theological debates. Her feminization of the image, however, seems to have no obvious motivation — that is, until it is situated in the context of the pervasive negative views of women in dominant Christianity, also clearly apparent in commentaries on Abraham and Sara. I will now return to Calvin, who offers his most extensive commentary on the conceit of Abraham’s bosom in A Harmony upon the Three Evangelists 20. In this exegetical text, Calvin dwells upon the story of Lazarus and Dives, elaborating on the rich man’s hedonistic taste in dress and at table, pointing to the irony of his treatment of Lazarus in contrast to that of the dogs who licked the beggar’s wounds, and enlarging upon their contrasting fates: the rich man sumptuously buried in spite of his eventual conveyance to hell and Lazarus’s body likely thrown into a pit, although his soul attains heaven. Calvin pointedly censures those “prophane menne” whose focus on “the glory of their buryall and funerall solemityes” belies their interior corruption.21 Calvin’s commentary recalls both Jesus’s charge

19 George Wither, A View of the Marginal Notes of the Popish Testament, translated into English by the English fugitiue Papists residant at Rhemes in France (London: Edm. Bollifant for Thomas Woodcocke, [1588]), STC 25889, fol. A2, 72–73. 20 Calvin also discusses the bosom of Abraham story in an early treatise, but his primary concern is to convince the reader of its veracity, rather than to explicate it. See Iohn Calvin, An excellent treatise of the Immortalytie of the soule, trans. T. Stocker (London: John Daye, 1581), STC 4409, fols. 16–20v. 21 John Calvin, A Harmonie vpon the Three Evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke, with the Commentarie of M . Iohn Calvine (London, 1584), STC 2962, 398. “In Sara’s Lap” 81 against his rabbinic opponents (Matt. 23:27) and Cary’s image of Salome, Mariam’s most venomous detractor, as a “painted sepulchre” (2.4.325). Calvin then spends several paragraphs explicating the image of Abraham’s bosom. He acknowledges that interpretations of the phrase are varied and urges the “naturall” meaning: that because God’s covenant was made with Abraham, those who share his faith will be gathered to his bosom after death. His keenest interest is in the image’s metaphorical power:

It is a Metaphor taken of a Father, into whose bosome . . . the chyldren doe come togeather, when they come home at the euening from thyr dayly labours. Therefore, sith the children of GOD doe trauayle as Pylgrimes scattered in this worlde, as in this present race they followe the fayth of Abraham theyr father, so departing they go into that blessed reste, wherein he looketh for them. Neyther is it necessarye to imagine anye certeine place: but that gathering of the Saints togeather is onely noted, that the faythfull might know indeed that they warre not in vain vnder the conduct of the faith of Abraham: for they enjoy the same place in heauen.22

The images Calvin evokes are even more predominantly male than those in Luke’s tale: a father gathers his male children to his bosom (females would not have worked outside the home); these men collectively follow the faith of their male progenitor and are gathered into his bosom with the saints, also collectively male. Whether or not Cary was familiar with this particular passage, the text was an influential one and indicative of Protestant thought. A young bride, perhaps resentful of her husband, one of those “Pylgrimes scattered” in the larger world of the court or in Holland while she chafed in relative confinement at her in-laws’ home, might have reacted negatively to the absence of a space in this narrative for herself or her heroine. Cary’s transformation of Abraham to Sara is a telling reaction to the dominant Protestant narrative that presents salvation in exclusively patriarchal terms.

22 Ibid., 398–99. 82 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note

Despite the positive model many women found in Marian devotion, Catholicism was of course no less patriarchal. In A Dialogue of comfort against tribulacion (1553), Thomas More touches on Luke’s story of Lazarus and the rich man within the larger context of casting the rich Abraham, whose prosperity he says was not continual, as a profitable example for the necessity of suffering. He is interested less in Lazarus’s position within Abraham’s bosom than in how the characters’ respective levels of earthly wealth and suffering contribute to their fates: “we shall see lazare set in welth some what vnder the riche Abraham: so shall we se another ryche man lye full lowe beneath lazare crying and calling out of his fyrie couche.”23 Although More provides a lengthy list of Abraham’s tribulations, including being forced to offer his wife to Abimelech and being unable to have a “child of his owne bodi,” not once does he mention Sara by name. References to Sara generally are far less common than those to Abraham in texts of this period. Reputed for her beauty, she is often portrayed as the virtuous wife, divinely blessed in conceiving Isaac late in life. However, Elaine James notes a renewed interest during the Reformation in the story of Sara’s expulsion of her handmaid Hagar, mother of Abraham’s firstborn, Ishmael. Although most Reformers judged both Sara and Hagar for their “womanly pettiness,” artistic depictions of a sympathetic Hagar and a spiteful Sara were increasingly common.24 Most theologians nevertheless tended to portray Sara’s persecution of Hagar as necessary. For example, Southwell deploys his sole reference to Sara in An Epistle of Comfort to the Reverend Priests (1587) to reprimand heretical reformers: “if thou hast suffered corporall persecution of the catholicke churche,

23 Sir Thomas More, A Dialogue of comfort against tribulacion, made by Syr Thomas More, Knyght, and set foorth by the name of an Hūgariē, not before this time imprinted (London: Richard Tottel, 1553), STC 18082, fol. D4v, D4. 24 Elaine James, “Sarah, Hagar, and Their Interpreters,” Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley (3rd ed.; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 52. “In Sara’s Lap” 83

thou hast suffered as Agar of Sara ”. 25 More’s single mention of Sara, too, is as a model for persecuting heretics; he sides with St. Augustine, who “cōmendeth Sara for persecutynge and correctynge her mayde.”26 Both writers highlight Sara’s shrewishness even as they applaud its outcome. Cary’s reference to Sara’s lap, however, seems to be unique. I am unable to find a single additional use of the phrase in surviving early modern English texts. As in Genesis, Sara is frequently conflated with her womb and defined by her (in)ability to bear children. The usual emphasis is on her womb’s qualities as dry, barren, or unfruitfull before the miraculous conception of Isaac in her old age.27 Perhaps the most unusual depiction of Sara’s womb is found, intriguingly enough, in Calvin’s work. In a series of two hundred sermons on Deuteronomy preached at Geneva in 1555–56, Calvin repeatedly alludes to Isaiah 51:1 (in the Geneva Bible: “Look unto the rock, whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit, whence ye are dug”),28 referring frequently to both Abraham and Sara as the stones from which God’s people derive. But, in sermon 74, he uses a strikingly vivid image when he insists that “God likeneth Saraes womb to a quarrie of stone.”29 The biblical text does name Sara in verse 2 (“Consider Abraham your father, and Sarah that bare you”), but the poetic leap to Sara’s womb as stone quarry, perhaps hinted at in Isaiah’s parallel structures, is Calvin’s own.

25 [Robert Southwell] An Epistle of Comfort to the Reverend Priests, & to the Honorable, Worshipful, & other of the Laye sort restrayned in durance for the Catholicke Fayth (Paris [London]: [1587]), STC 22946, fol. 185v. 26 Sir Thomas More, Bk. 6 of The second parte of the cōfutation of Tyndals answere (London: Wyllyam Rastell, 1533), STC 18080, fol. Ee3. 27 See, for instance, Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, Du Bartas His Devine Weekes and Workes Translated: and Dedicated to the Kings Most Excellent Maiestie by Ioshua Syluester (London, 1611), STC 21651, 408, who refers to “Sara’s dry and barren womb.” 28 This same verse is translated similarly in the contemporary New American Bible, revised edition (NABR): “Look to the rock from which you were hewn, to the quarry from which you were taken” (emphasis mine). See also Deuteronomy 32:18. 29 John Calvin, The Sermons of M . Iohn Calvin vpon the Fifth Booke of Moses called Deuteronomie: faithfully gathered word for word as he preached them in open Pulpet, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1583), STC 4442, 453. 84 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note

Undoubtedly, Calvin is drawing on the rich tradition of Old Testament language portraying God as the rock, the source of his people (see Deut. 32:18). One possible interpretation of Isaiah is to read God, and, consequently, his favored Abraham, as both rock and quarry (Isaiah 51:2 continues, “for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him”). Calvin, however, subscribes to an alternate interpretation: Abraham as rock and Sara as quarry — an interpretation far more ambivalent in its treatment of Sara. She will figuratively give birth to the multitudes of God’s faithful through Isaac, but Calvin conceives of her as an empty vessel for Abraham’s seed. Thus, the image of the quarry, although imbued with positive biblical connotations, negatively emphasizes Sara’s barrenness. It refers to the empty hole from which rock is removed, but not necessarily to the rock itself. Calvin’s assessment of Sara in his commentary on Genesis is also quite condemnatory: Sara pollutes her marriage bed with Hagar, disbelieves God by laughing when told well past menopause that she will conceive, and reveals not only her own, but all humanity’s corrupt nature when she denies having laughed. Even when Calvin lauds Sara for insist- ing that Abraham cast out Hagar and her son, thereby fulfilling God’s prophecy, the incident is interpreted as affirming the wife’s proper place in the familial hierarchy and as a warning to women not to overstep, as Sara has done.30 John Lee Thompson considers Calvin’s attitude to exemplify the larger cultural ambivalence toward women. According to Thompson, Calvin’s exegetical dualism combines a view of women’s double subjection (through Creation and the Fall) with their equality with man before God. Although some scholars have argued that Calvin was positively influenced by the pro-woman arguments of the querelle des femmes, given his correspondence with women such as Marguerite of Navarre and his classification of women’s teaching among the adiaphora (indifferent things), Thompson concludes that Calvin’s attitude differs little from that of his contemporaries. On the issue of women’s teaching, he bows to local church custom: “For Calvin, women’s silence in church is indeed indifferent, but indifferent only

30 John Calvin, A commentarie of John Caluine vpon the first booke of Moses called Genesis, trans. Thomas Tymme (London, 1578), STC 488, 335–37, 382–85, 456–57. “In Sara’s Lap” 85

to salvation and not to decorum . . . . Exceptions may be made when the Lord intervenes or when necessity constrains, but decorum will always limit the course of these exceptions.”31 Sara’s demand that Abraham exile Hagar, which exceeds decorum within a system of cultural constraints that Calvin accepts as God-given and immutable, fits within this exceptional category. Calvin acknowledges Sara’s prophetic power, yet because she inappropri- ately inverts the marital hierarchy, she is an aberration and not a precedent for others’ behavior.32 It is thus possible to read Calvin’s representation of Sara’s womb as stone quarry as a positive religious motif, albeit steeped in the misogyny both of Deuteronomy and of Calvin’s milieu. Because of the cultural pervasiveness of Calvin’s thought, Cary’s substitution of Sara for Abraham registers as a challenge to the blatant cultural prejudices against Sara and against women in general. The substitution of lap for bosom is equally complex: as we have seen, κόλπος could mean bosom, lap, and also womb. While there are no other easily identifiable references during this period to Sara’s lap, references to the lap of God, Christ, or the Church were not uncommon. Intriguingly, Calvin uses references to God’s lap with unusual frequency in the same sermon series in which he images Sara’s womb as stone quarry. In at least a dozen instances throughout the series, Calvin emulates biblical language to create a vivid refrain depicting God’s lap as a site of caring, protection, and instruction for his faithful.33 The imagery can be stern, as self- reflecting sinners are encouraged to cast themselves penitently into God’s lap; or tender, as God is portrayed as a doting father: “hee would keepe them as his flock and haue a speciall care of them, and as it were dandle them in his lappe, and bestow all his richesse vppon them.”34 Occasionally, Calvin’s imagery is also decidedly feminine — for example, when he likens the influence of God’s word to that of a nursing mother: “he could not doe any more for vs, except hee should take vs into his lap, and yet we see

31 John Lee Thompson, John Calvin and the Daughters of Sarah: Women in Regular and Exceptional Roles in the Exegesis of Calvin, His Predecessors, and His Contemporaries, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 259 (Geneva: Droz, 1992), 16–18, 246–60, 267. 32 Ibid., 164–75. 33 See, for example, Calvin, Sermons, 41, 1181. 34 Ibid., 1059. 86 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note

he applieth himselfe to our infirmitie, he chaweth our morsels to vs, he feedeth vs with pappe, speaketh to vs like a nurse.”35 Drawing on biblical examples of nursing fathers and of a maternal God,36 Calvin’s God appro- priates behaviors specifically gendered female: nursing, pre-chewing solids, and cradling an infant on the lap. While such feminization of God is not unprecedented among religious writers, even women writers,37 Cary does not attribute female characteristics to God. Instead, she replaces God / Abraham with a woman. Her unique substitution of Sara for Abraham, and of Sara’s lap for God’s, echoes and challenges the patriarchal tendency to appropriate feminine nurturing qualities for God the Father. Claims in the Life of Cary’s early interest in theology and her ability to dispute Calvin often have been discredited as a Catholic daughter’s attempt to celebrate her Catholic mother. Although it is impossible to know whether Cary had read the commentaries or sermons to which I refer here, the intriguing contrasts between Calvin’s imagery and Cary’s suggest that she may have been at least as well versed in Calvin’s writing as the biography claims, and possibly more so. Together with Ferguson’s discoveries of the Catholic connotations of the printer’s emblem, my analysis of Cary’s innovation suggests a counterargument to the common skepticism about Cary’s early Catholic leanings in the Life. What is most important, however, is that we recognize the pervasive cultural currency of Calvin’s thought and the likelihood that Cary’s audience readily could have recognized her image of Sara’s lap as participating in Reformation debates involving Abraham, Sara, and purgatory.

35 Ibid., 146. 36 See, for example, Num. 11:12, Isa. 49:23, and 1 Pet. 2:2–3. 37 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Elizabeth Spearing (London: Penguin, 1998), passim; Aemilia Lanyer, “Salve Deus Rex Judæorum,” Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets, ed. Danielle Clark (London: Penguin, 2000), 263. “In Sara’s Lap” 87

Visual Iconography and Religious Pieties

While Cary was certainly influenced by the wealth of references to Abraham and Sara in religious literature, she no doubt drew on yet another culturally pervasive and perhaps still richer vein of imagery in regendering the conventional bosom of Abraham image: religious iconography. Visual religious images were widely accessible, even in post-Reformation England. Early modern historian Tara Hamling emphasizes both the acceptability and availability of religious art in private spaces in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, particularly as a prompt for extraordinary (unplanned) devotions.38 Iconoclasm in England, which began under Edward VI and was renewed with Elizabeth I’s 1559 injunctions, was never a straightforward process, especially with prohibitions against religious images in places of worship being variously interpreted and enforced, and with removals occurring in several waves, not ending until the 1640s.39 Some religious images in churches frequented by Cary in her youth thus may have been removed later; and, in fact, a number of empty niches and traces of faded paint at St. John the Baptist in Burford, where Cary would have been baptized and married, indicate her early familiarity with these images as a tantalizing possibility. Cary was even more likely to have been exposed to religious imagery in her parents’ Protestant household at the former Burford Priory (since extensively renovated and now a private residence) or in the households of family members or acquaintances. Because religious imagery in the home was considered more purely decorative and less susceptible to abuses of worship, it was widely available from 1560 to 1660 on household moveables and in decorative paintings, carvings, and sculptures.40 Hamling notes that Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, a type for God’s sacrifice of his son, was the single most common biblical scene in all media in England, found in homes across a wide range of social differences and geographic locations.

38 Tara Hamling, Decorating the “Godly” Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 228–30. 39 Ibid., 3–4, 40–48. 40 Ibid., 48–50, 3. 88 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note

To illustrate, Hamling cites chimneypieces in Boston Manor, Brentford, Middlesex; and Hardwick House, Whitchurch, Oxfordshire.41 Instances of moveables with this motif include one of a set of six silver gilt spice plates from the 1570s, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and a series of tapestries in Henry VIII’s Great Hall in Hampton Court Palace depicting Abrahamic scenes, including the binding of Isaac. Artistic references to the story of Lazarus and Dives were also common in household decorations; Hamling cites as evidence a 1580 wall painting at Pittleworth Manor, Hampshire.42 A small, white, unglazed stoneware jug from the late sixteenth century, probably imported to London by Hanseatic merchants, also on display at the Victoria and Albert, provides an additional example of a common household item bearing this motif (fig. 2). One of three medallions adorning the sides of the five-inch tall drinking vessel is labeled “LUCE XVI” and depicts Abraham welcoming Lazarus to his resting place with outstretched arms, while Dives writhes in agony below. Cary also might have been familiar with this visual image in other forms, including early manuscripts.43 Several examples of this imagery from England survive today in illustrated moralized bibles (medieval pic- ture bibles or biblia pauperum), breviaries, books of hours, and psalters. The most prominent instance occurs in a magnificent psalter dated 1339, a gift from Robert DeLisle to his daughter Audere (fig. 3). Contained within a triangular space at the bottom of a full-page table titled “Duodecim articuli fidei” (Twelve Articles of Faith), devils move the soul of Dives downward to the maw of a personified Hell while an angel transports the soul of Lazarus upward to the waiting arms of Abraham.44 Drawing on the meaning of κόλπος that refers to the folds formed over the chest in a loose garment, these images most commonly take the form of Abraham cradling the souls of the elect in his bosom within the folds of a cloth held between his outstretched hands. Examples in English manuscripts

41 Ibid., 238–41, 151. 42 Ibid., 133. 43 For a list of depictions in multiple forms, see Jérôme Baschet, Le Sein du Père: Abraham et la paternité dans l’Occident medieval, Le Temps des Images Series (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 392–405. 44 De Lisle Psalter, British Library, Arundel 83, f.128r. “In Sara’s Lap” 89

Figure 2. Unglazed stoneware jug with three medallions, one labeled “LUCE XVI” and depicting the rich man in hell (bottom center) with Abraham receiving Lazarus (above and to the right), 1550–75, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Author’s photograph. include an incompletely illustrated, late thirteenth-century moralized Bible that retells the Lazarus story in a series of eight small square illustrations with accompanying Latin text, emphasizing the role of “Pater abraham” in saving Lazarus; an early fifteenth-century book of hours depicting a blue- robed, white-bearded Abraham holding a white cloth containing four souls above a Latin prayer for the dead; the early-to-mid fifteenth-century book of hours in Latin of Queen Elizabeth, consort of Henry VII, beautifully illustrated with six angels raising a cloth containing three souls toward a solemn Abraham, hands outstretched in greeting; and a late fifteenth-century Carthusian miscellany titled The Desert of Religion and Other Poems that depicts Abraham standing at the top of “ye mounte of perfection,” holding aloft seven souls with orange halos in a blue and gold-ornamented 90 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note

Figure 3. From the De Lisle Psalter, 1339. © British Library Board, Arundel 83, f.128r. “In Sara’s Lap” 91

cloth (fig. 4).45 Cary or members of her audience might have had glimpses of volumes like these. Bosom of Abraham iconography was also common in funerary monuments, where it was available to a still wider audience. One of the most spectacular English examples is the monumental brass for Thomas de la Mare, fourteenth-century abbot of St. Albans. Crafted in Flanders during the abbot’s lifetime, the brass depicts the abbot full-length, clad in official robes with miter and crosier, and flanked by a canopy of saints. Directly above his head, at the top of a group of celebratory angels, is a seated Abraham (fig. 5). His left arm is circled protectively around a small figure on his lap, presumably a diminutive image of the bishop intended to represent his soul, but now indistinguishable. St. Albans was sufficiently close to Aldenham Manor, the home where Henry Cary settled after his marriage, that his bride could have been familiar with the cathedral.46 Documentation reveals that this brass remained on display until the final waves of iconoclasm during the English Civil War, when it was removed from the abbot’s marble slab before the high altar and hidden face-down underneath the altar for protection, undiscovered until many years later.47 It is currently displayed in the cathedral’s north presbytery aisle. The particular type of bosom of Abraham imagery most likely to have been familiar to Cary and her audience appears in small alabaster panels or figures. Alabaster carving was an important industry from the mid-four-

45 Historia Veteris Ae Novi Testamenti Figuris Illustrata, British Library, Add. 18719, 258v–59; British Library, Add. 16998, 44; Missal, XV Cent., British Library Add. 50001, 67v (viewed in black and white facsimile); The Desert of Religion and Other Poems and Religious Pieces, British Library, Add. 37049, 37v. Add. 18719 is an unfinished, inferior copy of a moralized bible: British Library, Harley 1527 (see 36v–37). 46 A familial connection exists to the borough of St. Albans, Hertfordshire, represented in Parliament from 1601 to 1609 by Henry Cary’s brother Adulphus, who acquainted Elizabeth with St. Augustine and had “a good opinion of Catholic religion.” Cary, Life, 190. 47 William Page, “The Brasses and Indents in St Alban’s Abbey,” The Home Counties Magazine: Devoted to the Topography of London, Middlesex, Essex, Herts, Bucks, Berks, Surrey, and Kent, ed. W. J. Hardy (London: F. E. Robinson, 1899) 1:23–24; Cathedral Guide Julia Lowe, informal interview, July 17, 2012. The cathedral is approximately 8 km (5 miles) from present-day Aldenham. 92 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note

Figure 4. From The Desert of Religion and Other Poems, 15th century. © British Library Board, Add . 37049, f . 37v. “In Sara’s Lap” 93

Figure 5. Detail from brass funerary monument of Abbott Thomas de la Mare, St. Albans Cathedral, St. Albans. Author’s photograph. 94 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note

teenth to the mid-sixteenth century, when craftsmen in the Nottingham area produced large numbers of relatively inexpensive panels and figures for domestic use and export.48 The earliest use of such carvings was for insets in large altarpieces like the famed Swansea altarpiece, but they also became common as household devotional objects. Although many of the alabasters from religious houses were exported to the Continent or destroyed during the Reformation, many others survived in private settings.49 Most extant alabasters depict New Testament rather than Old Testament scenes, with figures of the Trinity being particularly popular as devotional images, as illustrated in the figure above the fireplace in Robert Campin’s painting of St. Barbara (1438) (fig. 6).50 In the late fourteenth century, Trinitarian images like this one, known as the Throne of Grace Trinity, intended for contemplation on Christ’s suffering as a source of mercy, coalesced with earlier Abrahamic imagery to produce what is now called the Trinity with souls or the Bosom of Abraham Trinity.51 O’Kane notes that this combination may be the result of iconographers drawing on John 1:18, with its account of Christ residing in the Father’s bosom.52 Whatever its exact origin, this distinctively English type draws on earlier representations of Abraham as an Old Testament antetype of the Father. God the Father holds the souls of the elect (usually in Trinitarian mul- tiples of three) in a cloth at his bosom, with the crucified Christ resting

48 W. L. Hildburgh, “Iconographical Peculiarities in English Medieval Alabaster Carvings. Part One,” Folklore 44.1 (1933): 32–34; Francis Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters, with a Catalogue of the Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Oxford: Phaidon and Christie’s, 1984), 11–16. 49 Hamling, Decorating the “Godly” Household, 30; Francis Cheetham, Alabaster Images of Medieval England (Woodridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2003), 5. 50 Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters, 28; Hildburgh, “Iconographical Peculiarities,” 50. 51 Jérôme Baschet, “Medieval Abraham: Between Fleshly Patriarch and Divine Father,” Modern Language Notes 108.4 (1993): 755–56; Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters, 18; Sheingorn, “Bosom of Abraham Trinity,” 273. For more on the Throne of Grace Trinity, see Margaret M. Duffy, “Iconography of the Holy Trinity: Imagining the Unimaginable,” Ad Imaginum Dei (blog), June 2, 2012, http://imaginemdei.blogspot. com/2011/06/trinity-imagining-unimaginable.html. 52 O’Kane, “‘Bosom of Abraham,’” 512. “In Sara’s Lap” 95

Figure 6. Robert Campin, St. Barbara, right-hand panel of the Werl Altarpiece, 1438. Public domain. 96 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note on his knees and a dove painted on or attached with a dowel.53 Nineteen examples survive, and one art historian speculates that hundreds existed before the Reformation.54 Because the visual representation of the Bosom of Abraham Trinity likely influenced Cary’s representation of Mariam and undoubtedly shaped her character’s reception, I will discuss three examples. A late fourteenth- century alabaster, now in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, depicts God the Father seated, crowned, and holding nine souls in a cloth while cradling the crucifix on his knees. Said to be “one of the finest English carvings of the period,” it bears strong similarity to contemporary manuscript illumi- nations, like those discussed above, as well as to images in print volumes, such as a 1486 edition of John Mirk’s Liber festivalis (fig. 7).55 An early fifteenth-century Bosom of Abraham Trinity, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is about three feet in height and bears clear evidence of its original polychromy: a gilt crown, red robes framing the souls to be saved (including a bishop and a king), and black paint on the cross and throne (fig. 8). With his spiked hair and more stylized features, God seems less realistic than in the Burrell specimen, and he no longer holds the souls waiting for salvation but carries them in the folds of his girdle. Both of these alabasters likely originated in religious settings and were removed during earlier waves of iconoclasm, perhaps to private settings, although collective memory within parishes may have preserved some details of their features and locations for a time. Alabaster panels like the late fifteenth-century panel on display in the Victoria and Albert were still probably fairly common in households during Cary’s lifetime. Although this one was designed as part of a large altarpiece (fig. 9), similar panels were housed in wood for private devo-

53 Hildburgh, “Iconographical Peculiarities,” 50–54; Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters, 18, 296–303. See also Richard Marks et al., “Medieval Europe,” The Burrell Collection (London: Collins, 1983), 87–117; NLR, “Bosom of Abraham Trinity,” Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400, ed. Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1987), 514–15. 54 See Cheetham, Alabaster Images; Sheingorn, “Bosom of Abraham Trinity,” 274. 55 Marks et al., “Medieval Europe,” 92; John Mirk, Liber festivalis (Oxford, 1496), STC 17958, 72v. “In Sara’s Lap” 97

Figure 7. Detail from John Mirk’s Liber Festivalis, 1486. Bodleian Library, Arch. G d. 34, fol. 43v. 98 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note

tional use.56 In this example, the face of God the Father seems more serene and distant than in the Museum of Fine Arts alabaster. A hole for the dowel to attach the dove is clearly visible above the heads of the three souls waiting to be raised to heaven. Two angels swinging censers flank God at the top, while the four lower angels catch Christ’s blood in chalices. The style of painting is typical: faces and robes unpainted; God’s crown, beard, and hair (and the angels’ hair) gilded; multi-colored swirls in God’s halo; red patterning on the angels’ wings; and a pattern of white dots forming flowers overlaying a black or dark green color in the bottom background, with evidence of the same patterning on the cross.57 It is conceivable that Cary had an iconographic image like this one in mind when she revised the common Abrahamic imagery in Mariam. Even if no such image was available in her home or in those of her acquaintances, which is unlikely given the cultural currency of these images well into the seventeenth century, members of her audience would have been familiar with this iconography and would have understood its conflations of Abraham with God and of the elect with Christ in the image of her penitent Mariam.

Cary’s Female Icon

My account of the verbal and visual representations of the bosom of Abraham enables us to see how pervasive the image was in Cary’s time and gives us some sense of why she may have alluded to it in Mariam. I now would like to examine further the effect within the play of the regendering of this common iconographic image. With few exceptions, most feminist readings undervalue the degree of agency the image suggests for the pious woman and none recognizes the image’s significance.

56 Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters, 1–5. 57 Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters, 26–27. In both the alabasters held by the Museum of Fine Arts and the Victoria and Albert, God extends the first two fingers of the right hand in an additional Trinitarian symbolism. The Catholic sign of the cross is made by the bringing together of the ring finger, little finger, and thumb, to symbolize the Trinity, while the index and middle fingers are extended together to indicate God’s human and divine natures. “In Sara’s Lap” 99

Figure 9. Bosom of Abraham Trinity panel. Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Author’s photograph. “In Sara’s Lap” 101

At its most basic, Cary’s reference to Sara’s lap participates in the play’s Christian imagery. Despite the pre-Christian Judean setting, Cary reads events through a distinctly Christian lens, suggesting not only the importance of the unbroken line of descent from Abraham and Sara to Mariam, but also from Mariam to Christ. Positioning Mariam as Cary does emphasizes her spiritual power over the worldly power of Herod and his scheming sister, Salome, clearly marked as part Jew, part Edomite and thus of “baser birth” (1.3.233).58 Cary’s distinctive image also has the effect of positioning Mariam as Lazarus, and Herod as the rich man of Luke’s gospel. Cary may have been exploiting Tertullian’s linking of Dives with Herod Antipas (her Herod’s son) and conflating multiple Herods as in the medieval mystery plays. But whether she read Tertullian directly, encountered a reference to his comparison in Calvin’s Imortalytie of the soule or elsewhere, or conceived the comparison independently,59 Cary casts her heroine as a beggar. Her reputation blackened by Salome, Mariam is the earthly outcast who nevertheless attains heavenly transcendence while her spiritually bankrupt husband broils in hell fires of his (and the devilish Salome’s) making. This reading, which pointedly places Mariam in an abject position despite her elite status as Jewish royalty, highlights the inescap- ably inferior position of women in Judean (and Stuart) society. Kimberly Poiteven explores the play’s connections between race and gender, noting that Salome’s husband Constabarus extends to all women “Cham’s servile curse,” inextricably linking them with the branch of Noah seen in the period as racially inferior (4.6.341): “at some level, all women (even those who

58 For a compelling reading of the complexities of race in the play, see Kimberly Woosley Poiteven, “`Counterfeit Colour’: Making Up Race in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 24 (2005), 13–34, rpt. in Elizabeth Cary, vol. 6 of Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700, ed. Karen Raber (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 327–48. 59 Quintas Florens Tertullianus, “Moses, Allowing Divorce, and Christ Prohibiting It, Explained,” in vol. 3 of Ante-Nicene Fathers, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, CCEL, accessed 08 Aug. 2014, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf03.v.iv.v.xxxiv.html; Calvin, Imortalytie, fol. 16v. On various Herods and their conflation, see Weller and Ferguson, Mariam, 20–23. 102 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note

appear white) are black.”60 Cary suggests that Mariam’s only escape from such earthly blackening is through spiritual salvation. Her speech in Act Four, scene eight, functions as an examination of conscience: she openly confesses her sinful pride and resolves to match her outward demeanor to her inner convictions. She ends by contrasting worldly “princes great in power, high in birth” (subsuming both Herod and Dives) with the greater power of her heavenly sustenance in Sara’s lap (4.8.571). This escape from Herod’s authority through an inward spiritual turn emphasizes the husband’s inability to control his wife’s interiority, particularly her private religious devotions. Although Herod might take her life, Mariam claims her soul “free from adversary’s power” (4.8.570). Weller and Ferguson gloss adversary as “Satan” and link it to seventeenth-century theological debates about the wife’s freedom of conscience from her husband, specifically her right to religious dissent.61 Both Ferguson and Elisa Oh explore the questionable nature of the normative silence expected of the well-behaved wife, linking it to practices of Catholic equivocation and to fears about Catholics generated by the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, but nei- ther examines this particular moment of private dissent, nor the power it grants Mariam.62 For all her faults, including a sense of racial superiority that we now recognize as highly problematic, Mariam sees herself as purely Jewish and as sharing in Christ’s lineage. Herod, like Salome, is a “mongrel” with no legitimate claim to spiritual authority in this pre-Christian empire, yet he has usurped political authority through his marriage to Mariam and by eliminating her grandfather and brother, the only other legitimate claimants (1.3.236).63 Mariam’s turn away from her husband and toward Sara, her foremother, rather than “father” Abraham, disrupts the idea of women’s natural subordination to the male head of household (and of state), marking her religious independence and her primary allegiance to the matriarchal line. The spiritual nature of Mariam’s devotion to Sara

60 Ibid., 334. 61 Weller and Ferguson, Mariam, 171–72 n570. 62 Ferguson, “Allegories,” 273–83, 283–95; Elisa Oh, “Refusing to Speak: Silent, Chaste, and Disobedient Female Subjects in King Lear and The Tragedy of Mariam,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 34.2 (2008): 189–90. 63 Poiteven, “`Counterfeit Colour,’” 331–34. “In Sara’s Lap” 103

is further accentuated by the hostility of her actual mother, Alexandra, toward Mariam. Mariam’s turn to Sara for succor is also a potent means of controlling her own self-representation. Her prayerfulness counters the false depictions of the wife who controls her demeanor to please her husband and of the blackened wife that Salome constructs for Herod. Not only does Mariam refuse Herod’s control of her dress, her demeanor, and her speech,64 but she refuses his authority over her religious devotions, using them instead to define herself independently from the marital bond. This redefinition is so powerful that Mariam ultimately prefigures Christ, as both Elaine Beilin and Frances Dolan have observed. Beilin outlines the numerous elements of Christian allegory in the final act, including its phoenix image, Mariam’s implied resurrection in three days’ time, and the reference to Judas Iscariot’s suicide.65 For Mariam, however, this is not allegory, but a charismatic identification that fundamentally transforms. For Cary and her early readers, the subtle interrogations of Mariam’s character in her negative interactions with other women and in the Chorus’s direct aspersions are washed clean in the final act’s redefinition, which begins at the moment when she turns to Sara. This instant in the play is made more vital in its contrast to Herod’s debased image of Sara early in Act Five. Ferguson notes this speech in her discussion of racial difference in the play, suggesting that Herod sees the genealogical split between himself and Mariam as beginning with Sara.66 In his response to the Nuntio’s report of Mariam’s death, Herod speaks as if to the Judean populace:

Tis I have overthrown your royal line. Within her [Mariam’s] purer veins the blood did run, That from her grandam Sara she deriv’d, Whose beldame age the love of kings hath won; Oh, that her issue had as long been liv’d. (5.1.177–81)

64 Oh, “Refusing to Speak,” 200–3. 65 Beilin, “Making of a Female Hero,” 164, 170–71; Dolan, “Women on Scaffolds,” 166–67, 177; Elaine Beilin, “”Elizabeth Cary and The Tragedie of Mariam,” Papers on Language and Literature 16 (1980): 45–64, rpt. in Raber, Elizabeth Cary, 1–19. 66 Ferguson, “Allegories,” 326–28. 104 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note

Ferguson emphasizes Herod’s view of Sara as sexually desirable, even in old age, and as a potential adulteress and bearer of impure lines. This sexual availability extends, of course, in Herod’s thinking to Mariam. As his wife and subject, her “issue” should be fully under his control, with both her womb (and her mouth) as receptacles for his use.67 But this debased view of Sara is potently contrasted in the recu- perative depiction previously established, making Herod’s image suspect. Depicting Mariam as lying in Sara’s lap rather than in Abraham’s bosom positively inverts the stereotypically negative gender associations regarding women’s sexuality. O’Kane notes the unexpectedness of the contrast between Abraham’s portrayal as seemingly cruel in binding Isaac, yet caring in taking up Lazarus. Cary exploits this incongruity by substituting for him his wife, “genetrix” of the faith for conceiving Isaac and thus giving birth to the first child in a series of miraculous biblical births that include Mary’s conception of Christ.68 In addition to this substitution of a feminized and conventionally more nurturing agent of succor, Cary’s shift from bosom to lap further feminizes and sexualizes the image. Not only is the term more intimate, evoking its less common meaning of a mother taking her child onto her lap, but it also may indicate Cary’s awareness of the additional meaning for κόλπος — womb or hollow.69 Cary replaces Abraham’s bosom with Sara’s womb, the ancestral womb of Mariam and of Christ, an image far more positive in its connotations than Calvin’s quarry. Jérôme Baschet explains Abraham’s importance in linking fleshly, spiritual, and divine kinship systems, calling him a “mediator between the fleshly and the divine.”70 For Cary, Sara fulfills this same function, establishing Mariam’s spiritual status as elect and, in turn, her divine kinship. Whereas in iconography, those souls waiting in Abraham’s cloth to be saved “melt[ed] into a single

67 See Fergsuon, “Allegories,” 299, on the mouth as receptacle and on Mariam’s speech as having negative agency in Salome’s portrayal of her. 68 O’Kane, “‘Bosom of Abraham,’” 487; David Lyle Jeffrey, gen. ed., A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1992), 80. 69 An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon, 442. 70 Baschet, “Medieval Abraham,” 758. “In Sara’s Lap” 105 mass,” 71 undistinguished by gender or age, the effect here is far more complex: Mariam serves as the representative of God’s female elect, humbling herself even before Herod’s bitter and vengeful first wife, Doris, yet making herself one with all the other elect. Orienting her reader to a more intimate area of the female body, with its connotations of both pudenda and womb, of female sexuality and female power, Cary suggests the generative (and regenerative) power of Mariam’s relationship to Sara. She creates a more nurturing parental relationship than that of Abraham, often depicted as distant and stern in his care of Lazarus, while at the same time she prioritizes the female body’s life-producing capabilities. This is a more redemptive view of female sexuality than that of the false temptress on which Herod’s condemnation of her is based. Here Mariam controls the receptacle, granting herself a more positive form of agency than the haunting vision of the adulterous female fabricated by the deceptive Salome and swallowed whole by Herod. Instead of posing a potential sexual or dynastic threat, Sara’s womb, conflated as it is with her lap, promises solace and salvation to the penitent Mariam, effectively rebirthing her into the heavenly realm. Furthermore, Mariam’s Sara is a corrective to the common negative stereotype that establishes a link between women’s open mouths and open legs.72 In much the same way that it recuperates women’s sexuality, this positive image also recasts Mariam’s outspokenness as spiritual necessity. As we have seen, Sara, too, was vilified for this stereotypically female flaw in her treatment of Hagar, yet she is nevertheless Christianity’s ancestress, prefiguring Mary in Christian typology. Cary’s substitution of Sara for Abraham refashions God’s promise of salvation for women by highlight- ing positive women’s roles. This is a bold display of female agency, marking Cary and, by extension, her devout female readers as one with Mariam and with Sara. Mariam’s private devotional moment handily signifies for

71 O’Kane, “‘Bosom of Abraham,’” 494. 72 See Heather E. Ostman, “Backbiters, Flatterers, and Monarchs: Domestic Politics in The Tragedy of Mariam,” Images of Matter: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 184–85; Carla Mazzio, “Sins of the Tongue,” The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 55–62. 106 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note

Cary’s audience the importance for women of approaching salvation from a distinctly female perspective. When we bring together this female perspective with the Bosom of Abraham Trinity, as Cary’s image so readily does, we can see that resting on the lap, rather than being held in the bosom, places Mariam in the position of Christ, who rests on the Father’s knees. Given the context of this Trinitarian visual influence on Cary’s tableau, Mariam is not merely Christ-like; her identification with Christ is deeper, more purely metaphoric. Just as Old Testament Abraham became God in the English evolution of the bosom of Abraham iconography, Mariam here becomes the divine feminine.73 Like the Trinity on the wall in Campin’s painting, Mariam is displayed within the text as a prompt to devotion for the reader. Cary’s inversion of gender at this critical moment in the text is a radical statement about salvation for women and by women, and contributes appreciably to the play’s message about the religious agency of women not only in Mariam’s Jerusalem, but also in Cary’s Stuart England. The verbal and visual contexts for Abraham’s bosom that I have explored here help us to appreciate more fully the uniqueness and power of the female icon Cary creates, both in terms of its implications for the play and for our understanding of the play’s author. The regendered Abrahamic image is emblematic of the complex and equivocal signification at work in the play as a whole and indicative of Cary’s early Catholic tendencies. In closing, I will turn to discuss the gap that is opened in the play with Mariam’s disappearance from the stage. Act Four closes with the Chorus’s condemnation of Mariam’s “virtuous pride” (4.8.663), a sin that Mariam herself has recognized in her encounter with Doris. Mariam is beheaded off-stage, only to be resurrected in the final act through the Nuntio’s report of her scaffold speech and Herod’s tortured repentance. Yet Mariam as actual character remains trapped in a textual purgatory, expiring between acts, never truly resurrected except through the words of others. She is represented through the Nuntio’s account, revived through Herod’s anguished imagery, and recreated from Josephus’s Antiquities through the words of

73 Weller and Ferguson, Mariam, 38, remark on the structural substitutions in which the roles of characters and their relationships to one another “repeat earlier configurations.” “In Sara’s Lap” 107

Cary herself, who in the end seems to side with the Catholic interpretation of the bosom of Abraham as a staging place along the way to Mariam’s salvation. Perhaps most importantly, she is resurrected by Mariam’s audience through its sympathetic assessment of the titular character. Earlier, I suggested that the image of Mariam in Sara’s lap acts as a prompt to devotion, and I would like to return to that idea now to suggest further that such contemplation provides a more faithful resurrection than Herod’s hollow attempts in the final act to revivify his wife. Cary relies upon her audience to ponder Mariam’s fate and, ultimately, in spite of her human failings, to judge Mariam innocent. Using the logic of substitution born of religious typology and fostered in an environment in which visual and verbal imagery called forth multiple meanings, Cary invites the reader to mark the substitution of Sara for Abraham and of Mariam for Lazarus. Furthermore, just as Abraham functions as a type of God the Father, Sara functions as a type of God’s Mother, Mary. In this way, Cary’s gender inversion of common Abrahamic iconography becomes not only a daring statement of the salvific power of and for women, but also an ingeniously equivocal reference to the devotional image of Madonna and child.74 This single brief, yet crucial image in the play, so richly steeped in iconographic tradition and so keenly imbued with theological debate, signifies Cary’s interest in Catholicism and her difference from Calvin. Her transformation of the bosom of Abraham image, unique within the period, also was a recognizable emblem of the Virgin, the feminine aspect of God within Christianity, whose power was diminished with the Reformation. In marked contrast to Calvin’s graphic depiction of Sara’s rocky barrenness, Cary offers a profoundly feminine theology. Mariam is saved because she is daughter to Sara, and by extension to Mary. She is saved because her author holds her up to the audience as a contemplative object: human, flawed, yet worthy of resurrection, like Cary and her readers. She is saved because the audience — especially those female readers who are more likely to challenge the Chorus’s early, overly-hasty condemnations — are tasked

74 Note, for example, the similarities in gesture and composition between God the Father and Christ in the images of the Bosom of Abraham Trinity and of the Madonna and Child in the Shaftesbury Psalter. 108 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Beverly Marshall Van Note with God’s role with respect to the tableau that Mariam creates: they are invited continually within the lines of Mariam’s textual purgatory to judge her and, mercifully, like Sara, to exonerate her.