The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry: With "The Lady Falkland: Her Life" by One of Her Daughters.

Weller and Ferguson's edition of The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) is a boon to scholars who want to incorporate women writers into their classes and research. Here scholars will find a reliable text of the play, with full scholarly apparatus, in a volume that is well designed (and thus can be carried next to editions of Shakespeare or Middleton without losing students' respect) and is available in paperback at a reasonable cost. Cary's play - as far as we know the first original play published by an Englishwoman - deserves this attention. The tragedy presents the story of Mariam, Queen of Judea, who is eventually beheaded on the orders of Herod, her king and husband. In Mariam, Cary explores with complexity and considerable ambiguity issues such as female resistance to authority and the nature of domestic and political tyranny. Despite the lack of a modem critical edition, the play has generated significant scholarly attention in the past few years.

Weller and Ferguson begin with the assumption that Cary's play is worthy of membership in "the mainstream canon of Renaissance drama" (50) and that their edition should accord the play the respect of full commentary. As a result, they provide a relatively lengthy introduction that draws on recent scholarship to place the play within its literary context - including its sources in Josephus and the Bible, the precedents in mystery plays and continental drama, and the tradition of English closet dramas - and its social context, specifically its associations with the topical issue of Henry VIII's divorce and remarriage to Anne Boleyn which, the editors argue, "informs Cary's play much more deeply than critics have allowed" (33). In their critical analysis, Weller and Ferguson consider the role of the Chorus, finding "the disparity between the moral adages of the Chorus and the experience of the heroine . . . the very heart of Cary's dramatic vision" (38); examine the play's structure and characterization; note intertextual connections to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Othello; and, finally, suggest that Mariam, "poised on the threshold between the private antitheatrical formalism of closet drama and the public forms of dissemination . . . may well represent a unique fusion of Shakespearean and neoclassical dramaturgy" (43).

Although they wanted an edition on which scholars could rely, the editors also wished to create a teaching text, by which they meant a modernized edition in which undergraduate readers would not be encumbered with extensive notes. Their solution to the problem of multiple audiences was to provide layers of apparatus. The text, based on the 1613 quarto, is modernized in spelling and punctuation, and the footnotes explain early modern phraseology for novice readers. For more advanced students and scholars, the editors provide discursive endnotes, including discussions of their editorial choices that invite readers to enter the editorial process. For textual scholars, the editors provide a collation in which they record substantive emendations and departures from the spelling and punctuation of the 1613 text. There are drawbacks to every editorial method: this system is awkward for scholars, who are forced to flip pages regularly. For most purposes, however, both students and scholars will find what they need.

Accompanying Mariam is the biography of Lady Falkland written by one of her daughters, which offers a fascinating drama of its own: Cary's unsuccessful marriage, despite her attempts to please her husband; his opposition to her conversion to Roman Catholicism; his death, graphically described; her daring kidnap of two of her sons from the household of her Protestant oldest son. The second half even has a villain in William Chillingworth, the deceiver who tried to lure Cary's children back to Protestantism. The modernized text is based on the manuscript in the Archives of the Departement du Nord and includes the manuscript's useful annotations and deletions.

As an editor, I might sometimes have made different choices than did Weller and Ferguson, but my students in Renaissance literature are now reading Mariam with Othello by way of this most welcome edition.

SARA JAYNE STEEN Montana State University