Conférence Modernités Britanniques: Closet Drama and Women's Writing (Aurélie Griffin, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – délégation CNRS à l'IHRIM, et Sophie Lemercier-Goddard, ENS de Lyon, IHRIM).
Présentation
Aurélie Griffin et Sophie Lemercier-Goddard parleront de Closet Drama et du théâtre de femmes dans la première Modernité en Angleterre, et plus particulièrement de la première pièce originale publiée écrite par une femme en Angleterre (1613): "From the Margins of the English Stage: Gender and History in Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam".
The Tragedy of Mariam is the first original play published by a woman in England. Herod the Great's fatal passion for his second wife Mariamne, as related in Flavius Josephus' The Jewish Wars, is the background plot of a dozen plays performed on the continent between 1552 and 1670, but Elizabeth Cary broke new ground by radically adopting the point of view of her female characters. Unlike its treatment in the Italian or French plays (Lodovico Dolce in 1565, Alexandre Hardy in 1610 or Tristan L'Hermite in 1636), Cary's Herod is virtually reduced to a secondary character, while the plot focuses not on one, but on four female characters, refusing to embody what would be a single female voice in the sole heroine. Far from an idealized sisterhood however, the play shows how patriarchy imposes itself at the expense of women, culminating in the ultimate injustice of the execution of the innocent Mariam. This paper will seek to identify the specificities of the play's treatment of gender and genre in the context of European plays devoted to Mariam and Herod, in order to show how Cary, writing a historical play from a woman's perspective, seized on the possibilities offered by closet drama to develop a proto-feminist approach.
Aurélie Griffin (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) and Sophie Lemercier-Goddard (ENS de Lyon) co-edited Closet Drama in Early Modern England: Theatre Without a Stage (Bloomsbury, The Arden Shakespeare, 2025) and, with Sandrine Berrégard (Université de Strasbourg), Mariamne et Hérode en Europe : métamorphoses d'une histoire antique, XVIe-XVIIe siècle dans Études Épistémè [Online], 45 | 2024.
Contact : sophie[point]lemercier-goddard[a]ens-lyon[point]fr
Illustration: Paul van Somer, Elizabeth Cary, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, ca.1620