vol. 2.1, 2001

volume 2.1, 2001

Patricia Crouch - Renaissance Tragic Queens: Authority and Reputation in Cary, Marlowe and Shakespeare

When we consider that Queen Elizabeth reigned in England for forty-five years, it is perhaps not surprising to find that a number of texts penned both during and after her rule embrace female queens as their subjects. Prominent among these works are Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, which appeared during Elizabeth's lifetime, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, which was produced within six years of the queen's death. The first known tragedy of female authorship, Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, also appeared during this time. Although Cary's closet drama was not published until 1613, Weller and Ferguson date its composition sometime after the author's 1602 "marriage and probably before the birth of her first child, Catherine, in 1609" (5). The play thus likely began to circulate in manuscript form not long after Elizabeth's death in 1603. In the texts of these three plays, Dido and Cleopatra share a number of similarities which offer an intriguing contrast to Cary's Mariam. In addition to being reigning queens, whereas Mariam serves merely as the king's consort, Dido and Cleopatra assert their authority chiefly in struggles against outside forces--squabbling gods in Dido's case, and a secular, empire-hungry triumvirate in Cleopatra's. Mariam, too, initially struggles against the external authorities--husband, king, society--who would limit her behavior and prescribe her destiny, but she eventually surrenders herself to fate, deciding that it should be enough to remain true to her own conscience.

Despite this defining difference in Cary's portrayal of Mariam, the three plays engage a number of similar themes: the devastating implications of lies and broken oaths; the maternal desire to secure a position of authority for offspring; a female defiance of societal prescriptions of behavior; and competition between women rather than support among them. But the most striking affinity among the plays is a shared emphasis on reputation, particularly as it regards chastity. While it may be tempting to conclude that both Dido and Cleopatra take their lives because they are denied the lovers they seek, their decisions to commit suicide are in fact motivated by the desire to preserve reputation, even though unchaste behavior is what undermined those reputations in the first place. On the other hand, Mariam has her life taken from her because she is falsely accused of adultery, and because she refuses to defend herself from the accusations leveled against her. Cleopatra and Dido die to avoid facing the truth; Mariam dies hoping that truth will prevail.

Because of their places as reigning monarchs, both Cleopatra and Dido enjoy, on some level, a lineal relation between their words and deeds. Although Mary Nyquist contends that Cleopatra "has been radically domesticated in ways appropriate to early modern bourgeois society" (97), she admits that the queen's "very obliviousness to the responsibilities of her office, along with her indifference to the lives of her subjects . . . mark her reign as despotical" (99). Indeed, there are a number of instances in the play where we find Cleopatra exercising her monarchical power in word (deed), as when she commits sixty Egyptian ships to aid Antony and announces her intention to be present during the battle: "Sink Rome, and their tongues rot / That speak against us! A charge we bear I' th' war, / And as the president of my kingdom will / Appear there for a man. Speak not against it, / I will not stay behind" (3.7.15-19).

Yet there are limits to Cleopatra's authority, for she is merely a queen in a world of emperors: Octavius Caesar, M. Aemilius Lepidus, and Marc Antony, the three men who together rule the Roman Empire. Cleopatra thus has no natural, or at least civil, authority over the man she loves, and Antony must answer above all else to the authority of the triumvirate. Cleopatra cannot simply dictate that her lover obey her commands, despite what she says in the following exchange:

ALEXAS. Good Majesty,
Herod of Jewry dare not look upon you
But when you are well pleased.
CLEOPATRA. That Herod's head
I'll have: but how, when Antony is gone,
Through whom I might command it? (3.3.2-6)

Not only does this passage reveal the limits of Cleopatra's authority within a Rome-dominated world, but it also reveals the queen's subordination to Antony, even as it claims mastery of him. At this point in the play, Herod is both a friend and loyal subject of Antony; Alexas has not yet co-opted him to Caesar's cause. Thus, even if Cleopatra possesses the military might necessary to murder the king of Jewry (however hypothetical this action may be in the current context), to effect it would be to betray Antony, not to mention the Roman Empire which had supported Cleopatra in the Egyptian civil war, to which both she and Antony owe allegiance. She might therefore only "command" Herod's death by securing Antony's permission as a representative of the triumvirate; it is not her lover's force that she requires, but rather his authority.

Cleopatra's dominion over Antony requires a different kind of language than the direct assertions which allow her to command absolutely within the limited domain of Egypt. Throughout the play, Cleopatra exerts control over Antony by using manipulative language which preys on the triumvir's pride in both his authority and his manhood. Her body attracts and tempts Antony with its promises of pleasure, but Rome allures him with the promise of a different type of manhood--one won on the battlefield and exercised in the senate house. In the first scene of the play, a messenger arrives with news from Rome. Although irritated to be so distracted from his pleasures, Antony agrees to hear the messenger, yet Cleopatra acts as if her lover had refused and sets out (ostensibly) to convince him:

Nay, hear them, Antony.
Fulvia perchance is angry; or who knows
If the scarce-bearded Caesar have not sent
His pow'rful mandate to you, 'Do this, or this,
Take in that kingdom, and enfranchise that.' (1.1.20-24)

Antony rises to the challenge, as Cleopatra knows he will, and in the end Antony refuses the messenger, telling Cleopatra that he will be "no messenger but thine" (1.1.54).

Although Cleopatra enjoys frequent success by employing such tactics, she is only able to distract Antony from the business of Rome for so long--a fact of which she is quite cognizant and about which she worries constantly. When Antony learns of the death of Fulvia, his wife and Cleopatra's rival, he hurries off to Rome to preserve his relationship with Caesar and Lepidus. Egypt's words have failed her. Ironically, as Antony himself acknowledges, Fulvia was just as desperate to trap him as Cleopatra:

Truth is that Fulvia,
To have me out of Egypt, made wars here,
For which myself, the ignorant motive, do
So far ask pardon as befits mine honour. (2.2.99-102)

In the end, Fulvia does succeed in drawing Antony away from Egypt, but her actions prevent her from ever possessing him again. Cleopatra reenacts Fulvia's fatal mistake when she joins Antony in his sea-battle against Caesar, and the consequences of her actions are equally dire: Antony is "'Stroyed in dishonour" (3.11.54) when he follows Cleopatra in a coward's retreat; the kings and soldiers who once followed Antony defect to Caesar's camp; Antony and Cleopatra "have lost command" (3.11.23) of both their military forces and their own destinies. Although dissembling, Cleopatra recognizes the truth of her situation when she tells Proculeius, "I am his [Caesar's] fortune's vassal" (5.2.29).

Cleopatra's protestation of innocence in effecting her lover's downfall--"I little thought / You would have followed" (3.11.55-56)--rings hollow in Antony's ears:

Egypt, thou knew'st too well
My heart was to thy rudder tied by th' strings,
And thou shouldst tow me after. O'er my spirit
Thy full supremacy thou knew'st, and that
Thy beck might from me the bidding of the gods
Command me. (3.11.56-61)

What Antony fails to realize, however, is that Cleopatra can never be sure of her sovereignty over him. She tests Antony again and again throughout the course of the play, most devastatingly when she sends word to him that she has taken her own life when in truth she has simply hidden herself within the monument, fearing his irrational ravings will express themselves in physical violence against her. Although Cleopatra dreams of catching Antony as a fisherman catches a fish--"My bended hook shall pierce / Their slimy jaws; and as I draw them up / I'll think them every one an Antony, / And say, "Ah, ha! you're caught!" (2.5.12-15)--she knows that she can never really solely possess him, for though he is "painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way's a Mars" (2.5.117-18). Gorgon Antony, the twisted visage of a woman who wears his lover's headdresses to bed, belongs to Egypt, but the god of war belongs to Rome. It may very well be that Cleopatra's flight during the sea-battle is, consciously or unconsciously, another test of her Janus-faced lover.

When Cleopatra asks Enobarbus, "Is Antony or we in fault for this?" (3.13.2), Enobarbus tries to soothe her by saying, "Antony only, that would make his will [i.e., lust] / Lord of his reason" (3-4). Yet Enobarbus's words contradict themselves, for Cleopatra represents the very desire which has overcome the triumvir's reason; in large measure, then, Cleopatra is indeed to blame. This victory over Antony's reason--this victory over Mars and Rome--is what Cleopatra has aimed for all along, and yet it represents at the same time a tragic defeat. By achieving her private end, Cleopatra has brought public disaster. The woman Egypt has conquered Antony, but the nation Egypt has utterly lost itself to Rome. Perhaps worse yet, Cleopatra's hard-won command of her beloved proves an empty triumph. Unable to forsake her manipulative ways, the Egyptian queen sends word to Antony that she is dead, hoping to gauge his reaction. Antony's response--falling upon his own sword--proves without doubt that Cleopatra has mastered her great Mars, but it comes at too high a price. There is little power in commanding the dead.

Like Cleopatra, Dido declares her royal powers explicitly. After the queen announces her plans to marry the socially inferior Aeneas and to elevate him to the status of king, for example, her sister Anna asks, "What if the citizens repine thereat?" (4.4.70). Dido's reply is an unqualified affirmation of a ruler's power to command what she wills:

Those that dislike what Dido gives in charge,
Command my guard to slay for their offence.
Shall vulgar peasants storm at what I do?
The ground is mine that gives them sustenance,
The air wherein they breathe, the water, fire,
All that they have, their lands, their goods, their lives,
And I, the goddess of all these, command
Aeneas ride as Carthaginian king. (4.4.71-78)

Throughout much of the play, as Clare R. Kinney has remarked, Dido "insists upon her princely free agency" (265), but that agency is, like Cleopatra's, in fact closely circumscribed, and the very thing which Dido most wishes to possess--Aeneas--remains out of her reach.

As the play begins, we are presented with a self-assertive and clever queen who has recently obtained her kingdom from Iarbas in a battle of wits. Although Marlowe does not depict Dido's arrival in Carthage, he draws (4.2.13-15) on Virgil's tale of how "the local king, whom Virgil calls Iarbas, sold her as much land as a bull's hide might contain: Dido cut up a hide into strips, and so secured enough land to build a citadel" (Grant and Hazel 110). A widow, Dido is so proud of her chastity and self-possession that she maintains a portrait gallery of the many suitors whom she has resisted (3.1.139), and she describes to Aeneas at length the various tactics by which kings and courtiers have thus far failed to win her heart: clever words, beautiful music, great wealth, and military prowess (3.1.150-67). She tells him, "Some came in person, others sent their legates, / Yet none obtain'd me. I am free from all" (3.1.152-53).

Even as she declares her independence and self-sovereignty, however, she is forced to admit that she is yet "entangled unto one" (3.1.154). While Dido has been able to resist all earthly arguments, including those of the persistently smitten Iarbas, she has been forced to submit to the will of the meddling, self-involved gods who rule over Aeneas's destiny and, by extension, her own. Like Antony, her reason has been subsumed to a passion over which she has no control. In order to ensure that Dido will repair Aeneas's fleet so he may sail for Italy, Venus dispatches Cupid to strike the Carthaginian queen's heart full of love for Aeneas. Under the spell of the god of love, Dido loses not only her self-rule but also her independence. As Kinney notes, once Cupid smites her, "Dido's fantasies of transcendent power deconstruct themselves almost as fast as they are uttered" (270).

This does not mean, however, that Dido has lost her drive for authority. Rather, she continues to assert her power in language, even if that language has lost much of its performative power in the transition from the public to the private sphere. Like Cleopatra, Dido relinquishes, in her embrace of passion over law, the ability to simply dictate her will and watch as it is fulfilled. And like Cleopatra, she turns to manipulation when command no longer suffices. Even before she and Aeneas exchange vows in the cave, during the time when the Carthaginian queen is still voicing denials of her love for Aeneas, Dido enters into negotiations with him: "Aeneas, I'll repair thy Trojan ships, / Conditionally that thou wilst stay with me, / And let Achates sail to Italy" (3.1.113-15). Later, after they have promised themselves to one another and Aeneas has been called in a dream to the battlefield, Dido entices Aeneas to stay by giving him her crown and scepter, utterly relinquishing her civil power to him: "Sway thou the Punic sceptre in my stead, / [. . .] Stay here, Aeneas, and command as king" (4.4.35, 39).

Even after Aeneas agrees to remain with her, Dido is tormented by fear that he will go, and so she takes his son Ascanius hostage (not realizing that the boy is in fact Cupid in disguise), as well as "his oars, his tackling, and his sails" (4.4.109). But Aeneas, like Antony, is a man of action, unable to sacrifice a public warrior's life for that of a private lover or husband: "A burgonet of steel, and not a crown, / A sword, and not a sceptre, fits Aeneas" (4.4.42-43). While Dido believes that she can become Aeneas's new "masts," "sails," "tackling," and "oars," (4.4.159-63), neither her words nor her gifts have the power to keep Aeneas with her once Hermes/Mercury reminds him of the "affairs" and responsibilities of which he has been "too-too forgetful" (5.1.30). No matter how clever she is, Dido cannot defeat even "very uncelestial Olympians" (Kinney 269), for Aeneas's allegiance is bound to a higher authority than her own. Words simply do not have the power to move Aeneas against the gods.

Unlike Cleopatra and Dido, Mariam enjoys no civil authority as a result of her position as Herod's queen consort, but she rules in the one arena where both Cleopatra and Dido find themselves ultimately ineffectual, and that is the arena of the heart. As Mariam tells Sohemus, "I know that I could enchain him with a smile: / And lead him captive with a gentle word" (3.3.163-64). Herod himself admits Mariam's power over him when he says, "Her eyes can speak, and in their speaking move; / Oft did my heart with reverence receive / The world's mandates. Pretty tales of love / They utter, which can human bondage weave" (4.7.445-48). Mariam seems to have achieved the very thing which Cleopatra and Dido each most desire: "fetters" which her beloved cannot "break" (Antony 1.2.117) and which will "chain" his "eyes to her" to the exclusion of all else (Dido 5.1.114). Yet in this play the chains are broken--just not by Herod--for what Mariam desires is not a committed romantic partner but rather a measure of authority or, at the very least, of autonomy. The Chorus preaches forgiveness, but it is not in Mariam's power to grant it, nor is she capable of dissembling in the manner of Salome: "I cannot frame disguise, nor never taught / My face a look dissenting from my thought (4.3.145-46).

Alison Findlay notes that Mariam "describes her marriage to Herod as a form of imprisonment" and remarks that the queen's "failure to conform herself to her husband's will leads to literal imprisonment" (152-153). In this play, it is the male ruler, Herod, whose words hold all the power, and Mariam berates herself for feeling grief at Herod's apparent death, for it was his "tongue" "that yielded forth [. . .] [her] brother's latest doom" (1.1.39-40) and "barr[ed]" her "from liberty" (1.1.25). Nearly all of the characters in the play acknowledge the power of Herod's words, often with anger or regret, as when Alexandra decries the "cruel mouth" that effected the "murder of [. . .] [her] boy" (1.2.92) or when Pheroras acknowledges that Herod, with a word, could have forced him to speak the marriage vows which would have made him take a "baby to [. . .] [his] bride" (2.1.16).

Worst of all, as far as Mariam is concerned, is Herod's murder of her brother Aristobulus and her grandfather Hircanus. Even after her husband returns from Rome having been vindicated of Alexandra's charges of wrongful conduct in the murders, Mariam refuses to consider Herod's case, which he in fact puts forth most movingly (4.3.117-36). Rather than seeking the truth, Mariam simply reproves Herod, implying that his actions prove that his love for her is not great enough: "had you wish'd the wretched Mariam glad, / Or had your love to her been truly tied: / Nay, had you not desir'd to make her sad, / My brother nor my grandsire had not died" (4.3.113-16). She declares that she will not be swayed by Herod's protestations of love unless they "my brother's life restore" (4.3.112). One suspects that if Herod had allowed Mariam a share in his authority as Antony allows Cleopatra a share in his, not only might the lives of Aristobulus and Hircanus have been saved, but Mariam's love for her husband as well.

With her hopes frustrated even before the play begins, Mariam struggles almost from the very start to assert an alternate authority. Although she feels that she cannot deny her body to her lawful husband as she would wish, she does appropriate the freedom to openly speak her thoughts. The catalyst for Mariam's commanding behavior is the rumor of Herod's death. Mariam's refusal to accept that the report might be erroneous has disastrous repercussions. She begins to speak out against her husband as soon as she hears of his supposed death, and this belief undoubtedly influences her uncensored speech with Salome as well, thus provoking the other woman's wrath and effectively initiating the events which will effect the queen's downfall. Once Mariam publicly voices her rejection of Herod, it is as if the floodgates have been opened.

Ironically, while Mariam displays an inability or unwillingness to censor her speech when appropriate, she also appears incapable of speaking on her own behalf when circumstances call for such action. As she tells Sohemus, "I scorn my look should ever man beguile, / Or other speech than meaning to afford [. . .] / Let my distressed state unpitied be, / Mine innocence is hope enough for me" (3.3.165-66, 179-80). Upon Herod's return, Mariam rashly announces that she despises him, causing Herod to conclude no less rashly in the following scene that she has attempted to poison him. Exacerbating the situation, she stands mutely by as Herod passes his ill-considered and fatal judgement upon her. When Herod says, "Your love [and alleged partner in adultery] Sohemus, mov'd by his affection, / Though he have ever heretofore been true, / Did blab forsooth, that I did give direction, / If we were put to death to slaughter you. / And you in black revenge attended now / To add a murder to your breach of vow" (4.4.179-84), Mariam can only reply, "Is this a dream?" (4.4.185). She only feebly denies her husband's accusation of infidelity, saying, "They can tell / That say I lov'd him, Mariam says not" (4.4.193-94), but she says no more, even after Sohemus has been conveyed to his death and she herself has been condemned. Language does not fail Mariam as it does Cleopatra and Dido; Mariam simply refuses to employ it in her own defense.

Each of the three queens would therefore seem to occupy an equivocal position of authority at best. Cleopatra rules over Egypt, yet her rule is ultimately neutralized by--and in fact exists all along only at the sufferance of--the stronger forces of the Roman Empire. Although Cleopatra does eventually succeed in turning Antony's loyalties against Rome, her own insecurities and machinations bring about his death; where once she possessed "half" of Antony, in the end she loses him altogether. Dido, on the other hand, by effectively captivating Aeneas, at first seems to succeed where Cleopatra fails, yet in the end her authority over Aeneas is exposed as an illusion. Dido herself is no more than a pawn in a game of spiteful gods who compelled the Carthaginian queen's passion for Aeneas in the first place. Finally, we come to Mariam, who does indeed achieve romantic mastery over her beloved, realizing the very thing that both motivates and escapes Dido and Cleopatra. Yet Mariam's achievement does not bring her even the qualified civil authority which the other queens enjoy, and the Jewish queen's captivation of Herod does nothing to prevent her from becoming a virtual prisoner in his court. Moreover, what command she does exercise is closely tied to her relation to the king. Herod's order that Mariam should die if he failed to return from Rome only formalizes the metaphorical effect his death would have had on his wife anyway; in that event, Mariam would have become a dowager queen, retired from the sphere of politics utterly as her husband's kingdom passed into new hands--even if those hands belonged to her son. Cleopatra and Dido use lies and manipulation in their efforts to capture and chain their beloveds, while Mariam refuses to dignify the lies and manipulation of others by defending herself.

Yet none of the queens' failures ends with the simple loss of her love object, for each play concludes instead with the queen's death. It is here that their destinies, at least, coalesce, and the point of intersection is marked by reputation, and, in particular, by sexual reputation. When we consider, as Linda Gowing has shown, that in early modern England "sexual behaviour had implications for women's whole characters" (127), it should not surprise us to find that the general notion of each queen's reputation in each of the plays is closely tied to her sexual conduct. For a queen to be a "queane" (a harlot, in the parlance of the time) was for her to risk losing the loyalty and respect of those who safeguarded and buttressed her power. As Gowing notes, women bore the brunt of the "responsibility for sexual morality"--"women's honesty was defined by their sexuality" whereas men's honesty was determined "by that of the women connected with them" (112). Not only that, but a queen's sexual indiscretions, if discovered, could threaten the process of peaceful succession by calling into question the legitimacy of royal heirs. Although this was perhaps more true in the case of married queens (think of Elizabeth I, whose mother, Anne Boleyn, had been executed as an adulteress), it would certainly have proven an issue for the illegitimate Caesarian upon Cleopatra's death, had the Egyptian queen refrained from warring against the Roman empire which had once protected her.

Of the three queens, only Cleopatra seems to choose a life of sexual promiscuity. Antony is not the first of Cleopatra's lovers; by the time the play begins, she has already engaged in overt sexual relationships with both Julius Caesar and Pompey, in addition to her earlier marriage to Ptolemy. The queen is described from the start as a lascivious "strumpet" (1.1.13), and she plays this role essentially without trace of shame. Cleopatra seems not to care at all when Antony's desertion and betrayal of Octavia bring humiliation to her rival, yet as her own defeat becomes clear, her thoughts turn to her reputation, and she vows neither to become a trophy of Caesar nor to be "chastised with the sober eye / Of dull Octavia" (5.2.53-54). Even when Antony lies dying below, Cleopatra refuses to descend, fearing that she will be captured and forced to walk in Caesar's triumphal procession, an "eternal" (5.1.66) monument to her own defeat. In the end, although Cleopatra is devastated by Antony's death, she chooses to take her own life not so that she may join her beloved in death, but in order to avoid the humiliation of public display:

Now, Iras, what think'st thou?
Thou, an Egyptian puppet shall be shown
In Rome, as well as I. Mechanic slaves
With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers shall
Uplift us to the view. In their thick breaths,
Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded,
And forced to drink their vapor.
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
Saucy lictors
Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o' tune. The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels. Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' the' posture of a whore. (5.2.204-9, 210-17)

Cleopatra wishes not to be remembered and mocked as a strumpet, but as the queen who first captivated Antony as she sailed along in a barge of gold and purple "like a burnished throne" (2.2.198), surrounded by mermaids, "pretty dimpled boys" (2.2.209), and a "strange invisible perfume" (2.2.219). Her final words are a command to her servants: "Show me, my women, like a queen. Go fetch / My best attires. [. . .] // Give me my robe. Put on my crown. [. . .] // Husband, I come: / Now to that name my courage prove me title" (5.2.223-24, 275, 282-83). By ending her life with dignity and a show of regal display, Cleopatra believes that she has earned the right, finally, to claim title as Antony's "wife." The Egyptian queen's last act is thus to claim a respectable place beside Antony as his rightful wife, and so to escape a life of shame in Rome which would forever brand her as a whore.

Unlike Cleopatra, Dido both worries about the ill effects of a loose reputation and struggles to maintain her chastity, as the following exchange with Iarbas reveals:

IARBAS. How long, fair Dido, shall I pine for thee?
'Tis not enough that thou dost grant me love,
But that I may enjoy what I desire:
That love is childish which consists in words.
DIDO. Iarbas, know, that thou, of all my wooers,--
And yet have I had many mightier kings,--
Hast had the greatest favours I could give.
I fear me, Dido hath been counted light
In being too familiar with Iarbas;
Albeit the gods do know, no wanton thought
Had ever residence in Dido's breast. (3.1.7-17)

Moments later, however, Cupid smites Dido's chaste "breast" with his arrow, and the queen instantly loses her will and begins to behave as a coquette. She toys cruelly with Iarbas before finally commanding him to be gone, demanding that he look no more upon her, then announces to Anna that she has fallen madly in love with Aeneas. Under Cupid's spell, and as a result of the joint machinations of Venus and Juno, Dido hides with Aeneas in a cave during a rainstorm, where they "interchangeably discourse their thoughts" (3.2.93). Although in Virgil's telling it is clear that Dido and Aeneas share their bodies as well, Marlowe does not make the point explicit. Even so, Iarbus concludes that the two, by "sporting in this darksome cave" (4.1.24), are now "adulterers surfeited with sin" (4.1.20).

Although Dido can no longer control her emotions, nor likely her body, when it comes to Aeneas, she nevertheless wishes to preserve her reputation. She offers her crown to Aeneas in order that he may "ride, / As Dido's husband, through the Punic streets" (4.4.66-67) in a public display of the lawfulness and propriety of their union. But in the end Aeneas is proven as powerless as Dido against the will of the gods: "How loath I am to leave these Libyan bounds, / But that eternal Jupiter commands!" (5.1.81-82). Aeneas begs Dido's pardon, but his apology does nothing to save her reputation in the eyes of the world, as Dido herself knows too well:

Hast thou forgot how many neighbour kings
Were up in arms, for making thee my love?
How Carthage did rebel, Iarbas storm,
And all the world calls me a second Helen,
For being entangled by a stranger's looks? (5.1.141-45)

Aeneas's flight, as Iarbas remarks, "dishonour[s] her and Carthage both" (5.1.280), and it is a dishonor with which Dido chooses not to live.

Dido commemorates her suicide not with the words of a forsaken lover, but with words of anger and revenge for the "treason" (5.1.307) which she believes Aeneas has perpetrated against her. Dido has moved from the private realm back to the public:

Now, Dido, with these relics burn thyself,
And make Aeneas famous through the world
For perjury and slaughter of a queen.
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
And from mine ashes let a conqueror rise,
That may revenge this treason to a queen
By ploughing up his countries with the sword!
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
Live, false Aeneas! Truest Dido dies. (5.1.292-94, 306-8, 312)

Although Dido knows she cannot save her own reputation, she hopes that her death will at least destroy Aeneas's as well.

The allegations of infidelity raised against Mariam would have proven even more dire than those levied against Dido, since in Mariam's case accusations of adultery effectively cuckolded the king, and, as previously noted, threatened the purity of the royal succession. As Henry VIII's prosecutions--and later executions--of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard reveal, the infidelity of a queen consort was tantamount to treason. For Herod, the idea of Mariam's adultery is far worse than even an overt rebellion would have been:

Hadst thou complotted Herod's massacre,
That so thy son a monarch might be styl'd,
Not half so grievous such an action were,
As once to think, that Mariam is defiled.
Bright workmanship of nature sulli'd o'er,
With pitched darkness now thine end shall be:
Thou shalt not live, fair fiend, to cozen more,
With [heav'nly] semblance, as thou cozen'd me. (4.4.207-13)

Herod recognizes that Mariam's alleged unchastity has indeed made him a cuckold:
I'm a sot, a very sot, no better:
My wisdom long ago a-wand'ring fell,
Thy face, encount'ring it, my wit did fetter,
And made me for delight my freedom sell" (4.4.223-226).

But, of course, Mariam is in reality chaste, the victim of Salome's slanderous claims against her. In the early modern period, it was not unusual to find women discrediting other women, and, in fact, as Gowing notes: "it was women, more than men, who ended up in court for calling other women whores, jades, and queans" (114). Whether the imbalance revealed by the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century court records reflects the fact that women were most often the perpetrators of slander against their own sex (as is the case in Cary's text), or rather that women simply failed in many instances to prosecute men for the same offence, must remain a mystery, but the statistic is nonetheless an intriguing one. One fact which Gowing's study reveals unequivocally is that "for the people embroiled in slander disputes, terms like 'credit,' 'name,' and 'reputation' [. . .] were part of an overall system of beliefs and ideals in which a definition of morality was used to judge reputation" (113). Right or wrong, charges of infidelity implied "sexual and economic betrayal," and terms like "whore" were "by no means always directed at actual immorality" (115). The "language of [sexual] insult" (115) often attacked not literal sexual offenses but rather the more general forms of socially transgressive behavior with which fornication was inextricably linked in the early modern period. Mariam's outspoken insults against Salome and her public defiance of Herod open her "reputation" to suspicion. When Salome attacks Mariam for an infidelity which the queen did not commit, Herod's sister may have felt perfectly justified in her actions, since the act of speaking against--and publicly defying--the royal family was as much an act of treason as adultery would have been. Salome simply exchanges one set of symbols, which have proven powerless to move Herod, for another set which has the power to convince him. Thus, Mariam's behavior is translated from a wanton use of language to a wanton use of sex.

While Mariam stubbornly clings to the hope that the truth of her chastity will vindicate her, she fails to recognize--even after the reports of Herod's death are proven wrong--that it is often rumor, rather than truth, which prevails in her world. As the Chorus remarks, "'Tis not enough for one that is a wife / To keep her spotless from an act of ill: / But from suspicion she should free her life" (3.3.215-17). As Sandra Fischer notes, Mariam eventually comes to recognize that "reputation is as important as actual innocence" (233), but she fails to act on this realization, instead reconciling herself to the reality of her impending death: "'tis my joy, / That I was ever innocent, though sour: / And therefore can they but my life destroy, / My soul is free from adversary's power" (4.8.567-70). As Frances E. Dolan notes, "Although Mariam is executed for outspokenness, she utters only [. . .] [one] terse remark, using it to insure both that Herod will know the irreversible consequences of his unjust sentence and that her death will gain the significance of being narrated, especially for the benefit of the man who ordered it" (164). By ordering Mariam's execution, Herod would seem to have silenced her forever, but her story will live on not only in Nuntio's tale, but in Herod's mind and conscience as well. Whereas in Dido the victim's words proclaim the infamy of the queen's "murderer," in Mariam it is the perpetrator's words, as Herod orders the following epitaph engraved upon his tomb: "Here Herod lies, that hath his Mariam slain" (5.1.258). Crucially, however, Herod's proclamation ensures that his name will suffer disrepute only after he is dead. As such, his words, which will have effect only at a temporal remove, lack the force and immediacy of Dido's final speech. Although they will be permanently inscribed on Herod's monument, there to be eternally commemorated, the king's words will do nothing to repair Mariam's reputation.

In the end, only Cleopatra achieves the sort of satisfaction which Dido and Mariam seek, for she will be remembered in death not as a strumpet or whore, but as the great queen whom she imagined herself to be, even if that remembrance is orchestrated at the hands of her mortal enemy, Caesar:

Take up her bed,
And bear her women from the monument.
She shall be buried by her Antony.
No grave upon earth shall clip in it
A pair so famous. High events as these
Strike those that make them, and their story is
No less in pity than his glory which
Brought them to be lamented. Our army shall
In solemn show attend this funeral,
And then to Rome. Come, Dolabella, see
High order in this great solemnity. (5.2.35-60)

Cleopatra's death brings the very thing which she, Dido, and Mariam most sought: the triumph of solemnity over slander, of queenly dignity over ridicule and moralistic condescension.

Works Cited

Cary, Elizabeth. The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry. Eds. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

Dolan, Frances E. "'Gentlemen, I Have One More Thing to Say': Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563-1680," Modern Philology. 92:2 (1994): 157-178.

Findlay, Alison. A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.

Fischer, Sandra K. "Elizabeth Cary and Tyranny, Domestic and Religious." Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works. Kent: Kent State UP, 1985. 225-237.

Gowing, Laura. Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.

Grant, Michael, and John Hazel. Who's Who in Classical Mythology. 3rd reprint. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

Kinney, Clare R. "Epic Transgression and the Framing of Agency in Dido Queen of Carthage." SEL 40:2 (Spring 2000). 261-276.

Marlowe, Christopher. Dido, Queen of Carthage. Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays. Ed. J.B. Steane. New York: Penguin, 1969. 40-99.

Nyquist, Mary. "'Profuse, Proud Cleopatra': 'Barbarism' and Female Rule in Early Modern English Republicanism." Women's Studies 24 (1995): 85-130.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. The Oxford Shakespeare. Eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. 1001-35.

Weller, Barry and Margaret W. Ferguson, Eds. The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.