Elizabeth Cary Cary, Elizabeth Author Kirsten Fleming Supervising Editor Melissa Walter Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kirsten Fleming, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Education Literature and the Arts Women Writers Published file. Updated metadata proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. swapped the desc and figDescs to be correct. added image citation and figure. Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Kirsten Fleming Kirsten Fleming

Kirsten Fleming was a student at the University of Fraser Valley.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 Melissa Walter Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
Image of an ornately dressed woman standing in between two pink curtains. Her hand rests on a pink chair, and her dress is made of a highly decorated cream underlayer and what looks to be a black velvet overlayer with gold embroidery. William Larkin. Elizabeth Cary? c. 1610. Oil on Canvas.
Elizabeth Cary (1585–1639)

Elizabeth Cary was an accomplished noblewoman who pioneered many firsts for women of her time. From a young age, she was bookish, reading Catholic and Protestant religious texts in her youth. This practice was encouraged by her parents, who employed a tutor who taught her to speak French fluently. She subsequently taught herself how to speak Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hebrew, and Transylvanian.

Upon her marriage at age 17, her in-laws barred her from reading books, so she began to write poetry, which she believed was the highest form of literacy. Cary and her husband, Sir Henry Cary (later elevated to Viscount Falkland, subsequently making Elizabeth Viscountess Falkland), were not acquainted prior to the marriage, which was socially advantageous for her and financially advantageous for her husband. She birthed eleven children between 1603 and 1624, six daughters and five sons, all of whom she lost custody of after converting to Catholicism in 1626 and being placed under brief house arrest by King Charles I.

Her conversion led to her formal separation from her husband and was met with disapproval from her parents; her father disinherited her while her mother refused to take her back after the separation. In 1633, after her husband’s death and living in poverty for many years, she regained custody of most of her minor children. She resorted to kidnapping two of her sons in 1636 to have her family back together, three years before she died in London in 1639, where she is also buried.

The Tragedy of Mariam (1613)

Although scholars argue whether or not this was the first play written by Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry is her earliest surviving piece and the first original English play written by a woman. It is the first English play to explore the account of Herod the Great’s marriage to his second wife, Mariam.

Several parallels exist between the character of Mariam and Cary: both are ambitious, unhappy wives to an authoritative husband. The play is a closet drama, most likely written to be read in a small, private circle of women, not performed on stage. Cary describes all of the action through the dialogue as opposed to physical actions or stage directions. Closet drama was popular with early modern women writers so they could have a private place to enjoy drama without endangering their reputations.

The History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II, or The History of the most Unfortunate Prince, King Edward II (published 1680)

In possibly a mere 10 days in 1627, Cary wrote The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, a political piece based on the English King Edward II. Although there were already a number of plays and biographies written about him, Cary’s included an intricate and well-written section about Edward’s wife, Queen Isabel, which is unique compared to other texts. Cary’s Edward II was not published until long after her death in 1680, when it was published anonymously by one of her daughters. This same daughter also wrote Elizabeth’s biography, Lady Falkland: Her Life, making Cary the first female English author to have a written biography.

Other Works

Although only a small amount of Cary’s work has survived, several missing poems and stories are hinted at in her surviving works, including the full plays of The Lives of St. Agnes, St. Elizabeth of Portugal, and St Mary Magdalene; verses of The Life of Tamburlaine and The Virgin Mary; and translations of Seneca and Blosius.

Aside from her original published pieces, she also made an English translation of Abraham Ortelius’s L’Epitome du Théâtre du Monde (1588), titled The Mirror of the Worlde in 1598 when she was only 13, which was finally published in 2012. It is believed to be one of the first English versions of the original text, and it provides information and context to the authors and texts that influenced the young Cary.

Key Print Sources Cary, Elizabeth, et al. The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry. Broadview Press, 2000. Hodgson-Wright, Stephanie. Cary, Elizabeth, Viscountess Falkland (1585–1639). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. 2014. Wolfe, Heather. The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary. Seventeenth-Century News. Fall-Winter, 2007, vol. 65, no. 3–4, pp. 1613–1680.
Key Online Sources Alfar, Cristina León. Elizabeth Cary’s Female Trinity: Breaking Custom with Mosaic Law in <title level="m">The Tragedy of Mariam. Early Modern Women, vol. 3, 2008, pp. 61–103. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23541518. Beal, Peter. Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland. Catalog of English Literary Manuscripts, 1450–1700. https://celm-ms.org.uk/introductions/CaryElizabethViscountessFalkland.html. Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, Writer, Translator & Catholic Recusant. The Twickenham Museum, 12 Mar. 2014. https://twickenham-museum.org.uk/people/writers-poets-and-historians/elizabeth-cary-viscountess-falkland/. Heller, Jennifer L. Space, Violence, and Bodies in Middleton and Cary. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, vol. 45, no. 2, 2005, pp. 425–441, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3844552. Mackay, Elizabeth Ann. Shrew(d) Maternities, Elizabeth Cary’s Life, and Filial Equivocations. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 33, no. 2, University of Tulsa, 2014, pp. 23–50, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43653324. Perry, Nandra. The Sound of Silence: Elizabeth Cary and the Christian Hero. English Literary Renaissance, vol. 38, no. 1, Wiley, 2008, pp. 106–141, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43447957.
Image Source Larkin, William. Elizabeth Cary? c. 1610. Oil on Canvas.