Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedie of Mariam, the earliest extant English play by a woman - Are Hebrew women now transform’d to men?

The English theater world was deeply hostile to women, possibly until quite recently, but the late 16th and early 17th century period went a step beyond, when even female characters are played by males. Everything with any status except, oddly, supreme sovereign of the nation is closed to women. Feminist scholars have, in the last fifty years, done enormous work on the handful of surviving works by women writers. I am looking at Three Tragedies by Renaissance Women, a 1998 Penguin edition with three plays: a translation of Euripides by Jane, Lady Lumley, a translation of Robert Garnier by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and the play at issue here, The Tragedie of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (written let’s say 1604, published 1613) by Elizabeth Cary, eventually Viscountess Falkland, the first extant original English play by a woman, and as far as I know the only such surviving play before the Restoration. The Tragedie of Mariam has understandably gotten a lot of attention. It is…