SOURCE: "Style and Gender in Elizabeth Cary's Edward II," in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, edited by Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, pp. 137-53.

In the following essay, Krontiris considers possible autobiographical elements in The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II and compares the work with The Tragedie of Mariam, outlining Cary's maturation as a writer. She also examines "the possible influence of religion in [Cary's development."]

Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, has been known primarily as the author of Mariam, a closet drama she wrote at the age of sixteen or seventeen. But it is now apparent that this is not her only surviving dramatic work. Some twenty-three years after her first published play, Mariam, and during a solitary confinement that followed her secret conversion to Catholicism, Cary wrote History of … King Edward...