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A Portrait, a House, and a Masque: Elizabeth Cary, Interdisciplinarity, and Early Modern Female Identity

This article argues that an interdisciplinary engagement with material, locational, and cultural contexts allows us to understand early modern female identity from a different and more challenging perspective through a focus on Elizabeth Cary, best known as the first Englishwoman to write an original tragedy, The Tragedy of Mariam (composed between 1603 and 1606). Here, however, the site of investigation shifts from Cary’s writing to her participation in a wider range of early seventeenth-century discursive practices: portraiture, the country house, and masque costume. As such, this article begins with an analysis of the portrait, A Lady in Masque Dress, Called Lady Tanfield (1615), and proceeds, through a consideration of provenance and style, to suggest why the painting is most probably of Elizabeth Cary. Second, it examines the location of the portrait at Sir Henry Lee’s country house, Ditchley, and, via manuscript investigation, demonstrates that the relationship between Cary and Lee was far closer than has previously been assumed. Third, the portrait’s depiction of a veil links the image