The Troubles of Friendship Mary Sidney Herbert's The Tragedie of Antonie and Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam

Mary Sidney Herbert’s The Tragedie of Antonius, an adaptation of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine, reimagines Cleopatra, centring Cleopatra’s role as mother amongst concerns of empire and erotics. Written over 20 years later, Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam’s Cleopatra has been used as a figure to reconsider the nexus of race, gender, and desire in Cary’s play. Sidney Herbert’s Cleopatra is strikingly different from Cary’s in that Cleopatra is cast as a devoted wife, though the depiction of her virtue is predicated on her fairness. Despite many references to Egypt’s geography and its Africanness, Cleopatra is decidedly white in Sidney Herbert’s text; desire for her body and her own desires is offered in the heteropatriarchal economy of Herod’s kingdom. This chapter explores the relationship between Sidney Herbert and Cary’s work, intervening in readings of Sidney Herbert’s Antonius by considering the troubles of friendship, both for male and female characters, in connection with racial construction within the plays.