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…