Mary Stuart Paperback – 9 Jun. 2017

Schiller's Mary Stuart is a classic in continental Europe that enjoys similar status to Shakespeare's plays in the United Kingdom. My introduction to the play was at second hand via Donizetti's splendid opera Maria Stuarda. This aroused my curiosity so while on holiday recently I downloaded this Penguin edition of the play to my Kindle.The play is set during Mary Stuart's last days at Fotheringay. Schiller played fast and loose with history using some real characters from history, inventing one major character and imagining the confrontation between Mary, deposed Queen of Scotland and former Queen of France with her cousin Elizabeth Queen of England, a meeting which never happened. Despite, or perhaps because of this dramatic license it is a powerful and effective play which must make great impact on the stage.The translator F. J. Lamport has reproduced Schiller's use of blank verse with occasional use of rhyme very successfully and the play reads like an original work rather than as a translation.I am glad that I have filled a gap in my literary education.

Great

Excellent play

I suppose I should't expect much from a free download - but this was a disappointing first attempt. It was a courrier font, badly formatted difficult to read. At least I have the text - and the price was right.

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Gaetano Donizetti's librettist for his opera Maria Stuarda, Giuseppe Bardari, used the Schiller play as his basis. It was interesting to see how much Bardari - and also Donizetti who was more involved with his libretti than most opera composers - varied from the Schiller story line. They reduced the complexity of the characters to render the story line more stark and thus more adapted to music.

This is in the form of a play which is not my favourite way of reading. My mistake, but I'm sure it would not put most readers off.

It's so nice to have an updated translation of Schiller's "Maria Stuart" - a play I really enjoy reading in German but have usually been disappointed with in English. The other English versions I'm referring to are the older free online ones (very nice that they are free, but the language is outdated!).

I was led to this play in my search for a fictional account of the relationship between Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I of England, hoping to find something with a literary quality. Schiller's play fills that bill, though it is too far from historical fact to serve as an introduction for the middler-schoolers for whom I am searching. Schiller (d. 1805) was apparently looking for a historical topic with psychological overtones, which he certainly did find in this tale of sixteenth-century Britain. Most fictional accounts of the real-life drama between these two queens are written from a romantic, Scottish point of view and portray Mary as the beautiful, passionate, and tolerant queen horribly wronged by the unfeeling calculations of her cousin Elizabeth, and some have viewed Schiller's play in the same vein. However, Mary's character is equivocal in this play. She is viewed as both a tragic figure as well as a conniving plotter. Furthermore, Elizabeth is portrayed much more as a plaything of the powerful nobles and advisers around her--Burleigh and Leicester (her one-time favorite) chief among them. At the end of the play, Mary is dead, Elizabeth maintains it was not her wish to have it so (though she did sign the document ordering the execution), and she is left alone on the stage, a sad figure who seems to have been totally outplayed by the machinations and convictions of others, including her nagging populace demanding Mary's blood. I found this an interesting twist.I understand that, in his exploration of Elizabeth's judicial murder of Mary, Schiller was influenced by Aristotle's concept of voluntary and involuntary transactions and the role of the judiciary in restoring balance. Richard Posner (1990) has explained it this way: "(1) People injured by wrongful conduct should have the right to activate a corrective machinery administered by judges, and (2) give no weight to the character or social status of the victim and the injurer." Thus, the decision to execute Mary was taken to restore balance after Mary was involved with plots to murder Elizabeth, irregardless of the fact that both parties were monarchs and the destiny of kingdoms was involved.I must hasten to add that Schiller plays fast and loose with history in the writing of this play, and one should not take it for a literary depiction of actual facts. He creates a face-to-face meeting between Elizabeth and Mary in the woods near Fotheringhay Castle, where Mary was imprisoned, while the irony of history is that these two women never actually met. In addition, the Babington Plot by the Catholic Sir Anthony Babington to kill the Protestant Elizabeth is mixed up in this play with an attempt on Elizabeth's life, which coincides with this fictional meeting of the two queens. Mary is blamed since she had sought this meeting. Other non-historical elements of the play include a totally fictional character, Sir Edward Mortimer, the supposed nephew of the actual person Sir Amias Paulet, a gentle Puritan into whose keeping Mary has been given. Mortimer is the villain of the piece. A former Protestant, he has converted to Catholicism before the opening of the play and comes to England from Europe with a view toward freeing Mary. He places himself in league with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, an actual personage who was a major figure in Elizabeth's reign. Schiller depicts Leicester as switching his romantic attachment from Elizabeth to Mary (once suggested as a wife for him) after Elizabeth agrees to marry a French prince. Wishing not to spoil the reading of the play, I will not say how everything turns out in the end, but certainly Schiller has shown that Elizabeth was no match for Mortimer and Leicester--or other powerful men who spoke for or against Queen Mary. This, I think, is the most interesting aspect of this play.A word on the Kindle edition: Schiller wrote in blank verse, as did Shakespeare, and the translator has certainly worked to give a Shakespearean flavor to the work, employing iambic pentameter and Elizabethan language. Normally the text would be laid out as poetic lines with a capital letter beginning each new line in the blank verse, regardless of whether preceded by a period or not. The Kindle edition is, in fact, the same edition as displayed in the "Look Inside" feature. It is just that the formatting has been lost, giving the Kindle edition the appearance of random capitalization in prose lines.