Customer Reviews

Mary Stuart

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A brilliant psychological drama. Schiller begins with presenting Mary as the epitome of passion and misguided sincerity, with Elizabeth as the epitome of rational calculation and statecraft. With superb plotting, he stages their confrontation to emphasize their common features and with elements of role reversal. The confrontation essentially purifies their original characters, heightening the contrast between passion and calculation. I don't read German but this translation contains a great deal of eloquent language and an appropriately Shakerspearean flavor.

Friedrich Schiller wrote this drama about the power struggle between Elizabeth of England and Mary of Scotland after he finished the Wallenstein trilogy, his Thirty Years War drama. He finished MS in 1800 and it had a triumphant stage premiere shortly afterwards, in Weimar. Schiller was by now `over' his Sturm und Drang period and had become a co-leader of classicism, teaming up with Goethe. He said of this play that he had had enough of war and heroes and soldiers, he was looking more for passionate humanity than for history. Consequently he wrote a credible drama about semi-fictional characters. As long as you don't confuse this with historiography, the method is fine with me.

The drama focuses on Mary's last 3 days, beginning with her verdict in the first of five acts. Mary does not recognize the authority of the court. She sees herself as a state guest, the legitimate queen of another country who had come to England asking for shelter. She had fled Scotland after her own murderous activities had made her unsafe there. In England she had been put in jail, now since 19 years.

Her imprisonment is motivated by the fact that she would have been able to claim a possibly better right to England's throne than the current job holder. In other words, Elizabeth has reasons to fear her, especially in view of her Catholic backing in France and Spain. Apart from that personal motive, Elizabeth has the pressure from her court that fears a return to a Catholic ruler. On the other hand there may be benefits in a milder rule.

Mary's state of mind in captivity is ambivalent: she resents the treatment that she is given, hopes to be able to talk to Elizabeth and reach an understanding, but at the same time she is haunted by her own conscience about her past murder of her husband at home.
The trial against her is however about something else. She is accused of having tried to conspire with England's enemies to usurp the throne. Mary feels innocent in that respect and even her captors are aware that the trial itself was not following proper procedure.

Schiller weaves a conspiracy of an attempted jail break involving some double-dealing noblemen. But the true high point of the play is a personal confrontation between the two lionesses. Pride, jealousy, fear, humiliation come into play. Mary wins the battle and loses the war. Elizabeth had been of a split mind, but Mary's aggressive and offensive behavior towards her leaves her no choice. Still she tries to escape direct personal responsibility for ordering an execution - in vain.

The plot in Schiller's version probably has as many holes as a sieve, historically, but as a human confrontation it works very well. The language has matured since the puerile enthusiasm of some earlier plays. There is also, luckily, no morality tale, no attempt to manipulate the audience to whatever good cause. The play has been staged recently in London, to much acclaim, and traveled to the Broadway from there. Which goes to show that Fritz is not entirely mummified. His claim to the Shakespeare equivalent throne in Germany was much enhanced with MS.

... have told me again and again that Shakespeare has been translated beautifully in their language, by Schiller and others, and holds the stage effectively in translation. I'm too nice a guy ... really! ... to challenge that perception, but I read German well enough to KNOW that neither Schiller's nor Goethe's plays have been successfully translated into English. If the translations are anything close to literal, they sound impossibly stiff and bewigged in the resulting "18th C" lingo. If they are loosely adapted, aside from the fact that they'll come out 30-50% shorter, they lose all poetic splendor. The former sort will require more footnotes than most of us can tolerate; the latter will have the reader wondering why such bland stuff can be regarded as classic.

On stage, however, there isn't even a moment's choice between the literal and the adapted. Mary Stuart is easily the Schiller drama best suited to an anglophone audience. After all, it portrays "our" beloved Elizabeth 1, though in a far-from-flattering guise as a jealous narcissistic tyrant egged toward villainy by her religious fanatic councilors. But a literal translation, especially one that attempts versification, will put even an audience of scholars into catatonic slumber. I know. I've slept through the emotional fifth act of several such stagings.

Recently I viewed an 'adaptive' staging, done without any costuming and with only rudimentary modern-furniture sets. The language, nevertheless, was moderately suggestive of Elizabethan protocols; that is, it was not updated into 20th C slang. The thespians include one Englishman among six Californians. I could have been snobbish about the diction but I chose not to be, considering myself lucky to be able to hear and comprehend the dialogue. The drama worked. The tragedy was poignant. The issues of conscience versus duty were vividly impressed upon the audience. Stripped of its poetic grandeur, however, the play was no more 'powerful' than many political films or TV dramas. It was a California audience, and therefore the subtle "Karl Rove" manner of the rigid villain Lord Burleigh drew some appreciative gasps and grunts. The directors' notes in the program asserted the 'universality' of the play, and I believe most of the audience readily "got the point" that opportunism and ethical government are never compatible. Too bad the crowd didn't include any of the newly elected Tea Party Congresspeople!

This translation, like most, is hard slogging. But it's as good as any other, better than most, giving me some justification for five-starring it. I doubt that many anglophones will ever approach Schiller unless they have an interest in the German language, German culture, or in the several grand operas that have been composed with librettos that butcher Schiller's play into Italian doggerel.

The translation of Mary Stuart that you see when you "Look Inside" is not the same one that is being sold on this page!!!!

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.

The Kindle Edition referred to on this page is not the Peter Oswald translation. Not sure why it would be treated like that. Bait and switch? Or just digital ignorance.

This is the play that was used in the 1987 (?) movie, "Anne of Avonlea." It's really neat!