Queen of Scots

This play about Mary Stuart is restricted to those seven fateful years in Scotland between 1561-8, which broke the Queen's spirit and changed her from a not-too-much cast down, Frenchified young woman - her husband, Francis II of France, had only just died - to the pathetic creature who escaped to England after the defeat of Langside in 1568, and thus entered on her long-protracted but inevitable doom. One has the workings of political intrigue and subterfuge, which start from the temporary banishment of Bothwell, and include the murder of Rizzio, and marriage with the worthless Darnley and his subsequent assassination in a sickbed, and the second marriage, this time with the rugged masterful Bothwell, which was the beginning of the end.