Overview
Schiller's grand historical tragedy, a battle
of wits between Mary Queen
of Scots and her captor, Queen Elizabeth I. Mary has been held
prisoner for nineteen years by her cousin, Elizabeth I, who has
condemned her to death, but is reluctant to be seen to carry out the
sentence. Leicester, Elizabeth's favorite and Mary's ex lover, engineers
a meeting of the two Queens an encounter which never took place in
historical fact from which Mary emerges triumphant but doomed.
Friedrich Schiller's play Mary Stuart (Maria Stuart in the original
German) had its premiere in Weimar, Germany, in June 1800. This
English version by Jeremy Sams was first staged at the National Theatre,
London, in 1996.