Maria Stuart

Two queens face each other in this drama: one, Elizabeth, as the judge, and the other, Mary Stuart, as the condemned. The Catholic-raised Mary Stuart and the strictly Puritan Elizabeth are fundamentally different in character. For Schiller, Mary Stuart is the true queen, who, although innocent of the conspiracy, internally accepts her sentence as atonement for the (historically unproven) murder of her second husband. The afterword contains the exact historical dates. Annotations facilitate the understanding of the poetry.