'Mary Stuart' may be described, then, as a tragedy of self-conquest in the presence of an undeserved death. The stage climax is the meeting of the two queens in the third act, but the psychological climax occurs in the fifth act, when Queen Mary gives up her hopes of freedom and of life and welcomes the 'solemn friend' who is to lift the burden from her soul. In working out this conception Schiller did not trouble himself greatly about the historical verisimilitude of his chief personages. One who looks for the real Mary, Elizabeth, Burleigh and Leicester, will not find them in his pages. The principal figures are drawn with less impartiality than in 'Wallenstein', the subjective presence of the author is more noticeable. And yet, looked at in a large way, the play is an excellent piece of historical fresco-painting. The whole spirit of the time with its warring passions, its intrigues of fanaticism, is vividly and powerfully brought before us. The author's partisanship is aesthetic only, not religious or political. The many counts in the long indictment of Queen Mary, the motives and arguments of the English government, even the higher traits of Queen Elizabeth, are all brought out in the course of the play. Nothing of importance is neglected, and the whole complicated situation is made admirably clear. The historical background, with its luminous vistas of European politics, really leaves very little to be desired.
Masterly, too, in the main, is the constructive skill with which all this history is brought to view in a dramatic action concentrated into the last three days of Queen Mary's life. The great difficulty which always besets the 'drama of the ripe situation',—to use a modern phrase for a thing as old as Euripides,—is the difficulty of explaining the past without forcing the dialogue into unnatural channels; in other words, of orienting the public without seeming to have that object in view. As regards this merit of good craftsmanship, 'Mary Stuart' is here and there vulnerable. For example: in the fourth scene of the first act, the nurse, Hannah Kennedy, recounts to her mistress at great length the latter's past sins and sufferings, describing her motives, her infatuation, her heart-burnings and much else that the queen must know far better than any one else in the world. Such passages, obviously intended for the instruction of the audience, were permitted by the traditions of the drama, but they are bad for the illusion. In 'Wallenstein' they are much less noticeable,—a fact which indicates that Schiller was now disposed to make his labor easier by availing himself of conventional privileges. In most respects, however, the technique of 'Mary Stuart' is excellent. The scenes are lively, varied and very rarely too long. Everything is well articulated. Dramatic interest is not sacrificed to any sort of private enthusiasm or special pleading.
One who reads the history of Mary Queen of Scots in any good historian, and endeavors to follow the maze of intrigues, uprisings, plots, assassinations and what not, is impressed by no other characteristic of the age more strongly than by its complete dissociation of religion from humane ethics. The religion of love to one's neighbor, though the neighbor be an enemy, had become a fierce fanaticism which scrupled at nothing and recognized no fealty higher than the supposed secular interest of the church. In his 'Mary Stuart in Scotland' Björnson makes the queen put to Bothwell the question: 'You are surely no gloomy Protestant, you are certainly a Catholic, are you not?' To which Bothwell replies: 'As for myself, I have never really figured up the difference, but I have noticed that there are hypocrites on both sides.' For the modern man this is an eminently natural point of view, and we might have expected, from all we know of Schiller, that he would introduce into his play some representative of this sentiment. Or if not that, we might have expected some representative of the religion of love. Instead of either we have a romantic youth who has forsworn the Protestant creed on purely aesthetic grounds.
Mortimer is on the whole the most interesting of the subordinate characters. He was obviously suggested by Babington, but the coarse fanatic of history was too repulsive for a proper champion of Schiller's idealized heroine. So the name was changed, and we get an imaginary youth who has been intoxicated by the glamour of the Catholic forms as he has seen them at Rome. The description of Mortimer's conversion,—his sudden resolve to abjure the dismal, art-hating religion of the incorporeal word, and to go over to the communion of the joyous,—is one of the telling declamatory passages of the play. With the sentiment expressed Schiller can have had, in the bottom of his heart, but little sympathy; but his artistic nature had begun to respond to the Romantic propaganda. For the rest, Mortimer is not a very convincing creation. One is a little surprised that a youth who purports to be so very soft-hearted, so very susceptible to the religion of the beautiful, should undertake so jauntily the rôle of murderer. As for his amorous passion, that is credible enough if, in accordance with Schiller's direction, we think of Queen Mary as twenty-five years old. But in that case one's imagination has difficulty with that perspective of years which have accumulated the ancient burden of guilt.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 119: In a letter to Iffland, written June 22, 1800, Schiller directed that his Queen Elizabeth be represented as a woman thirty years old, Mary as twenty-five.]
[Footnote 120: The thought is expressed thus by Harnack, "Schiller", page 324: "Der eigentliche tragische Konflikt, der den Helden vor grosze Entscheidungen stellt und endlich in sein Verhängnis hinabreiszt, fehlt in 'Maria Stuart'. Die gefangene Königin befindet sich im Konflikt mit ihrer unwürdigen äuszeren Lage, aber nicht mit sich selbst.">[
[Footnote 121: Compare, however, Fielitz, "Studien zu Schillers
Dramen", page 49.]
[Footnote 122: Even Macaulay, who was certainly not the man to be captivated by anything in the scene save its poetry, thought the "Fotheringay scenes in the fifth act … equal to anything dramatic that had been produced in Europe since Shakspere."—Trevelyan, "Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay", II, 182.]