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WEEK II: Lecture Notes to Mary Stuart

Schiller and the Truth of History

1 THE BALANCED STRUCTURE OF MARY STUART

          Schiller's subject is not the actual histories of Mary and Elizabeth in life..  He uses them as emblems to search out what is spiritually true, and what is spiritually false, in our human world in general.  To make this clear to us he increases the number of parallel contrasts between Mary and Elizabeth:       

 The sequence of scenes follows the pattern: a.b.c.b.a.

      (The play opens on the day after Mary has been sentenced to death)

         Schiller's play is structured, not to resemble everyday real life, but to create a pattern of contrasts, on every level.  In fact, Schiller, an Idealist, would see no point in imitating evryday life.  To him, everyday life is the result of the blundering human consciousness over time  Like a bad artist warping and distorting his material, human consciousness had created all around us, and within us, a mess of what our potential lives could and should have been.  The French Revolution was one attempt to undo the mess, but Schiller decided it set about the work too hastily: that the revolutionary needs to proceed more slowly, "to repair the clock while it is in motion".  And one of the best ways was "an aesthetic education of humanity."
          So, unlike so many writers on Mary Stuart, Schiller ignores the steamy erotics and draws our attention above and beyond these to the universal 'argument' the history can reveal.  What he finds intensely interesting is the way in which passions convert themselves into (a) ambitions, (b) ideologies (Catholic vs. Protestant), (c) historical conflicts, (d) finally an image of humanity itself "under the eye of eternity".  And in Mary Stuart he finds that it is the transgressor, the criminal, who is best able to take us on this journey - a major theme of modern literature.

2.   THE STRUCTURE OF OUR ALIENATED WORLD.

          In a blunderingly and unjustly constructed world we inevitably are 'alienated' from our potential natural selves.  When a man comes into the world, wrote Schiller, he looks around and finds himself in - the State.  He is confronted by a system of institutions, customs, moral prejudices, authorities, even buildings like palaces and prisons,that stand between him and the natural world.   This world we call society, and by being in this society we have already given up much of our identity and freedom.  This society contains the 'reified' forces that cause actual conflicts: ethnic identities, religions, by which one group of people sees itself antagonistic to another set of people, like the Catholics and Protestants, British and Europeans, in MARY STUART. or the Jews, Christians and Muslims in Lessing’s NATHAN THE WISE   All of them are fired by passions that are artificial creations through Time, History.
          At the same time we are alienated from our potential inner identity: that too, has been warped and distorted over the centuries: we find it impossible to "be natural" - or if we are, we are vulnerable.  Mary's history is one in which she allowed her passions, in the past, to lead her into anarchy and murder: yet she is less alienated from her natural self than the calculating and virtuous Elizabeth.

THE CONTRASTING CHARACTERS

          Schiller has chosen these two women, and their male counterparts, Mortimer and Leicester, so that we can contemplate what history has done to our humanity.  For this purpose he has very cunningly shaped his play in a whole cluster of contrasts and parallels. To record events as they actually happened would only be repeating the Lie these events were acting out.  To get at the Truth, Schiller's great artistry does not pretend to be realism, but aesthetic contemplation.  (To copy the actual patterns of everday speech, as if by tape recorder, is to be content to stay in the Hell we have made of life, instead of offering a possible alternative to it).
"The purpose of Culture," Schiller wrote, "is to set Man free and to help him be Man equal to his Concept."    This 'Concept' is something very different from everyday reality: in fact might be the negation of everyday reality.  So Schiller's dramatic method is to get us to 'see' something of this Concept behind the human, political, historical, religious story he is telling.

3.  THE ACT THREE MEETING OF THE TWO WOMEN

     The most famous scene in MARY STUART is the meeting and confrontation of Mary and Elizabeth in Fotheringay Park in Act III.  In this scene Mary, the prisoner, a woman of passionate feelings, verbally lashes and puts to flight the cold and arrogant Queen Elizabeth.  By doing so, she brings about her own death.  The encounter brings out more clearly than anything else the difference between the two women, the nature of their different kinds of strength.  The meeting is one of those inevitabilities, one of those events that had to happen, by all the laws of history, and most dramatists of the subject after Schiller have tried to rival him in showing this meeting.
          Yet, in actual fact, the meeting never took place.  Elizabeth never once met Mary who had been her prisoner for over eighteen years.  Mary, as we see her in the play, is a young and sexually attractive woman when, in actual fact, she was fat and over forty and grey-haired.   Yet Schiller would claim he is telling the ‘truth’ about the events as history itself was unable to do.
          History was not just a poor playwright who missed the opportunity to bring the two women together; it was also a poor philosopher.  For the meeting between the two queens, the sensuous Catholic and the calculating Protestant, brings out the truth of their situation better than the historical facts did.  A young and sensuous Mary, who attracts to her young Mortimer and the Earl of Leicester, typifies the 'Sensuous' charms of the Catholic religion which also had captured Mortimer's love.  The Catholic Church works on us, leading us to truth through the senses, through icons, rituals, music, incense, sacred objects, relics, (the Shroud of Turin) and a very physical idea of Hell and perhaps of Heaven.  Above all, it worships Mary, and Mortimer, when he dies, calls on Holy Mary.  We can't be sure which one is in his mind as he dies, the earthly or the heavenly, the sensuous or spiritual.
          Protestantism distrusts the sensuous (Schiller was a Protestant, so he is being very fair-minded in this play) and believes in inward faith, and the word of the bible, believing sensuous objects to distract from the truth.  But as artist, Schiller, like a Catholic, did believe spiritual truth could be arrived at through beautiful works of art - like his play.
           Elizabeth, the Protestant Queen, also is surrounded by lovers, but these are calculating lovers, pretending to love the Virgin Queen, pretending courtship, for their own advantage.  Elizabeth's principle of calculation and policy cannot count on the loyalty and devotion Mary can command, and the play ends with Elizabeth's tragedy.  While Mary goes to her execution surrounded by loving and weeping friends, Elizabeth ends up alone, deserted by those who tried to serve her loyally.
MARY STUART, then, takes certain historical figures and then makes them into mythic figures, where they are larger-than-life vehicles of forces, powers, like the figures in Greek drama: Antigone, Oedipus, Dionysos and Pentheus.  Mary not only is the queen of Scotland: in Schiller's play she is a symbol of the entire Catholic orientation to the world - and beyond
          Her opponent, Elizabeth, is not just another, rival monarch but the very symbol of the emerging, ruthless new world of realpolitikk attaching itself to the Protestant cause and to the future.
          Mary, gradually 'finds' herself, and comes to terms with herself, by renouncing all that is false and inauthentic in her past and present: at the same time she renounces all her claims to this world as she prepares to enter eternity, purifying, at the same time, all that is suspect or compromised in the old Catholic order.
          The present action of Mary, in the play, then, is a re-run of her earlier history: once again, she is flanked by two lovers; once again, large political and religious forces are in opposition over her; but whereas, in the earlier drama, she had tried to gain love and power, this time she must renounce carnal love and power..  And this will be her victory, as her earlier action had been her defeat.
          The other character, Elizabeth, 'loses' herself completely in the impure world of politics, to become wholly inauthentic, while gaining all the worldly power she seeks.  While Mary ends her life surrounded by friends, who genuinely love her, Elizabeth ends up alone, on her throne, deserted by everyone - a death in life.  The future may belong to the Protestant Elizabeth, but it will be a sterile future: the Catholic past, for all its faults, as embodied by Mary, contained an emotional richness which the human spirit should not sacrifice.
          Mary, therefore, symbolizes Catholicism itself: its appeal to the senses, to physical beauty, to elaborate rituals and ceremonies, works of art, great cathedrals, music and so on.  It leads the spirit through physical beauty to a perception of divine beauty. However,  the danger is that one can become ensnared purely at the physical level, as Mortimer and his fellow-conspirators are.  The Catholic Church, also, is a nest of intrigues and terrorist attacks upon the Protestant monarch, just as Mary herself contains this murderous quality in her past.  

          At the same time, Mary herself is now cynically used, as a symbol, by the Catholic powers, just as the Cardinal of Guise ruthlessly traps young Mortimer into an assassination attempt by using the beauty of Mary as bait.  A statue or portrait of the Virgin Mary would be a similarly sensuous bait.  Mortimer's account of his conversion in Rome is an account of his sensuous seductionby the Catholic Church, confusing symbol and reality - the opposite of what Schiller's art wishes to do - to create aesthetic beauty only as a 'ladder' beyond illusion to ethical and philosophical truth.

            In the past, Mary  had seduced others by her beauty: but now, in the present, she is seen protesting against Mortimer's love and his plans to kill for her.  In other words, she is replaying her old drama, in which she was tempted to murder her husband, but now ‘redeeming’ it by not repeating it and allowing the murder of Elizabeth..

4. THE PLAYWRIGHT AS CULTURAL MYTHMAKER

          This did not happen "in fact" in history, but it is true of the larger forces in history, of the clash between the Catholic and Protestant world views.  And the play manages to locate this universal "inside" the individual.  In Schiller, it is through some "world-historical" individual. It is a historical myth, with all the poetic and philosophic truth of good myths, as in Greek drama. 

a.  Schiller as Thinking Artist
1.       With Lessing and Schiller that we come upon the playwright as myth-maker and as thinker.  It is now that the playwright believes his art form - drama - should be "consciousness-raising" and so become a force in shaping and changing the culture.  To do this, it must not just give back to the public, nicely elaborated, the ideas it already has: it must get the audience to "see" and think in new ways, as Greek drama once had done.  [From Schiller on, the major dramatists are trying to restore to drama the purpose and prestige it had with the Greeks.  That is, they are trying to make dramatic art be the independent shaper and influencer of culture, as it had been in ancient Greece.  And to do this, it must be a "drama of ideas."  It must put upon the stage an adequate image of our total humanity  its past, its present, its possible future, as Aeschylus had done in e.g.  The Oresteia.
         
As man of the theater
b.       Schiller is a skillful man of the theater, so that he uses all the devices of the physical theatre: stage settings, props, costumes, character roles, characters in carefully balanced opposition.  He knows he must draw us into his work by exciting plots, and interesting individuals, not by philosophical lectures.  Often, he can be capable of quite shameless melodramatic moments, as when Mortimer reveals he is not Mary's enemy, as we thought, but her would-be savior; or when Melvil, at the end of the play, reveals he is an ordained priest, qualified to give Mary the last sacraments.  But Schiller's plays, also have a philosophical dimension: When the playwright is thinker, he must be a good playwright, but he also must be a good thinker.  (Eugene Scribe is an excellent playwright but a non-thinker)

Aesthetic Education of the Audience
c.        Schiller reminds us that we are watching a work of art, not real life: that is, he raises the level of our aesthetic consciousness.  This is because he wants to approach us honestly; just like Brecht, later, he lets us see how his plays are made, by the careful balancing of characters and scenes; because he wants us to participate with him in the artistic control of the material he is taking up, and not to be lost in the illusion that what is on stage is reality.  Yet the result is not a lifeless and abstract exercise, but, as in Brecht, a work full of human passion.
          Schiller's MARY STUART  creates its meanings by a very controlled and elaborate system of constrasts, where one scene balances and contrasts with another, one set of characters balances another set, one action has its corresponding reaction.  We can see much of Schiller's meaning just through these patterns, which are 'there' on the surface.  This much more resembles a careful argument than a slice of life. 
          And this creation of a dramatic-theatric structure that is at the same time an intellectual-ideological structure - an argument - is the great contribution of German drama, after Lessing, in making possible a wide-ranging modern drama.  It is the German dramatists, above all Schiller, who show that a dramatic action can be created, not to tell a good story, nor relate historical facts, but to set up a dialogue with the culture, to argue with it - to engage in a counter-discourse to the culture’s false discourse.  This is the beginning of that whole effort by modern artists and dramatists to make their work an alternative vision to the accepted one. It was to lead to the cult of the Artist as Isolated and Alienated Guru.  It was also to lead to the modern situation of the advanced theatre as minority theatre, with a totally opposite agenda to the mainstream theatre.  This begins with Schiller.

5.  THE IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT OF THE PLAY

          The opponent of Catholicism is Protestantism, which turned away from the sensuous arts and ceremonies of Catholicism, and proclaimed that spiritual truth and salvation could be found only in the individual's true experience of the word of God.  This, of course, soon led to a proliferation of quarrelling groups and sects each claiming to have the true interpretation, each self-proclaimed teacher claiming to have divine revelation. 
          The new nationalism of the northern European countries cynically welcomed a break with Rome because it permitted these countries to pursue their own worldly ends: conquest and wealth.  The Catholic Church, for example, forbade usury but the northern cities needed capital - and interest - to expand: so it is no coincidence that Germany, and Geneva, centers of banking, both embraced Protestantism.   In England, the Protestantism was even more cynical: Henry VIII's desire for a divorce, and the nobles' greed over monastic lands and property. 
          In Schiller's day, especially in Germany, Protestantism was now the victor in the battle: the Protestant powers in northern Europe and later in America dominated the world.  Their motives, like Elizabeth's, were far from pure, whatever they proclaimed.

          This power was gained, Schiller believed, by very dubious means, creating a system of oppression and dominance as bad as that of Catholicism.  For Schiller, as an artist, there was also a troubling tendency in the Protestant mind, to turn away from the sensuous, the physical, and the sense of community, for a rationalist and bloodless Individualism.  The battle with the Catholic Church was far from being a battle for the souls of women and men, and in the figure of Elizabeth we see the impurity, the hypocrisy, of this rising Protestant power.  In their determination to dominate the world the Protestant powers had totally lost sight of the spiritual motives that made Luther react to the old Catholicism.  Elizabeth's world is one of intrigue, dishonesty, a calculated 'show' with little behind it.  Elizabeth's treatment of her secretary Davison - giving him the death sentence of Mary in the most ambiguous terms so that she could deny it later, was a historical fact. 
          For Schiller it makes the perfect contrast with Mary, honestly and authentically accepting the death that Elizabeth so deceitfully has brought about.  The ideological battle of Catholic and Protestant was a false, impure, distorted one, where "ignorant armies clash by night" and a figure like Mary must learn to transcend it, to discover a spiritual truth which the ideological battle travestied.  For her own AUTHENTICITY.  And so must the audience of Schiller's play.  It must rise above sectarian prejudice to find in the story our common humanity, distorted by ideologies, finally returning, in Mary and Mortimer, to some mode of authentic being.

AUTHENTICITY

Lecture Notes Part II

          Though greatly respected by his countryman, Schiller was not a popular dramatist.  That is, his plays were not commercial successes.  The popular dramatists in Germany of his time were Kotzebue and Iffland, dramatists we no longer read or perform.  With Lessing and Schiller, for the first time, the theater now divides into a Minority and a Mainstream theater.  Classical Greek drama was written for the whole 'free' population of Athens. Elizabethan and Spanish drama was attended by all clases in society.  French neo-classical drama was 'aristocratic' in outlook but was AT LEAST 'available' to all classes.   There was no 'alternative' theatre so that these dramas represented the 'conventional' or 'official' culture.  An alternative viewpoint to the 'official' one would not have been permitted. Shakespeare expressed the official Tudor line just as Corneille, Racine and Moliere served the social agenda of Richelieu and Louis XIV.  So there was one central theatrical tradition in these cultures.

From now on, with Lessing, Schiller, Goethe and Kleist and their followers, drama divides in Mainstream (popular) and Minority (challenging the given and mainstream point of view) The plays we now study in a History of Modern Drama course have little to do with the performed plays we would study in a history of the theater.

          We can trace a line of dramatists: Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Buechner, Hebbel, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Hauptmann, Shaw, Wedekind, Brecht, Pirandello and so on up to Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, Peter Handke and Heiner Müller today.  Anyone, teaching a course in drama since the late eighteenth century, would include these writers.  They might include such writers as Alfred de Musset, who wrote "armchair plays" - plays he did not expect to be performed by the theatre.

          But in a course on the development of the theater, one of the most important names would be that of Schiller's contemporary in Paris, René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844).

THE INFLUENCE OF THE MELODRAMA

          Pixérécourt  had tremendous influence on the development of the modern theater, immensely more than Schiller.  And his theater was the exact opposite of Schiller's for it was a theater only of the senses, of sensational theatrical effects.  He was a brilliant master of the melodrama: and the effects he called for tremendously changed the whole nature of theatrical technology.  He would demand such effects as onstage floods, earthquakes, storms, avalanches; railway trains, real racing horses, sudden and overwhelming changes of scenery.  It was Pixérécout who brough into being the modern stage scene design studio, for there had to be specialized workshops to meet the demands of his plays.     And he also brought into being the DIRECTOR.

          A Pixérécout plot would  involve dastardly villains and their horrible henchmen, innocent victim-heroines, noble heroes, good old folks- usually harassed unmercifully by the villain - sympathetic disabled mutes, cripples, etc. - like Smike in Nicholas Nickleby for Dickens took over many of Pixérécourt's melodramatic metaphors), and, finally, the forces of Good who would finally prevail.  Before Good prevailed, however, the victim heroine, and often the hero, would have to be horribly harassed, undergoing one diaster after another, like the Perils of Pauline in the silent movies.  The heroine would be ejected from her home, would travel through dreadful dangers, crossing ice-filled rivers, going through fire and water.  At one point, the hero might have to dive into a torrential river to rescue the heroine, who had been tossed into it by the villain.  The most popular play in the United States, for over 50 years was the melodrama version of  UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, with the famous onstage scene of Eliza crossing the icy river.(Bertolt Brecht uses much of this in THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE )
All these complicated effects needed precise timing and co-ordination - otherwise the fatality rate among actors and actresses would be appalling.  And to co-ordinate all these effects, to make sure the actor hero did jump into the river at the right moment, that the earthquake did happen in time for the house to crush the villain at the precise moment he was about to triumph, and so on - the director was invented.  And the emergence of the director, you will agree, is one of the major events in the history of the modern drama.

          Pixérécourt's melodramas were the great recreation of the masses - the equivalent of the movies today, which learned a lot from his melodramas.  And they frankly appealed to the senses: creating thrills, fear, easy sympathy and always happy endings where the good would triumph.  Their moral universe was very simple: you knew who was Good and who was Evil practically by the color of their costumes.  The same types or stereotypes of good and evil re-appeared in melodrama after melodrama which were written according to a formula.

          Evil people did appallingly evil things for the flimsiest of reasons, just because they were evil. They triumphed for most of the play but ended horribly.   Virtuous victims suffered appallingly (Nicholas Nickleby again) before they were at last united into the bosoms of their loving family and their lovers.  The formulae of melodrama rarely changed, though the location did, as this form of theater was taken up all over Europe and the United States.  One can say that the experience of ninety-nine percent of theatergoers then, as today with the movies, was melodrama.  The formula of melodrama is incredibly complicated and stunning technology with incredibly simple-minded 'morality'.  The melodrama and, later , the well-made-play (Scribe) really created the agenda and the formula of modern mainstream drama.

          It is obvious that there is no place in the simple moral world of melodrama for characters like Schiller's Mary or Ibsen's heroines and heroes.  They are often unsympathetic (Hedda Gabler), certainly complex, like Rebecca West.  It is hard to identify the villains - in fact there are no villains just as there are no innocent victims.  In fact, unlike melodrama, we cannot judge morally or conventionally.  As with MARY STUART  we are forced to see a more complicated moral world.

          Before we can ‘judge’ Mary, we have to 'take in' too many aspects of her character.  And Schiller's method of presenting his drama makes sure we DO take in all threse elements, on all their levels - psychological, social, historical, 'natural', metaphysical.

          These means he cannot distract us by brilliant stage effects:  certainly not by spectacular scenery.  Instead, he gets our attention by aesthetic shaping.  By asking us to look, to contemplate, think about, the subtle structure he is creating, the way his scenes and his characters balance each other.  If we can get excited by his story and its events, and yet, above this, see the fine, rational artistry and control of his drama, then we have gone through an evolution somewhat like Mary herself: of experiencing passion, acknowledging it, but transcending it.  So there has to be passion in his play, in order for it to be transcended.  One cannot perform Schiller 'coldly'.  In fact, his critics accuse him of too much emotionality.

          Just as  in e.g. a Beethoven symphony or sonata, the passion is there, often overwhelmingly: but so is the controlling sonata form.  This is the opposite OD melodrama, which arouses emotions in excess of the intellectual adequacy of the situation. We stay 'inside' the excitement and never get out of it, never transcend it.  In every art, this is true: whether the passion is there for easy sensationalism, or there to start us on an altogether more significant journey of the mind.  With Schiller, we already have started on a cultural journey that will continue upto Samuel Beckett and beyond.  That is, modern drama shares a Supertext that Schiller launches in DON CARLOS.

Schiller gets us to see his argument by brilliant external means.
In the succession of Acts, the setting of each Act carries its own part of the argument:  The play opens with a struggle over possessions as Hannah Kennedy tries to prevent Paulet from taking a jewel and, later, the letter [props!] with which Mary still tries to find her way back into the world.  Schiller's use of props, just like that of costume and scene, therefore, carries important metaphoric meanings.  (We will see how Scribe sets about emptying props of meaning in THE GLASS OF WATER.)   The setting of this act is bare and austere, and Mary, simply dressed in black, visibly shows us that she has lost power,  and all that goes with it.
Yet we see that she still can command loyalty, when young Mortimer reveals his devotion to her cause:  And here, it seems, is her way to get back into the world of power.  This is the delusion she must learn to get rid of.

          We see what this power is that she has lost in Act II, which is the sumptuous royal palace of Westminster, where Elizabeth, magnificantly dressed and jewelled, surrounded by the lords of the realm, receives the homage of the ambassadors of France, to arrange a royal, dynastic marriage.  Nothing could be a stronger contrast to Mary and her situation.  Yet this courtship is a sham.

           Elizabeth, if she can love at all, loves Leicester, who pretends to love her.   Anything like emotion and passion, therefore, is totally distorted and destroyed in this world of intrigue, in contrast to the real love Mary can still elicit from Mortimer (and from Leicester.)  In this act, too, Elizabeth shows that, for all her power, she is afraid of Mary, and asks Mortimer to assassinate her.  In contrast to Mary, who is being painfully led to salvation, Elizabeth is descending into Hell.  Ironically, Elizabeth asks Mortimer to commit the crime for which Mary is unjustly (in Schiller's version) condemned to death.

          In Act III, out of vanity and a wish to triumph, Elizabeth agrees to a meeting with Mary, though this has to be pretended as an accident.  The setting is now neither Mary's prison nor Elizabeth's palace, not a place of oppression nor of power: but the natural world Fotheringay Park.  And it is in this natural setting, where neither woman has the advantage, that Mary fatally gives way to her natural passions (as Mortimer will, also)  The natural setting, therefore, is not just a picturesque backdrop, but a working symbol of released passions.

          It suggests Nature itself, a force stronger than both women and representing a reality long preceding their 'Elizabethan' culture; - the natural human identity that that culture has distorted.  [A major theme of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of Schiller's mentors]  By expressing her violent natural feelings, Mary has put aside all deception, and has made contact with an essential part of herself, which seems more important and more true to her than her quest for power.    For, though this will lead to her death, it also is an important stage of her spiritual liberation.   Her anger is a moment of authentic truth.

          And this 'anger' of Mary's, making her attack Elizabeth, is 'amplfied' by the ideological anger of the Catholic rebels, who now more murderously attack Elizabeth.  It is as if Mary's anger here expands.  The meeting of the two women is, theatrically, what is called and "obligatory scene": one that the story cries out for: and all dramatists are free with history in this way.  It shows how good Schiller's instinct for theater was, even how close to the sensationalist art of Eugene Scribe:

          Acts IV and V also balance each other, as Palace and Prison, and we see that the play comes full circle, beginning and ending with Mary and her setting, apart from one final 'coda' where we see Elizabeth in a condition of spiritual damnation: having won her safety but losing everything of value.   By coming full circle, back to the prison setting, the play emphasizes how far Mary has evolved from the beginning scenes, now truly repenting and renouncing her old identity, preparing to make peace with her eternal self.   And her value is underscored by the loyalties she earns from others:

          Mortimer will die for Mary, she will be accompanied in her death by her loving women, she will be granted the 'miracle' of the sacrament from Rome which Elizabeth tried to deny her, and Leicester, locked in a room as if in prison, will be punished for betraying her by having to witness her death.   So we see how Schiller has 'arranged' his art, not to convince us we are looking at a realistic historical action, but reminding us we are watching a play, and asking us to follow the 'argument' he has constructed out of this pattern of contrasts and parallels.

          In Mary and Elizabeth and in Mortimer and Leicester, we see how individuals are as much the victims, as the vehicles of ideological conflicts that have been created over centuries.  Mary and Elizabeth or 'prpducts' of historical processes that started long before they were born and over which they had no control.   Elizabeth is as much imprisoned in the world of realpolitikk that dictates and perverts her thoughts, feelings and actions, As Mary.   What a true, authentic, 'nAtural' ELIZABETH might have been, we can hardly guess, she is so thoroughly  remade as an artificial and distorted identity with no access to true feelings. 

          MARY at least has been able, at last, to confront her own criminal nature, the 'self' or 'identity' that let her so disastrously astray.  So she can finally learn, although reluctantly, to genuinely renounce her claims to the political power of ELIZABETH.  It is no objection to say she has no choice: she might have gone to her death without an authentic renunciation, in a mood of terror and bitterness.  Schiller endeavours to convince us, in Mary's last moments, that she has attained 'Grace".  In death she escapes the manipulations of both Protestant and Catholic powers, both Burleigh and the Guises.  (Historically, it is very likely MARY was trapped by Burleigh and Walsingham in the Babington plot.)

          ELIZABETH, trapped in intrigue to the end, is no better than the callous BURLEIGH, as the DAVISON episode (historically true) reveals.  It also is historically true that she tried to get Mortimer's father, Paulet, to assassinate MARY and so free herself of the need to send her officially to her death.  Though it is not true that she was deserted by LEICESTER, the fact that her lovers and her friends pay only insincere court to her was true.  She is the victim of the POWER she represents.

          MORTIMER, similarly, has been a victim of the crafty Catholic powers who used the glamorous image of MARY as a bait luring many unfortunate young men to horrible deaths attempting to assasinate ELIZABETH.   His courageous suicide, ambiguously calling upon MARY, also 'redeems' his Catholicism of all sensuous and selfish feeling, making it holy, and so is a form of spiritual liberation or salvation.

          By contrast, the survivor, LEICESTER, is made by Schiller to undergo a form of earthly damnation.  He is trapped in the room, forced to hear the execution of the woman he loves but is too cowardly to help.

          The principal characters supply, in exalted terms, the condition Schiller feels we all share: of being born into a human world shaped and distorted through conflicts, oppressions, unjust powers,  inhibitions that evolved through long time (History).  These 'reified' processes hav e become as powerful as actually living things,  removing us far from our authentic selves or authentic identities.  That is the condition of 'alienation' in which we are distorted perversions of our true humanity.
         

                                                           OUTLINE
1.  SCHILLER the inaugurator of 'minority' theatre
2.  Minority theater as a 'counter-discourse' to conventional culture.
3.  Minority theater versus popular melodrama - Rene-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt.
4. Arrival of the Director and the Design Studio.
5.  Melodrama's extrraordinary 'effects' and ordinary morality
6.  Mary Stuart's transcendence of ordinary morality.
7. Aesthewtic transcendence of 'passionate' story.
8.  The external 'shaping' and design of the play: its pattern of contrasts.
9.  Act III and the eruption of formerly contained emotions.
10.Mary's triumphant death and Elizabeth's empty victory.                
11. The contrasting fates of the majhor characters
12.  Mary attains 'Grace' and Elizabeth remains imprisoned.
13. Mortimer transcends his 'sensuous' self and achieves heroic salvation.
14.  Leicester descends into an earthly hell.
15  Schiller's exalted historical personages are amblems of our own condition.
16.Ibsen was to 'localize' the draa of Mary Stuart within 'ordinary' life.
              

          We remember Aristotle's contrast of poetry and history: that history tells us what did happen, while poetry can tell us what should have happened..  The story, as Schiller tells it to his Enlightenment German audience, is more true to their needs: more true as an 'Idea" that tells us something about life.  It is not the events as they happened, but the meaning behind the events.This is the 'Kantian" aspect of the play.  Schiller wants his audience to perceive the Moral Idea behind his drama.  He knows most of his audience is not capable of reading Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and understanding Kant's Categorical Imperative.  Most people would read a succession of historical events, such as Mary's life, and not get any moral philosophical idea out of it.  (Most novelists who write on Mary Queen of Scots turn the subject into erotic fantasy)  Most people also cannot live in the severe abstract level of philosophical argument.  They need helping upwards towards it, and the poet, Schiller believes, should gently lead the audience up to this level through a work of the senses: through beautiful and passionate images which, however,  do not drag us down into erotic fantasy as in the romantic novels, but, after getting our attention, begin to get us to follow the play's higher argument.  This is what Idealist Drama is all about; and it has been attacked by pragmatist dramatists like Buechner and Brecht.  But it is the method, also, of Ibsen and Shaw.

SUMMARY
          Schiller believed that our everyday life also is artifical, false, created by our unhappy and imprisoned consciousnesses.  This is a major theme of Romanticism.  Our institutions, laws, superstitions, prejudices, even our passions, our hates and loves, our  forms of love-making or of religious worship, have nothing to do with nature "in itself" - they are what we, like bad artists,  have made out of nature.  If drama just imitated the reality we have made of the world, it would only be imitating something that was false, artificial.   We have to re-arrange reality, idealistically, to try to get back to the natural, human  truth we have falsified.  The world at it is, does not give us this reality: that is the whole problem with so-called realism.  Art has to show us what the human world covers up and conceals.  It has to allow us to see forces and powers which the world often does not allow full expression So drama, like the other arts, goes on the offensive against the world, agaInst conventional life, denying that everyday reality is real.  It admits that its own art also is artificial, a fiction, but it insists it is a more adequate fiction than the one the world imposes on us.  This is the whole program of modern drama: in Schiller, Kleist, Ibsen, S

APPENDICES

1.  In Schiller's theater we are aware of two kinds of artificiality: the deceitful world of institutions and expressions that prevent us seeing our true human nature; and the artifical means of the theater that tries to offer a 'critique' of this supposedly 'real' world. 

          We are moving to a drama of Authenticity.
          The other 'A' word for modern drama is Alienation

          In the play, the various characters have all suffered a distortion of their human natures: both from what others have done to them and what they have done to themselves.  Mary's situation comes from her past crimes: her complicity in the murder of her young husband, Darnley so that she could be with her older lover, Bothwell.  This is the crime of her passionately sensuous nature.   She has lost her true identity, become inauthentic, through giving way to her passions: when the play opens, she is starting on her journey to her authentic self.

          Schiller surrounds her with the setting of the prison: bare, without decoration or glamor, without any form of distracting her from her true nature. She is dressed simply in black.   All her previous power and wealth has been renounced.  The play will show her making a full renunciation, coming to terms with her pas actions and her past identity. 

          Elizabeth, too, the aging virgin surrounded by pseudo-lovers in her artificial court, is a grotesque disortion of her human nature, totally losing her humanity in her world of pretense and calculation.  In the course of the play, it is Mary, the audience discovers, who has come to terms with her guilty and distorted human nature, her past, and, in the present, will overcome this past, freely renounce it when it threatens to repeat itself in the present, and goes to her death as a free spirit.  Mary, like the audience, must learn to rise above the passionate and  material world, and its social political intrigues,
  to attain a state of 'grace' which transcends these levels.

  She, as we, must go through passion in order to transcend and discard it

          Elizabeth remains imprisoned on her throne.   When the audience follows this argument, it is better able to understand the Idealist values that Schiller believes are needed to create the more adequate humanity of the future.  This is the only 'truth' in history he is interested in.

2.  The Romantic loss of myth and the tyranny of historical time.
          We need this Enlightenment myth, he believes, to free us from the tyranny of mere historical fact.  Therefore, without shame, he rewrites history where he feels it falls short as Idea.     In factually true historical plays, (or plays that claim they are) details are in the play not because they are logically, philophically necessary, but arbitrarily, because they just happened to have happened.  In a mythic drama, like Oedipus the King the tragedy gains its inevitably through its controlled logic.  Schiller, basically, in his dramas, is reshaping history into philosophically  true myth.

          One has to be a Schiller (or a Shaw) to get away with this: that is, if you are departing from historical fact you need to have a compelling philosophical reason for doing so..  

          It is through the shape of the action, and the shape of the sequence of scenes, that Schiller gets us to 'see' his argument:
          Here, BELOW are the two major actions in the play: the one in the past, made in spiritual confusion, criminal passion, erotic adventures,
          committed out of ambition for earthly possessions, (to rule three kingdoms).  This is the level of action most romantic novelists are interested in: the  exciting and sensuous story.

The action Schiller wants us to follow is the second one, in which we find Mary has understood, condemned and renounced this past and it now embarked upon a quest for her spiritual authenticity and salvation: a state of grace.  To make this clear, Schiller stages the first action again.  Once again Mary has a young lover, Mortimer the equivalent of her young husband , and and older, more powerful one, Leicester, the equivalent of Bothwell: both of these are fictions: they never happened "in fact" but they are important to the play's 'alrgument:  (see handout)

 Mary Stuart: past guilt and present redemption

It is the second, tragic plot that is the mythic one, invented or re-arranged by Schiller.  The 'past', which is penitently recollected on the day of the play's opening action, is not greatly changed - Schiller accepts Mary's guilt for Darnley's death.  The second plot is a Romantic  'tragic quest' to surmount the 'alienated world' of political-national-ideological intrigue.  Without her crime, Mary could not undertake this journey to spiritual grace: hence the paradox of the Romantic tragic hero/heroine: the guilty, alienated consciousness is required for tragic stature.  Innocence is inadequate.   For tragic consciousness must be capable of surmounting  guilt, of overcoming alienation.  This is the Romantic version of the 'fortunate fall'. 
In fact, the  hero, as rebel or criminal is the major modern archetype, from Schiller's The Robbersright up through Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Camus to the present. 
It’s lurid popular forms are ambiguous vampires, entertaining monsters, intriguing killers, outrageous pop stars (e.g.. Sid Vicious)  and criminals: they are vehicles of non-conformity and disturbing intelligence that challenges the complacent and unimaginative everyday (suburban) world.etc.  This is another legacy of ROMANTICISM.