Mary Stuart (NHB Classic Plays) E-Book

Friedrich Schiller

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Schiller's grand historical tragedy is 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. 'Jeremy Sams's succinct and sharp new adaptation gives it all a telling urgency' - Daily Mail

Leseprobe

Friedrich Schiller

MARY STUART

translated by

Jeremy Sams

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Original Production

Introduction

Characters

Mary Stuart

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

This version of Schiller’s Mary Stuart by Jeremy Sams was first staged at the Royal National Theatre, London. First preview was on 15 March, 1996 and press night on 21 March 1996. The cast was as follows:

HANNA KENNEDY

Gillian Barge

PAULET

Patrick Godfrey

MARY STUART

Isabelle Huppert

MORTIMER

Ben Miles

BURLEIGH

Paul Jesson

DAVISON

Colin Hurley

KENT

Seymour Matthews

ELIZABETH I

Anna Massey

AUBESPINE

Christopher Campbell

BELLIEVRE

Collin Johnson

TALBOT

James Grout

LEICESTER

Tim Pigott-Smith

O’KELLY

Will Keen

MELVILLE

Osmund Bullock

BURGOYNE

Randal Herley

SHERIFF

Jonathan Deverell

OFFICER

Jean Benoit-Blanc

OFFICER

James Nickerson

ROSAMUND

Cathy French

ALICE

Naomi Capron

MUSICIANS

Paul Higgs

Deborah Boyes

Paul Kellett

Director

Howard Davies

Designer

William Dudley

Lighting Designer

David Hersey

Music

Jason Carr

Fight

William Hobb

Company Voice Work

Patsy Rodenburg

Sound

Jonathan Suffolk

Introduction

Eighteenth-Century German Drama andSturm und Drang

Germany was later than most western European countries in developing a native professional theatre. It was not until 1767 (with Lessing’sMinna von Barnhelm) that a major play with German characters and a German setting was written. The sub­sequent drama of the 1770s was dominated by theSturm und Drang(literally Storm and Stress) movement. Enlightenment classicism was rejected in favour of a more epic, individualistic drama which acknowledged a great debt to the plays of Shakespeare, which at that time were being translated into German. Specifically and consciously German, theSturm und Drangplays appealed to a developing sense of nationhood amongst the German states. The plays focused on the individual hero and in particular on the heroic character under severe stress: plots include patricide, incest and violent suffering. This is drama that is less concerned with the more classical predilection for the unpredictable and inexorable processes of fate than with the imposing romanticism of the indi­vidual.Sturm und Drangplays often involved a degree of social criticism, especially of the class system. The plays of Lenz and Goethe typify the movement, and the early work of Schiller, although written in the 1780s, reveals an immense debt to the drama of the previous decade.

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805)

Schiller’s first play,The Robbers, was written in 1781 while he was a disillusioned recruit in the military academy at Württemberg. The other two plays counted as Schiller’sSturm und Drangplays,The Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa(1781-2) andIntrigue and Love(1782-3), were written while he was the house dramatist at Mannheim. All bear witness to his youthful idealism and reveal an indebtedness to Shakespeare.

However,Intrigue and Lovemarks Schiller’s departure fromSturm und Drangvalues and a movement towards a more classical idiom. This period has come to be termed the ‘Weimar Style’, a distinctive mixture of the classical and the romantic. The drama displays classical influences, not only on subject matter but on form and structure (Goethe’sIphigenia in Taurisdates from this time).Don Carloswas written over a period of several years during the 1780s. Schiller arrived in Weimar in 1787; the next few years of his life were devoted to the study of history, philosophy and aesthetics. He was appointed professor of history at Jena University in 1789. He returned to drama with his trilogy on Wallenstein (all 1799). In 1800 he wroteMary Stuartwhich he described as a ‘romantic tragedy’. Schiller’s final years were spent at Weimar. where he found a friend and collaborator in Goethe and it was during this period that he produced much of his best work:The Maid of Orleans(1801), the 1803 play,The Bride of Messina, a conscious reworking of Greek tragedy, and his final completed play,Wilhelm Tellin 1804.

Themes inMary Stuart

Mary Stuartcentres on the last days of Mary Queen of Scots and her troubled relationship with her cousin, Elizabeth I of England. Mary was held prisoner in a series of castles over a period of nineteen years, and although the play depicts a meeting between them, in reality the queens did not meet. The dramatic central meeting in the park of Fotheringay Castle offers Schiller the ideal opportunity to demonstrate the personal differences between the sensual, passionate Mary and the more political and pragmatic Elizabeth. Indeed, the play centres on the contrast between Mary’s ‘grief… gentleness… and… patience in adversity’ (I vi) and Elizabeth, the ‘vile, lubricious, double-dealing queen’ (II vi). Where Mary inspires a devotion bordering on idolatry among her entourage, Elizabeth’s court is a hotbed of corruption, double-dealing, paranoia and anxiety. It is this contrast, the pursuit of the emotional versus the political, which characterises much of the action of the play.

At Westminster, what is of consequence is seeming. The necessity of monarchy for Elizabeth is the relationship between image and truth:

I have to seem to be responsible and yet maintain the appearance of detatchment. (II v).

Guilt and responsibility are significant themes within the framework of the play. Mary’s compelling complexity is rooted in her own perception of her past crimes, and she is depicted as being motivated, at least in part, by guilt. Elizabeth is not the sole enemy of Mary; her own past informs against her. Mary is erroneous in claiming to Mortimer that her right to the English throne is ‘The only cause of all my suffering’ (I vi). To her mind, only Catholic communion will release her from the murder of Darnley, and when Melville offers her this opportunity in Act V she is able to make peace with her conscience in a way that remains impossible for Elizabeth. Indeed, Mary achieves in her death the release and freedom that Elizabeth craves. The play draws parallels between their states of confinement: while Mary’s imprisonment is physical, Elizabeth’s is metaphysical. Elizabeth is portrayed as a character profoundly disillusioned with the processes of monarchy, and the play ends on a stark depiction of her isolation.

The contrast between Mary and Elizabeth is mirrored in the difference between Mortimer and Leicester. The play emphasises the freeing of Mortimer in his suicide while Leicester finds himself ensnared by his own politicking:

She has gone – her soul quite transfigured – and I’m left here, damned to despair. (V i)

Whilst often historically accurate,Mary Stuartconcertinas actual historical events: for example, the length of Mary’s detention and Elizabeth’s extrication from the Alençon marriage. However, Schiller succeeds in clearly delineating the problems of religion in Elizabethan England, charting the conflicts between Catholic and Protestant Churches that were such central issues to the recent and fragile Protestant monarchy.

Schiller’s Dramatic Theory

Mary Stuartdemonstrates Schiller’s preoccupation with classical form while retaining the more immediately personal and romantic strains ofSturm und Drang. Schiller’s theory of tragedy holds up the modern as distinct from the ancient Greek, a theory expounded in his essayOn Naive and Sentimental Poetry(1797). Here Schiller stresses the fact that the modern writer detects a harmony in nature which is lacking in the self: this is termed the ‘Senti­mental’. In contrast, the ancient Greek dramatist was unaware of any difference between the self and nature and is defined as ‘Naive’. Developing this idea further, Schiller applied it to the idea of the Sublime. The distinction drawn between Beauty and the Sublime is defined by Schiller in his essayOn the Sublime: Beauty offers no challenge to the Reason while the Sublime makes us aware of disharmony within ourselves.

It is the Sublime which Schiller seeks to demonstrate in his tragedies. His essay,On the Patheticsuggests that the purpose of tragedy is to move the audience to sympathy rather than offer moral example:

the tragic hero must first of all establish himself as a being capable of feeling before we will honour him as one capable of Reason and believe in his strength of soul.

Suffering is a means of demonstrating the hero’s Sublimity, either active or passive. It is Schiller’s conception of active Sublimity which informsMary Stuart; the protagonist’s suffering is brought about by repentance of a past deed. It is this repentance which Schiller conceives of as particularly relevant to tragic drama.

Schiller’s drama privileges emotion and contemporary notions of dramatic structure: the theatrical genre was developed by Schiller to include the psychological and intimate personal state of the protagonist in a manner more usually connected with the novel.

Performance History

In 1784, a theatre was constructed in Weimar to replace the earlier amateur court theatre which had been housed within the palace of the Duchess Anna Amalia. The old theatre had been run by Goethe with a group of courtiers to produce plays for royal occasions. This theatre admitted courtiers free of charge, but members of the public had to pay.

The new Court Theatre (Hoftheater) boasted its own professional company, and it was to this theatre that Goethe was appointed as Artistic Director in 1791. Together, Goethe and Schiller worked to create their vision of a theatre characterised as much by high theatricality as literary and intellectual endeavour. The repertory included (among others) plays by Shakespeare, Calderon, Lessing and Voltaire as well as by Goethe and Schiller themselves. The theatre was renovated in 1798 in a neo-clasical style, with pillars painted to resemble antique marble. The first performance ofMaria Stuarttook place in this building on 14 June 1800.

The recent history of the play in Britain includes productions of Stephen Spender’s translation at the London Old Vic in 1958 and 1960. The Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow presented the play in a translation by Robert David MacDonald in 1988, and Greenwich Theatre mounted a production of the same translation in 1989 with Fiona Shaw and Paola Dionisotti as Mary and Elizabeth.

Gaynor Macfarlane

Cast of CharactersHANNA KENNEDYPAULETDRURYMARY STUARTMORTIMERBURLEIGHDAVISONKENTELIZABETH IAUBESPINEBELLIEVRETALBOTLEICESTERO’KELLYOFFICERPAGEMELVILLEBURGOYNEALICEROSAMUNDSHERIFFand further nobles, soldiers, guards, etc.