Maria Stuart

Maria Stuart, described as Schiller’s most perfect play, is a finely balanced, inventive account of the last day of the captive Queen of Scotland, caught up in a great contest for the throne of England after the death of Henry VIII and over the question of England’s religious confession. Hope for and doubt about Mary’s deliverance grow in the first two acts, given to the Scottish and the English queen respectively, reach crisis at the center of the play, where the two queens meet in a famous scene in a castle park, and die away in acts four and five, as the action advances to its inevitable end. The play is at once classical tragedy of great fineness, costume drama of the highest order—a spectacle on the stage—and one of the great moments in the long tradition of classical rhetoric, as Elizabeth’s ministers argue for and against execution of a royal prisoner.

Flora Kimmich’s new translation carefully preserves the spirit of the original: the pathos and passion of Mary in captivity, the high seriousness of Elizabeth’s ministers in council, and the robust comedy of that queen’s untidy private life. Notes to the text identify the many historical figures who appear in the text, describe the political setting of the action, and draw attention to the structure of the play.

Maria Stuart
Friedrich Schiller. Translated by Flora Kimmich. Introduction by Roger Paulin | November 2020

Contents

Translator’s Note Download
Flora Kimmich

Introduction Download
Roger Paulin

Maria Stuart Download
Friedrich Schiller and Flora Kimmich

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

Act Five

Short Life of Mary Stuart Download
Flora Kimmich

Endnotes Download
Flora Kimmich

Flora Kimmich translates from French and German. Her translation of Gustav Droysen’s classic History of Alexander the Great—the first into English—was published in 2012 by the American Philosophical Society. We have published four other plays by Schiller in translations by Flora Kimmich: Love and Intrigue, Fiesco's Conspiracy at Genoa, Wallenstein and Don Carlos. Flora is also the translator of Jules Michelet's On History.

Roger Paulin is Schröder Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. His major interest is literary history from 1700-1900. His chief monograph publications have been on Ludwig Tieck (1985), on the German Novelle (1985), and on the reception of Shakespeare in Germany (2003). He has published numerous articles on Goethe, Kleist, Romanticism, and on German poetry from Klopstock to Rilke. In 2002 he was awarded a Humboldt Prize and in 2011 the Bundesverdienstkreuz. With OBP he has published The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry and wrote the Introduction for Wallenstein: A Dramatic Poem.

Introduction © 2020 Roger Paulin.

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Friedrich Schiller. Maria Stuart. Translation and Notes to the Text by Flora Kimmich. Introduction by Roger Paulin. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0217