The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

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CHAPTER XVII

Mary Stuart

Wohlthaetig heilend nahet mir der Tod,
Der ernste Freund! Mit seinen schwarzen Fluegeln
Bedeckt er meine Schmach--den Menschen adelt,
Den tiefstgesunkenen das letzte Schicksal--_'Mary Stuart'_.

After the completion of 'Wallenstein', in the spring of 1799, Schiller
was not long in selecting a new dramatic theme. The unwonted leisure was
irksome to him, so that he felt like one living in a vacuum. At first,
being weary of war and politics, he was minded to try his hand upon
something altogether imaginary, some unhistorical drama of passion. But
the aversion to history and the balancing of attractions did not last
long. On the 26th of April he wrote to Goethe as follows:

I have turned my attention to a political episode of Queen
Elizabeth's reign and have begun to study the trial of Mary Stuart.
One or two first-rate tragic motives suggested themselves
straightway, and these have given me great faith in the subject,
which incontestably has much to recommend it. It seems to be
especially adapted to the Euripidean method, which consists in the
completest possible development of a situation; for I see a
possibility of making a side issue out of the trial, and beginning
the tragedy directly with the condemnation,

This time the historical orientation proceeded very rapidly. By the 4th
of June he was ready to begin the first act, which formed his principal
occupation during the next two months. From a letter to Goethe, written
June 18, it is clear that he was then thinking especially of the danger
of sentimentalizing his heroine. She was to excite sympathy, of course,
but, so he averred, it was not to be of the tender, personal kind that
moves to tears. It was to be her fate to experience and to arouse
vehement passions, but only the nurse was to 'feel any tenderness for
her'. As we shall see, he did not remain entirely faithful to this
early conception of Mary's character. In August, the second act was
completed and the third begun. Then came a long interruption,
occasioned by the demands of the 'Almanac', the dangerous illness of
Frau Schiller,--a lingering puerperal fever following the birth of her
third child, Caroline, on the 11th of October,--and finally by the
distractions incident to a change of residence. For Schiller had now
decided to make his winter home in Weimar, so that he might be near the
theater. He was heart and soul in the business of play-making, and
looked forward to devoting the next six years of his life to that kind
of work. To Koerner he did not confide his new plan at first, though he
wrote of it often to Goethe.

The removal to Weimar took place early in December, having been made
possible by an increase of stipend amounting to two hundred thalers. In
granting this increase Karl August intimated that it might be of
advantage to Schiller as a dramatic poet if he were to take the
Weimarians into his confidence and discuss his plays with them. 'What is
to influence society', he sagely remarked, 'can be better fashioned in
society than in isolation'; and he added a very gracious expression of
his own personal friendliness. Schiller thus found himself once more
virtually a theater poet. The Weimar stage, with its little and large
problems, became the focus of his activity. As a good repertory was of
prime importance, much of his time went to the making of translations
and adaptations. Thus he began a version of Shakspere's 'Macbeth', and
had not finished it when he was again prostrated by a fresh and
dangerous attack of his malady. After the completion of 'Macbeth, in the
spring of 1800, he returned to 'Mary Stuart', but found his progress
impeded by manifold interruptions. To escape these he retired to the
quiet of Ettersburg, and there, early in June, he finished his tragedy
of the Scottish queen. A few days later, June 14, it was played at
Weimar, and from that time to this it has been one of the accepted
favorites of the stage. One who saw the second performance has left it
on record that the spectators unanimously declared it to be 'the most
beautiful tragedy ever represented on the German boards'. Madame de
Stael characterized it as the most moving and methodical of all German
tragedies.

Schiller conceives Mary Queen of Scots as a beautiful sinner who has
repented. Her sins are grievous and she does not deny or extenuate
them. But they are in the distant past; so far as the present is
concerned, she is in the right. She has come to England seeking an
asylum, but instead of being treated as a queen she has been confined
in one prison after another and finally brought to Fotheringay, where
she is subjected to petty indignities and denied the consolations of
the Catholic religion. She has been charged with a crime of which she
declares herself innocent, has been brought to trial before a
commission of judges whose jurisdiction she indignantly repudiates, and
has even been denied the common right to confront the witnesses
testifying against her. At the opening of the play she does not yet
know the verdict of the court.

This is the substance of Schiller's masterly exposition; and the effect
of it, upon the reader or spectator who has not prejudged the case, is
to create an attitude of compassion for the prisoner. But the sympathy
that one feels for the passive victim of political or legal injustice is
not the kind which Schiller regarded as 'tragic'. There had to be some
sort of 'guilt', and it was also necessary that this guilt should grow
out of the free act of the individual. But what was to be done with a
helpless captive who was not free to shape her own fate? From the
above-quoted letter to Goethe, of April 26, 1799, it is inferable that
Schiller at first thought of representing the trial of Mary. He soon
saw, however, that this would make the effect of the drama turn upon
political, religious and legal considerations of an abstruse and
doubtful character. It would be with the play as it always had been with
the historical controversy: the devout Catholic would regard Queen Mary
as the victim of brutal tyranny, while the Protestant would think her
deserving of her fate. Schiller did not wish to take sides boldly in a
partisan controversy, but to make a tragedy the effect of which should
grow out of universal human emotions. So he felt happy when a
'possibility' occurred to him of dispensing altogether with the trial
and beginning with the last three days of Mary's life.

The expedient that had suggested itself to him involved three
unhistorical inventions: first, an attempt to escape, in which Mary and
her cause would become involved in the guilt of the murderous fanatic,
Mortimer; secondly, a supposititious love for Leicester, who would use
his influence with Elizabeth to bring about a meeting of the two queens;
and, finally, the meeting itself, in which Mary's long pent-up passion
would get the better of her and betray her into a deadly insult of her
rival. After this her fate would appear inevitable and incurred by her
own act. This concentration of the action brought with it certain other
departures from history which are of minor importance. Mary was beheaded
in February, 1587, in the forty-fifth year of her age. At the time of
her death her captivity in England had lasted about nineteen years. In
order to account for the infatuation of Mortimer and the still lingering
passion of Leicester, our drama imagines her some twenty years younger
than she actually was.[119]

As thus made over by Schiller, Queen Mary is a pathetic rather than a
tragically imposing figure. She appeals, after all, to the sentimental
side of human nature and does not produce that effect of tragic
sublimity which is produced by 'Wallenstein'. The sympathy that she
excites is like that one feels for a martyr. We see in her a royal
_religieuse_ who is persecuted by powerful and contemptible enemies and
is unable to help herself. Her death is decreed from the beginning and
there is no way of averting it. The object of fierce contentions on the
part of others, she herself does nothing, and can do nothing, to change
the predestined course of events. She is never placed, as the real
tragic hero must be, before an alternative where the decision is big
with fate. When the end comes there is nothing to do but let her
renounce all earthly passion and face the headsman as a purified saint.
So far as she is concerned, there is no action at all, but only the
dramatic development of a situation.[120]

For, after all, the expedients just spoken of do not hit the mark
exactly, in the sense of making the heroine responsible for her own
fate. They bring in some new and exciting complications, which, however,
do not affect the course of events at all. The catastrophe would have
been just the same without them. This, nevertheless, is something that
one does not see until we reach the end and look back. Before the two
queens come together it seems as if the meeting might be a turning-point
in Mary's fate; and this appearance is all that Schiller aimed at. In a
letter to Goethe he spoke of this scene as 'impossible', and he was
curious to know what success he had had with it. By this he meant,
seemingly, that the futility of the scene, as affecting Mary's fate, was
predetermined by the nature of the subject[121]. Mary was to die; it was
impossible to make Elizabeth pardon her or treat her claims with
Indulgence. And yet it was necessary to create the illusion of great
possibilities hanging upon this interview of the two queens. This was a
very pretty problem for a playwright, and the skill with which it is
solved by Schiller is the most admirable feature of the whole piece. The
scene is not great dramatic poetry, for there is too little of subtlety
in it,--we are simply placed between light and darkness, as one critic
says,--but it is the perfection of telling workmanship for the stage.

The preparation for the scene begins back in the first act, where Mary
declares to Mortimer that Leicester is the only living man who can
effect her release. When she produces her picture and sends it to him
for a token of her love, we begin to share her premonition that
something may indeed be hoped for if her cause is taken up by the
powerful favorite of Elizabeth. The lyric passages at the beginning of
the third act fix attention altogether upon Mary's longing for mere
physical freedom. There is no room for the suspicion that she wishes to
use her liberty for any political purpose whatever. She appears as a
noble sufferer whose whole being is absorbed in the delirious joy of
breathing once more the free air of heaven. She surmises rightly that
her unwonted liberty to walk in the park is due to Leicester, and she
imagines that greater favors are in store for her:

They mean to enlarge the confines of my prison,
By little favors to lead up to greater,
Until at last I see the face of him
Whose hand shall set me free forevermore.

And the hope seems reasonable. May not the queen of England--so one
is inclined to speculate--be moved to pity? May she not be persuaded
that policy is on the side of mercy? May she not at least postpone
the execution of the death-sentence and gradually increase her
prisoner's liberty?

When Elizabeth appears it is quickly made evident that these hopes are
vain. Mary humbles herself to no purpose. Her enemy, a consummate
hypocrite herself, sees in her self-abasement nothing but hypocrisy.
Mary's earnest pleading, her offer to renounce all for the boon of
freedom, are met with bitter taunts and accusations which culminate in
the galling insult:

To be the general beauty, it would seem,
One needs but to be everybody's beauty.

Then Mary loses her self-control and throws discretion to the winds. In
a wild outburst of passionate hate she accuses Elizabeth of secret
incontinence and calls her bastard and usurper. Thus she triumphs in
the war of words, for her enemy retreats in speechless amazement; but
there is no more room for hope in the clemency of Elizabeth. The
prisoner's fate is sealed even without the murderous attempt of the
fanatic Sauvage.

It must be repeated that the whole famous scene is better contrived for
the groundlings in a theater than for the lover of great dramatic
poetry. Mary's crescendo of feeling, from humble supplication to
reckless defiance, gives an excellent opportunity for a tragic actress,
but the whole thing is rather crass. The effect is produced by
confronting Mary with a vain and spiteful termagant bearing the name of
the great English queen. One could wish, not only in the interest of
historical truth, the obligation of which Schiller denied, but also in
the interest of poetic beauty, the obligation of which he regarded as
paramount, that Elizabeth had been painted here in less repulsive
colors. She might have been allowed to show a trace of human, or even of
womanly, feeling. She might have been represented as touched for the
moment by Mary's entreaty, and as holding out to her some small hope of
life and liberty, under conditions which it would have been reasonable
to discuss. If she had been so portrayed and then later brought back to
a sterner mood by the attempt upon her own life and the discovery of
Mortimer's conspiracy, the final result would have been just the same;
the meeting of the two queens would have served even better the dramatic
purpose which it was meant to serve, and we should have had from it a
noble poetic effect instead of a crass theatrical effect. The pathos of
Mary's position would have been increased, because it would have been
made evident that, whatever her own inner thoughts and purposes might
be, she was a standing menace to the English monarchy. Thus her death
would have appeared in the play what it was in fact,--a measure of high
political expediency with which petty female spite had nothing to do.

It is natural to raise the query whether these considerations, which are
so obvious and are of the very kind that would have appealed to
Schiller, were overlooked by him or were set aside for reasons of his
own. Virtually he takes the Catholic side of the controversy. The ugly
traits of Mary's character, while we cannot say that they are concealed
with partisan intent, are so wrought into the picture that they do not
impress the imagination as ugly at all. They are consigned to the dim
limbo of the past and have the effect of winning for her that sympathy
which human nature is always ready to bestow, in art if not in life,
upon the Magdalen type. On the other hand, the ignoble traits of Queen
Elizabeth are brought into the foreground and made the most of, while
her great qualities are hardly more than adumbrated in the picture. The
result is a canonization and a caricature; and one cannot help wondering
how Schiller was brought thereto, when it would seem that his Protestant
sympathies, as we have known him hitherto, should have led him in the
contrary direction.

The key to the riddle is, no doubt, that he had begun to feel the
influence of the Romantic movement, which was well under way when 'Mary
Stuart' was written. The influence is difficult to prove, because
Schiller always maintained ostensibly a very cool and critical attitude
toward the efforts of the new school. His relations with its leaders
were not intimate, and one of them at least, the younger Schlegel, was
his particular aversion. Nevertheless he read their works; and while he
always professed to be but little edified, there is abundant evidence
that his ideas of literary art were considerably affected by the new
propaganda. So, too, Goethe was never a partisan of the Romanticists,
and he often spoke derisively of them; yet when he published the Second
Part of 'Faust', the world saw that he had learned from them all there
was to be learned. An author is not always most influenced by that which
he consciously approves.

As for Schiller there was much in common between him and the
Romanticists. He had worked out an aesthetic religion which completely
satisfied him. In religious dogma of any kind he had ceased to take a
practical interest. His ethical ideal was an ideal of harmony, of
equipoise. His critical studies had cured him of his one-sided
Hellenism, and his historical studies had taught him that the Middle
Ages were not without their own peculiar greatness. It was thus natural
enough that the Catholicizing drift of the Romantic school should appeal
to his aesthetic sympathies. When a man of poetic temper drifts away
from his theological moorings and becomes indifferent to positive dogma,
he is apt to value the historical religions according to their aesthetic
qualities. That is best which has the most warmth and color and makes
the strongest appeal to the imagination.

It is along this line of reflection that we must seek the explanation of
Schiller's Catholicizing tendency in 'Mary Stuart'. Her creed, if
reduced to dogma, would have offended his intellect, just as her
political claims would have been rejected by his historical judgment.
But he saw in her character that which could be poetically transmuted
into a type of the noble sufferer, burdened with remorse, fated to
contend with injustice, and betrayed by her own rebellious nature; but
triumphing at last in the peaceful assurance that her death is the
divinely appointed expiation of her sins. The drama was to represent a
process of inward purification,--the attainment, after fierce storms and
buffetings, of a calm haven for the soul. Queen Mary was to appear at
last as the embodiment of all the qualities that seem most noble and
enviable in one who "feels the winnowing wings of death". And of this
idea what better dramatic setting can be imagined than the ceremony of
confession and absolution in accordance with the forms of the Catholic
Church? The solemn searching of the heart gives to Mary's character a
saintly dignity, as of one already beatified, and invests the whole
scene with an incomparable pathos.[122] Swinburne makes his Mary
declare, in angry scorn of woman's weakness, that

Even in death,
As in the extremest evil of all our lives,
We can but curse or pray, but prate and weep,
And all our wrath is wind that works no wreck,
And all our fire as[*] water.

[* Transcriber's note: So in original.]

Schiller's Mary meets her fate in a nobler mood. She sees in death the
'solemn friend' who comes to lift the ancient burden from her soul. Not
only does she forgive and bless her enemies, but she sees in the very
injustice of her death a part of the divine benediction:

God deems me fit, through this unmerited death,
To expiate my heavy guilt of yore.

Such a sentiment, it must be admitted, is rather too sublimated to
harmonize perfectly with the political complications that precede. We
seem to have come suddenly into another world; and so we have in
truth,--the world of medieval mysticism. That which begins as a drama
of conflicting political passions, ends as a drama of mystical
edification. The rationalist does not see how the divine order can be
vindicated by the triumph of gross injustice; nevertheless he
recognizes that the ways of God are inscrutable, and he knows that such
ideas, of the winning of peace through blood-atonement, were once
intensely real to the Christian world. Schiller requires the
rationalist to return in his imagination to this time and place himself
in the emotional _milieu_ of the medieval church.

Returning now, in the light of these considerations, to the famous
quarrel-scene in the third act, we see that a more favorable portrait of
Elizabeth, while it would have had the advantage pointed out, would have
weakened the final effect which Schiller wished to produce. It was
necessary that Mary appear as the victim of injustice in order that her
saintly triumph might shine with the greater luster. Moreover, Mary's
outburst of passion, for which there would have been no room if her
enemy had been given a nobler character, was needed in order to make her
earlier sins credible. Without that scene we should have difficulty in
believing that so excellent a lady could ever have committed those
crimes of hot blood which weigh upon her soul. All this means that a
noble-minded Elizabeth would not have fallen in with Schiller's artistic
idea, but it hardly justifies him in making her the monster that she
appears. In making her heartless he might at least have left her head in
the possession of ordinary common sense. Her off-hand employment of the
stranger, Mortimer, as an assassin; her stagy signing of the
death-warrant, after a speech indicating that she acts from
pusillanimous motives of personal spite; her silly comedy with Davison
about the execution of the death-sentence; her coquettish airs with the
wretched Leicester,--these are repulsive touches which are difficult to
justify on any aesthetic grounds, and the total effect of which
approaches perilously near to caricature.

'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' Bjoernson 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.

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