Endnotes
© Flora Kimmich, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0217.03
Act One
1 The device of the House of Valois: three golden lilies against a ground of blue.
2 At Stirling Castle, near Edinburgh, Mary’s son James was baptized. Her enemies claimed that her husband, Darnley, withdrew and was served on pewter, while Mary and Bothwell, her lover, were served on gold.
3 The exchange that follows plots Paulet’s Protestant stringency against the Catholic ease of Mary’s custom.
4 For these events in Mary’s early history, see the “Short Life of Mary Stuart.”
5 A recurrent motif and an important argument in Mary’s behalf.
6 Two of the many plots to deliver Mary from captivity. William Parry was convicted of plotting—without Mary’s knowledge—to assassinate Queen Elizabeth (1585). Anthony Babington, once Mary’s page, led a similar plot, which Mary seems to have sanctioned (1586).
7 Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, of the highest English nobility, conspired with Spain to deliver Mary. His ambition was to marry her (1571).
8 Helen of Troy. Fabulously beautiful wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, she eloped with her husband’s guest, Paris, to Troy. A Greek army followed. The Trojan War of Homer’s Iliad lasted ten years.
9 See the “Short Life of Mary Stuart.”
10 Mary Tudor, called Bloody Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife, Katharine of Aragon. Queen of England, 1553-58, eventually married to Philip of Spain. Her reign saw Catholicism restored in England.
11 One of several abortive attempts to regularize relations among the royal houses of England, Scotland, and France (1560).
12 This is unhistorical Mortimer, who enters in Scene Three.
13 William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, Elizabeth’s valued advisor, made Lord High Treasurer 1572.
14 The play opens at the ripe moment: Mary has been tried, as she describes, and is waiting to hear the outcome of that trial.
15 Sir Christopher Hatton presided over Mary’s trial.
16 The passage fairly vibrates with dramatic irony.
17 For the historical basis of the long exposition that begins here, see the “Short Life of Mary Stuart.”
18 Hence the veil and Crucifix at Mary’s entrance, Scene Two, above.
19 Mary’s husband Darnley and others broke into a dinner party and murdered Rizzio before the pregnant Mary.
20 Veiled and obscure. Possibly an allusion to Bothwell’s having raped Mary, as rumor had it. See the “Short Life of Mary Stuart.” Bothwell’s brutishness, both physical and mental, is cited whenever he is spoken of. See, for example, lines 951ff. and 1723f.
21 Charles of Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine and Archbishop of Reims (d. 1574).
22 Matthew 5-7.
23 Reims was a center where English Catholics in exile gathered and were trained for the priesthood, then dispatched back to England.
24 John Morgan, a Welshman, Talbot’s secretary and Mary’s partisan; John Lesley, Scottish priest, Mary’s confidant and eventual Bishop of Ross.
25 This Duke of Anjou, François de Valois, younger brother of King Henry III, died 1584. Here and elsewhere Schiller has handled chronology freely.
26 Elizabeth’s mother was Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife; Catherine Howard was his fifth. Lady Jane Grey figured in a long struggle over Henry’s succession.
27 For Babington see note 6, above. Chidiock Tichbourne took part in Babington’s plot. They were spectacularly executed to discourage further plotting.
28 Mary’s son became James VI of Scotland and James I of England. He is mentioned only here.
29 George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, is a major figure in the play and counterweight to Burghley. Mary was long in his lenient custody before being transferred to Sir Amias Paulet and harsher conditions. Historically he was not Lord Privy Seal.
30 The reigns in question are those of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth, as reigning authority wavered between Catholic and Protestant.
31 Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, ended the War of the Roses, between the houses of Lancaster and York, took the throne as Henry VII, and united the kingdom.
32 This is the Act for the Queen’s Safety, passed by Parliament in the wake of a long series of plots to free Mary.
33 Claude Nau and Gilbert Curle were Mary’s secretaries. Their testimony was false.
Act Two
34 Honorific of a French king’s eldest brother.
35 Saint Germain, then outside Paris, was a seat of the court of France.
36 The redoubtable Catherine de’ Medici, widow of King Henry II, mother of Francis II and of Charles IX, for whom she stood as regent.
37 That is to say, to marriage and childbearing.
38 Famously, the badge of the Order of the Garter, the kingdom’s highest. Its motto translates: “Shame on any who thinks ill of this.” Folklore traces the Order to a lady’s loss of her garter in the heat of dancing at a ball, which seems to be false.
39 Mary, aged seventeen, was widowed of the French king Francis II. See the “Short Life of Mary Stuart.”
40 These are three brothers of the House of Guise, sons of Francis, Duke of Lorraine, and Mary’s cousins.
41 Goddess of ruin.
42 Mary Tudor, succeeding to the throne, first confined her half-sister Elizabeth in the Tower, then had her removed to Woodstock in Oxfordshire. See note 10, above.
43 For Morgan and Ross, see note 24, above.
44 Sir Francis Walsingham, chief of intelligence.
45 This is renewal of the papal anathema against Elizabeth. It will figure in Mortimer’s plot.
46 They are arranging to meet.
47 The French lay claim to the oldest throne in Christendom, at the conversion of Clovis (496); the three crowns are those of France, England, and Scotland.
48 Henry II of France raised a pretension to England and France on behalf of his eldest son Francis and Mary, and quartered the royal arms accordingly.
49 An intrigue between Mary and Leicester is Schiller’s invention.
50 An event that lies outside the action. The letter Mortimer brings is therefore the second step.
51 On Norfolk, see note 7, above.
52 See above, Scene Four, line 1045f., 1050ff.
53 The Howards were dukes of Norfolk; the Percys, dukes and earls of Northumberland.
Act Three
54 This is Elizabeth’s interpretation of Mary’s stopping halfway.
55 The notorious Saint Bartholomew’s night, 24 August 1572, a massacre of the Protestant nobility of Paris, urged, among others, by the House of Guise.
56 The Pope is Saint Peter’s successor and holds his keys.
57 Another among many abortive attempts to regularize relations between the two queens. See note 11, above.
58 Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife and Elizabeth’s mother, was condemned for adultery and incest.
59 The legitimacy of Elizabeth’s birth turned on the question whether Henry was cognizably divorced from his first wife, Katharine of Aragon, when he married Anne Boleyn. The question was both doctrinal and—importantly—political.
60 Public place of execution in London.
61 John Savage was among the Babington plotters.
62 This is the papal bull that Mortimer announced to Elizabeth, Act Two, Scene Four, above.
63 Act Three, at the center, is the hinge of this beautifully constructed play. A long resolution follows. Elizabeth’s reaction is represented directly in Act Four, with fine comic relief—some of it ghastly—as one plot line after another meets with disaster; Mary’s is represented indirectly, in Hanna’s report in Act Five. When we see her again, she is transformed.
Act Four
65 The Spanish Armada. It sailed a year later.
Act Five
66 The action has come full circle.
67 The Lamb of God: a medallion representing a lamb holding a victory banner.
68 Didier Siflard was a witness at the execution.
69 The King of France.
70 The King of Spain.
71 The references are: Numbers 17, 8; Exodus 17, 5-7 and Numbers 20, 2-13.
72 Matthew 18, 20.
73 Acts 5, 17-19.
74 This is Leicester.
75 Thus Mary announces her full reconciliation with God.
76 As Melvil explains, the privilege of the chalice is reserved.
77 It is late in a day that began before dawn.
78 The episode is not historical.