The Return of Elizabeth and Mary

By Gerald Clarke

WHO are the women who capture the public imagination today? Angela Davis? Germaine Greer? Shirley Chisholm? Each of them does command unusual attention, but none of them more than two long-dead ladies: Elizabeth I, Queen of England from 1558 to 1603, and Mary, Queen of Scots, her contemporary and bitter rival. Their sudden popularity is a turn of the popular psyche that befuddles the critics, but, in this day of so-called new politics, Elizabeth and Mary's Old World politics remain as fascinating as ever. Four centuries old, history's most famous catfight still reverberates passionately, and every entertainment medium is having a try at retelling it.

The movie Mary, Queen of Scots, with Vanessa Redgrave in the title role and Glenda Jackson as her archrival, is playing in more than a dozen U.S. cities. Jackson is also starred in TV's Elizabeth R, a six-part series that has broken all ratings records for noncommercial television and is up for seven Emmy awards next week. On the New York stage, Robert Bolt's Vivat! Vivat Regina!, with Claire Bloom as Mary and Eileen Atkins as Elizabeth, has just finished a Broadway run and is scheduled to go on tour in the fall. Also in New York, a musical called Elizabeth I had a short run, and at Lincoln Center there was an adaptation of Schiller's Maria Stuart--not to mention a production of Donizetti's Maria Stuarda at the New York City Opera.

Part of what makes it all so intriguing is that comparing the various stories has become a kind of historical scrabble. Was Mary's husband, Darnley, for instance, a womanizing lech as Vivat has it? Or was he a homosexual as the movie has it? (He seems to have been the former.) The popular version of the story, accepted by those raving romantics Schiller and Donizetti, portrays Mary as a high-brogue Joan of Arc and Elizabeth as the Wicked Witch of the West. The new versions, sometimes wildly inaccurate in other ways, do at least correct that longstanding libel against poor Bess. The truth is that Mary probably was an accomplice in the murder of the philandering Darnley and that she constantly schemed for Elizabeth's death. She was a royal piece of baggage who royally deserved to have head and body separated long before Elizabeth signed her death warrant.

Though the two Queens were never within shouting distance of one another, romantic playwrights and librettists could not resist bringing them together in a dramatic confrontation. On this point, the new scriptwriters split. Hollywood does Schiller's and Donizetti's single meeting one better and stages two, both full of ear-splitting cliches and sounding uncannily like a commercial for Tide or Cheer. In Vivat, Bolt finds his own not particularly happy solution by placing Elizabeth and Mary onstage at the same time, but in separate scenes. TV's Elizabeth R, by far the most accurate and the best of the accounts, is wise enough not even to attempt a face-to-face encounter.

Is there any harm in having the two characters meet, especially if it makes for better drama? Unfortunately there is. It was basic to Elizabeth's character and to her politics that she would not and could not see Mary. Brave enough to do anything else--"I am more afraid of making a fault in my Latin," she once said, "than of the kings of Spain, France, Scotland, and the whole House of Guise, and all of their confederates" --she was unequal to the task of confronting the woman she knew she might have to kill.

Schiller's play and Donizetti's opera (which followed Schiller) were born of an age when Mary was a stock romantic heroine. In the Donizetti particularly, the role makes a stunning vehicle for opera's finest singing actress, Beverly Sills. The newer playwrights and scriptwriters are less certain what to do with the character of Mary. They cannot make up their minds whether she is good, bad or half-and-half, and their ambiguity perplexes and defeats the actresses who find themselves in the role. Mary is as hard for modern writers to understand as Elizabeth was for their 19th century predecessors.

The contemporary age seems more drawn to Elizabeth as a heroine. Far from being the cold harridan some histories used to portray, she was deeply emotional, a supremely complex and contradictory woman. She was also, even as legend has it, probably a virgin. Highly sexual, she was yet terrified of sex, which in her experience was associated with the death of her mother, Anne Boleyn, and of many of those she loved. "I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married," she once said. Paradoxically she was, in her own way, a very feminine woman who could go into a swoon on bad news.

To convey all this is a formidable, albeit irresistible, challenge for an actress. Two of the current attempts are strikingly successful. Eileen Atkins turns Vivat, Bolt's ponderous high school history pageant, into exciting drama, with an Elizabeth of coruscating wit and feline sensuality. Glenda Jackson, in Elizabeth R, is more subtle, but equally brilliant, with an astonishing ability to convey mood and nuance and to switch from a purr to a roar. "We are," Elizabeth proudly and accurately proclaimed, "of the nature of the lion."

The laws of chance, if nothing else, argue against so many re-creations of the Elizabeth and Mary story arising from coincidence alone. There are several possible reasons why two such lionesses are so popular this year. One of the most important might be the story itself. With its beautiful settings and colorful pageantry, it provides "posh escapism," as Glenda Jackson calls it. "People," she says, "like going back to black-and-white days when people lived their lives by absolute standards." Producers in turn like what audiences like, and they have been quick to jump on the Tudor bandwagon. Vivat, after all, was a hit in London two seasons ago.

Another equally persuasive reason might be the public's yearning for intelligent, decisive government on the one hand and stability and continuity of national life on the other. Elizabeth's reign provided both to a degree almost unparalleled in history. She ruled for 45 years and gave her subjects leadership that was usually wise, often glorious, and always loving. "We loved her," one of her stalwarts said after her death, "for she said she did love us." Unlike Mary, Elizabeth was in charge from the moment she heard of the death of her sister Mary Tudor. "Little man, little man," she told an adviser who presumed to direct her, "the word 'must' is not to be used to princes."

Still another reason for the E. and M. phenomenon may be the psychological undercurrent of Women's Lib. The movement could hardly ask for a better object lesson than Mary, whose submission to her passions and her sexuality was perverse and ultimately self-destructive. Nor could it seek a better symbol of equality--or superiority--than the woman who gave her name to England's greatest age. With a knowledge of seven languages and with all the academic disciplines of her time, Elizabeth was the perfect Renaissance prince, an inspiration to Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare. Beyond that, she is a supremely modern figure in her fate and fortune. She was afflicted with many of today's doubts and uncertainties as well --neither of which the superficial Mary knew--but she more than surmounted them all. In 100 years, Mary once again may be the heroine of the story, but today and for the foreseeable future, Elizabeth reigns again. -Gerald Clarke

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.