Mary Stuart

Section III -the English Drama

FROM ITS BEGINNING TO THE PRESENT DAY

GENERAL EDITOR

GEORGE PIERCE BAKER

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

MARY STUART

IN CAPTIVITY AT SHEFFIELD CASTLE

FROM THE PAINTING BY P. OUDRY IN THE COLLECTION OF THE

DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE K. G. AT HARDWICK HALL

MARY STUART

BY

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

EDITED BY

WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE, LL.D.

ASSOCIATE EDITOR OF *« THE DIAL "

BOSTON, U.S.A., AND LONDON

D. C. HEATH &. CO., PUBLISHERS 1906

CopyriKm tniry

GLAS5/ ^ XXc. No.

COPY 8.

COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY D, C. HEATH & CO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

To G. M.

pvtfatovv Bott

The selection for the purposes of the Belles-Lettres Series of the play most strictly representative of Swinburne's dramatic work has been determined by the following considerations. The Siueen Mother and Rosamond are out of the qu«6tion because of their immaturity j Atalanta in Calydon and Erechtheus are put aside because of the fact that their proper classification is with the lyrical rather than with the dramatic group of his poems. There remain the Mary Stuart trilogy and the four later dramas. Since the trilogy is unquestionably Swinburne's dramatic masterwork, it must be represented, and (Bothnvell being excluded by its great length) the choice must fall upon either Cbastelard or Mary Stuart. The former of these plays is essentially a production of the poet's unchastened and exuberant youth, and consequently, despite the patent beauty of its poetic diction, must give place to the latter, which exemplifies the full ripeness of Swinburne's dramatic powers and the complete mastery of his poetical material. The fact, moreover, that the author has himself avowed the belief that he has never *< written anything worthier " in its kind than Mary Stuart should confirm the justice of the selection. A further reason is incidentally provided by the fact that Schiller's treatment of the close of the career of the Queen of Scots is made the subject of much study in school and college, a feet which makes it interesting to compare his treatment with that of Swinburne. The present text follows the so-called second edition of 1899, which is, however, an unaltered reprint of the original edition of 1 8 8 1 .

W. M. P.

■Btogmp]^^

Algernon Charles Swinburne was born in London, April 5, 1837. He was the oldest child of Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne and Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the third Earl of Ashburnham. Both the Swinburne and the Ashburnham lineages are long and distinguished. The present head of the family is Sir John Edward Swinburne, sixth baronet, a first cousin of the poet. Algernon was educated at Eton and Balliol, but left Oxford without taking a degree. During his university years (1856— 1860) he contributed to Undergraduate Papers^ distinguished himself in French, Italian, and the classics, and began his life-long friendship with Morris, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones. His first book. The S^een Mother and Rosamond^ was published in i860, just after leaving the university. A visit to Italy the next year was made memorable by his meeting with Walter Savage Landor. Returning to England, he devoted himself to literary work, in 1865 won the applause of the judicious with his Atalanta in Calydon and Chastelard, and in 1866 took the public by storm with the famous first volume of Poems and Ballads. During the next twelve years he lived in London, and wrote industriously. The chief works of this period are William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868), Songs before Sunrise (1871), Bothivell (1874), Essays and Studies (1875), Songs of T1V0 Nations (1875), Erechtheus (1876), and the second series of Poems and Ballads (1878). During these years in London he became intimately associated with Theodore Watts (now Watts- Dunton), and in 1879 accepted the invitation of that distinguished man of letters to share his home at Putney Hill, a London suburb. Here the poet has lived ever since, except for a few holiday excursions, and here he has produced the long succession of books that have added almost yearly to his ever-broadening fame. The principal titles are : A Study of Shakespeare {l%%o)j Songs of the Springtides (1880), Studies in Song (1880), Mary Stuart (1881), Tristram of Lyonesse (i88a), A Century of Roundels (iSS'^), A Midsummer Holiday {lii4)i Marino Faliero (l%%^)^A Study of Victor viii BiograpJ^

Hugo (1886), Miscellanies (1886), Locrine (1887), a third series oi Poems and Ballads {1%%^)^ The Sisters (iS ^2)^ Astrophel {l%<)^y Studies in Prose and Poetry (1894), The Tale of Balen (1896), Rosamund^ S^ueen of the Lombards (1899), A Channel Passage (1904), and Lo've'' s Cross Currents (1905), a novel in epistolary form, published serially and pseudonymously in 1877, and written in the early sixties. The foregoing list omits several works of minor importance, and takes no account of a large amoimt of material still uncollected from the pages of the periodicals to which it was contributed. The poet has recently superintended a uniform reissue of his verse, the Poemsy in six volumes, and the Tragedies j in five volumes. Of late years Swinburne has lived a somewhat secluded life, owing in large measure to the infirmity of deafness, but he retains his active interest in the historical happenings of the time.

ginttoDuctfon

Swinburne is the author of eleven dramatic works, all tragedies, and all written in verse. ^ The list comprises: first, the two juvenile pieces. The Queen Mother and Rosamond, included in his earliest volume ; second, Atalanta in Calydon and Erechtheus, his two reproductions of the Greek form ; third, the colossal chronicle-trijpgy which deals with the tragic fortunes of the Queen of Scots, and which consists of Chastelard, Bothzvell, and Mary Stuart ; and fourth, the tragedies of his later years, which are Marino Falieroy Locrine, The Sisters, and Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards, Of these eleven productions the two Greek studies, being essentially lyrical in spirit and accent, are grouped with the Poems in their author's classification of his works, while the remaining nine constitute the Tragedies in that classification, and occupy five of the eleven volumes which make up the new uniform edition of Swinburne's verse. It is an account of these nine tragedies that is now attempted.

In the Dedicatory Epistle of 1904, inscribing the new edition of his works to Theodore Watts-Dunton,

^ Since this essay is given up exclusively to the study of Swinburne's dramatic verse, its readers may be referred, for a more comprehensive view of his work, and for those considerations which compel us to regard him as the greatest poet now living, to the present editor's Introduction to Selected Poems by Algernon Charles Sivinburne^ published in the section of the Belles-Lettres Series devoted to Nineteenth Century Poets.

X 3IntroUuttion

his '*best and dearest friend/* Swinburne thus speaks of his first venture in dramatic composition : ** My first if not my strongest ambition was to do something worth doing, and not utterly unworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster the pupil of Shakespeare, in a line of work which those three poets had left as a possibly unattainable example for ambitious Englishmen. And my first book, written while yet under academic or tutorial authority, bore evidence of that ambition in every line. I should be the last to deny that it also bore evidence of the fact that its writer had no more notion of dramatic or theatrical construction than the authors of Tamburlaine the Great, King Henry FJ, and Sir Thomas Wyatt. ' * This self-criticism seems a trifle severe as applied to The ^een Mother y which play, whatever its faults of mannerism, of obscurity or super-subtlety, of turgid diction, and of over-emphasis of its sensuous elements, is at least structurally coherent and dramatically effective in the Elizabethan manner. It preserves the unities of time and place, the scene being laid in Paris during the three days that culminated with the night of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and many an Elizabethan play has less unity of action. Rosamond, which is also included in this first volume, is a much slighter aiFair. It is a dramatic sketch in five scenes, alternating between the king's palace at Shene and the bower at Woodstock, and dealing with the secret love of Henry II and the vengeance taken by his jealous queen. An interesting comparison might be made between this work and Tennyson's Beckety in which the same theme receives episodic treatment.

iBntroHttction xi

Swinburne's chief dramatic work is the great trilogy which occupied his attention for a score of years, and which has for its central figure the ill-starred Queen of Scots. Here was a subject magnificently fitted for tragic uses, and appealing with peculiar force to a poet whose own ancestors had fought and bled in the Stuart cause. And so the woman whose figure had been the ** red star of boyhood's fiery thought " occupied the best years of the poet's manhood with an endeavor to set forth her varied fortunes in a drama of colossal plan, affd to embody in the characterization something of the "love and wonder" with which her memory had inspired the ** April age " of his youth. Chastelardy the first section of the trilogy, was published in 1865, but its writing dates, at least in part, from an earlier period. In his Adieux a Marie Stuart, written after the completion of the trilogy in 1881, Swinburne speaks of "the song . . . that took your praise up twenty years ago," and in the Dedicatory Epistle already mentioned he calls Chastelard a play ** conceived and partly written by a youngster not yet emancipated from servitude to college rule." He fiirther says, after disclaiming any ascription to his earlier volume of ** power to grapple with the realities and subtleties of character and of motive," that in Chastelard "there are two figures and a sketch in which I certainly seem to see something of real and evident life."

The figures here referred to are, it is hardly necessary to state, those of the Queen and of the poet-lover who has come with her from France to Scotland, xii 3|ntrotmction

while the sketch is that of Darnley. In the play, the Queen weds Darnley as an immediate consequence of her imagined discovery of Chastelard's unfaithfulness, whereas the historical fact is that the marriage did not take place until more than two years after the execution of Chastelard. The four women who are the personal attendants of Mary Stuart, and who are known in Scotch romance and minstrelsy as "the Queen's Maries," figure prominently in Chastelard, and the motive of the tragedy is provided by the Queen's belief that her lover has played her false with one of them. In a sense, the motive of the entire trilogy is thus provided, for this woman, Mary Beaton, loves Chastelard, although her affection is unrequited. And when, twenty-five years after his death, her mistress expiates upon the scaffold at Fotheringay the accumulated errors and crimes of a lifetime, the direct agency in bringing about the tragic consummation is this same Mary Beaton, who has for all these years in silent persistency guarded her secret and cherished her vengeful purpose. Chastelard meets his fate as a ** verray parfit gentil knight," breathing no word of reproach upon the Queen's fame, and taking upon himself the entire burden of their common guilt. The closing scenes are dark with foreshadowings of what is to come in after years. Says the Queen, alone with her doomed lover for the last time :

" I am quite sure I shall die sadly some day, Chastelard, I am quite certain." Act v, Scene 2.

3|ntroDttction xiii

And Chastelard :

** Men must love you in life's spite j For you will always kill them, man by man Your lips will bite them dead ; yea, though you would, You shall not spare them j all will die of you."

Act V, Scene a.

And Mary Beaton, pleading for Chastelard' s life :

" If you do slay him you are but shamed to death : All men will cry upon you, women weep, Turning your sweet name bitter with their tears j R«d shame grow up out of your memory And burn his face that would speak well of you j You shall have no good word nor pity, none, Till some such end be fallen upon you."

Act IV, Scene i.

And the prayer of Mary Beaton, when the headsman has done his work, and the cry, "So perish the Queen's traitors ! " goes up from the multitude, is this :

** Yea, but so Perish the Queen ! God do thus much to her For his sake only : yea, for pity's sake Do this much with her." Act v, Scene 3.

Thus the tragedy closes, heavy with the sense that somewhere in the dim future it will be complemented by another and more resounding tragedy, and the ends of a retributive justice be accomplished. It is evident that the entire trilogy was outlined in some shape in the poet's consciousness before the completion of this introductory section.

Bothwell, the second section of the trilogy, did not appear until 1874, which means that nearly ten of Swinburne's most virile years went to its composition.

xiv 31ntroDuction

It covers a period of a little more than two years, from March 9, 1566, to May 16, 1568, — that is, from the assassination of Rizzio to the escape of the Queen into England after the battle of Langside. The five acts are respectively entitled David Rizzio y Bothwelly Jane Gordon^ John Knox, and The Queen. The first act deals with the conspiracy for the removal of the Queen's Italian favorite, and ends with his being dragged from her helpless presence to death at the hands of Darnley and his fellow assassins. In the second act, Bothwell, whose advent into the Queen's life had been ominously heralded at the very close of Chastelard, and whose ambitious passion for Mary was already kindled, although he had but recently been wedded to Jane Gordon, becomes the central figure. Nearly a year is covered by this act, and the events are the Queen's escape, with Bothwell' s aid, from her selfconstituted guardians, the flight and outlawry of Rizzio' s slayers, the birth of the child who was afterwards to become James I of England, the investment of Bothwell with titles and estates, and the plot against Darnley, now hated by all parties alike for his treachery and double-dealing. The act ends with his ignominious death at his lonely lodgings in Kirk of Field. In the third act, Bothwell, who is denounced on every hand as the murderer of Darnley, is protected fi-om popular vengeance by the Queen, who becomes more shameless than ever in her intercourse with him. Then follows his farcical trial and acquittal for lack of evidence, his further advancement in power and wealth, his divorce fi-om Lady Jane Gordon, whom he had

3|ntroiJuction xv

wedded only the year before, his marriage with the Queen, his flight with her to the refuge of Borthwick Castle, the siege and capture of the castle by the confederated lords, and Bothwell's escape, followed by that of the Queen in the disguise of a page. The fourth act opens with the array of the opposing forces at Carberry Hill, followed by proposals and counter-proposals to settle the engagement by single combat, and the final agreement that Bothwell shall retire unmolested while the Queen remains a prisoner. Here, after a passionate scene of parting, Bothwell disappears from the Queen's sight forever, fleeing into exile, and imprisonment, and ignominy. The following scenes show us the Queen at Edinburgh in the hands of her captors, and John Knox in the High Street denouncing her in what is probably the longest uninterrupted speech to be found anywhere in dramatic literature, a speech of something like four hundred verses. At the close of this act the Queen is about to be conveyed to the island castle of Lochleven, which has been chosen as the safest available place for her bestowal. In the fifth act, we have the forced abdication of the Queen in favor of her infant son, and her consent to the regency of Murray, her half-brother. Then follows her escape from her island-prison, the rallying of her scattered friends to her defence, her final stand and disastrous defeat at Langside, her flight to the border, and her last view, standing on the shores of Solway Firth, of her native land. The closing words of the drama are those with which she goes into her life-long exile, and give expression, robed in the utmost magnificence of xvi JlntroUuction

poetic diction, to the passionate resolution with which she confronts the future, and looks to it for the requital of all the wrong that has been done her, and all the shame that has been wrought upon her during her seven years' sojourn in Scotland.

*' Methinks the sand yet cleaving to my foot Should not with no more words be shaken off, Nor this my country from my parting eyes Pass unsaluted ; for who knows what year May see us greet hereafter ? Yet take heed, Ye that have ears, and hear me ; and take note, Ye that have eyes, and see with what last looks Mine own take leave of Scotland 5 seven years since Did I take leave of my fair land of France, My joyous mother, mother of my joy, Weeping ; and now with many a woe between And space of seven years' darkness, I depart From this distempered and unnatural earth That casts me out unmothered, and go forth On this gray sterile bitter gleaming sea With neither tears nor laughter, but a heart That from the softest temper of its blood Is turned to fire and iron. If I live, If God pluck not all hope out of my hand, If aught of all mine prosper, I that go Shall come back to men's ruin, as a flame The wind bears down, that grows against the wind, And grasps it with great hands, and wins its way. And wins its will, and triumphs 5 so shall I Let loose the fire of all my heart to feed On these that would have quenched it. I will make From sea to sea one furnace of the land. Whereon the wind of war shall beat its wings Till they wax faint with hopeless hope of rest. And with one rain of men's rebellious blood ■ Extinguish the red embers. I will leave No living soul of their blaspheming faith

31ntroDuction xvii

Who war with monarchs : God shall see me reign

As he shall reign beside me, and his foes

Lie at my foot with mine j kingdoms and kings

Shall from my heart take spirit, and at my soul

Their souls be kindled to devour for prey

The people that would make its prey of them.

And leave God's altar stripped of sacrament

As all kings' heads of sovereignty, and make

Bare as their thrones his temples ; I will set

Those old things of his holiness on high

That are brought low, and break beneath my feet

These new things of men's fashion j I will sit

And see tears flow from eyes that saw me weep,

And dust and ashes and the shadow of death

Cast from the block beneath the axe that falls

On heads that saw me humbled ; I will do it,

Or bow mine own down to no royal end.

And give my blood for theirs if God's will be, .

But come back never as I now go forth

With but the hate of men to track my way,

And not the face of any friend alive. ' '

Thus ends a work which has the distinction of being not only the longest of Swinburne's dramas, but also the longest production of its class in the whole of English literature. The five acts are divided into sixty scenes, and comprise nearly fifteen thousand lines of blank verse. The dramatis personae number in the neighborhood of sixty, each one of whom is a character occupying a definite niche, if not a pedestal, in the history of that troublous time. The author's own comment upon Bothwell is as follows : *< That ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive piece of work is of course less properly definable as a tragedy than by the old Shakespearean term of a chronicle-history. . . . This xviii 31ntroliuctton

play of mine was not, I think, inaccurately defined as an epic drama in the French verses of dedication which were acknowledged by the greatest of all French poets in a letter from which I dare only quote one line of Olympian judgment and godlike generosity. * Occuper ces deux cimes, cela n'est donne qu'a vous.' Nor will I refrain from the confession that I cannot think it an epic or a play in which any one part is sacrificed to any other, any subordinate figure mishandled or neglected or distorted or effaced for the sake of the predominant and central person. And though this has nothing or less than nothing to do with any question of poetic merit or demerit, of dramatic success or unsuccess, I will add that I took as much care and pains as though I had been writing or compiling a history of the period to do loyal justice to all the historic figures which came within the scope of my dramatic or poetic design. There is not one which I have designedly altered or intentionally modified : it is of course for others to decide whether there is one which is not the living likeness of an actual or imaginable man."

Before leaving Bothwell for a discussion of Mary Stuart i two contemporary judgments may be quoted, both framed within a year of its publication. E. C. Stedman said of it : ** I agree with them who declare that Swinburne, by this massive and heroic composition, has placed himself in the front line of our poets, that no one can be thought his superior in true dramatic power. The work not only is large, but written in a large manner. It seems deficient in contrasts, especially needing the relief which humor, song, and illntroUuction xix

by-play afford to a tragic plot. But it is a great historical poem, cast in a dramatic rather than epic form, for the sake of stronger analysis and dialogue. Considered as a dramatic epic, it has no parallel, and is replete with proofs of laborious study and faithful use of the rich materials afforded by the theme. , , . Bothwell exhibits no excess but that of length, and no mannerism ; on the contrary, a superb manner, and a ripe, pure, and majestic style." ^ J. A. Symonds wrote of it in these terms : ** It is surely a wonderful work of art. I do not think anything greater has been produced in our age, in spite of its inordinate length and strange affectation of style. However, one reads one's self into a sympathy with his use of language, and then the sustained effort of thought and imagination is overpowering in its splendour. It seems to me the most virile exercise of the poetic power in combination with historic accuracy that our literature of this century can show." 2

The completion of the dramatic trilogy is given us in Mary Stuart ^ which appeared in 1 88 1 . This drama is hardly more than one third the length of Bothwell, and requires only about half as many characters for its unfolding. When it opens, over eighteen years have elapsed since the Queen crossed Solway Firth, and she is now within a few months of her doom. Exactly stated, the period of the play is from August 4, 1586, to February 8, i 587. It opens with the Babington con-

* Victorian Poets, revised edition (1887), p. 406. ^ John Addington Symonds: A Biography. H. F. Brown, p. 301.

XX iflntroiJttction spiracy — the last of the many plots against Elizabeth and the commonwealth to which the captive Queen set her hand — and deals in swift succession with the capture and punishment of the conspirators, the trial of Mary for complicity in their design, her conviction of bloodguiltiness, the hesitation of Elizabeth to give eiFect to the judgment thereupon pronounced, the eventual signing of the death-warrant, and the execution at Fotheringay Castle. The immediate motive of this tragic consummation is provided, as has already been stated, through the agency of Mary Beaton — that one of the Queen's Maries who had been her constant companion during all her years of triumph and defeat, in Scotland and in England. Mary Beaton has never forgotten that she loved Chastelard, and has never forgiven the Queen for allowing him to go to his execution without an. effort to save him. As the years pass by, the sharpness of her desire to avenge his death becomes dulled, or rather that desire becomes transformed into a sort of prophetic sense — voiced over and over again in the tragic crises of the history — that she shall never leave the side of her mistress until the consequences of that deed shall somehow recoil upon the doer, and cause the Queen to expiate with her own life the bloodshed of her old-time lover. This attitude of passive expectation is maintained by Mary Beaton until near the end, when judgment has been pronounced upon the Queen, and her hfe is hanging in the balance. Then the old vengeful instinct stirs once more, and the maid tips the scale against her mistress. The means of vengeance are in her possession, for she has preserved for years a letter written in bitter mood by

3|ntroDuction xxi

Mary Stuart to Elizabeth and given to the maid to destroy — a letter recounting in the guise of friendly warning certain unspeakable allegations against Elizabeth's character gathered from the Countess of Shrewsbury. This letter (well known to historians as one of the documents in the case) is now despatched to Elizabeth, who is inflamed to fury upon reading it, and at once signs the death-warrant.

This invention, so richly justified by the artistic unity which it bestows upon the trilogy taken as a whole, is one of-the very few departures that Swinburne has made from exact historical truth in dealing with the history of the Queen of Scots. He has not been guilty, he says, of ♦* any conscious violation of historical chronology, except — to the best of my recollection — in two instances : the date of Mary's second marriage, and the circumstances of her last interview with John Knox. I held it as allowable to anticipate by two years the event of Damley's nuptials, or in other words to postpone for two years the event of Chastelard's execution, as to compile or condense into one dramatic scene the details of more than one conversation recorded by Knox between Mary and himself" One has only to read Swinburne's memoir of Mary Stuart in the Encyclopaedia Britannica to realize with what scrupulous care he has dramatized the facts of her career. The very fact that he should have been chosen as the man best fitted to prepare that memoir affords convincing evidence of the thoroughness of the historical scholarship which he brought to the writing of his greatest dramatic work.

The character of Mary Stuart has been, and will conxxii 3|ntroliuction

tinue to be, one of the insoluble problems of history. The almost endless controversies of which it has been the subject are a natural consequence of the strong religious, political, and personal partisanships to which she and her cause excited the men of her own time. And these controversies still range men into opposing parties through the persistence of the passions which they involve. The documentary evidence, moreover, upon which determination of the points at issue must be founded, is hopelessly entangled in a mesh of forgery and fabrication and falsehood. Again, many matters of importance rest upon circumstantial evidence alone, for the dark statecraft of those days pursued devious ways, and was careful to conceal its tracks, as far as it was humanly possible so to do. In such a case the insight of the poet may well prove a safer reliance than the industry of the historian ; at all events, the Mary Stuart that Swinburne has constructed for us is given the consistency of a product of the creative imagination, and this without doing any serious violence to the historical record. As an elaborate piece of portraiture it is artistically convincing, and at the same time it is based in every feature upon what is at least a reasonable interpretation of the disputed conditions.

Swinburne's conception of his heroine may best be illustrated by a few quotations from the trilogy. It is John Knox who thus describes her :

** Her soul Is as a flame of fire, insatiable, And subtle as thin water ; with her craft Is passion mingled so inseparably

3(|ntrotiuction xxiii

That each gets strength from other, her swift wit

By passion being enkindled and made hot,

And by her wit her keen and passionate heart

So tempered that it burn itself not out,

Consuming to no end." Bothivell^ Act i, Scene 2.

The Queen herself, in a scene with Bothwell, is moved by an approaching storm to this revealing utterance :

** I never loved the windless weather, nor The dead face of the water in the sun j I had rather the live wave leapt under me, • And fits of foam struck light on the dark air, And the sea's kiss were keen upon my lip And bold as love's and bitter ; then my soul Is a wave too that springs against the light And beats and bursts with one great strain of joy As the sea breaking. You said well, this light Is like shed blood spilt here by drops and there That overflows the red brims of the cloud And stains the moving water : yet the waves Pass, and the split light of the broken sun Rests not upon them but a minute's space j No longer should a deed, methinks, once done Endure upon the life of memory To stain the days thereafter with remorse And mar the better seasons."