Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles
by
[Viking, $3.50]
MANY dramatists have dealt with the story of Mary Queen of Scots, but only Shakespeare could have done it justice. A Greek would have had to make three tragedies out of the three conflicts: (1) between Mary and the Scots; (2) between Mary the queen and Mary the woman; (3) between Mary and Elizabeth. Interlinked, they look Shakespearean, like one of the great chronicles. Mary plotting with Bothwell to kill a king of Scotland is another Lady Macbeth. Mary hurrying from her murdered husband to Bothwell the murderer is another queen in an unwritten Hamlet. Stefan Zweig, though a modern biographer, has given his drama a kind of Shakespearean form. The first twenty-three and the last nineteen years of Mary’s life here take up fewer pages than the two years of her tragic passion.
But Stefan Zweig is a modern biographer, neither Scottish nor English, neither Catholic nor Protestant. Fresh from a sister book about Marie Antoinette, he has turned to a queen who was as much a victim of the Reformation as his earlier heroine was of the Revolution. Edinburgh and Holyrood furnish a small, dim scene beside Paris and Versailles, but Mary is more interesting, because more truly tragic, than Marie Antoinette. While their final sufferings were the same, and both were destroyed by events, Mary lived through a tragedy in her own right, not merely shared one with a husband. Her love for Bothwell seems to have been sudden, boundless, and uncontrollable. Her two former husbands, both boys, had never stirred her. In a whirlwind of first love she struck out for freedom, at the cost of murder.
Elizabeth would not have married Darnley, would not have murdered him — but if she had done both she would have known how to go on and save herself and England. Mary was lost in love, let herself sink into it too deep and too long, and found that she had been too much a woman ever to be queen again. All her powers and wiles could not protect her from the enemies into whose hands, in her blind recklessness, she had put the weapons they were waiting for. Her destiny could not rise higher than her character, in which the strength of her love was her tragic weakness.
Mr. Zweig has followed the usual outlines of the familiar story, though he has more faith in the authenticity of the Casket letters and poems than some biographers. If these are not genuine, he asks, who else in Scotland could have written them? And they of course confirm his judgment of her nature and her passions — the documents of her inner tragedy. At times he elaborates his points, spinning them out in analyses which, from being too wordy, become soft and seem sentimental. Her tragedy would be more moving in briefer, harder words. But he only now and then fails to realize that the story needs no laboring to make it tragic, because it is tragedy itself.
CARL VAN DOREN