Queenfight: Confession, Confrontation, and
Coercion in Schiller's Maria Stuart
Professor Gail Hart
Professor of German
University of California, Irvine
April 28, 2008
Clark Hall 206
Reception at 4 p.m.
Public Talk at 4:30. p.m.
A challenging re-examination of Schillerian freedom and the necessity of coercion
for that freedom to be exercised.
THE PLAY
Maria Stuart, a five-act blank-verse tragedy from Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) was
first performed in Goethe's Weimar in 1800. Its historically based but dramatically
fictionalized plot begins with Mary, Queen of Scotts [in German as Maria], in
Fotheringhay, where she has been imprisoned by Elisabeth, Queen of England.
The jailer's nephew Mortimer, seeks to free Maria together with a certain Lord
Leicester, while Lord Burleigh and the Queen Elisabeth maneuver for her death
sentence. In an effort a reconciliation, Lord Shrewsbury effects a meeting between
the two queens--alas, a queen-sized disaster! The plot thickens and in the tragic
end, Maria is executed, Mortimer commits suicide, Lord Burleigh is banished, Lord
Shrewsbury resigns, Lord Leicester exiles himself, and Elizabeth stands alone and
unsupported.
Gail Hart received degrees in English, German, and Comparative Literature before earning her Ph.D. in
German from the University of Virginia. Since receiving her doctorate she has held positions at Yale
University, Reed College, and the University of California, Irvine. She is currently Professor of German in
Irvine and recently served as Director of Humanities Core Course from 2000-2007, as Associate Dean of
Humanities (1994-98), and Director of the University of California's Education Abroad Programs in Germany
among many other posts. Her areas of scholarly expertise are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German
literature, drama, fictional prose, and the history of punishment. She is the author of three books: Readers
and their Fictions in the Novels and Novellas of Gottfried Keller (1989), Tragedy in Paradise: Family and
Gender Politics in German Bourgeois Tragedy 1750-1850 (1996), and Friedrich Schiller: Crime, Aesthetic and
the Poetics of Punishment (2005), and numerous articles. Sponsored by The Department of Modern Languages
& Literatures, Women's and Gender Studies, German Studies, The Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities.