L’Angleterre et l’Écosse au miroir de la fureur : L’Écossaise d’Antoine de Montchrestien et Marie Stuard de Charles Regnault

Abstract

During the first half of the XVIIth century, two tragedies focus on the death of Mary Stuart, nearly 40 years apart. Antoine de Montchrestien’s L’Ecossaise (1601) and Charles Regnault’s Marie Stuard (1639) stage the conflict between the crowns of England and Scotland, through the confrontation of the two queens. This article studies the transposition of a contemporary event into a French corpus of tragedies through the integration, in the writing of both plays, of the dramatic motive that goes together with the story as well as with the genre as it evolved in the XVIth and XVIIth centuries: tragic fury. Fury becomes the mirror in which Mary Stuart’s tragic downfall is reflected, thus bringing to light the three-faceted nature of the issues at stake. They are first political, since the ruling class will always be under the threat of popular uprising. The plays are also about passion, for the two queens are entangled in a personal conflict in which ambition, and political and romantic rivalry are entwined. Lastly, the issues at stake are of a hagiographic nature, as French playwrights celebrated the Catholic Queen as the innocent victim of the executioner that Elizabeth I had become.

Keywords

• tragedy
• Montchrestien
• Regnault
• Marie Stuart
• Elizabeth I
• fury