Mary Stuart, a Play
by . Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1921. 12mo, 73 pp. $1.25.
AFTER Lincoln, Mary Stuart gives the effect of a non sequitur. Why the Queen of Scots, next? Yet the juxtaposition immediately becomes suggestive: two great lovers, an antithesis, perhaps — the man dominating opportunity; the woman betrayed by impulse; the man moulding history; the woman railing at fate; the man lost to self; the hungry, self-ridden woman. Obvious enough, when we set it down; but was it what the poet meant? Is he not celebrating ‘This Mary’s best magnificence of the great lover’s mind ? Is he not comparing her to ‘the sun of heaven, the beauty of the world’ ? Is he not insisting, in phrases of light, that she does ‘not love unworthily’?
For this is Mary Stuart’s defense of herself, that reiterated defense which she has been making from generation to generation through her poets: Schiller, Scott, Swinburne, Hewlett, and the lesser men, each with his own interpretation of the mystery of her conduct and the mystery of her charm, by his own reading of the facts; and now John Drinkwater with his ‘tragedy of all such women who are unlucky in their men.’ So he explains her.
Curious it is to see her still betraying her lovers after nigh on four hundred years; unless there is a subtler something at work here than we suspect, and Mr. Drinkwater is not cursing where he meant to bless, but is consciously portraying this brilliant Mary of arrogant reproaches, who wavers between self-pity and self-disgust, and imperiously sidesteps the blame. ‘Hungry for peace — for the man who can establish my heart. — What man is there with authority? Where is
he who shall measure me’? — ’It’s wrong, though, that so slight a man as Darnley should be able to hurt me even so much.’ — ‘ If I could find peace, if there were but a man to match me, my power should work.’
Her love was magnificent, her poet tells us, and shows her drenching her ribald husband with a pitcher of wine, calling the murdered Riccio a fantastic nothing, yielding to the importunate Bothwell though she knows ‘it is but one step farther into the darkness, the last.’
Was this the real Mary? No one knows. Is it Mr. Drinkwater’s vision of Mary, ‘who could have made the greatest greater’? He seems to say so; but how strangely! for the lady mocks him out of his own lines — those flashing, rapier-edged lines, piercing so delicately; yet that’s in character. And she lives. We see her loveliness, we sway to her charm, to the lovely charm of her poet’s words. Whether she is the Mary of history or of Drinkwater, she has come alive for him, quite tremendously, a bright falling star across his pages, ‘a woman of great wit.’ But, the prologue and the epilogue to the contrary notwithstanding, she does not solve the problem of free love in the twentieth century.
FLORENCE CONVERSE.