Time Essay: The Return of Elizabeth and Mary

WHO are the women who capture the public imagination today? Angela Davis? Germaine Greer? Shirley Chisholm? Each of them does command unusual attention, but none of them more than two long-dead ladies: Elizabeth I, Queen of England from 1558 to 1603, and Mary, Queen of Scots, her contemporary and bitter rival. Their sudden popularity is a turn of the popular psyche that befuddles the critics, but, in this day of so-called new politics, Elizabeth and Mary's Old World politics remain as fascinating as ever. Four centuries old, history's most famous catfight still reverberates passionately, and every entertainment medium is having a try at retelling it.

The movie Mary, Queen of Scots, with Vanessa Redgrave in the title role and Glenda Jackson as her archrival, is playing in more than a dozen U.S. cities. Jackson is also starred in TV's Elizabeth R, a six-part series that has broken all ratings records for noncommercial television and is up for seven Emmy awards next week. On the New York stage, Robert Bolt's Vivat! Vivat Regina!, with Claire Bloom as Mary and Eileen Atkins as Elizabeth, has just finished a Broadway run and is scheduled to go on tour in the fall. Also in New York, a musical called Elizabeth I had a short run, and at Lincoln Center there was an adaptation of Schiller's Maria Stuart—not to mention a production of Donizetti's Maria Stuarda at the New York City Opera.

Part of what makes it all so intriguing is that comparing the various stories has become a kind of historical scrabble. Was Mary's husband, Darnley, for instance, a womanizing lech as Vivat has it? Or was he a homosexual as the movie has it? (He seems to have been the former.) The popular version of the story, accepted by those raving romantics Schiller and Donizetti, portrays Mary as a high-brogue Joan of Arc and Elizabeth as the Wicked Witch of the West. The new versions, sometimes wildly inaccurate in other ways, do at least correct that longstanding libel against poor Bess. The truth is that Mary probably was an accomplice in the murder of the philandering Darnley and that she constantly schemed for Elizabeth's death. She was a royal piece of baggage who royally deserved to have head and body separated long before Elizabeth signed her death warrant.

Though the two Queens were never within shouting distance of one another, romantic playwrights and librettists could not resist bringing them together in a dramatic confrontation. On this point, the new scriptwriters split. Hollywood does Schiller's and Donizetti's single meeting one better and stages two, both full of ear-splitting cliches and sounding uncannily like a commercial for Tide or Cheer. In Vivat, Bolt finds his own not particularly happy solution by placing Elizabeth and Mary onstage at the same time, but in separate scenes. TV's Elizabeth R, by far the most accurate and the best of the accounts, is wise enough not even to attempt a face-to-face encounter.