Schiller's grand historical tragedy is a battle of wits between Mary Queen of Scots and her captor, Queen Elizabeth I.

Mary has been held prisoner for nineteen years by her cousin, Elizabeth I, who has condemned her to death, but is reluctant to be seen to carry out the sentence. Leicester, Elizabeth's favorite and Mary's ex-lover, engineers a meeting of the two Queens - an encounter which never took place in historical fact - from which Mary emerges triumphant but doomed.

'Jeremy Sams's succinct and sharp new adaptation gives it all a telling urgency' - Daily Mail

Born in 1759, Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller wrote his first play, The Robbers (staged: 1782), while he was a regimental surgeon at the military academy in Württemberg. Fleeing from the Duke of Württemberg's displeasure at the play, he accepted a contract from the National Theatre at Mannheim, where he wrote Fiesco and Intrigue and Love (both staged: 1784) and where his blank verse drama, Don Carlos, was first performed (1787). Most of his subsequent plays were staged at the Court Theatre in Weimar, under the direction of his fellow-dramatist and poet, Goethe. These included Egmont (1796), for which Beethoven wrote an overture and incidental music, the Wallenstein trilogy (1798-99), Mary Stuart (1800) and William Tell (1804). He was professor of history at Jena from 1789 to 1791 and settled in Weimar in 1799, where he collaborated with Goethe in running the theatre until his death in 1805.