The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots, 1560-1690

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'An excellent, timely and ground-breaking book, based on serious research and profound thought, The Tragic Histories of Mary, Queen of Scots, 1560-1690 is a lucidly written work, demonstrating all the signs of years of painstaking study by an exceptional scholar. John Staines ranges across an impressive array of historical and literary sources to make his argument: government propaganda, polemic, drama in French and English, political treatises, and epic poetry. In doing so he not only shows how contemporaries read her tragic fate, invariably manipulated by interested parties, but how the representations of her life and death are central to an understanding of British culture in the late sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth. Mary also emerges as one of the key figures in early modern European political thought. This is a book which few readers interested in the period can afford to ignore.' Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex, UK 'This is an engaging and deeply researched history. Staines pays attention to Latin and French versions of the story; he is also persuasive in his claims that plays on other subjects, such as Thomas Hughes' s Misfortunes of Arthur, were coloured by the events of Mary's fall. Above all, this book presents a productively expansive understanding of "tragic history". It is a mode not restricted to drama and not straightforwardly governed by the dictates of truth. In the words of Staines' s characteristically lucid conclusion, "tragic history" comes into being whenever an author "infuses the moral message of a tragic fall with a political argument."' Times Literary Supplement 'John Staines's lucidly written and usefully illustrated book puts forward a sophisticated and well-sustained argument that debates in print about the history of Scotland in general and Mary, Queen of Scots in particular played a crucially formative role in understanding of the revolutionary changes of the late sixteenth and early to mid-seventeenth c