TO ANYONE READING THE DRAMA Maria Stuart (1800) by Friedrich Schiller today, more than 200 years after its Weimar premiere, the power struggle between the two queens may seem like a dusty tableau from a distant past: on the right in this picture the virginal, austere Elisabeth, queen of England, on the left her seductive and beautiful rival, Maria Stuart, queen of Scotland. And one wonders what motivated Elfriede Jelinek to choose this constellation in her play Ulrike Maria Stuart (2006), which bears the subtitle “Queens’ drama.”

I would like to formulate some theses on this topic that focus primarily on the relationship between women and power. First of all, I will offer a brief analysis of Schiller's “women's drama,” which has received less attention and appreciation in traditional scholarship than his “male dramas” Die Räuber, Don Carlos, Wallenstein or Wilhelm Tell, even though its antithetic structure is considered to be particularly well executed. Moreover, on stage the tragedy of the two competing “sisters” has always stood in the shadow of the Maid of Orleans, which was written a little later and whose “militant femininity” has become an impetus for spectacular new productions, especially in current director-driven theater. Then I will turn to Jelinek's “Secondary Drama,” which, in its reference to the “classical model,” reexamines power and gender conflicts in a contemporary context. As I will show, Schiller ultimately reframes a female competition for power as an erotic rivalry and thus resituates his two female sovereigns safely in a more gender-appropriate sphere. In contrast, Jelinek links female power to maternity and deconstructs the notion that women derive power from motherhood.

Schiller

Schiller began work on Maria Stuart shortly after completing his Wallenstein trilogy. While Wallenstein was about the design of a “genius of strength” (Kraftgenie) who oscillates between grandiosity and depression, 3 Maria Stuart is concerned with the confrontation of two female rulers who fight for power and who—despite many differences—prove similar in character, even though the contrasting arrangement of the drama leads readers to assume the opposite. In some ways, Elisabeth and Maria—much like their “royal sisters” Käthchen von Heilbronn and Penthesilea a little later in Kleist—function as “two sides of the same coin”: together, they represent the “split image of woman” typical of male-authored literature around 1800.