chapter 4 Women Take Centre Stage: Lesbian Desire in The Island Queens

The ban on The Innocent Usurper did not discourage Banks from addressing political topics again. The Island Queens, his following play, inherits the sombre mood of the aftermath of the Rye House plot and envisions the attempt – and ultimate impossibility – of reconciling the Protestant and Catholic factions. Perhaps emboldened by the need to overcome the banning of his previous play with a powerful comeback and trying to capitalise on his tried and tested recipe for effective characters, Banks revisited Queen Elizabeth, the chief asset in his first and greatest theatrical success to date. However, he did not con- front her with another male protagonist: instead, he chose another woman, Mary Queen of Scots, to share the lead. By presenting two heroines without a consort, Banks continued with his ongoing experiment on subverting gender dynamics on stage as distinctions between subject and object, desiring and desired, male and female collapse. The fictional meeting between both queens would prove so influential that it inspired drama and opera versions, most no- tably Schiller’s and Donizetti’s, as well as numerous prose texts, establishing a new pattern in the representation of interpersonal relationships in the drama of the following years.1 The story is the most sensational and politically controversial of all of Banks’s plays and, unsurprisingly, it was banned from the stage, although it ap- peared in the somewhat less scrutinised form of print. The life of the Scottish queen was full of adventure and reversals of fortune, which made her an ideal pairing for the charismatic Protestant queen. By concentrating on Mary’s imprisonment and execution in London, Banks deflected attention from the scandals that accompanied her from a very young age, omitting any men- tion of her three marriages (each of them more sensational than the previous one), which would have been at odds with her presentation as an essentially naïve young woman.2 Neither does he dwell on her escape to England, only to

1 For an outline of representations of Mary Stuart after the Restoration, see Jane Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (London: Routledge, 1998). 2 The only surviving child of James V and Mary of Guise, Mary was betrothed to the French Dauphin, the future François II, and sent to France in 1548, aged six. When François died less than two years after their marriage, Mary went back to Scotland as the Protestant ref- ormation was being implemented. She married her Catholic cousin Henry Stuart, Lord

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004379343_006 Women Take Centre Stage 125 be imprisoned by Elizabeth for eighteen years during which she relentlessly tried to unite the Catholic forces inside and outside England in an attempt to be rescued, nor the Babington plot, which would finally lead to her trial and execution. Instead, Banks chooses to compress the span of the action from Mary’s ar- rival in England to her execution, concentrating on the pathos of her impend- ing death. In addition, he portrays meetings between the cousins which never took place in history but which would be recurrently copied in subsequent fiction. The dramatic effect of the interpretative duel between two female pro- tagonists, as well as the topical interest of a plot ending in the dethroning and trial of a monarch, prompted Banks to write his most ambitious play to date, and one which he hoped would bring him the same recognition as his first play on Elizabeth had. The play’s greatest innovation is not the sensational account of their meet- ing, which had already appeared a year earlier, albeit with a very different in- tention, in Edme Boursault’s Marie Stuard, Reine d’Escosse, Tragedie.3 Actually, it is the overall concept of the play that is strikingly modern: instead of pair- ing the heroine with a sadistic tyrant or an unfortunate lover, he presents an all-gynocentric universe where the material presence of the actresses on stage literally embodies a full exploration of the emotional, spiritual and public fac- ets of women’s personal and political experience at the turn of the eighteenth century. In a bold move that had no precedent in English drama, Banks both consolidates and reinvents his ‘golden formula’ of she-tragedy by transferring the male-male eroticised intimacy signalling “legal authority and hegemonic control” at the core of heroic tragedy to the relationship between Elizabeth and Mary.4 Banks had already exploited the political dimension of same-sex relation- ships in order to articulate the dynamics of power and masculinity in The Rival Kings. Rebecca Ann Bach has shown that until the early years of the

Darnley, but the marriage turned out to be unbearable and Mary started to grow close to James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell. Bothwell would end up assassinating Darnley and abducting and marrying Mary. Their alleged connivance led to Mary’s imprisonment in Loch Leven Castle and her forced abdication in favour of her one-year-old son James, leaving the reins of the country virtually in the hands of Protestant nobles. A biography of the Scottish queen discussing the role that her gender and her conscious use of her femininity played in her downfall is Kristen Post Walton’s Catholic Queen, Protestant Patriarchy: Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Politics of Gender and Religion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 3 See John D. Staines, The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots, 1560–1690: Rhetoric, Passions, and Political Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 229. 4 George E. Haggerty, Men in Love. Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 28.