The Queen of Scots: La Reina di Scotia

Fabio Battista's volume presents the first English translation of La Reina di Scotia, a seventeenth-century Italian tragedy by Federico Della Valle (1560–1628). This edition is a welcome contribution to the growing body of translations that aim to expand the canon of early modern Italian drama beyond its more frequently studied Anglophone and French counterparts. The tragedy itself deals with the death and subsequent martyrdom of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and the translation is accompanied by a comprehensive introduction and explanatory notes that situate the reader in the historical context of the tragedy and render the work useful and accessible for both scholars and students.Battista's critical introduction is divided into sections tracing the historical and literary record, beginning with a well-researched account of Mary Stuart's life—from her birth and coronation as an infant queen, to her education in France, her marriage to Francis II, her widowhood and subsequent marriages, and finally, her trial, imprisonment, and execution. These historical details are thoroughly contextualized with a view toward how Mary's story has been treated in the Italian literary tradition. Battista demonstrates familiarity with not only the factual narrative of Mary's life but also the long-standing fascination it has inspired among Italian tragedians, opera librettists, and later intellectuals. This literary history is one of the introduction's major strengths, particularly in its demonstration of the early interest shown by a young Benedetto Croce, who helped bring about renewed interest in both Federico Della Valle and La Reina di Scotia.From a formal standpoint, La Reina di Scotia is representative of a broader Renaissance departure from strictly Aristotelian and Horatian poetics. Rather than dramatizing mythological or classical historical figures, Della Valle selects a contemporary and provocative subject. The play is unorthodox in structure, as it is not divided into acts or scenes, which sets it apart from many of its contemporaries and challenges assumptions about tragic form during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While this innovation places the play in conversation more broadly with early modern Italian experiments in tragedy, Battista's edition does not delve into the implications of this formal choice.The translation itself is excellent even as Battista discusses the difficulty of rendering Della Valle's endecasillabi and settenari into free verse that is easily comprehensible to the contemporary reader. Battista's English remains close to the original, but he does not hesitate to deviate where necessary for reasons of intelligibility and clarity. The result is a translation that is both faithful and accessible. The play is presented in a side-by-side format with the Italian original facing the English translation. While this is immensely helpful for scholars and students wishing to compare texts, the layout may present challenges, particularly for those interested in metrics and scansion, as lines of verse sometimes spill over onto successive lines due to formatting constraints, obscuring the metrical structure. Additionally, the explanatory notes that accompany the translation deserve particular praise. Rather than simply offering lexical glosses or brief historical clarifications, Battista uses the notes to extend his analysis and to provide insightful commentary on the text's poetic structure, themes, and historical references. In many ways, the notes are where the intellectual heart of the edition lies, as they reveal the editor's depth of engagement with the play and his sources.The translation is made from the editio princeps of 1628 and includes the dedicatory letter to Pope Urban VIII, followed by the full text of the play, and a letter by Sartorio Toschi, which serves as source material for the tragedy. In this final version, Della Valle compresses the tragic weight of the Queen of Scots’ twenty-year-long imprisonment into just her final hours as he portrays her in a sympathetic light. The lack of division into acts enhances the effects of the dramatic action by maintaining the focus on Mary but also on her cousin, Elizabeth I, by relying on what Battista refers to as “a mechanism of mirroring through omission” (15). Elizabeth remains the constant unseen force, the “evil” power behind the scenes, which stands in opposition to the virtue of Queen Mary.The shadowy figure of Elizabeth never physically appears as one of the dramatis personae, and Mary's death sentence is pronounced by the counselor of the Queen of England, most likely Robert Beale. Not only does the counselor attempt to persuade Mary to renounce her claim to the English throne in a feigned offer of clemency, but he also asks her to renounce the Catholic Church itself. In the end, we see the politico-religious theme that lies at the heart of Della Valle's tragedy, which leads inexorably to Mary's death.Della Valle's work, imbued with political and religious significance, dramatizes the entanglement of monarchical power, religious allegiance, and gendered agency. Della Valle presents Mary as a martyr figure, implicitly casting the conflict between her and Elizabeth as an allegory for the larger tensions between Catholicism and Protestant England. The play also reflects on the limits of sovereignty and divine right as Mary asserts that what God has given her cannot be taken away. Mary's identification in the ternary formulation pointed out by Battista—wife, mother, and queen—tacitly demonstrates the role that gender plays as a lens through which power dynamics and authority are explored.Viewed in light of the political, religious, and gendered dynamics dramatized in the play, Battista's edition of La Reina di Scotia offers an important and long-overdue English translation of a compelling early modern Italian tragedy. Its strengths lie in the lucid historical framing, the thoughtful translation, and the analytical depth of the commentary. Although the volume omits a broader discussion of the development of the tragic form, it is otherwise a highly valuable contribution to the study of Renaissance drama and of Mary Stuart's literary afterlife.

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