Author John Staines here argues that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers in England, Scotland, and France wrote tragedies of the Queen of Scots - royal heroine or tyrant, martyr or whore - in order to move their audiences towards political action by shaping and directing the passions generated by the spectacle of her fall. In following the retellings of her history from her lifetime through the revolutions and political experiments of the seventeenth century, this study identifies two basic literary traditions of her tragedy: one conservative, sentimental, and royalist, the other radical, skeptical, and republican. Staines provides new readings of Spenser and Milton, as well as of early modern dramatists, to compile a comprehensive study of the writings about this important historical and literary figure. He charts developments in public rhetoric and political writing from the Elizabethan period through the Restoration, using the emotional representations of the life of this tragic woman and queen to explore early modern experiments in addressing and moving a public audience. By exploring the writing and rewriting of the tragic histories of the Queen of Scots, this book reveals the importance of literature as a force in the redefinition of British political life between 1560 and 1690.

George Buchanan (1506-82) was one of the most distinguished humanists of the Northern European Renaissance. Hailed by his contemporaries as the greatest Latin poet of his age, he is chiefly remembered today as a radical political theorist whose Dialogus, first published in Edinburgh in 1579, justified the deposition of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1567 on the basis of a theory of popular sovereignty, which vested in the people the right to resist, depose and kill tyrannical monarchs. Immensely influential in radical circles both in Britain and on the Continent, it made a notable contribution to the debates over the nature and location of sovereignty which would finally bear fruit in the writings of John Locke. This critical edition and translation of the Dialogus makes available for the first time a modern scholarly version of one of the key texts in the history of early modern British political thought.