ABSTRACT
During her six-year personal reign in Scotland from 1561 to 1566, Mary, Queen of Scots, presided over a range of festivities which were designed to ratify her royal status, expound the splendour of her personal court and strengthen Scotland’s various foreign alliances. However, in terms of critical scholarship in the field of the early modern festival, there is hardly any work on Mary’s theatrical agency during her reign in Scotland. In fact, in the rare instances when Mary’s Scottish court festivities are mentioned, they are usually branded as recreational and apolitical.1 I believe that the modern critical reluctance towards recognizing Mary’s Scottish court entertainments as a plausible scholarly topic can be ascribed to two fundamental reasons. Firstly, there is the dominant critical consensus that Mary was an unsuccessful monarch. Secondly, our retrospective awareness of the ill-fated later years of Mary’s reign has prompted many critics to brand Mary’s earlier court festivals as trivial.
