• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Association for Scottish Literature

Scottish Literature's International Voice

  • Home
  • News
  • About
    • ASL Council Members
    • Honorary Fellowships
  • Publications
    • Author submissions
    • Books
      • Annual Volumes
      • Free Publications
      • International Companions to Scottish Literature
      • New Writing Scotland
      • Occasional Papers
      • Scotnotes Study Guides
      • Other titles
    • Periodicals
      • Scottish Literary Review
      • Scottish Language
      • The Bottle Imp
    • Articles
    • Audio
  • Events
    • ASL Book Launches
    • ASL Conferences
    • ASL Lectures
  • Schools
    • Videos
      • Schools Conference: 2021
      • Schools Conference: 2020
      • Schools Conference: 2019
      • Schools Conference: 2018
      • Schools Conference: 2017
      • Schools Conference: 2016
      • Schools Conference: 2015
      • Schools Conference: 2014
      • Schools Conference: 2013
      • Strange Tales: Three Uncanny Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson
      • Tally’s Blood
    • Free Publications
    • Schools Conference
    • Scotnotes Study Guides
    • Teaching Notes
    • Teaching Units
  • Contact
    • Author Submissions
  • Join the ASL
Home / Publications / Books / Scotnotes Study Guides / Scotnote 16

Scotnote 16

Liz Lochhead’s
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS
GOT HER HEAD CHOPPED OFF

Margery Palmer McCulloch

Published in: Paperback.
By: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2000
Price: £5.95
ISBN 978-0-948877-39-1

Order from our bookshop


Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off is the best-known and most critically acclaimed of Liz Lochhead’s plays. Dramatising the religious and political history of Scotland from a particularly female point of view, it remains popular with audiences and with the author herself, who sees the work as “a metaphor for the Scots today”.

Margery Palmer McCulloch’s Scotnote provides a background to the history and to the dramatic presentation, as well as giving an overview of the modern context of the play, for senior school pupils and students at all levels.

CONTENTS

  • Introduction
    1. The author
    2. Mary Stuart and her historical background
    3. Lochhead’s approach to Mary and her historical background
    4. A preliminary note on dramatic form and performance styles
    5. Lochhead’s approach to the dramatic presentation of Mary and her historical background
  • The Play
    1. Act One
    2. Act Two
  • Bibliography

Primary Sidebar

Retrieving and Renewing: a poem for ASL

   Forget your literature? – forget your soul.
   If you want to see your country hale and whole
   Turn back the pages of fourteen hundred years.
   Surely not? Oh yes, did you expect woad and spears?
   In Altus Prosator the bristly blustery land
   Bursts in buzz and fouth within a grand
   Music of metrical thought. Breathes there the man
   With soul so dead—? Probably! But a scan
   Would show his fault was ignorance:
   Don’t follow him. Cosmic circumstance
   Hides in nearest, most ordinary things.
   Find Scotland – find inalienable springs.
  Edwin Morgan, 2004

Footer

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Archives

ASL
Department of Scottish Literature
University of Glasgow
7 University Gardens
Glasgow G12 8QH
Scotland
Phone/Fax: +44 (0) 141 330 5309

© 2022 Association of Scottish Literature · Developed by TRWA ·