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Edinburgh Festival Based on Schiller, the opera is an unhistorical take on the circumstances that led to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, an event that Donizetti views as being dictated as much by Elizabeth I’s sexual jealousy of Mary as by her desire for political control. The two queens, rivals both for the English throne and the love of the Duke of Leicester, meet in a famous fictional slanging match during the course of which Mary’s assertion of her moral superiority causes Elizabeth’s detes
