Elements of Historiographic Metadrama in Liz Lochhead’s Plays: Blood and Ice and Mary Queen of Scots got her Head Chopped off

Abstract

The most prominent concerns of contemporary British literature have been reserved for the revision of tradition and history and contestation of metanarratives through historiographic metafiction and historiographic metadrama. Liz Lochhead’s works are abundant in elements of historiographic metadrama which Lochhead uses to rewrite (hi)stories from a different angle, especially (hi)stories involving famous women and their position in the society, as is the case with Blood and Ice and Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. Blood and Ice focus on Mary Shelley’s process of writing her novel Frankenstein while Mary Queen of Scots got her Head Chopped Off presents Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I in the light of their strained relations. Pertaining to Blood and Ice, the aim of this paper is to discuss the position of MaryShelley as a woman artist surrounded by Romanticists such as P.B. Shelley and Lord Byron and their liberal humanist ideology which shows great indebtedness to the patriarchal metanarrative. With regards to Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, the paper examines MaryStuart and Elizabeth I’s roles as women and monarchs, masculinity-femininity dichotomy surrounding the queens, the problematics of their historical representation, as well as the danger of their mythologization. The analysis of the elements of historiographic metadrama in the two plays shows that they are examples of ‘herstories’ that dismantle male-centered narratives as imposed rather than natural.