< BACK to main PROGRAMME

Katherine Hamilton was a real young woman and we know a few sparse facts about her life. We know her brother was executed for promoting the new form of Christian faith that came to be known as ‘protestant’ in 1528. We know that she was later put on trial for her life for that same heresy and threatened with execution. We know she had a secret and very surprising conversation with King James V in the middle of that trial. That was the inciting incident I built the play around, a speculation as to what might have been said in that secret conversation. But I have also chosen to imagine that she fell in love with another woman. We can’t know if that’s true or, indeed, if anything I’ve imagined her saying or feeling is true. 

The James plays have shown queer love stories before, in James 2nd and James 3rd, but this time the story is centre stage. We will never know what Katherine’s romantic and sexual nature might have been but what we DO know, what we can be certain of, is that there will have been lesbian women living lives like hers in sixteenth century Scotland. I’m choosing to speculate about what those real lives and love stories might have looked like while also telling the story of verifiable historical events.

One of those verifiable events is that during the Scottish Reformation homophobia was weaponised as a way of attacking same sex religious communities, nuns and monks. And misogyny was weaponised as a way of attacking worship focused on the Virgin Mary and, latterly, as a way of attacking Catholic female rulers.

The Scottish Reformation, the events that led to the complete rejection of the Catholic Church, at every level of society, occurred with extraordinary rapidity, in historical terms. Basically, the nation flipped completely, with huge popular support, in the space of only about twenty years.

The reasons are complex, with different interest groups supporting this seismic change for very different reasons. To make all that comprehensible to an audience, in all its nuances, would be impossible. Therefore, I have prioritised three goals- Show the history, give the bare bones of the nature of that change. Show how its puritanism might have affected women and closed the door on any possibility of queer tolerance. Show how FAST the change was. To achieve that last goal, I have basically compressed the events of ten years into something more like twenty days.

I feel incredibly lucky that I currently have producers like Raw Material, who are still prepared to share the journey I planned ten years ago now, and that these plays, whose themes I ambitiously sketched out mentally from the start are still reaching audiences.  In all the James plays my ambition from the beginning has been to make invisible Scottish history visible. In one sense all of it is invisible as it is barely taught or known. Scottish history was made by people just like us and that includes, women, queer folk, global majority Scots, all that overlaps within that list, and especially all those who never had the opportunity to write their own stories, or access to the wealth and power that left any easily visible mark. It’s an obvious thing to point out, when you think about it, but most people’s impression of history is not so inclusive. To understand why, you have to look at who’s writing the history, who has been writing the academic texts, the history books, the learned articles then quoted as fact. Overwhelmingly that work has been done by generations of cis-gendered, straight-identifying, privileged white men. The mirror they have held up to our past is in their own reflection and, I think, they often literally didn’t comprehend that any other view was credible.  If you don’t believe that something could exist you don’t even notice the evidence of its reality.

Of course, that description of academic historians, increasingly and delightfully does NOT apply to many of those working today. I am completely indebted to the support and wise guidance of Dr Amy Blakeway of St Andrews University and to linguist and visionary writer on queer Scottish history, Ashley Douglas. Academia is becoming a much more inclusive place and while that’s fragile and probably has a long way to go, other perspectives, other ground-breaking inclusive insights into our past are emerging. However, the lag between what is starting to be understood by many historians and what is generally known by most ordinary folk and within popular culture is a large one.

When it comes to queer history the assumption is often made that there are no queer people in history, or virtually none, and those who become visible are subtly mocked and undermined or presented in ways that veer between salacious and disapproving. There are barely any known queer women in history. If you trusted that history you might believe that queer women never had the power, emotional intelligence or self-awareness to assert their sexuality. You might believe they were genuinely never there at all. 

Yes they were. And after years of invisibility, I think it’s now our job to imagine their reality.

RONA MUNRO (she/they)

A note on terminology:

Women who love women, whatever they might (or might not) have called themselves, have always existed. These days, such women might identify as, for example, "gay", "lesbian", "bisexual" or "queer".

When discussing such women in a historical context, "queer"  is often used as an umbrella term, because modern identities such as "gay/lesbian/bisexual" were not available to them and we don't know how they would have identified themselves.

The term "queer" has previously had negative connotations, but it has begun to be positively reclaimed by many in the LGBT+ community in recent years. It is used here interchangeably with "LGBT+" and "women who love women" when describing women who loved other women in Scottish history.