The Queens' Encounter is the first scholarly work to examine the anachronistic meeting between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor in a coherent, international manner. First showing the encounter in the exchange of correspondence between the two queens, Paulson follows the development of an implied anachronism in seventeenth-century France and Spain to the actual depiction of the fictitious interview sequence in Diamante's La reina María Estuarda; the work then shows the «improvement» in the anachronism in the hands of such varied authors as Boursault, Schiller and Donizetti. The epilogue shows some post-Schillerian variations on the theme, to include works by Maxwell Anderson, Lebrun and others.