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.