Queen Mary (Mária királynő) is one of the historical dramas Madách composed at Sztregova in the mid-1850s, in the years of inward withdrawal that followed the defeat of 1848–49 and his own imprisonment. Unlike the contemporaneous Louis II, which survives only as a single scene, Queen Mary is complete: a full tragedy in five acts, dense with the aphoristic, dialectical pressure that would shortly find its full scope in The Tragedy of Man. Its subject is the brief and catastrophic reign of Mary of Anjou (1382–1387), the sixteen-year-old daughter of Louis the Great, who inherited the Hungarian crown at his death and saw the realm dissolve almost at once into baronial revolt, foreign intrigue, and civil war.

The historical matter is the succession crisis after 1382: the refusal of much of the nobility to accept a woman on the throne; the rebellion of the Horváthy brothers and the Croatian lords gathered around the brigand-prior Palizsnay of Vrana; the invitation of Charles of Durazzo (Charles the Small) from Naples to take the crown, his coronation and murder; the imprisonment of the two queens — Mary and her mother Elizabeth — and Elizabeth’s strangling; and the eventual rescue of Mary by Venetian sea-power while her estranged husband Sigismund of Brandenburg, indifferent to her fate, has himself made king at Buda. Madách follows the chronicle closely but bends it to his recurring thesis: a nation undone less by any outward enemy than by the vanity, faction, and self-interest of its own great men. The peasants who come to petition whichever ruler can serve their lawsuit, the magnates who weigh a crown against a quarrel over a cow, the would-be king who would rather coin patents of nobility than feed his army — all belong to the same diagnosis.

The drama turns on two figures held in tension. Mary is forced across the play from girl to monarch: she begins half in love with the cup-bearer Forgách, mourning the womanhood the throne denies her, and ends having "trodden underfoot the flowers of my life" to become wholly and only a queen — the cost, not the triumph, is the point. Against her stands Palizsnay, the rebel prior, the play’s most arresting invention: a man who rises not for ambition or homeland but because "rebellion is my pleasure," who needs struggle "to feel that I am alive," and who lays siege to Mary to settle a wager with himself — whether she is more than a woman. His final compulsion to force her to her knees, and her proof that "strong, strong after all is a woman’s heart," is the dialectical core of the work.

The verse is Madách’s characteristic blank iambic line, run on by enjambment, carrying thesis against counter-thesis from speaker to speaker. A textual note: the source carries several embedded stage-direction cross-references of the form "the hall of the first act, second scene," which the print tradition marks typographically; these are scene-setting recurrences, not structural divisions, and are rendered here as ordinary stage directions. The five acts are the work’s only true divisions.