Hell hath no fury like a sovereign scorned.

Or so it would seem in the world of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, or Mary Stuart, which the Houston Grand Opera premieres Saturday at the Wortham Theater Center and runs through May 4.

Mary Stuart features a tense encounter between the soon-to-be-executed Queen of Scots and her political and erotic rival, Queen Elizabeth. We learn quickly from Donizetti that when two queens meet on the stage, sparks will fly, and one queen will lose her head.

After the magnificent and brutal Don Carlos, with its burning of heretics on stage, an execution seems the next logical leap in HGO’s fascinating treatment of political terror this spring.

With Mary Stuart, HGO returns to Renaissance history after its latest epic effort, Don Carlos. Donizetti was fascinated by the erotic complications and political machinations of the Tudor court. In addition to Maria Stuarda, Donizetti produced Anna Bolena (about Henry VIII’s unfortunate and eventually headless second wife, Anne Boleyn), Roberto Devereux (a courtier and devotee of Queen Elizabeth), and Il Castelo di Kenilworth (the location of a famous entertainment designed for Elizabeth’s benefit).

What’s so fascinating about the Renaissance, you might ask?

When it came to the lives and loves of the Tudor monarchs, especially Henry VIII with his many wives and children, the answer is plenty. Add to that a monarch who presented herself as Virgin Queen and you have the recipe for dozens of operas of frustrated desire. Elizabeth never married yet encouraged all of her courtiers to address her as the beautiful and unavailable lady typically addressed in the sonnet tradition.

Elizabeth also negotiated a variety of marriage contracts to various European rulers to keep peace between England and its often hostile Catholic neighbors on the continent. Did she ever intend to marry any of them? It seems unlikely. Single life suited England’s first great female monarch, and it was excellent political strategy to keep everyone guessing about who she might marry and whether she might produce heirs to the throne.

Recent entertainment indicates a greater fascination with the sexual appetites of Henry VIII and the complex lives lead by Anne Boleyn and her sister. For example, Showtime’s The Tudors, which lavished attention on the ambitious and unstable Anne Boleyn deftly performed by Natalie Dormer.

Or, Philippa Gregory’s popular historical novel The Other Boleyn Girl, later adapted to the screen to feature Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman.

But dare I say the original obsession, hinted at in a variety of recent representations, was with the erotic life of the Virgin Queen. What was Elizabeth up to all those years?

Maria Stuarda is quite particularly about what never happened and what might have happened. It invents a fictional meeting between Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart or Mary Queen of Scots. Although she was a popular figure of sorts, Mary had been queen of Scotland for a quarter century before unpopularity and a murder scandal forced her from the throne.

In the tenuous years of religious division and political uncertainty, some feared while others fantasized a Catholic uprising in England would result in the deposition of Elizabeth. Mary Stuart’s presence in Europe fueled that fantasy.

So Donizetti and his librettist Giuseppi Bardari maximized the interest in what would happen when two competing sovereigns stood together on the same stage. This was, of course, Friedrich Schiller’s interest in the play, Mary Stuart, on which Donizetti’s masterpiece is based.

Elizabeth and Mary Stuart never did meet. As for the erotic triangle Maria Stuarda constructs between Elizabeth, Mary Stuart and the Earl of Leicester? Similarly unlikely, although Leicester is a prime candidate for a secret or not-so-secret lover of Queen Elizabeth if she had one at all.

What does it look like when two queens confront one another? Something like this in a Geneva production featuring Joyce DiDonato, Gabriele Fontana, and Eric Cutler:

HGO fans can look forward to DiDonato and Cutler rekindling their relationship as Elizabeth and Leicester here in Houston.

But I would say that Donizetti’s thrilling Mary Stuart might in fact point us in the direction of the next great Renaissance fascination for contemporary viewers. Elizabeth has triumphed in the last half century, portrayed in film and television by Bette Davis, Cate Blanchett and Helen Mirren. Henry VIII finally got his due in The Tudors.

Isn’t it time for Mary, Queen of Scots to shine? Besides, the political world of Renaissance Scotland was packed with drama, deception, murder, religious revolution and constant border tensions with England. Given the fact that Mary Stuart's son, James, would succeed Queen Elizabeth as the first king of Scotland and England, the political tensions would only increase. Talk about a Game of Thrones!

In other words, move over Boleyn girls and make room for Mary Stuart. I’m not, of course, the first to think this. I found, in some casual web surfing, an 1895 film of the execution of Mary Stuart produced by Thomas Edison and which some describe as the first (or one of the first) films to deploy trained actors:

How strange to think of Edison fantasizing about the death of Mary Stuart in the midst of his rather prolific career as an inventor. Of course, we can’t always explain our fascinations.

If we could, maybe there’d be no need for opera.