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EDWARD II

Date. Edward II is generally agreed to be the maturest and, with the possible exception of the Massacre at Paris, the latest of Marlowe's plays. There is, however, very little external evidence by which to determine the precise year of composition. Henslowe makes no mention of the acting of this piece, as it was in the possession of a rival companythe Earl of Pembroke's-to which we may conclude that Marlowe transferred his services after the completion of the Jew of Malta (? 1590), the latter play having_been certainly, like its predecessors, Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, one of Henslowe's repertoire.1

On July 6, 1593, one month after Marlowe's death, William Jones registered the play under the following designation: A booke Intituled The troublesom Reign and Lamentable Death of EDWARD the SECOND, king of England, with the tragicall fall of proud MORTYMER.' As the editions of Jones, the earliest of which probably belongs to 1593,2 declare on the title-page that the play had been sondry times publiquely acted in the honorable Cittie of London, By the right honorable the Earle of Pembroke his Seruants,' we must assume, what in any case would be probable, that the tragedy had been known on the stage for a considerable time before it came into the hands of the printer. The year 1591, or the early part of 1592, seems then the most likely date for the completion of Edward II and its first theatrical presentation.

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Editions. Edward II survives in quarto editions, dated 1594, 1598, 1612, 1622, the first two having been published by William Jones. I have elsewhere given my reasons

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1 If the Massacre at Paris is later than Edward II, the poet would seem to have renewed his connexion with Henslowe, for the Diary records the acting of the former tragedy as a ' new play' on January 30, 1593.

2 Cf. infra.

Quoted from the MS. title-page of ed. ?1593. The statement is repeated on the title-pages of 1594, 1598, and 1612.

for believing that Jones had already, before the end of the year 1593, issued a version of the play, of which no copy is now known to exist. An eighteenth-century manuscript in the South Kensington Museum purports, however, to reproduce the title-page and the first seventy lines of this edition. The quarto of 1594 has itself been known only during the last two generations, and its text, superior in a great many details to that of 1598, is here for the first time reprinted. Two copies of this 1594 edition have so far been discovered, of which my text follows that preserved in the Landesbibliothek of Cassel, Germany.

Concerning the stage history of Edward II there appears to be no information except that given on the title-pages of the early editions, namely, that the play was acted by the Earl of Pembroke's men, and, as we learn from the edition of 1622, that it was revived by the late Queenes Maiesties Seruants at the Red Bull in S. Johns streete'.1 Henslowe's Diary makes casual mention of two lost plays, which may or may not have borne some relation to ours. In March, 1588/9 he notes the payment of £6 to the dramatists Chettle and Porter for a work called the Spencers', and in September, 1602, he expends £6 18s. on properties for the 'playe of mortymore'.

Text. Marlowe's authorship of Edward II is stated on all the early title-pages and has never been questioned. Publication followed so close on composition in the case of this play that there is no reason to suspect the presence of alien matter, and the text is probably purer than that of any other of Marlowe's dramatic works, though small printers' errors are common enough in the last three editions. As the best preserved of the poet's tragedies, and much the most perfect in all matters of technical skill; as the first considerable history play in the English language; and as the textbook from which Shakespeare undoubtedly learned many lessons of dramatic art, later to be used in Richard II and in Henry IV, this play of Edward II makes a special appeal to the student of dramatic evolution. It is no injustice to these high merits to add that many lovers of Marlowe will turn rather less often to Edward II than to Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, or Hero and Leander. To the very end there appears in Marlowe's writing no sign

1 Queen Anne's men played at the Red Bull between 1609 and the death of their patroness in 1619. Cf. Fleay, History of the London

of league or compromise between the hostile forces of lyric and dramatic inspiration. In the earlier plays dramatic fitness is often sacrificed to the craving for poetic selfexpression. In Edward II the attention to stage requirements and dramatic structure tends frequently to banish some of the subtler and sweeter qualities of Marlowe's verse; or if the lyric vein finds here and there an outlet, it bursts forth as unsubdued as ever, throwing off the restrictions of dramatic propriety and launching into declamation as eloquent and as uncritical as that of Tamburlaine itself. In his last great tragedy Marlowe shows no more than in his first an ability to fuse these two main elements of dramatic poetry. The incapacity to do so is doubtless fundamental, and it explains better than anything else why Marlowe's genius could never have developed as that of Shakespeare did.

Source. The main source of Edward II is Holinshed's Chronicle, from which Marlowe has selected the material for his tragedy with the imaginative freedom characteristic of Shakespeare's use of the same historian. Chronological accuracy is not attempted, but the true meaning of history is faithfully represented. The Scottish jig (II. 990–997) is derived from the Chronicles of Fabyan, and one or two other incidents, unrecorded in Holinshed, have been traced to the General Chronicle of John Stowe. The relation of the play to each of these three works has been worked out with some elaborateness by C. Tzschaschel1 in a Halle dissertation, and the same general results are recorded independently in the introductions to the editions of Tancock and Fleay.

1 Marlowe's Edward II und seine Quellen, 1902.

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