INTRODUCTION.

THE play of Edward II was written, according to Warton, in 1590. He is undoubtedly right. It must have preceded Henry VI, in which the facts of history are much more accurately adhered to. And the first part of Henry VI, which was the last written, was acted in 1592; the second and third parts almost certainly in 1591. Edward II was produced by the Earl of Pembroke's company, for which Marlow began to write in 1589. It was probably acted at the Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch. The text is in very fair condition, considering that it was not published till five years after Marlow's death; and is free, except in the third act, from the alterations and interpolations which so grossly disfigure the Jew of Malta, and still more the History of Faustus. Yet the system of refashioning his plays had begun a year before Edward II was published; and the printer of Tamburlaine, Parts I and II, as early as 1592 complains of the mixture of 'fond and frivolous gestures interpolated into those two plays.' Many words and parts of lines have, however, dropped out of the text, and are now irrecoverable. The play is well worth the attention of the student as being in itself as good a production as, if not a better than, Shakespeare's Richard II, which was written three years later, at a time when Shakespeare had become three years older than Marlow was when he wrote this play, which Shakespeare's was possibly an attempt to rival. To my mind there is nothing in Richard II so fine as the last act in Edward II, nor are the characters better discriminated. Edward himself, Gaueston, Kent, Isabella, Baldock, and the younger Spencer are fully as individual and dramatic as Bolingbroke, Richard, Gaunt, and York. Nor is the play so heavy. The long speeches in Richard II are very tedious in representation, and it can scarcely succeed on the modern stage except

* That is, if the notice in Henslow's Diary of payment to Dekker for additions to Faustus (as printed by Mr Collier) be not a forgery, which is very doubtful.

as a spectacle. Only the almost superstitious reverence we have for the name of Shakespeare has kept in comparative oblivion the rival drama-certainly the masterpiece of history plays at the time of its production.

Again, this play is specially interesting from its naïve manner of introducing changes of place, and its disregard of all considerations of time, dramatic as well as historical. The Temple becomes the Parliament at Westminster by the mere drawing of a curtain; the queen walks to a forest in a London street; journeys are performed between consecutive lines of the same scene. The whole thing impresses us with the infantile condition of the then theatre, and is of the highest value to one who wishes to trace the steps by which the historical drama reached its culmination in Henry IV and V. For educational purposes it has another advantageits comparative freshness. Many a schoolmaster, jaded with continued repetitions of the half-dozen plays of Shakespeare that can be adapted to his purpose, will be glad to use one which is desirable in itself, gives abundant scope for historical exercises, and affords by contrast no less than by similarity to the works of our greatest dramatist, a subject of study, linguistic as well as metrical, hitherto unused for such a purpose in this country, though it has been used in German schools. I have, therefore, in the notes carefully marked all matters bearing on Marlow's peculiarities of pronunciation, grammatical forms, etc. : the wealth of illustration, so easily accessible in Schmidt's Lexicon and Abbott's Grammar, has allowed me to curtail the numerous quotations that will at once suggest themselves to the student of old English; and I have been enabled to use the room thus gained in breaking new ground on several heads, among which I may mention these: a short sketch of the rise of the historical drama amongst us; the manner in which Marlow divided his plays into acts, and the distribution of parts among the actors; some new chronological results as to Marlow's career; the similarities between this play and Henry VI, indicating identity of authorship; and, finally, illustrative extracts from Fabyan, Stow, and Holinshed; by comparing which with the text the student will be able to see how Marlow diverged from the authorities for his story. Το these matters the rest of this Introduction will be chiefly devoted. I should add that the highest authority for the text is the first quarto (Q. 1) of 1598. All deviations from this of any moment are carefully noted. The only accurate modern editions are those by Dyce (1865) and Wagner (1871),

RISE OF HISTORY PLAYS IN ENGLAND.

It would be out of place in this small work to give a full account of the rise of the historical drama in England. It may, however, have some interest for the reader to see the principal works of this kind arranged in chronological order of production:

It is clear from this list that Peele and Marlow were the originators of this branch of the drama; that Shakespeare, after working with them, and to some extent imitating them, brought it to perfection; that Dekker, Heywood, Webster, and others then tried their hands at it with less success; and that, with the isolated exception of Henry VIII, its cultivation was abandoned during the reign of James I. Peele has the merit of the first conception, and Marlow that of throwing over extraneous buffoonery and resting solely on the historical plot for the success of his work; while Shakespeare combined and perfected the methods of Marlow and Peele. No improvement was introduced afterwards.

TABLE OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE PARTS AMONG THE ACTORS.

ON THE ASSIGNMENT OF THEIR PARTS TO THE ACTORS AND THE DIVISION INTO ACTS.

In order to show plainly the manner in which the parts were divided among the actors, I have drawn up a table of the acts and scenes in which each character appears. It is clear from this table, that the parts of King Edward II, Isabella, Mortimer, and Kent, must have required separate actors throughout the play, and that one actor may have taken two or more of the other parts. Now, from a careful examination of all the lists of actors extant, of the Elizabethan theatres, it appears that each company consisted of about twelve or thirteen principal performers, and a few supernumeraries. We should, therefore, expect to find that this number of actors could perform this play. Among the many possible arrangements that would enable them to do so, the following is as probable as any: