Edward II (play)
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Edward II is an Elizabethan play written by Christopher Marlowe. It is one of the earliest English history plays. The full title of the first publication is The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer.
Marlowe found most of his material for this play in the third volume of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (1587). He stayed close to the account, but he embellished history with the character of Lightborn (or Lucifer) as Edward's assassin. First played in 1593 or 1594, Edward II was printed in 1594.
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[edit] Synopsis
The play telescopes most of Edward II's reign into a single narrative, beginning with the recall of his lover, Piers Gaveston, from exile, and ending with his son Edward III's execution of Mortimer the younger for the king's murder.
Marlowe's play opens at the very outset of the reign, with Edward's exiled favourite, Piers Gaveston, rejoicing at the recent death of Edward I and his own resulting ability to return to England. In the following passage he plans the entertainments with which he will delight the king:
- Music and poetry is his delight;
- Therefore I'll have Italian masques by night,
- Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows;
- And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,
- Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;
- My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,
- Shall with their goat-feet dance an antic hay.
- Sometime a lovely boy in Dian's shape,
- With hair that gilds the water as it glides,
- Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,
- And in his sportful hands an olive tree
- To hide those parts which men delight to see,
- Shall bathe him in a spring; and there, hard by,
- One like Actaeon, peeping through the grove,
- Shall by the angry goddess be transformed,
- And running in the likeness of a hart
- By yelping hounds pulled down and seem to die.
- Such things as these best please his majesty. (I.i.53-70)
However much they may please his majesty, however, they find scant favour from his nobles, who are soon clamouring for Gaveston's exile. Edward is forced to agree to this and banishes Gaveston to Ireland, but Isabella of France, the Queen, who still hopes for his favour, persuades Mortimer, her lover, to argue for his recall, though only so that he may be more conveniently murdered. The nobles accordingly soon find an excuse to turn on Gaveston again, and eventually capture and execute him.
Edward now seeks comfort in a new favourite, Spencer, and his father, decisively alienating Isabella, who takes Mortimer as her lover and travels to France with her son in search of allies. Edward, both in the play and in history, is nothing like the soldier his father was—it was during his reign that the English army was disastrously defeated at Bannockburn —and is soon outgeneralled, while his brother Edmund, Earl of Kent, who, after having initially renounced his cause, now tries to help him, is executed by Mortimer. Edward takes refuge in Neath Abbey, but is betrayed by a mower, who emblematically carries a scythe. Both Spencers are executed, and the king himself is taken first to Kenilworth and then to Berkeley Castle, where he meets his death at the hands of the luxuriously cruel Lightborn, whose name is an anglicised version of “Lucifer”. The play ends with the accession of Edward III, who orders the imprisonment of his mother and the execution of Mortimer.
[edit] Comments
Although the play's opening speech is heavily homoerotic in its language, the nature of Gaveston's relationship with the king is never explicitly spelled out. Indeed, the barons who oppose Gaveston do so because he is low-born, and because of his and the king's mistreatment of the Bishop of Coventry, not because of his sexuality. Edward and his favourite are portrayed in an unflattering light throughout much of the play, as they overspend and neglect their duties. However, after Gaveston is killed at the beginning of act three, Edward becomes an increasingly tragic figure as he is captured and imprisoned. He mourns his loss in a dungeon before being murdered.
Edward II may have been the only one of Marlowe's plays not written for the greatest actor of the time, Edward Alleyn. It has been suggested that this is the reason the play lacks a dominating protagonist and the grand speeches usually associated with the playwright. It is also one of the best preserved texts of any Marlovian play and indicates that the quality of his writing was much greater than is suggested by the corrupt or extensively rewritten texts of plays like Doctor Faustus or The Jew of Malta.
Edward the Second may have been Marlowe's last play, and gives a sense of his progress as a dramatist just as his life was cut short. It contains his most mature characterisation, and some fine speeches, such as the final words of the queen's lover, Mortimer:
- Base Fortune, now I see, that in thy wheel
- There is a point, to which when men aspire,
- They tumble headlong down. That point I touched,
- And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher,
- Why should I grieve at my declining fall?
- Farewell, fair Queen, weep not for Mortimer,
- That scorns the world and, as a traveller,
- Goes to discover countries yet unknown.
[edit] The play in modern times
the play has been revived several times, usually in such a way as to make explicit Edward's homosexuality. The Prospect Theatre Company's production of the play, starring Ian McKellen and James Laurenson, caused a sensation when it was broadcast by the BBC during the 1970s. Numerous other productions followed, starring actors such as Simon Russell Beale and Joseph Fiennes. There has even been a ballet created for the Birmingham Royal Ballet.
The play was adapted by Bertolt Brecht in 1923 as Leben Eduard des Zweitens. The Brecht version, while acknowledging Marlowe's play as its source, uses Brecht's own words, ideas, and structure, and is regarded as a separate work in its own right.
In 1991, the play was heavily adapted into a film by Derek Jarman which used modern costumes and made overt reference to the gay rights movement and the Stonewall riots.
