Examine critically how in Edward II Marlowe has transformed the chronicle play into a great

personal tragedy.

Edward II by Marlowe is history remade. This is for the simple reason that Marlowe was not
writing the history of the reign of Edward II but was writing a tragedy out of the material that
history provided. The play was written in 1590, acted soon after, and set an example of the type
of English historical play which Shakespeare closely followed. The tradition came to stay even
long after. Havelock Eliis wrote: “Here Marlowe reached the summit of his art. It was not until
ten years later that Shakespeare came near to this severe reticence, these deep and tragic tones.”

Glowing with national pride and eager to learn the lessons that history could teach, the
Elizabethans looked to their dramatists for information. History play had the appeal of truth –
‘this really happened’- though some were truer than others. Marlowe’s two hours’ traffic of the
stage embraces twenty-three years of Chronicle history. In so doing, the dramatist’ perverts
certain facts and scrambles certain dates to achieve an emotional authenticity far beyond the
reach of the most detailed and accurate of his sources.’

Marlowe’s Edward II, on the contrary is an English historical play in which ‘history, in the
main, well presented, history well dramatized.’ The poet does not moralise or teach a lesson. He
lets his characters speak for themselves, and the audience would have a re-look at the King’s
weakness, his neglect of the queen, his carelessness about the French dominions and about the
honour of England. They may also witness the haughtiness of the barons, the patriotic yet
arrogant attitude of Younger Mortimer, the sycophancy of Gaveston and later by the Spencers,
the resultant shift of loyalty and hypocrisy of the Queen, and they may form their own
judgments.

The long twenty-three years’ (1307-1330) rule of Edward II is skilfully compressed by Marlowe
by linking up the episodes of Gaveston and Spencer in Scene I, Act II. And the dramatist’s
power is displayed in the successful treatment of Edward himself. While in Constitutional
History Stubbs says: “ His reign is a tragedy, but one that lack in its true form the element of
pity ; for there is nothing in Edward, miserable as his fate is, that invites or deserves sympathy,”
Almost unanimously, Marolwe’s Edward II as a tragedy claims being parallel, if not superior, to
Shakespeare’s Richard II.

The main characters of the play show no conspicuous (marked) deviation from history. While the
events haven reordered for dramatic effect, the nature of the characters remains unaffected. In his
presentation of Edward II, Marlowe is closely faithful to history. He was the son of Edward I
and Eleancer of Castile. Born in April 1284, he succeeded his father in July 1307. He was forced
to resign his crown, and deposed in January 1327. He was murdered at Berkeley Castle, in
Gloucestershire in September 1327. The poet has drawn the character of the King in accordance
with the views of the historians of the time, and shows him thoughtless, unwise, vindictive,
undignified.
The second most important character in the play is Piers Gaveston. Son of a Gascon knight, Sir
Arnold Gaveston, who had ‘served King Edward I in Gascony’, he was brought up as the foster-
brother and playfellow of Edward II. He was banished from the court and the kingdom by
Edward I in 1307, the year the Kind died, because of his bad influence over Prince Edward. But
he seems to have summoned back by Edward II, immediately after the death of Edward I, upon
his ascension to the throne. He was made Earl of Cornwall in August 1307, and married
Margaret de Clare, daughter of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, and niece of the King. He
was banished in May 1308 but he returned in 1309, his brother-in-law supporting him. He was
again banished in 1311 but was again recalled in January 1312. He was taken by the Barons in
May at Scarborough, and beheaded without a trial on Blacklow Hill in June 1312.

Queen Isabella, daughter of Philip the Fair, King of France, was married to King Edward II at
Boulogne on January 25, 1308. She was sent by her husband to France in 1325 to arrange with
her brother King Charles IV, who since his accession in 1322 had vainly summoned the king of
Englnd to do homage for Gascony and Ponthieu. There she became the centre of a plot to
overthrow the Despensers. She landed with a force at Orwell on September 24, 1326. With
Mortimer she ruled England till October 1330. After the fall of Mortimer she was sent to live at
Castle Rising in Norfolk, and received an allowance of three thousand pounds a year. She died in
1357.

Mortimer Jr. was Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, also a powerful Baron of Welsh march. He was
nephew of Roger Mortimer of Chirk and the son of Edmund Mortimer who was killed in Wales
in 1303. He was the grandson of the Roger Mortimer of the Barons’ war. With his uncle he
yielded to the King in January 1322, and was imprisoned, but he escaped from the Tower in
August 1324. He joined the Queen in France, and with her planned and carried out the invasion
which overthrew the Despensers. He was created Ist Earl of March in 1327, and was the real
ruler of England till October 1330.

Prince Edward , afterwards Edward III, was the son of King Edward II and Queen Isabella of
France. He was born in November 1312, became King in January 1327, on the deposition of his
father, having been made ‘Custos’ or ‘Guardian’of the realm in October, 1326. He died in 1377.
Though in this play, he is called Prince, he was never created Prince of Wales as his father had
been and as his son was.

The view of history of the reign Edward II is generally diachronic. But he omits and condenses
freely for the sake of the action to be continuous and dramatic. Thus he drops King’s voyage to
France and his marriage, the second banishment of Gaveston to Flanders, and the banishment
and recall of the Spensers. He transposes (rearranges) the battle of Bannockburn from the
seventh year of Edward’s reign till Gaveston dies, not later than the fifth year of the reign. This
Marlowe does to show the disaster caused by his favourite’s wanton administration (ii.2.180-94).
The whole story of the Spensers is connected with supreme skill and judgment with that of
Gaveston by making the younger Spenser a page or esquire attending to the daughter of the Earl
of Gloucester who is to marry Gaveston, and by representing the elder Spenser as a stranger
introduced to the King by his son. The attack of the barons on the Spensers which actually took
place in the 12th year of Edward’s reign is advanced to the fifth year of the reign in close
connection with Gaveston’s death. The principal movements of the Baronial war – the surrender
of the two Mortimers to the King’ grace at or near Shrewsbury, operations against Thomas of
Lancaster and the Earl of Herford about Burton-on-Trent and Pomfret and the signal defeat of
those nobles at Borough bridge – are compressed into a single victory of the King against the
allied forces. Warwick is introduced after the battle of Boroughbridge to meet the punishment for
his murder of Gaveston, whereas historically his death took place before the battle. In Act V, the
whole action is abbreviated by shortening the long period of Mortimer’s usurpation of power and
bringing about swift punishment for the wrong-doers. Mortimer himself is executed by order of
the young King before the body of the murdered King has been given a burial.

Edmund, the Earl of Kent is the poet’s own creation. According to history, Kent, six years older
than the King, was a person of no consequence. He is perhaps modelled on the Duke of York,
uncle of Richard II, or more probably the Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV. Much like the
King, he is impulsive and feeble, and is an ambivalent character, now joining the league of
Mortimer for the King’s over-infatuation for Gaveston and now switching allegiance back to the
King for his highhandedness and lust for power.

Prof. Ward and Dr Wagner hold that Marlowe drew upon the material provided mainly Fabyan’s
Chronicle or Concordance of Histories. This was a chronicle History from the beginning of
the world to the reign of King Henry VIII. Instances of close likeness, if not in details, between
the Chronicle and passages in the play are frequent. In Act II, Scene II, 186 Marlowe presents a
short ballad which is found, almost word for word in Fabyan (page 420). Marolowe is
sometimes more faithful to history than Fabyan, particularly in respect of the small points of
detail. These details are provided by Holinshed. This great Chronicle, or History, is a continuous
narrative of English history based on previous authors, including Fabyan, and presents events in
much detail. It was published in 1577, and a second edition was issued in 1686-87. As we see in
the play, Edward II makes Gaveston Lord High Chamberlain, Chief Secretary to the State and to
him, Earl of Cornwall, King and Lord of Man. While Fabyan (p.417) merely says that the King
gave Gaveston ‘the earldom of Cornewall and the lordship of Wallyngforde’.

Marlowe has not only drawn upon Fabyan and Holinshed, but also many authorities
particularly because, the study of history was most popular at the time, and the books could
be had without much difficulty. Hence it is indisputably believed that the General Chronicle of
John Stow was the dramatist’s source for the story of the king being shaven with ditch water.
This incident is found neither in Fabyan nor in Holinshed. Stow’s General Chronicle had been
published in a convenient volume in 1580, and was soon popular. But it is short, compared with
Holinshed’s work and does not contain many of those details which Marlowe had carefully
inserted in his play.

Lastly, it may be noted that Marlowe is prone to use his knowledge of other portions of history in
order to present his characters in a familiar form to his audience who had a fair knowledge of
history. Shakespeare too used modern and well-known history for the same purpose when, for
example, in King Lear , he introduces a Duke of Burgandy, who reminded his audience of the
famous duke who had married Margaret, sister of Edward IV. So Marlowe’s Earl of Kent
reminds us of the Duke of Clarence.

Thus Marlowe has made use of his historical sources in Edward II like a master tragedian. He
has manipulated the historical incidents and characters in such a way that the play has been a
great success of the genre. He has abridged the period, transposed the events and shed focus on
the areas of the characters and incidents that served his purpose of unities. Most particularly, his
greatest stress has been upon the role of the evil, corrupting Gaveston and over-indulgence to
whom constitutes the hamartia of the King’s character. It is because of his irrationally excessive
indulgence to Gaveston who does not reciprocate his friendship as unselfishly as the King loves
him, that the king antagonizes the patriotic barons, turns the queen hostile, neglects his duties as
a ruler and commits the sacrilegious act of stripping the Bishop of Coventry of his position and
property, and even shares with joy the contempt thrown to the poor multitude by Gaveston from
the palace window. This moral flaw leads him to his ruin, and practically in his death the
kingdom rediscovers an order. This would have been all right, had the situation not turned in
favour of Edward from Act IV onward. The abdication scene rouses our pity in his favour, and
we begin to withdraw our sympathy from Mortimer-Isabella duo as we perceive that they are
prone to usurp power. Mortimer had suffered multiple injuries in the hands of the king and his
minion, and there was enough reason for him to revolt against the King and dethrone him. But
when it comes to light that he seeks to turn the fortune’s wheel as he pleases, ruling the prince
and commanding the queen, we find the patriot Mortimer being replaced by a Machiavellian
Mortimer. The play rises to the height of tragedy in the murder scene. The way the king is
subjected to pre-mortem torture and is finally killed by suffocation rouses both terror (rather
horror) and pity of the highest kind. That is why Charles Lamb showers high praise upon the
play as a tragedy, and Professor Ward says: “The drama of Marlowe’s which seems to me
entitled to the highest and least qualified tribute of praise is his historical tragedy of Edward the
Second”; “and none of his plays, except Edward the Second … is to be regarded as the
unadulterated expression of Marlowe’s art.”

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