Marlowe’s Edward II and ‘The Woful Lamentation of Jane Shore’: Tactical Engagements with Sewers in Late-Elizabethan London Christopher D. Foley University of California, Santa Barbara
[email protected] I The historical figures of Jane Shore and Edward II would have occupied the same conceptual space in the minds of many early modern Londoners. Given the widespread popularity of the de casibus tradition in English chronicle histories, both figures were well known for scandalous court romances that violated sexual and class boundaries. Although the imaginatively recounted histories of these two figures were numerous and circulated in complex, and potentially contradictory, forms throughout the early modern period, this essay explores two instantiations in which Jane Shore and Edward II occupy not only the same conceptual space but also the same geographic space. Dating from the 1590s, the anonymous yet wildly popular ballad entitled ‘The Woful Lamentation of Jane Shore’ offers a unique, albeit false, etymology of the northern suburb of Shoreditch that emphasises the abject environmental conditions of the area’s principal ditch.1 I would like to thank Paddy Fumerton, Ken Hiltner, Jim Kearney, and Andrew Griffin for their careful and considerate feedback at various stages of this essay’s composition. I would also like to thank Julian Bowsher for his private correspondence regarding the general argument of this essay in its early draft form and for his helpful bibliographic suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous readers at EMLS for their insightful and stimulating criticisms of my originally submitted manuscript. 1 ‘The Woful Lamentation of Jane Shore, A Goldsmith’s Wife, in London, sometime King Edward the Fourth’s concubine, who for her wanton life, came to a miserable end: Set forth for the example of all lewd livers’.