EDWARD the SECOND

ElizabethanDrama.org presents the Annotated Popular Edition of EDWARD the SECOND by Christopher Marlowe Written c. 1592 Earliest Extant Edition: 1594 Featuring complete and easy-to-read annotations. Annotations and notes © Copyright Peter Lukacs and ElizabethanDrama.org, 2020. This annotated play may be freely copied and distributed. EDWARD the SECOND by Christopher Marlowe Written c. 1592 Earliest Extant Edition: 1594 DRAMATIS PERSONAE. INTRODUCTION to the PLAY King Edward the Second. The focus of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II is more Queen Isabella, Wife of King Edward the Second. on personalities than politics, particularly spotlighting the Margaret, Niece to King Edward the Second, king's obsessive attachment to his various favorites. The Daughter of the Earl of Gloucester. consequences of Edward's irrational and unkingly behavior Prince Edward, his Son, afterwards King Edward are catastrophic for all. The result is a tragedy in the true the Third. sense of the word, a play with no heroes, a drama in which Earl of Kent, Brother of King Edward the Second. the king's wounds are self-inflicted, and a story in which those whose lives are intertwined with that of the king are Gaveston, the King's Favourite. left without any honourable options or recourse. The King's Party: OUR PLAY'S SOURCE Spenser, the elder. Spenser, the younger, his Son. The text of the play is adapted from the Mermaid Baldock. edition of the plays of Christopher Marlowe, edited by The Earl of Arundel. Havelock Ellis, and cited in the footnotes below at #4, Beaumont. with some wording and spelling from the original 1594 Levune, a Frenchman. quarto reinstated. The King's Noble Opponents: NOTES ON THE ANNOTATIONS The Earl of Warwick. The Earl of Pembroke. References in the annotations to various editors refer to James, a retainer of Pembroke. the notes provided by these scholars for Edward II in their The Earl of Lancaster. individual collections of Marlowe's work, each volume The Earl of Leicester. cited fully below. Hutchison's book, however, is a standard Lord Berkeley. biography of Edward. Mortimer, the elder. Biographical and historical notes appearing in italics are Mortimer, the younger, his Nephew. adapted from the Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Leslie Stephen and Sydney Lee (London: Smith, Elder, More of the King's Opponents: and Co., 1885-1900), unless otherwise noted. Archbishop of Canterbury. The most commonly cited sources are listed in the Bishop of Coventry. footnotes immediately below. The complete list of footnotes Bishop of Winchester. appears at the end of this play. Trussel. Footnotes in the text correspond as follows: Sir John of Hainault. 1. Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online. Rice ap Howell. 2. Crystal, David and Ben. Shakespeare's Words. London; New York: Penguin, 2002. The King's Jailers: 3. Ribner, Irving. The Complete Plays of Christopher Gurney. Marlowe. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1963. Matrevis. 4. Ellis, Havelock, ed. The Best Plays of the Old Lightborn. Dramatists: Christopher Marlowe. London: Viztelly & Co., 1887. Abbot, Monks, Herald, Lords, Three Poor Men, Mower, 5. Hutchison, Harold F. Edward II. New York: Stein and Champion, Messengers, Soldiers, and Attendants. Day, 1971. Ladies. 6. Briggs, William D. Marlowe's Edward II. London: 2 David Nutt, 1914. 7. Tancock, Osborne William. Marlowe - Edward the Second. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887. 8. Dyce, Alexander. The Works of Christopher Marlowe. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1876. 9. Schelling, Felix E. Christopher Marlowe. New York: American Book Company, 1912. 10. Cunningham, Lt. Col. Francis. The Works of Chris- topher Marlowe. London: Chatto and Windus, 1879. 11. Verity, A.W. Edward the Second. London: J.M. Dent and Co., 1896. 14. Bevington, David, and Rasmussen, Eric. Doctor Faustus and Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Historical and biographical notes which are not strictly necessary to understand the play, but provide background of possible interest, are supplied in italics. 3 A. Our Story So Far. On 25 April 1284, at the castle of Carnarvon in Wales, a son was born to the English king, Edward I. According to an apocryphal story, the old king proclaimed that his son, also named Edward, was destined to be the sovereign of the Welsh. It was not until young Edward's older brother Alfonso died in August of 1284 that Edward became heir to the throne. During his childhood, Edward was presented with a foster brother, a child named Pierce (alternately Piers or Peter) Gaveston, the son of a Flemish knight who had fought with the king against the Scots. Gaveston became Edward's nearest friend and confidant, a relationship which eventually blossomed into an uncomfortably close love. Edward was trained to be a warrior, but he seems to have preferred such rustic pursuits as blacksmithing, raising horses, digging trenches and thatching houses. When they were older, Edward and Pierce joined the aging king in his later battles with the Scottish, acceptably acquitting themselves. In 1305, an immature Edward "invaded" the forests owned by the Treasurer and Bishop of Coventry, Walter Langton. When Langton criticized the prince for his trespass, Edward responded with insults; King Edward sided with his Treasurer, and banished his son from the court for six months. Young Edward never forgave the prelate; Edward's resentment would come back to haunt Langley when the old king died, as we will see in Act I of our play. The other important event of the junior Edward's life occurred in early 1307, when it was reported that he asked his father to give the lands of Ponthieu in France as a gift to Gaveston; the old king, enraged, and perhaps also worried about the too-near relationship between Gaveston and his son, banished his son's best friend from England on February 26. Just five months later, King Edward died, and young Edward ascended the throne. His first order of business was to recall his companion Gaveston. B. Basic Timeline of the Play. Edward II can be basically divided into two halves: Part One: Act I.i - Act III.i; the Gaveston years (1307-1312). Transitional Scene: Act III.ii; the scene ties together Gaveston's removal in 1312 to Edward's military challenge to Lancaster at Boroughbridge in 1322. Part Two: Act III.iii - Act V.v; the final years of Edward's reign (1322-1327). Coda: Act V.vi, the final scene of the play; the end of the Mortimer era (1330). 4 C. Scene Breaks, Settings, and Stage Directions. Edward II was originally published in 1594; later editions, which included modest revisions, followed in 1598, 1612 and 1622. As usual, we lean towards adhering to the wording of the earliest quarto as much as possible. Words or syllables which have been added to the text to clarify the sense or repair the meter are identified by being surrounded by hard brackets [ ]; as such, they may be omitted by a director who wishes to remain truer to the original text. The quartos do not divide Edward II into numbered scenes, nor do they provide scene settings or identify asides. We have broken up the play into Acts and Scenes as suggested Ellis. We adopt the scene settings suggested by Dyce and Ellis, and the asides by Dyce. Finally, as is our normal practice, a good number of the quarto's stage directions have been modified, and others added, usually without comment, to give clarity to the action. Most of these changes are adopted from Dyce. D. Annotations in Italics. Those annotations which appear in italics serve two distinct functions: they provide either: (1) biographical background on the characters, or (2) historical context for the events of the play, allowing the reader: (a) to see when in real time the events depicted in Edward II occurred, and (b) to know where Marlowe has deviated from historical reality, either by changing the timeline of events, or inventing action or characters out of thin air. The most important thing to note is that it is not necessary to read the italicized annotations in order to understand the play. 5 EDWARD the SECOND by Christopher Marlowe Written c. 1592 Earliest Extant Edition: 1594 ACT I. SCENE I. A Street in London. Enter Gaveston, reading a letter that was brought Entering Character: Pierce Gaveston has been a close him from the king. companion of the new king, Edward II, since Edward was a boy - uncomfortably close, for many. In fact, the last king, Edward's father Edward I, had banished Gaveston from the kingdom in February 1307, perhaps because of the "inordinate love", as one chronicler put it, he had for young Edward. But now, only five months later, old King Edward has died (7 July 1307), and the new king, our Edward II, has wasted no time in recalling his friend Gaveston from exile - on 6 August, to be exact. 1 Gav. “My father is deceased! Come, Gaveston, 1-2: Gaveston rereads the letter sent to him by his bosom- 2 And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend.” friend, the new king Edward. Ah! words that make me surfeit with delight! = "fill me". 4 What greater bliss can hap to Gaveston = happen. Than live and be the favourite of a king! 6 Sweet prince, I come; these, these thy amorous lines Might have enforced me to have swum from France, = compelled. 8 And, like Leander, gasped upon the sand, So thou would’st smile, and take me in thine arms. 6-9: Marlowe's intention to have the relationship between Edward and Gaveston be understood as more than platonic is established in the first few lines of the play. Leander was a mythological youth who famously swam every night across the Hellespont (the modern Dardanelles in Turkey) to visit his love, Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite.

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