Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was the son of a shoemaker of Canterbury, and went to the old King's School of that town. Thence in 1579 he went up to Cambridge on a scholarship which he held all during his residence at the university, where he took a bachelor's degree in 1584, a master's in 1587. Between 1587, when Tamburlaine was acted, and 1593 he produced at least six plays, as well as the unfinished narrative poem, Hero and Leander. All that is certainly known of his death is that he was killed by one Francis Archer; the rumors of dissipation and atheism attaching to his name are undeserving of credence.

The feeling of national unity which had been growing in England under the Tudor sovereigns, especially during the reign of the great Maiden Queen, received a tremendous impulse from the defeat of the Armada in 1588. The mistrust of Spain, shown in the popular discontent with Mary Tudor's marriage to Philip, accentuated by the resentment of Spanish oppression of the Netherlands, and fanned into a white heat of hatred by Philip's ambitious project of regaining England for the Pope, probably did more to make England a united nation than any other one cause. The fears of a Catholic uprising were dissipated by the staunch loyalty of the English Catholics, and the jubilation over a great crisis safely passed found one means of expression in the glorious flood of Elizabethan literature. To this national inspiration the drama, just finding itself in the decade from 1580 to 1590, responded with extraordinary vigor. The twenty years following the Armada saw the rise and full development of a new and quite native form of drama, taking its subject-matter from the history, authentic or legendary, of Britain, the chronicle-history play. It has been estimated that such plays during the period of their popularity constituted more than a fifth of the contemporary drama. Of the thirty-seven plays in the Shakespeare canon ten (counting parts of plays individually) are of this type, while Cymbeline, Lear, and Macbeth are drawn from the same sources. It was natural that during a period of strong national feeling Englishmen should take interest in the history of their country. What numerous historical works in prose and verse did for readers, the chronicle plays did for spectators, and their actual educative

function must not be overlooked. Forerunners of the type may be found in such a play as Bale's Kyng Johan (1538) and a few Senecan tragedies like Gorboduc (1562), but it was not till 1586-7 in The Famous Victories of Henry V that we get our first example. To raise the chronicle-history play to the plane of artistic drama was the work of two men, Marlowe and Shakespeare.

Edward II is generally accepted as being the latest of Marlowe's plays, written probably about 1592. Not so rich in poetry as Tamburlaine or Dr. Faustus, nor so theatrically effective as the melodramatic Jew of. lalta, in technique it is Marlowe's best works The material is taken from the source that supplied Shakespeare with his knowledge of English history, Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with occasional borrowings from the older chronicles of Fabyan (e.g., the song on Bannockburn, II. ii) and Stow. The play is, however, so much more than a mere transference to the stage of Holinshed's narrative that a comparison of the play with the historical account reveals, as can nothing else, Marlowe's methods as a playmaker.

The action covers a period of twenty years, from 1307, when Gaveston was recalled, to the death of Edward in 1327. Marlowe's treatment of the story shows a selection and transposing of events in order to bring out the one essential fact of the King's utter incompetence and subjection to unworthy favorites. Gaveston was executed in 1312, and the troubles in Ireland (II. ii) and in Scotland (II. ii) occurred after his death, but Marlowe shifts both forward in point of time in order to connect them with Gaveston's baleful influence. Warwick died in his bed in 1315, seven years before the battle of Boroughbridge, but Marlowe keeps him alive to have him captured and ordered to execution in retaliation for his killing of Gaveston. At the time the play opens the Earl of Kent was six years old, but Marlowe, needing a counsellor and supporter of the King, used Kent for the purpose. In the play young Spencer immediately succeeds Gaveston as the King's favorite; really the younger Hugh le Despenser, who had been an enemy of Gaveston, remained an opponent of Edward's for some six years after Gaveston's death. Historically the Mortimers be long with the Spencers, i.e., to the later part of the reign, but in order to motivate the

affair between the Queen and young Mortimer Marlowe transfers them to the beginning of the play and makes them leaders in the barons' councils.

What does all this rearrangement mean? It means that Marlowe was working with a definite dramatic end in view, with all his faculties alert to make the play a single, logical portrayal of the King's fatal weakness and its consequences to him and to the realm. In the first place he had to show in action the evil influence of Gaveston over Edward. This he does by showing the King's unkingly infatuation with an arrogant favorite who holds his position only by flattering the royal vanity, an infatuation so complete that it leads to the insulting and final alienation of a faithful and loving Queen. The practical effects of Gaveston's pandering to the King's love of pleasure are seen in the hostility of the great barons and the affronts to English honor in Scotland and Ireland. With Gaveston out of the way (III. ii), Marlowe is faced by the difficulty of avoiding in the Spencer story a mere repetition of that of Gaveston. He had already, by introducing young Spencer in II. i as a dependent of Gaveston's, and thus preparing for Spencer's promotion to Gaveston's shoes, prevented his play from breaking in two on Gaveston's disappearance. Now he solves his fresh problem by shifting the interest from the affairs of the kingdom to the more familiar situation of the eternal triangle-husband, offended wife, lover. From the first Mortimer has been the main reliance of the Queen in her effort to maintain her position with the King; when the King himself impugns her honor by flinging Mortimer's name in her face we are fully prepared for her soliloquy at the end of the scene (II. iv), and the understanding between her and Mortimer in. IV. iv and v. The development of their love affair, merely hinted at in Holinshed, is rather left for the actors to bring out than explained in the text, but Marlowe makes the situation clear. Mortimer's relations with the Queen place him definitely at the head of the revolting barons, and he is thus ready to play his part as chief actor in Edward's deposition and murder, and as virtual ruler of the realm until the young King asserts himself at the end of the play.

Detailed analysis of this sort is useful not only for showing how Marlowe met the problem of making a play out of unpromising material, but also how, in the process of making the story truly dramatic, his method tends to break away from the chroniclehistory form and approaches tragedy. In early crude examples of the type-plays like The Famous Victories of Henry V, Jack Straw, Peele's Edward 1, Henry VI-the emphasis is frankly on circumstance, what happened during the reign of a certain king.

Events are set down in chronological order, and the writer is more concerned with the effect of the immediate situation than with the coherent development of a logical story. Characters are presented in a purely superficial way, and the unity of the play is secured only by the presence in the chief scenes of the same leading figures. The progress of the play is, therefore, clumsy and jerky. Is the chief interest in Edward II in event or in character? Clearly what interests Marlowe most is the character of Edward himself; by centering attention on the petulant king, powerless to command even his own desires, and by careful analysis of Edward's weakness, Marlowe shifts the emphasis from event to character, and in so doing almost writes tragedy The method of securing dramatic unity by focusing attention on a central character, Marlowe had employed in his previous plays; but there is this fundamental difference between Edward II and its predecessors, that where in Tamburlaine, Faustus, and The Jew all the other characters are completely subordinated to the one commanding figure, are satellites shining only by light reflected from their sun, in Edward II Marlowe develops four characters with distinct personalities of their - Edward, Gaveston, Mortimer, and the Queen. Of these Isabella is the least satisfactory, probably because, although her abandonment of the King for Mortimer is well enough motivated, Marlowe does not give us a change to see the development of her passion. One genuine love-scene between her and Mortimer would have helped us to a sympathetic understanding of the Queen, and done away with the apparent abruptness of her change of heart. Marlowe's was an essentially masculine intellect, and his inability to portray women with success is as striking as Byron's. Gaveston, in his combination of arrogance and sycophancy, stands out as a clear study of the royal favorite. Mortimer's most prominent trait is a headstrong resolve to rule or be ruined, to be all or nothing; his last words have the true Marlowe ring of towering ambition and undaunted defiance in the face of defeat.

own

Upon Edward, Marlowe lavishes all his power. Edward has the fatal flaw in character which brings tragedy upon its possessor, a flaw which at the same time unites him with Marlowe's other heroes in their Amour de l'Impossible, to use Symonds's often-quoted phrase. The lust for power seen in varying manifestations in Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas the Jew, in Edward is replaced by an inordinate desire for affection, to love and to be loved by the one object of his affection. Since this is not a case of one of those deathless passions between man and woman which make the world seem well lost for love, Marlowe has the difficult task of gaining sympathy for an unsympathetic

figure without palliating its weakness. That he has done so must be the verdict of the reader upon finishing the long and pathetic presentation of Edward's humiliation and death. As Schelling puts it: "Contemptible in his unkingliness up to the moment of the turning of the tide against him, the royal sorrows and the unregal inflictions put upon him arouse our sympathies until, when the pitiful catastrophe which overtakes him is reached, contempt is transmuted into sympathetic grief that any king could so fall."

More than any other of Marlowe's plays Edward II exhibits a restraint, a conscious attempt to place dramatic truth before poetic imagination. As a result the verse is inferior as poetry to that of the others. We catch echoes of "Marlowe's mighty line" in passages like Gaveston's soliloquies in the first scene, in Edward's speeches in the deposition scene where he gives up "the sweet fruition of an earthly crown," in the scene where he is murdered, in Mortimer's last speech. It may be questioned, indeed. whether the glorious sweep and daring of

Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus might not have been out of place in this study of Eng lish history. And this may certainly be said, that where in the preceding plays we feel Marlowe's failure to make his finest lyrical passages dramatically appropriate, Edward II shows him on his way to accomplishment. He had already settled one thing: that blank verse was to be the medium of Elizabethan drama.

It is a truism that on the serious side Shakespeare felt no influence like Marlowe's. Marlowe was Shakespeare's master in chronicle-history: the two may have worked together on Henry VI, Richard III is the application to chronicle-history of Marlowe's centralizing method, and Richard II shows at every turn the influence of Edward II. Had Marlowe been permitted to live and work his way to true tragedy as did Shakes peare, Edward II might have proved the transitional stage that Richard II was for Shakespeare. But "cut was the branch that might have grown full straight," and Marlowe's Lear and Hamlet were never written

For which,

him well

He should ha
his look

The undaunte peas'd, And Moubery Yet dare you face?Brother, reveng heads Preach upon po tongues. War. O, our head K. Edw. Aye, y would wish

War. Bridle thy

mer.

Y. Mor. I cannot,
speak.-
Cousin, our hands
heads,

And strike off
threaten us.
Come, uncle, let us
king,
And henceforth parle
swords.

E. Mor. Wiltshire hat save our heads. War. All Warwickshire my sake.

Lan. And northward G
friends.-
Adieu, my lord; and
mind,

Or look to see the
should sit,

To float in blood; an
head,