But it is Edward, or Edward’s reign, to whom the title of ‘England’s scourge’ (3.3.38) is bestowed. The commons now begin to pity him’ (5.4.1-2). This is made most explicit by the increasingly Machiavellian Mortimer Junior: ‘The King must die, or Mortimer goes down. At various moments in the play, the attitudes of the commoners allow Marlowe’s audience and readers to gauge the play’s shifting political allegiances. I’ll have it published in the streets’ (1.4.89). Pembroke’s pronouncement on Gaveston’s banishment as ‘good news to the common sort’ (1.4.92) is another example of the public disapproval of Edward’s reign, as is Lancaster’s response after seizing the document that Edward has signed to seal Gaveston’s banishment: ‘Give it me. 4 Shortly after the reference to the ‘murmuring commons’, Mortimer Junior says to Edward ‘Libels are cast against thee in the street / Ballads and rhymes made of thy overthrow’ (2.2.176-7), lines followed by Lancaster’s ‘The northern borderers, seeing their houses burnt, / Their wives and children slain, run up and down, / Cursing the name of thee and Gaveston’ (2.2.178-80). These lines are representative of a number of references to public or common dissent in the play, and they echo similar criticism of King Edward in Holinshed’s Chronicles: for example, ‘so that the English nation began to grow in contempt by the infortunate gouernment of the prince’ ( Holinshed 1587, III, p.
2 Edward II, I argue, stages a republican drama of a beleaguered political nation. The peers’ animosity to Edward’s abuse of power is motivated by an oppositional politics grounded in republican ideas and underpinned by a deep-rooted patriotism if not nationalism. The play’s action is dominated by a feuding royalty and nobility, fuelled mainly by the peers’ animosity toward the King’s ‘upstart’ favourites. However popular the play was among late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century readers, it is not strictly speaking a ‘people’s history’, to use Helgerson’s term for the history plays staged by the Henslowe companies ( Helgerson 1992, p. 245) histories and the Henslowe playwrights’ concern with the common people? 1 Edward II, Marlowe’s sole single-authored play set in England (and Wales), went through four editions (1594, 1598, 1612, 1622). Where might Helgerson have placed Marlowe’s Edward II within the opposition that he posits between Shakespeare’s and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s ‘exclusively monarchic’ ( Helgerson 1992, p. 245), it is surprising that Marlowe’s Edward II, a key text among the nascent genre, receives no mention.
Given that a chapter in Forms of Nationhood explores ‘the new genre of the national history play’ ( Helgerson 1992, p. Noting that this collective project was not restricted to these eight men, Helgerson offers more names, one of which is Christopher Marlowe. Richard Helgerson opens his magisterial Forms of Nationhood with a list of authors who represent a ‘generation’s contribution to the writing of England’ ( Helgerson 1992, p.
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