Christopher Marlowe's Edward II - And now and then stab, as occasion serves

I take Doctor Faustus as Christopher Marlowe’s richest play but Edward the Second (performed 1592?, published 1594) as his best play-as-such.  Meaning structure, drama, pace, whatever we associate with the idea of the well-made play.  The pace is fast, the characters interact with each other rather than giving speeches, and the story hits plot points like a modern screenplay.  A big turn right in the middle, for example.  I believe in the 20th century it has been Marlowe’s most performed play.

So young Edward, at the death of his father, attains the throne, which means he can bring his boyfriend Gaveston back from banishment in France.  Edward’s nobility more or less rebels, assuming that the dissolute Gaveston will ruin the king, who is not that strong to begin with.  One of the rebels, the hothead young Mortimer, gets a taste for power, and goes too far.  Sympathy likely turns from the once-sensible nobles to poor King Edward, imprisoned in a filthy cell, murdered in a shocking manner.  Although the theme is a bit muted, Mortimer is where I find the usual Marlovian critique of power.  He has a point when the play begins, but the pursuit of power becomes its own goal.

Marlowe likely borrowed the “weak king” theme from Shakespeare’s Henry VI series, which were big hits; Shakespeare was clearly imitating Edward II, or so it looks to me, in Richard II (1595).

The great cost Marlowe paid for writing such a zippy play was a muting of his mighty line, his great poetry.  It is here, especially in the marvelous final act, but Edward II is more, let’s say, efficient, or maybe crisp, than the Tamburlaine plays or The Jew of Malta.

Still.  Here are a pair of minor courtiers throwing in their lot with King Edward and Gaveston.  One is a scholar, perhaps like Marlowe from Cambridge.  The weaselly striver Spenser advises him on how to succeed as a courtier:

      … you must cast the scholar off,

And learn to court it like a gentleman.

He begins with what actions do not make a courtier, for example:

Or holding of a napkin in your hand,

Or saying a long grace at table’s end…

Instead:

You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,

And now and then stab, as occasion serves.  (II.1, p. 462)

That last line, now that belongs in a Marlowe play.

The play begins with Gaveston, with his return to London.  He speaks in a more poetic manner.

Music and poetry is his [King Edwards’s] delight;

Therefore I’ll have Italian masques by night,

Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows;

And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,

Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;

My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,

Shall with their goat-feet dance an antic hay;

Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape,

With hair that gilds the water as it glides,

Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,

And in his sportful hands an olive-tree,

To hide those parts which men delight to see,

Shall bathe him in a spring… (I.1, 436-7)

But other characters, with a show to put on, do not have time for this kind of talk, and Gaveston is killed halfway through the play for the crime of corrupting the king and being more interesting than the other characters.  Although once crushed, King Edward becomes a lot more interesting.  My imaginary Shakespeare’s realization, for Richard II, was that the last act ought to be the whole play.

I am back in The Complete Plays, the Penguin Classics edition, for the text and page numbers.

I’ll write about The Massacre at Paris in two weeks, and that is it for Marlowe.  Massacre is definitely not a well-made play, and the state of the text we have is terrible, but is it ever full of Marlowe.