ABSTRACT
Francis Hubert’s poem, The Deplorable Life and Death of Edward the Second, written as a complaint from the King’s perspective, was almost contemporaneous with Elizabeth Cary’s history. Edward’s story was thus very much in the air at the time that Cary composed her text; neither the genre nor the subject she chose was precedent-setting. Cary’s text reflects the influence of a hundred years of print publishing practices, not least the interaction of oral modes of story telling with identifiably literate habits of composing. Elizabeth Cary’s History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, King of England begins with the death of King Edward I in 1307 and tells the whole saga of Edward II’s twenty year reign. Cary’s narrative first sets the eponymous character in a familial, national, and historical situation. Cary’s syntax is shot through with the present tense, a tense that has a variety of discourse functions despite its uniformity of grammatical form.
