ABSTRACT
The choice of Marlowe’s play Edward II to illuminate aspects of the emergent national identity might come as a surprise. Although it is sometimes referred to as a history play, most critics agree that it is concerned more with an individual than with the nation at large. With its strong focus on the king, it appears to be more of a tragedy foregrounding the rise and fall of a specific person than a history play commenting on the state of the nation. Harry Levin, for instance, argues that Marlowe ‘is not concerned with the state but, as always, with the individual’, and Clifford Leech agrees: ‘For Marlowe, the concept of England means little – he was, after all, a servant in Elizabeth’s secret police – and he cared only for what happened to the individual human being. He was interested in Edward, not as embodying a suffering England, but as a man, a man who had and lost power.’ 1 In this chapter, I argue that this juxtaposition of Edward and England, of the personal and the public, essentially misses the point. Edward II is a highly political play reverberating with allusions to Marlowe’s contemporary England precisely because it focuses on the private and intimate; its message is that the private is political and that the two spheres cannot be separated.
