ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Marlowe's Edward II is the fact that, although it has every appearance of being a play on a national and political theme, a play about kingship, it is yet an intensely personal play in which the public issues hardly arise. It's true that there is a fair deal of talk about 'our country's good' (see n. iii. r ; rv. i. 2; rv. v. 74-7; and v. i. 38), and no scarcity of criticisms against Edward's mode of ruling, but on these occasions one is primarily conscious either of the slackness of unfelt platitude, or of a very bald sophistry on the part of egocentric power-seekers. The sentiments do not seem to mesh with any larger scheme of political morality in the drama. When Isabella exults,
Successful battles gives the God of kings To them that fight in right and fear his wrath, IV. V. 28
one's first impulse is to sneer, for the introduction of providential sanctions seems quite gratuitous in the world of this play. It is not that Marlowe has created a dramatic context, like the world of Richard III, within which the rationalisations of violence stand nakedly revealed for pious cant: what would have been clearly placed, in Richard III, as a sophistical cloak for unscrupulous opportunism, remains, in Edward II, oddly unplaced. Like the frequent appeals to an overriding common good, the queen' s theology is neither imaginatively ratified nor used to expose the egocentricity ofher motivation: it is simply a statement thrown up in the course of conflict.
