Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Riot, Sodomy, and Minions: The Ambiguous Discourse of Sexual Transgression
- 2 From Goats to Ganymedes: The Development of Edward II’s Sexual Reputation
- 3 Edward II and Piers Gaveston: Brothers, Friends, Lovers
- 4 ‘Is it not strange that he is thus bewitch’d?’: Edward II’s Agency and Culpability
- 5 Edward II as Political Exemplum
- 6 ‘No escape now from a life full of suffering’: Edward II’s Sensational Fall
- 7 Beyond Sexual Mimesis: The Penetrative Murder of Edward II
- Conclusion: The Literary Transformation of History
- Appendix: Accounts of and allusions to Edward II’s reign, composed 1305–1697
- Index
Conclusion: The Literary Transformation of History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Riot, Sodomy, and Minions: The Ambiguous Discourse of Sexual Transgression
- 2 From Goats to Ganymedes: The Development of Edward II’s Sexual Reputation
- 3 Edward II and Piers Gaveston: Brothers, Friends, Lovers
- 4 ‘Is it not strange that he is thus bewitch’d?’: Edward II’s Agency and Culpability
- 5 Edward II as Political Exemplum
- 6 ‘No escape now from a life full of suffering’: Edward II’s Sensational Fall
- 7 Beyond Sexual Mimesis: The Penetrative Murder of Edward II
- Conclusion: The Literary Transformation of History
- Appendix: Accounts of and allusions to Edward II’s reign, composed 1305–1697
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This conclusion explores the implications of this study for two key areas of scholarship: the study of Marlowe's Edward II, and our understanding of medieval and early modern history-writing. I argue for the productive potential of acknowledging the extent to which the medieval and early modern writing of history was a literary process, one significantly shaped by literary techniques and literary texts. Medieval and early modern writers constructed historical accounts in all genres – chronicles and political texts as well as drama and poetry – for an imagined reading public. In this way, writers’ consideration for imagined readers – based on knowledge of the actual tastes of the reading public – directly shaped the reputations of historical figures.
Keywords: Edward II, Christopher Marlowe, chronicles, historiography
Introduction
By the end of the seventeenth century, Edward II had been historiographically established as an exemplum of utterly ineffective rule – led astray by the poor advice of controlling favourites, but also by his own uncontrollable emotional attachment and sexual attraction to them – whose life ended with a pathetic series of ordeals at the hands of his captors and an agonizing, torturous anally penetrative murder. He was remembered equally for his irresponsibility as a reigning monarch and for his sympathetic, suffering humanity as a deposed King. When I set out to trace the process by which Edward acquired his early modern reputation, this apparently contradictory legacy was not what I expected to find. Based on modern assumptions about past narratives of love and sex between men, I was anticipating a pattern of moralizing which led to the incorporation of Edward into a lineage of sexually transgressive figures whose sins were unambiguously condemned; while based on the received understanding of the relationship between chronicles and history plays or poems, I was expecting to confirm Maureen Godman's claim that that ‘Marlowe made a personal drama out of the uncohesive mass of detail which constituted the large chronicles’.1 What I found, however, was this: the majority of significant changes in the historiography of Edward and his favourites can be summed up as part of an overall increasing emphasis on features of the text that enhance reading pleasure. This trend – which, I have argued, can be considered a move towards the literary – is what unites the outrageously condemnable King Edward and the pathos-inducing deposed Edward.
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- Reputation of Edward II, 1305–1697A Literary Transformation of History, pp. 277 - 286Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020