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.