Edward II: With Related Texts

Stephen J. Lynch is Professor of English and Director of the Liberal Arts Honors Program at Providence College.

"Marlowe's Edward II has received quite a bit of attention lately, both by scholars and theatre companies. The play's treatment of sexuality, its importance in the development of the history play in English drama, and its beautiful verse have helped to raise it to a status equal to Marlowe's other great plays. Lynch's excellent edition of the play therefore comes at a very fortuitous time."Lynch has made the play extremely accessible to beginning readers of Marlowe. The text is laid out attractively on the page, with mostly complete names for speech prefixes and a hanging indent for multiline speeches. Implied stage directions are written out clearly, but not intrusively. Marginal glosses are often quite useful for the inexperienced reader. . . . Spelling, in both the play text and in the accompanying historical texts, is modernized, and the text is indeed a pleasure to read."The introduction to the play is also extremely useful. . . . Sections of the introduction mention themes such as 'unruly nobles' and 'friendship and love,' but, again, the final interpretation is left to the reader; the last section of the introduction is headed 'Royal Sodomite or Saintly Martyr?'"Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this volume comes at the end, where the 'Related Texts' are gathered. The inclusion of the relevant passages from Holinshed's Chronicles is useful. . . . It was a pleasant surprise to see some of the classical texts with which Marlowe was familiar, such as Plato's Symposium and Cicero's Of Friendship.”"[F]or undergraduates and for the general public (especially with the accessible price of the paperback edition) this edition of Edward II should remain a valuable resource of many years."—Joseph F. Stephenson, Abilene Christian University, in Sixteenth Century Journal