Edward II

Edward II tells the story of the fourteenth-century monarch’s reign, fall, and gruesome murder. Marlowe’s dramatization focuses on the relationship between Edward and his male “favorite,” Piers Gaveston, and indirectly engages the corrupt and convoluted politics of Marlowe’s time as well as of the recent past. It is an important cultural, as well as dramatic, document from the early modern period for its treatment of sexuality and class, and is still frequently performed in North America and Europe.