SOURCE: Parks, Joan. “History, Tragedy, and Truth in Christopher Marlowe's Edward II.” SEL 39, no. 2 (spring 1999): 275-90.

In this essay, Parks takes issue with the traditional notion that Edward II functioned to bring about the transition between the chronicle play and more modern history plays.

Christopher Marlowe's Edward II is typically applauded as an aesthetic achievement, a history play that brings form and meaning to the incoherent material of its chronicle source by retelling the king's slightly dull, twenty-year reign as the fierce and deadly struggle of a few willful personalities. Within the development of Elizabethan drama, Edward II is granted a crucial role in bringing to the English “chronicle play”—including Shakespeare's Henry VI plays and Richard III—the unity and purpose of the mature “history” play, epitomized by Shakespeare's later, more aesthetically sophisticated tetralogy. In this narrative of literary development, the episodic chronicle play fails to show...