Cast:
King Edward II
Prince Edward, his son, later King Edward III
Edmund, Earl of Kent, the King's brother
Piers de Gaveston(Tim Abell)
The Earls of Warwick, Lancaster, Pembroke, Arundel, Leicester & Berkeley
Mortimer the Elder
Mortimer the Younger, his nephew
Spencer the Elder
Spencer the Younger, his son
Baldock
The Bishops of Coventry, Canterbury & Winchester
Et al.
Written by Christopher Marlowe (1564 - 1593)
This play was first printed in 1594. Set against a background of fierce feuding Barons, Marlowe drew an effective picture of a sentimental and weak, but stubborn English King and his "friend", Piers de Gaveston. The complicated relationships between the King, his neglected Queen, his favoured coutier Gaveston and the ambitious Baron, Mortimer are explored in detail and expressed in a detached but sympathetic manner. Marlowe showed remarkable understanding of these relationships but also when necessary, in the abdication and brutal murder of Edward, showed a dark and violent imagination.
The Elizabethans were obsessed with ideas of Machiavelli and often distorted them. Marlowe was similarly fascinated and this play explored those ideas as well as the nature of disaster, the power of society and the dark extent of an individual's suffering.
Marlowe was just 29 when he died on 30th May 1593, stabbed in a knife fight in Dame Eleanor's Bulls Tavern in Deptford, England. Friends with Sir Walter Raleigh, Marlowe was allegedly working for the English Secret Service at the time of his death. Suspicions then suggested that he was murdered, having been provoked into the fight in the first place. This brilliant young playwright was snatched from literature too soon; a brightly-coloured, bejewelled and feather-bedecked popinjay snuffed out in his prime.