“And in the chronicle enrol his name”: Documenting Power in Edward II

This essay situates the acts of sealing and signing that occur throughout Marlowe’s Edward II in the context of Tudor administrative practices in order to demonstrate that in the play, as in Marlowe’s own world, the royal seals function as tools with which to claim, enact, and display political power. It argues that Edward II and Mortimer Junior fail to maintain control of the realm in large part because they fail to understand and take advantage of subjects’ perceptions of these marks. Edward’s peers, on the other hand, draw on their experiences authenticating and authorizing royal documents as administrators to wrest political power away from the King and seize it for themselves. Indeed, they use the royal seals to conceal their treason from the historical record. The essay contends that by highlighting the political and epistemological power of these devices at the same time that he draws attention to the duplicitous ends to which they can be deployed, Marlowe urges his playgoers to be skeptical of textual authorities like chronicles, warrants, and royal correspondence and to question what can and should be “gather[ed]” from documentary forms of information. [L.W.]