Edward II: A Critical Reader ed. by Kirk Melnikoff (review)

The Arden Early Modern Drama Guides aim to bring established critical trends together with performance history and to build upon them by exposing readers to new critical directions. Those intended readers form a wide-ranging audience, encompassing students, instructors, and scholars. The series aims to be useful to secondary, undergraduate, and graduate courses while also informing scholars undertaking their own research. In the latest of the series, editor Kirk Melnikoff tackles Christopher Marlowe's Edward II and achieves these expansive goals. The book contains features that serve all target constituencies, offering a grounding in critical and performance trends while also staking out new territory. The chapters function as standalone resources but also engage with each other. These connections are established by Melnikoff's introduction, which adeptly brings together an array of print and performance elements and prominent interpretive issues relevant to the volume as a whole, thus paving the way for subsequent chapters.

In 'The Critical Backstory: Edward II's Critics in History to 1990', Darlene Farabee concisely covers a great swathe of time and range of critical responses. She focuses first on the play's early print history and then, proceeding through the centuries, highlights persistent critical trends. Farabee notes the importance early critics placed on the position of Edward II within Marlowe's canon. The question of whether it is his greatest play arose in the earliest eighteenth-century responses and influenced criticism up to and throughout the twentieth century. Another prominent angle in her survey is her critical attention to the play's genre and its representations of and engagement with history. Farabee also tracks increasing critical interest in issues of sexuality, from Bertolt Brecht's 1924 adaptation to their growing prominence in scholarship of the later twentieth century.

Next, Andrea Stevens surveys Edward II's performance history. Her consideration of early performances exemplifies the volume's sensitivity to varied reader requirements. She includes foundational detail appropriate for high school students and undergraduates, such as description of Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses and performance conditions. More useful for graduate students and scholars are the links she draws with Roslyn Knutson's later chapter on Edward II in repertory. Stevens covers Edward II's return to the stage in the early 1900s and Brecht's adaptation, proceeds to the rise of productions addressing Edward's homosexuality, from the 1950s to the 1990s, and gives Derek Jarman's 1991 film its own section. Stevens also provides an overview of notable twenty-first-century stagings up to 2015. Throughout the chapter she tracks the staging of Edward's murder and its relation to productions' increasing exploration of the play's homoerotic content.

Questions of sexuality and history raised by Farabee and Stevens continue in Judith Haber's 'The State of the Art: Desire, History, and the Theatre', which surveys criticism from the 1990s onwards. She highlights the 1990s as the most productive and innovative period for work on Edward II, particularly in terms of arguments focused on sexuality and gender. Haber first offers an overview of those innovations and then addresses what she sees as the refining of those established arguments in the twenty-first century. Throughout, she traces prominent critical approaches, including homoeroticism and definitions of sodomy, feminist perspectives, early modern politics, psychoanalysis, theatre history, and genre. Haber argues that sexuality and its construction once formed the most innovative area of Edward II scholarship, but that it is now the least inventive. She suggests revitalizing this area by using Edward II to engage in the ongoing debate about history and historicism among early modern queer theorists, referencing Madhavi Menon and Jonathan Goldberg's advocacy for 'homohistory'. I agree that the play's intertwining of history and sexuality makes this a fruitful avenue for exploration.

The first of the volume's contributions of new scholarly work is Alan Stewart's 'Edoüard et Gaverston: New Ways of Looking at an English History Play'. Stewart argues for the relevance of the French Wars of...