Marlowe's Edward II(c.1592) features a ‘pliant king’ drawn ‘which way I please’ by a male lover planning to fill the court with ‘wanton poets, pleasant wits’, ‘Italian masques’, pages dressed ‘like sylvan nymphs’ (I.50 ff.); such reorganisation rankles the existing warrior nobility, who ‘leave the brainsick king’ to ‘henceforth parley with our naked swords’ (I.124–5). Edward's lover, Gaveston, tells the ‘Base leaden earls, that glory in your birth’ to ‘Go sit at home and eat your tenants beef” (VI.74–5). But he misinterprets the situation: if they were mere hedonists they would not be such obstacles. ‘Glory’ is the sticking point. Honor ‘glories in scorning life’, Montesquieu writes, ‘and the despot is strong only because he can take life away’. The honour ethos of Warwick and Lancaster ‘scorn[s] thy threats and menaces’ as ‘but temporal’: ‘The worst is death, and better to die to live / Than live in infamy under such a king’ (XIII.21–4). In one of the great influence-ratchets in literary history, it seems, Marlowe was goaded into Edward IIby the success of Shakespeare's Henry VIseries; Marlowe's play, in turn, prompted Richard II. (Like that hapless monarch, Edward ends up murdered in prison, calling usurpation ‘my tragedy’ (XXV.74).)

Now I must plead an exception to my general framework, which moves chronologically through European history rather than Shakespeare's career. The fact that the Henriadwas composed after the Henry VIseries is, here, more important than the fact that its events take place earlier; the Henriadshall be read as the fuller depiction of political modernisation.