Mortimer His Fall was printed in the 1640 folio at the end of the section comprising The Underwood, masques, and late entertainments. The text is made up of a list of dramatis personae, a prose ‘argument’ that summarizes the plot, a 46-line blank verse soliloquy spoken by Roger Mortimer, first Earl of March, and an incomplete verse dialogue between Mortimer and Queen Isabel, widow of Edward II and mother of Edward III. The play fragment takes place in the aftermath of Isabel and Mortimer’s successful deposition of Edward II in 1326–7, and begins with a soliloquy in which, among other things, Mortimer celebrates his 1328 assumption of the title of Earl. Jonson appears to have intended to explore the young King Edward III’s progressive comprehension of Mortimer’s perfidy, and his overthrow of the latter at Nottingham Castle in 1330. However, for reasons that remain obscure, this was not to be. Early states of the fragment conclude with an editorial note: ‘Left unfinished’. Later states have: ‘He died and left it unfinished.’

Critical opinion is divided over whether this play was begun and abandoned early in Jonson’s career, or whether, as the second version of the concluding note suggests, it represents a late piece of work. Herford and Simpson incline towards an early date, and observe that the play’s structure, especially its use of a chorus, may represent a discarded experiment with the form that Jonson later employed in Catiline (H&S, 10.383). Anne Barton, however, persuasively suggests that Mortimer is a ‘late attempt to reconcile the English history play with classical tragic form’ and that Jonson’s innovative use of the chorus is ‘a logical step forward’ from Catiline (Barton, 1984, 339–40). There is evidence to support both views, although, on balance, a later date is more likely, as will be argued below.

Several arguments may be evinced in support of an earlier date of composition. The 1590s saw the appearance of several works about the reign of Edward II, including Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (c. 1592), and William Drayton’s long historical poem Mortimeriados (1596), which, as Jonson told William Drummond, was criticized for its title, presumably on grammatical grounds (see Informations, 142). James Shapiro suggests that Marlowe’s play served as a model for Jonson’s plot, noting that both include ‘the haling away of Kent, the humiliation and torture of the king, and the hired assassins and torturers’ (Shapiro, 1991, 45). Mortimer’s soliloquy certainly has a Marlovian feel, and also finds analogues in Envy’s opening speech in Poetaster (1601) and Sejanus’s speech at 5.1–24 in Sejanus (1603).

However, the events cited by Shapiro are also to be found in John Stow’s Annals, believed by Herford and Simpson to be the main source for Jonson’s play. The Annals included a history of Edward II and were published for the first time in 1592. Interestingly, Stow’s information about Edward’s reign came from a manuscript copy of Geoffrey le Baker of Swinbrook’s medieval chronicle (mistakenly attributed by Stow to Baker’s patron, Thomas de la More), a document Stow had earlier lent to Jonson’s friend, William Camden, who used it as the source for his ‘Vita et Mors’ of Edward II, published in his Anglica, Normannica, Hibernica of 1603 (Thompson, Chronicon Galfridi le Baker de Swynebroke, 1889, vi–vii).

Not only, then, was there a popular interest in the Edward II story during the 1590s and early 1600s, but there is evidence to link that interest directly to Jonson’s circle of acquaintance. It is, therefore, entirely possible the poet might have conceived his dramatic project at this time. Mortimer bears comparison with two plays from the same period. The Case Is Altered (perf. 1597) is the only other Jonson play to make use of the classical device of the Nuncio, or herald, while Sejanus His Fall contains several verbal similarities with Mortimer, not least in its choice of title (H&S, 10.385; Shapiro, 1991, 45). Interestingly, the title of Catiline His Conspiracy (1611) follows a similar pattern, perhaps indicating a Jonsonian preference for the naming of tragic plays. Petreius, in his speech beginning at 5.629, also serves a function similar to that of a Nuncio.

Nonetheless, as Barton points out, Mortimer’s use of a series of choruses ‘suggests the late stages, rather than the beginning’ of an experiment with such a structure (Barton, 1984, 339). In Sejanus, Jonson felt the need to apologize for the lack of a chorus (To the Readers, 5–7), while in Catiline, as Herford and Simpson note, the chorus ‘conforms strictly to the type defined in the Ars Poetica of Horace’ (H&S, 10.130), translated by Jonson in 1604. In contrast, in the later Staple of News (perf. 1626), a comic choric structure was provided through the ‘Intermean’ discussions of a group of gossips, while The Magnetic Lady (perf. 1632) again provides a comic chorus of a boy and two gentlemen who comment on the stage action. Rather than being Jonson’s early attempt to produce what Shapiro calls ‘a radically new type of tragedy’ that drew upon Marlowe’s Edward II (Shapiro, 1991, 45), the choruses in Mortimer might link it to Jonson’s later experiments with classical forms.

The story of Edward II was certainly in Jonson’s mind in the late 1620s for he wrote a verse epistle to Drayton in 1627 praising him for a new edition of The Barons’ Wars. The history of the reign also had currency in Queen Henrietta Maria’s circle. It is now generally accepted that the History of Edward II – printed in 1680, but declaring itself to have been written in 1627 – was composed, not by Henry Cary, Viscount Falkland, but by his estranged wife, Elizabeth, a close friend of the Queen. This text, like Jonson’s fragment, gives Queen Isabel a much expanded role. It also draws sympathetic parallels between her position as a Gallic wife who endures her husband’s favourites and the new Queen Henrietta Maria (see Falkland, 1680, 52). In 1628, François Garnier, Henrietta Maria’s ‘procurer general’, translated Stow’s account of Edward II’s reign into French for the Queen, again indicating that her circle was interested in the story (Leeds Brotherton Library, MS 97). Not long after, the poet Thomas May, Jonson’s friend, completed his commission to produce a verse life of Edward III for Charles I.

From the late 1620s, then, Jonson might have been considering writing a play on a subject of renewed interest to the court. However, the fragment is decidedly ambivalent about courtly morals in a manner that suggests it should be ascribed to the 1630s, rather than the late 1620s. In 1631, the poet clashed with Inigo Jones over whether poetry or scenic illusion was ‘the soul of masque’ (‘Expostulation’, 6.377, line 50), and his comments in Mortimer bear some resemblance to the accusations he levelled at such courtly display. Although Stow’s Annals contain a description of the ‘shows and masquing’ intended to persuade Edward II’s adherents that the King was still alive within Corfe Castle (Stow, Annals, 348), there is a note of distaste in Jonson’s representation of ‘the feigned lights and masques there that deceived ’em, all which came from the court’ (Argument, 20–1). The play seems to rework a story of obvious interest to the court, transforming it into a veiled critique of courtly practice and suggesting the need for renovation.

The very choice of this story, in which Nottinghamshire has such a central role in the exposure of courtly corruption, links with the playwright’s connections to William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, his last patron. The setting of the fourth act in Nottingham connects the play to such late works as The Sad Shepherd, set in Sherwood Forest, and to the Cavendish entertainments at Welbeck (1633) and Bolsover (1634). Furthermore, the banquet-of-sense motif, invoked by Isabel at 1.2.12–15 and identifying her as a dangerous sensualist, resonates with Cavendish’s iconographic programme in the Little Castle at Bolsover which demonstrated his mastery over the passions (see Bolsover, Introduction). The political and moral corruption of Isabel and Mortimer is, therefore, contrasted with the loyalty of Nottingham’s subjects in a manner that would have pleased Cavendish. Although the banquet-of-sense motif was widespread in the period, and had been exploited by Jonson in Poetaster, it is also worth noting that Isabel’s lines obliquely invoke and invert the fashionable discourse of neoplatonism promoted by Henrietta Maria at the Caroline court.

Mortimer His Fall remains an intriguing document, both for the insight it gives into Jonson’s working practices, and for its innovative use of classical forms. Although it is impossible to assert with confidence that the play does date from the last few years of Jonson’s life, it is tempting to accept the implication of F2’s concluding note: that death prevented Jonson from completing this fragment on which he had recently been working.