GAVESTON reads My father is deceased come Gaveston And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend Ah words that make me surfeit with delight 1113 The kingexists ID: 780216
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Slide1
The Problem(s
) of
Edward II
Slide2GAVESTON
[
reads
]
‘My father is deceased; come,
Gaveston
,
And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend.’
Ah, words that make me surfeit with delight!
(
1.1.1-3
)
The
king…exists
to maintain social order, yet Edward, from the
first line
of Marlowe's play, inviting Gaveston to share the kingdom, instigates a
sodomitical order
, one that alienates his peers and his wife, driving Queen Isabella and the
younger Mortimer
into an adulterous and rebellious
embrace…
The transgression of the legal system in
Edward II
starts with the king, and it begins in
the first
line of the play.
It
stops nowhere.
The figure upon which all systems
of relationship
between men depend, whether conducted through women or not, is
the figure
who, in the very exercise of his prerogatives, violates the law that he is
supposed to
found. The site of legitimation and. transgression at once, the king, from his
opening words
, announcing the death of his father and the refusal of the paternal law for the
sake of
friendship, institutes a sodomitical regime. In the extended sense of the term, as
not only
the ruination of the maintainence of male/male hierarchies through friendship,
but also
as the explosion of the marital tie,
sodomy
is the name for all behavior in the play
. (Jonathan Goldberg,
Sodometries
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 122-123)
Slide3GAVESTON
I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits,
Musicians that with touching of a string
May draw the pliant king which way I please.
(1.1.50-52)
Slide4MORTIMER
Why should you love him whom the world hates so?
EDWARD
Because he loves me more than all the world.
(1.1.76-77)
Slide5Small
time, but in that small
most greatly
lived
This star of
England
. (
Henry V
, Epilogue 5-6)
Rightly
to
be
great
Is not to stir without
great
argument
But
greatly
to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake. (
Hamlet
4.1.52-55)
To be or not to
be… (
Hamlet
3.1.55)
I am not what
I am. (Iago in
Othello
1.1.63)
I do; I
will. (Prince Hal in
1 Henry IV
2.4.438)
Has
he
affections
in
him? (
Measure for Measure
3.1.107)
Slide6EDWARD
Instead of ink, I’ll write it with my tears.
MORTIMER
The king is
lovesick
for his
minion
.
(1.4.86-87)
It is Gaveston’s lowly birth, not the sexual relationship between Edward and Gaveston, that truly enrages the lords. ‘Minion’ seldom passes their lips without a qualifying ‘base.’ The reunion scene, in which Gaveston first kisses Edward’s hand, then is raised by Edward to an embrace, enacts the conflict before our eyes… For the lords, it is Gaveston’s lowly station that makes him so threatening. For Edward, it is what makes Gaveston so beguiling… In that coupling of king and commoner the lords…perceive a threat to social order itself.
In the orthodox hierarchy of Elizabethan society, power was conceived as a force that properly operates in one direction only, from ‘higher’ to ‘lower’
– from god to mortal, from king to subject, from older to younger, from male to female…
With politics, as with gender and social class,
Edward II
demonstrates that power works in two directions.
(Bruce R. Smith,
Homosexual Desire in Shakepseare’s England
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 215-216)
Slide7MORTIMER
SENIOR
And seeing his mind so dotes on
Gaveston
,
Let him without
controlment
have his will.
The mightiest kings have had their minions
:
Great Alexander loved
Hephaestion
...
Then let his grace, whose youth is flexible,
And
promiseth
as much as we can wish,
Freely enjoy that vain, light-headed earl,
For riper years will wean him from such toys.
(1.4.390-401)
Slide8MORTIMER
Uncle, his wanton humour grieves not me,
But this I scorn, that one so basely born
Should by his sovereign’s favour grow so pert
And riot it with the treasure of the realm.
While soldiers mutiny for want of pay
He wears a lord’s revenue on his back,
And Midas-like he jets it in the court
With base outlandish cullions at his heels,
Whose proud fantastic liveries make such show
As if that Proteus, god of shapes, appeared.
I have not seen a dapper jack so brisk.
He wears a short Italian hooded cloak,
Larded with pearl, and in his Tuscan cap
A jewel of more value than the crown.
Whiles other walk below, the king and he
From out a window laugh at such as we,
And flout our train, and jest at our attire.
Uncle, ’tis this that makes me impatient.
(1.4.402-419)
Slide9But this I scorn, that one so
basely born
Should by his sovereign’s favour grow so pert
And riot it with the treasure of the realm.
While soldiers mutiny for want of pay
He wears a lord’s revenue on his back
,
And Midas-like he jets it in the court
Mortimer
charges
Gaveston
with
a travesty of class, not gender
, the
theatricalization
of social
difference, not sexual difference. Indeed, sexual and social issues are
explicitly separated
, for Mortimer Junior responds, at this moment in the play, to his uncle,
who counsels
him not to oppose the
king…
“Uncle, his wanton
humor
grieves not me,” Mortimer
replies…
This is an extraordinary moment in the play, precisely because it is usual
to suppose
that social and sexual irregularities are mutually causative and equally to
be condemned
. Mortimer's allowance of the sexual relation is as disarming as the
flaunt delivered
by
Gaveston's
transvestite
theater
, for Mortimer countenances what
the
antitheatricalists
abhor, sexual
behavior
usually thought to be
tantamountto
social dissolution. (Jonathan Goldberg,
Sodometries
p. 117)
Slide10He wears a short
Italian
hooded cloak,
Larded with pearl, and in his
Tuscan
cap
A jewel of more value than the crown.
Slide11Whiles other walk below, the king and he
From out a window
laugh at such as we
,
And flout
our
train, and jest at
our
attire.
Uncle, ’tis this that
makes me impatient
.
Slide12Edward’s enemies: a shift in motivation
f
rom ‘a matter of principle’ to ‘self-interest’
This shift is a gradual one.
Edward’s enemies are as self-interested as they accuse him of being.
Slide13To talk of an individual in this period as being or not being ‘a homosexual’ is an anachronism and ruinously misleading
… Only two of the possible [alternatives], bugger and sodomite, were in general use and neither was synonymous with homosexuality alone. ‘
Buggery
’ could be used with as equal ease to mean bestiality as homosexuality… ‘
Sodomy
’ was a concept at least as broad… It could also be a heterosexual sin. (Alan Bray,
Homosexuality in Renaissance England
(London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), pp.
14, 16)
Above all else, what God created was order… It is a view of the world in which Nature is a unity, as is its Creator… ‘So that,’ as Sir John Fortescue wrote, ‘there is nothing which the bond of order does not embrace’. Nothing except an inescapable possibility: that the chaos of the first day of Creation when ‘the earth was without form, and void’ might come again. It is here that homosexuality had its place in the myth, altogether outside the ordered world of creation. In Michael Drayton’s
Peirs
Gaveston
the Creation retreats in horror when
Gaveston’s
love for Edward II falls into homosexuality… [Homosexuality] was not conceived as part of the created order at all; it was part of its dissolution. And as such it was not a sexuality in its own right, but existed as a potential for confusion and disorder in one undivided sexuality. Hence the absence already commented on of any satisfactory parallel for the contemporary use of ‘homosexuality’ in the sense of an alternative sexuality.
What sodomy and buggery represented – and homosexuality was only part of these – was rather the disorder in sexual relations that, in principle at least, could break out anywhere
… In John Taylor’s narrative of the reign of Edward II in his
The English Monarchs
, it is not the homosexual nature of the King’s passion for
Gaveston
– a subject on which Taylor is ambiguous – that brings him to disaster… In Taylor’s history the catastrophe is brought about by Edward’s offence against
orrder
, his ‘immoderate love’. (Bray, pp. 23-26)
[In cases of prosecution for sodomy] what was at issue was primarily the maintenance of the social order, in particular the maintenance of parental rights, and only secondarily the enforcement of the legislation against homosexuality.
So long as homosexuality was expressed through established social institutions, in normal times the courts were not concerned with it; and generally this meant patriarchal institutions – the household, the educational system, homosexual prostitution and the like
. (Bray, p. 74)
Slide14Heresy, homosexuality, and treason were blended in the famous allegations made against the playwright Christopher Marlowe by the sinister figure of the informant Richard Baines. For the authorities the most alarming part would have been the blasphemous and treasonable nature of the remarks he is supposed to have made (among others), ‘
that the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe
’ and ‘
that he had as good a right to coin as the Queen of England
’; but Baines went a step further and quietly added enough to colour them and enhance their plausibility. Marlowe, he implies, is a sodomite: ‘
St John the Evangelist,’ Baines reports Marlowe as saying, ‘was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma
’ and ‘
that all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools
’. Although a sceptic he is also, according to Baines, a Papist sympathiser: ‘
if there be any God or any good religion, then it is in the Papists
.’… Whether or not there is any truth in Baines’s stories, these were connections in which people were inclined to believe:
the Papist was a sodomite and a traitor
. (Bray 20)
For hauing reuoked againe into England his old mate the said Peers de Gaueston
, he
receiued him into most high fauour, creating him earle of
Cornewall
, and lord of Man, his principall
secretarie, and
lord chamberlaine of the realme, through whose
companie
and societie he was suddenlie so
corrupted
, that he burst out into
most heinous vices
; for then vsing the said Peers as a procurer of his
disordred dooings
, he began to haue his nobles in no regard, to set
nothing
by their instructions, and to take small
heed vnto
the good gouernement of the commonwealth, so that within a while, he gaue himselfe to
wantonnes
, passing his time in
voluptuous pleasure
, and
riotous excesse
: and (to helpe them forward in that kind of life, the foresaid Peers, who (as it may be thought, he had sworne to make the king to forget himselfe, and the state, to the which he was called) furnished his court with companies of iesters, ruffians, flattering parasites, musicians, and other
vile and naughtie
ribalds
, that the king might spend both daies and nights in iesting, plaieng, banketing, and in such
other
filthie and dishonorable
exercises
. (Raphael Holinshed,
The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland
(1587), Vol. 6, p. 318; accessed via
The Holinshed Project
http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed
/
)
Slide15Through the torture of Edward, a strictly homophobic connection appears to be made between the sodomitical body and excrement. It is not a connection of which Mortimer or the queen necessarily needs to be conscious; indeed their irrationally compulsive degradation of Edward suggests that it is not… Both the martyrdom and murder of Edward imply a violent and deeply embedded ‘homophobia’. (Jonathan
Crewe, ‘Disorderly Love: Sodomy Revisited in Marlowe’s
Edward II
’,
Criticism
51.3 (2009),
385-99; pp. 395-396)
[available via Literature Online]
Slide16MORTIMER
Uncle, his wanton humour grieves not me,
But this I scorn, that one so basely born
Should by his sovereign’s favour grow so pert
And riot it with the treasure of the realm.
While soldiers mutiny for want of pay
He wears a lord’s revenue on his back,
And Midas-like he jets it in the court
With base outlandish cullions at his heels,
Whose proud fantastic liveries make such show
As if that Proteus, god of shapes, appeared.
I have not seen a dapper jack so brisk.
He wears a short Italian hooded cloak,
Larded with pearl, and in his Tuscan cap
A jewel of more value than the crown.
Whiles other walk below, the king and he
From out a window laugh at such as we,
And flout our train, and jest at our attire.
Uncle, ’tis this that makes me impatient.
(1.4.402-419)
Slide17[M]ark
the
flocking and running to theaters and curtains
, daily and
hourly, night
and day, time and tide, to see plays and interludes, where
such wanton
gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and fleering
, such kissing
and bussing
,
such clipping and culling, such winking and
glancing of
wanton eyes, and the like is used, as is
wonderful
to behold. Then
these goodly
pageants being done, every mate sorts to his mate, everyone
brings another
homeward of their way very friendly,
and in their secret
conclaves (covertly
) they play the sodomites
,
or worse
. And these be the fruits
of plays
and interludes, for the most part
. (Philip Stubbes, ‘Anatomy of Abuses’ (1583), in
Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook
(Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 115-123; 121) [available online via the library catalogue]
Slide18How to make a film of a gay love affair and get it commissioned. Find a dusty old play and violate it
. Heterosexuals have fucked up the screen so completely that there’s hardly room for us to kiss there. Marlowe outs the past – why don’t we out the present?...
This book is dedicated to: the repeal of all anti-gay laws, particularly Section 28.
(Derek Jarman,
Queer Edward II
(London: The British Film Institute, 1991), p. v)
Slide19MORTIMER
Lightborn
,
Come forth.
(5.4.21-22)
Slide20LIGHTBORN
Ne’er was there any
So
finely
handled as this king shall be.
(5.5.39-40)
Slide21MORTIMER
Base Fortune, now I see that in thy wheel
There is a point to which when men aspire
They tumble headlong down. That point I touched,
And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher,
Why should I grieve at my declining fall
?
Farewell, fair queen. Weep not for Mortimer,
That scorns the world, and as a
traveller
Goes to
discover countries yet unknown
.
(5.6.59-66
)
HAMLET
But that
the
dread
of something after death,
The
undiscovered country
, from whose bourn
No
traveller
returns
... (
Hamlet
3.1.77-79)
Slide22GUISE
That like I best that flies beyond my reach.
Set me to scale the high
pyramides
,
And thereon set the diadem of France;
I’ll either rend it with my nails to naught,
Or mount the top with my aspiring wings,
Although my downfall be the deepest hell.
(
The Massacre at Paris
, Scene 2,
42-47
)
Students of Marlowe know his propensity to 'unfettered soaring' as the signature of the
‘overreacher’,
epitomised in the Ovidian myths of Icarus and Phaethon.
But
we can profitably historicise Marlowe's high-flying verse in terms of the Western sublime
, as practiced by Lucan, Ovid and Longinus
. (Patrick Cheney, ‘
Edward
II
: Marlowe,
Tragedy
and the
Sublime’, in
The
Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance
Tragedy
, ed. by Emma Smith et al. (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), pp. 174-187; 178)