Tuesday 25 July 2017

"Edward II" by Christopher Marlowe

I saw this play at the Tristan Bates Theatre on Tuesday 29th September 2017. It was performed by Lazarus Theatre Group. I also saw them perform Marlowe's Tamburlaine. I review their production at the end of this review of the script.

Edward II was the probably gay king who doted on Piers Gaveston which made all the nobles angry because Gaveston lorded himself over them and enriched himself at their expense. So the Barons, including Roger Mortimer, rebelled and, after one defeat which led to many of them being executed as traitors, captured Gaveston and lynched him. Ed II found himself some new favourites, the Spencers, and bunged Mortimer in the Tower but he escaped and fled to France where he met Queen Isabella, Edward's wife, who was on an embassy to her brother the King of France to try to negotiate a peace treaty. Mortimer and Isabella began an affair and invaded England in the name of Edward's son, prince Edward, later Edward III. Ed II was captured and famously done to death in Berkeley Castle by having a red hot poker thrust into his anus.

Marlowe was a brilliant playwright who was also responsible for Dr Faustus, Tamburlane, and The Jew of Malta. Marlowe is credited with being the playwright who introduced the iambic pantameter to the Elizabethan stage; in this sense Shakespeare was Marlowe's apprentice but an apprentice who bettered his master for, while Marlowe's iambic pentameters are almost all end-stopped, Shakespeare developed the form to use many more caesuras and enjambements which makes his verse flow more naturally and sound a little less formulaic. 

Thesis and antithesis in the play
One interesting feature of the verse of Edward II is the use of pairs of lines which act in a sort of dialectic as thesis and antithesis, in which the second line is a retort:
  • Scene 1

    • Kent: For he'll complain unto the see of Rome. 

    • Gaveston: Let him complain unto the see of hell

  • Scene 4

    • K. Edward: Lay hands on that traitor Mortimer!

    • Elder Mortimer: Lay hands on that traitor Gaveston!

  • Scene 4:

    • Young Mortimer: Why should you love him whom the world hates so?

    • K. Edward: Because he loves me more than all the world.

  • Scene 4:

    • Q. Isabella: "Villain, 'tis thou that robb'st me of my lord."

    • Gaveston: "Madam, 'tis you that rob me of my lord."

  • Scene 6:

    • King Edward: Look to your own heads; his is sure enough. 

    • Warwick: Look to your own crown, if you back him thus. 

  • Scene 12:

    • Warwick: Saint George for England, and the Barons’ right.

    • K. Edward: Saint George for England, and King Edward’s right.

  • Scene 23

    • K. Edward III: My lord, he is my uncle, and shall live.

    • Young Mortimer: My lord, he is your enemy, and shall die.


Marlowe and Shakespeare
The play is not divided into acts but into 25 scenes. Some of these scenes are brief, a few very long. Many of the scenes in the middle of the play are rather busy with plot: Marlowe does have to tell quite a complicated history of battles won and lost and allegiances changed. Here, again, I would argue that Shakespeare learned from Marlowe: his Richard II, written shortly after Edward II and dealing with a very similar subject (a king who gets deposed), focuses only on the last two years of Richard's reign and, by simplifying and concentrating, is made more intense. Nevertheless, I would argue that Shakespeare learned much from Edward II; the similarities include both kings like wanton or lascivious music and 'Italian' fashions, in both plays the King is shown desiring the death of an enemy, there are complaints that the royal favourites are from the lower-classes, the king is compared with a shadow, there is reference to the Phaeton myth, and in both plays there is a moment when the King sits on the ground, references.

The big difference is clearly the openly gay subtext of Marlowe's play.

The gay theme:
Quite apart from the numerous references by Edward to 'sweet' Gaveston, the gay theme is set at the start when Gaveston plans entertainments for the King in which:

"Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;

My men like satyrs grazing on the lawn"

Since satyrs, in Greek myth, were nature spirits with permanent erections who like having sex with female woodland nymphs, Gaveston is clearly proposing dressing up his (young male) pageboys as women so that men can have sex with them.


Queen Isabella repeatedly bemoans the fact that Gaveston has come in between herself and her husband. She says:

For never doted Jove on Ganymede

So much as he on cursed Gaveston:”

Ganymede was the pretty Trojan shepherd boy (and prince) who Zeus/ Jove so fancied that he used an eagle to snatch him from the hillside and take him to Mount Olympus to become the cup-bearer to Zeus and the original catamite.


Later one of the Lords suggests that it isn't exactly unusual for a King, or another powerful man, to have a catamite:

"The mightiest kings have had their minions:

Great Alexander loved Hephaestion;

The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept;

And for Patroclus stern Achilles drooped:

And not kings only, but the wisest men;

The Roman Tully lov'd Octavius,

Grave Socrates wild Alcibiades.”



Marlowe arguing against himself
One interesting point is that Marlowe seems to be writing a play which takes a position against what one presumes Marlowe himself held:
  • He was reputed to be gay ... and yet moist of the characters in the play attack Edward II and his 'minion' Gaveston for having what is clearly a gay relationship. 
  • Marlowe was also possibly a Roman Catholic: there are suggestions that Corpus Christi College withheld Marlowe's Cambridge MA (until the Privy Council, for whom Marlowe may have been spying, told them to award it) on the grounds that Marlowe was intending to pursue his education abroad at a Jesuit college; the play attacks Roman Catholicism (though not as much as Doctor Faustus does; Marlowe's writings do seem anti-church in general):
    • “Why should a king be subject to a priest?
    • Proud Rome, that hatchest such imperial grooms,
    • With these thy superstitious taper-lights,
    • Wherewith thy antichristian churches blaze,
    • I'll fire thy crazed buildings, and enforce
    • The papal towers to kiss the lowly ground,
    • With slaughter'd priests make Tiber's channel swell,
    • And banks rais'd higher with their sepulchres!”
  • Marlowe has one character tell another:
    • Then, Baldock, you must cast the scholar off,
    • And learn to court it like a gentleman.
    • 'Tis not a black coat and a little band,
    • A velvet-cap'd cloak, fac'd before with serge,
    • And smelling to a nosegay all the day,
    • Or holding of a napkin in your hand,
    • Or saying a long grace at a table's end,
    • Or making low legs to a nobleman,
    • Or looking downward, with your eye-lids close,
    • And saying, "Truly, an't may please your honour,
    • Can get you any favour with great men:
    • You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,
    • And now and then stab, as occasion serves.”
    • Yet Marlowe was a 'sizar' at Cambridge which is a student who pays lower fees and in return does menial work to serve the gentlemen scholars; this quote sounds like him saying he shouldn't.
  • Finally, the main objection of the Lords to Edward's favourite Gaveston is that he is base-born and they can't bear him being put on their level (or even above them). Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker and may have been acutely conscious of how he was looked down upon.

In short, Marlowe seems to have cast himself in the role of the villain!

The plot
The play opens with Gaveston, having returned from exile and newly arrived in London, reading (presumably rereading) a letter from the King Edward II summoning him back from banishment. When they are reunited, Edward demonstrates his affection for Gaveston by giving him wealth and titles, some stolen from disapproving churchmen; soon both the nobility and church are offended and they demand that Edward sends Gaveston back into exile. But then Queen Isabella persuades them to change their minds (there is a lot of flip-flopping in this play; many characters find themselves on different sides at different times; this might be a theme of the play, and a fact from the history, but it makes things confusing). But with Gaveston restored again, things get worse and the Lords rise in revolt and capture and kill Gaveston. This causes civil war and, after an initial success, the rebel forces now led by Young Mortimer and Queen Isabella capture the King and force him to abdicate. He is then murdered. The play ends with the crown prince, now King Edward III, taking revenge on Mortimer.

It's a lot more complicated than that!

Selected quotes:

"Base leaden earls that glory in your birth,

Go sit at home and eat your tenants' beef" (Scene 6)


"I thank you all, my lords; then I perceive

That heading is one, and hanging is the other,

And death is all." (Scene 9)


“Misgoverned kings are cause of all this wrack,” (Scene 17)


"But what is he, whom rule and empery

Have not in life or death made miserable?" (Scene 19)


"A litter hast thou? Let me have a hearse,

And to the gates of hell convey me hence,

Let Pluto's bells ring out my fatal knell,

And hags howl for my death at Charon's shore" (Scene 19)


"We are deprived the sunshine of our life." (Scene 20)


"But what are kings, when regiment is gone,

But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?" (Scene 20)


"'Tis not the first time I have killed a man.

I learned in Naples how to poison flowers,

To strangle with a lawn thrust through the throat,

To pierce the windpipe with a needle's point,

Or, whilst one is asleep, to take a quill

And blow a little powder in his ears,

Or open his mouth and pour quicksilver down.

But yet I have a braver way than those." (Scene 23)


Base fortune, now I see, that in thy wheele

There is a point, to which when men aspire,

They tumble hedlong downe: that point I touchte,

And seeing there was no place to mount up higher,

Why should I greeve at my declining fall?” (Scene 25)




The Lazarus production
The Lazarus production reduced the play to 90 minutes by cutting out the Spencers and the bit where Mortimer goes to the Tower but escapes (with Kent) and the bit where Isabella goes to France, meets up with Mortimer and returns at the head of an army and the bit where Edward is captured disguised as a monk. This certainly simplifies things! It still leaves all the flip-flopping politics of Isabella, forced to defend her husband's boyfriend and managing to persuade Mortimer to rescind the second decree of banishment, and the turning of Kent. It also simplified the capture and execution of Gaveston.

What was left was a play ostensibly about a King, deposed because he loved a man, and it was billed as Marlowe's gay play. But Marlowe offers much more than that. It has been said that all of Marlowe's plays are about a man overreaching himself. Edward II's 'fatal flaw' was not his love for a man. At one point the elder Mortimer (in this production they were brothers rather than uncle and nephew) reminds his nephew of all the great men who had lovers including Alexander, Hercules, and Socrates; it would seem that Edward II's problem is that he is not a great man. EdII flings titles, honours and riches at Gaveston (and when attempting reconciliation with the rebellious barons he bestows honours on them too); it is his weakness that is the cause of his downfall. His tragedy is perhaps that he doesn't really want to be king. What he wants is his lover. And it is he who oscillates. The ostensible changing allegiances of Isabella, Mortimer and Kent are merely external signs of the terrible wavering to and fro of EdII. Even at the end he tries to cling to his crown. And perhaps a sub-theme of this play is that if you would sacrifice all for love, as Edward does, then make sure your love is worthy. This play showed very well that Gaveston was a spoilt little boy who throws piss at the Archbishop of Canterbury and who flaunts his riches in the face of poor men (although the scene at the start with the three men seeking employment was not included in this production). It isn't really about being gay. It is about being weak.

The murder of EdII was superbly done. After the long sequence in which he begs to keep his crown he is placed face down on a table. All the lords (who have stripped to their underpants, put on plastic aprons and grotesque masks) then hold him down. His underpants are then stripped off and a large mace is thrust towards his anus. The lights go off and he screams; there is the sound of something splattering. The lights come on again and Ed is naked, lying on his side, curled into a foetus; blood is pouring from the ceiling splattering him and the floor. He stays like that until the end of the play (when he is given a towel to protect his modesty as he takes the bow). A stunning end.

The final scene of this play has the new King, Edward III, denouncing and condemning his mother and her lover, Mortimer. This was done in the Lazarus production by a telephone call which was very clever (I wish the acoustics had been a little better).

Other works referencing this story and reviewed in this blog
Incidentally, the story of Edward II and his possible escape from imprisonment rather than his horrible death forms part of the background to Robert Goddard's Name to a Face, a thriller with several historical back stories. Roger Mortimer's fascinating life story is brilliantly told in Ian Mortimer's biography The Greatest Traitor. Mortimer (Ian not Roger) outlines his theory that Edward II escaped execution in Medieval Intrigue. The brilliant life of Edward III, the son of EdII and Isabella, is told in a wonderful Ian Mortimer biography: The Perfect King

Other plays reviewed in this blog may be found here.



This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God


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