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.
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.
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.
"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.”
- 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.
"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 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).
No comments:
Post a Comment