"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

"Dr Faustus" by Christopher Marlowe

I saw the RSC production of this play on Saturday (matinee) 24th September 2016 at The Barbican Theatre in the City of London; it starred Sandy Gierson and Oliver Ryan as Faustus and Mephistopheles (Sloth was played by Richard Leeming who had so impressed me with Abel Drugger in The Alchemist the week before). The RSC made sense of the play but a lot of the drama comes from knockabout comedy and extravagant spectacle and I couldn't help thinking that if Shakespeare rather than Marlowe had written this play we might have had more sense of the existential crises suffered by Faustus; I might have cared when he was dragged to Hell.

This was an interesting experience! The copy that I have purports to reproduce the 1616 quarto edition of the play. It is not split into acts or scenes so I cross-referenced it with the Kindle edition, based on the First Quarto of 1604, the earliest extant edition, which has fourteen scenes (though no division into Acts). But there are significant differences in the text between these two editions.

The story: scene by scene
The basic story is the same. Faustus, a scholar, is dissatisfied with Logic, Medicine, Law ("This study fits a mercenary drudge, /Who aims at nothing but external trash") and Divinity (we are all sinners so we must all die: "What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera"). So he resolves to study Magic.

O, what a world of profit and delight,

Of power, of honour and omnipotence,

Is promis'd to the studious artizan!

He asks his manservant Wagner to summon his friends Valders and Cornelius who will helps him to summon demons. Whilst waiting for them a Good Angel and a Bad Angel appear, warning and tempting. But Faustus is determined:

'Tis magic, magic that hath ravish'd me

In Scene 2, two scholars appear and engage in word play with Wagner.

Scene 3. In a grove at night Faustus speaks Latin and summons Mephistophilis. When he arrives, Faustus says:

I charge thee to return and change thy shape;

Thou art too ugly to attend on me: 

Go, and return an old Franciscan friar;

That holy shape becomes a devil best.

So M exits and then re-enters as a friar. This is just one of a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment that the play contains.
M now tells F about how Lucifer and his mates were cast from hell. And F asks

How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?

and M replies:

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it:

Thinks't thou that I, that saw the face of God,

And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,

In being depriv'd of everlasting bliss?

This is great stuff. M is warning F of the consequences of rebelling against God and M regrest being a devil because of what he has lost. In this sense it is NOT "better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all" as Tennyson was later to claim in In  Memoriam.
Nevertheless, F offers his soul to the devil if in return he can have "whatsoever I shall ask".

Scene 4 is 'a street' and is a comedy routine between Wagner, the servant, and a Clown

Scene 5: we are back in Faustus' study. He is debating with himself (and the the Good and Bad Angels) about whether he should sing the contract. He tells himself "The god thou serv'st is thine own appetite" and the Evil Angel calls prayers the "fruits of lunacy". Then Mephistopheles appears and Faustus, using his own blood, signs the contract donating his sou to Lucifer, "Chief lord and regent of perpetual night". The blood dries up and Faustus cannot finish the contract till Mephistopheles brings fire to warm it back into liquid again. Then F says: "Consummatum est"; it is finished, the words spoken by Jesus on the cross in the Latin of the Vulgate Bible translation of St Jerome, the version Faustus mentions in Scene I.
This is surely an incredibly significant line. Marlowe is drawing parallels between Faustus and Jesus.

Faustus now reads the text of what he has just signed and, it being accepted by M, begins to seek knowledge from M. Learning is the motivation for F. But the King James Bible states: "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." (In the Vulgate: eo quod in multa sapientia multa sit indignatio; et qui addit scientiam, addit et laborem; in Wycliffe's translation "for in much wisdom is much indignation, and he that increaseth knowing, increaseth also travail"). The first thing he wants to know is where is hell and M replies:

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd

In one self-place; but where we are is hell

Very modern!
F now asks M for a woman:

For I am wanton and lascivious,

And cannot live without a wife.

But the "hot whore" M offers is rejected. It is not until much later that F sees Helen of Troy and falls in love.

In Scene 6, again in the study, F quizzes a procession of the Seven Deadly Sins; each tells him who they are and who their parents were. The Sins speak in prose (Wrath admits to "wounding myself when I could get none to fight withal").

Now there is another comic scene in which two rustics, Robin and Dick, have stolen Faust's magic book and wish to pronounce its spells, but they cannot read.

I guess this is the end of an Act or we are half way through the play because the Chorus who started us off and will finish comes on at this stage. The nest few scenes are Faustus and his side-kick Mephistopheles going to exotic places and, using fireworks and conjuring tricks, playing jolly japes on the locals. It seems that F has sold his soul so he can play some practical jokes. He spirits Bruno (perhaps Giordano Bruno the Dominican philosopher who was burnt at the stake for his heretical views regarding the Copernican system in 1600; this would have been too late for Marlowe (who died in 1593) and does not appear in the earlier Faustus, (my version remember is dated 1616 when it might have been topical), who is an anti-pope, away from the rather foolish Pope Adrian. F and M caper about, hitting cardinals and stealing food from the Pope; this so annoys the religious princes that they decide to excommuniate the 'ghost' and F says:

Bell, book, and candle, - candle, book, and bell, -

Forward and backward, to curse Faustus to hell!

Another comic interlude in which Robin and Dick have stolen a cup from a vintner and summon a grumpy Mephistopheles from Constantinople to help them. M turns Dock into an Ape and Robin into a Dog providing Robin with the wonderful innuendo:
A dog! that's excellent: let the maids look well to their porridge-pots, for I'll into the kitchen presently

More merry japes as Faustus meets the Hol Roman Emperor and plays tricks on his courtiers. When, later, they waylay him in a lonely place they cut off his head but he has a false head on and so, having seemed to die, he gets up again. As well as 'It is finished' from the cross, Faustus is now resurrected! Is Marlowe blaspheming or just drawing parallels?

In another comic interlude, Faustus tricks a horse dealer who chops his leg off (but it is a false leg ...)

Faustus is at a posh dinner party with the Duke and Duchess of Vanholt. F says "I have heard that great-bellied [I presume he means pregnant rather than fat] women do long for things that are rare and dainty." The horse seller and Robin and Dick and other clowns disturb the party with their complaints against F. More merriment.

Scene 13: Back home. Faustus has made his will. Some scholars ask F who the most beautiful woman in the world was and Mephistopheles brings in Helen of Troy. Faustus, who has been encouraged by an old man to the brink of repentance, is seduced:

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? -

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. -

Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies! -

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. 

Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips ...

O, thou art fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars

Then Lucifer, Beelzebub and Mephistopheles walk in. Lucifer is here

To view the subjects of our monarchy

Those souls whose sin seals the black sons of hell

and they tell Faustus to prepare to surrender his soul that very night.

Now the scholars are back, concerned that F looks ill:

He is not well with being over-solitary.

The Good and Evil Angels are there, the Evil one smirking

He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall.

The clock strikes 11 PM, half past,, then midnight and Faustus, protesting, pleading, is dragged to Hell.
The Chorus returns and says

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight

Discussion

It is not great literature. It is clearly written for the theatre. The comic interludes would be done these days before the curtain to enable scenery to be changed behind. They are there to lighten the mood of the play and to allow some rustic punning. It is almost formulaic in its structure, alternating serious drama with rustic comedy. But then the middle of the play is the opportunity for Faustus to tour the world being silly. One can see the dramatic potential in having fire-works whizzing about on stage and heads being chopped off and regrown and people sprouting horns from their heads but it is clumsy knockabout stuff.

Of course there are the classic lines but not so many that this play could be in the same league as, say, Macbeth.

Perhaps I need to read the 1604 version. Perhaps some of the things I liked least are the additions made by lesser playwrights after Marlowe's death.

In a lecture to the Gresham College 'How to be a Shakespearean atheist' Ryrie (2019) points oiut that Faustus "claims not to believe in Hell while having explicitly made a pact with the devil. The conventional caricature would call that an outrageous example of wishful thinking. In fact it is more like a defiant refusal to submit to reality."

I also recommend:

• Dead Man in Deptford, a brilliant fictional biography of Marlowe by Anthony Burgess
• Shakespeare and Co by Stanley Wells, a set of biographies of Shakespeare's contemporaries
• Faustus by Leo Ruckbie, a biography of the German alchemist who may be the man behind the legend

April 2014; Not only did my edition not have scenes; it didn't even have page numbers! And I can't be bothered to count them.

Other plays reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Dead man in Deptford" by Anthony Burgess

This was the last novel written by Burgess before his death in 1994. Other great novels by this accomplished novelist include his first, the Malaysian Trilogy, A Clockwork Orange, The four Enderby novels, One Hand Clapping and what I consider to be his masterpiece, Earthly Powers.

This book is a fictionalised account of the life of Christopher Marlowe who wrote the plays Tamburlaine, Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Edward II; there is a suggestion in the book that he collaborated with a young Shakespeare on Henry VI part 1.

It is narrated by a young actor, who is blatantly not present for much of the action but doesn't actually enter much into the action which seems a rather pointless device. It is also written in Elizabethan English, spelt modern-wise in dialogue but Elizabethan-style when quoting written texts (eg the plays); this is sometimes a little difficult to understand (Burgess makes up a language in A Clockwork Orange called Nadsat based on Russian slang which is easier to read than this; my favourite example of an author immersing you in the language of a bygone age is Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd). There is a lot made of the fact that names are flexible, thus Marlowe is often turned into Marley or Merlin.

The life of Kit Marlowe offers a fascinating plot. He was an atheist and sodomite at at time when both of these were capital offences. He wrote world class plays and was an honourable predecessor to Shakespeare. He spied for Francis Walsingham (which might explain how he got away with the sodomy and atheism for so long) and was killed (murdered?) is a brawl in a tavern in Deptford. Burgess turns this is into a classic novel but I think something a little easier to read and slightly faster paced might have been even more exciting.

Nevertheless, every Burgess is a masterpiece. May 2015; 269 pages