Comensoli - Homophobia and the Regulation of Desire: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Marlowe's "Edward II"

Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 4, 1993. 175-200.

Homophobia and the Regulation of Desire: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Marlowe's Edward II

VIVIANA COMENSOLI Department of English Wilfrid Laurier University

CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON Christopher Marlowe portrayal of homosexuality in Edward II ¹ is largely divided between those who see the play as a morality-patterned tragedy inscribing a cause-and-effect relation between a king's "unnatural" love for a male subordinate and social disintegration ² and those who claim that, while Marlowe may be sympathetic to the love relationship between Edward and Gaveston, the issue of homosexuality is isolated from the sociopolitical context of the tragedy. Within the latter direction, the widely accepted view regarding the bold portrayal of homosexuality in the play was initially proposed by W. M. Merchant, who suggested that the spectator must reject Edward not for his possibly abnormal sexuality but for his neglect of political duties. ³ For the most part, commentators have viewed homosexuality in the play as an issue of morality rather than as a problematic construct of forbidden desire. ⁴ More recently, Stephen Guy-Bray, in a provocative but brief polemic in which he is critical of much of the scholarship on the construction of homoeroticism in Edward II, has shown how during the past fifty years homophobia has informed interpretations of the play's death scene: "The critical suppression of the possibility of a positive homosexual discourse imitates the action of Edward's murderer in a way that does not disturb the critics, who seem to be only too eager to deny social and political legitimacy to homosexuals." ⁵ And in Sodomy and Interpretation Gregory Bredbeck argues that in its unmasking of "an unstable world of amorphous power plays," Edward II demonstrates how the "motives of politic ambition" are "obfuscated . . . with a rhetoric of temporal sexuality," namely, homoeroticism. ⁶ What has been ignored is how Marlowe's deliberate distortions of official Tudor history foreground an issue not overtly treated in his chief sources ( Holinshed and Fabyan chronicles and Stow Annales of England), ⁷ making homophobia a dominant cause of the political struggle for power that on January 20, 1327, made Edward II the first king since the Norman Conquest to be deposed.

The action of Edward II covers a broad historical period, from the accession of Edward in 1307 to the execution of Roger Mortimer in 1330. Marlowe telescopes historical material by creating an indeterminate time frame so that the spectator is never entirely certain as to how much time has elapsed between acts 1 and 5. The play would appear to span approximately one year; however, references in the final act to the king as "agèd Edward" (5.2.120) ⁸ and "the old wolf" (5.2.7) suggest that a longer period of time has passed. Historical indeterminacy is reinforced by Marlowe's extensive modifications of a number of particulars recorded in his sources. In addition to Marlowe's telescoping of historical time, other widely observed distortions of chronicle material are: (1) Marlowe's more explicit and complex portrayal of the homoerotic bond between the king and Piers Gaveston; (2) Gaveston's and the Spencers' alleged status as commoners; ⁹ (3) the political opposition to Edward on the grounds of the barons' disdain for Gaveston, whom they deem "basely born" (1.4.402); and (4) the militant influence of Roger Mortimer on the events leading to Gaveston's and Edward's deaths. In the chronicles the overt cause of the political unrest is not Gaveston's reinstatement but Edward's disregard of the barons' counsel and his wasting of the treasury. ¹⁰ None of Marlowe's sources dwells at length on the notorious friendship between Edward and Gaveston, whom Fabyan describes as having a "wanton" nature; ¹¹ when they do, it is to illustrate the king's moral corruption by an ambitious foreigner. The chroniclers hint at but never directly exploit the political repercussions of the king's homosexuality. The covert assumption, however, is that Edward's unruly body, and not just his political ineptness, is responsible for his overthrow. Before elaborating on the king's political failings, Stow describes Edward as "faire of bodie, but vnstedfast of manners, and disposed to lightnes, haunting the company of vile persons, and giuen wholly to the pleasure of the body, not regarding to gouerne his common weale by discretion and iustice," implying a link between Edward's misgovernance of the realm and his riotous body, a combination that led to "great variance betweene [Edward] and his Lords." ¹² Holinshed, who amasses an extensive day-by-day itinerary of Edward's rule, depicts the king's affection for Gaveston as incidental to the barons' opposition to the ambitious and spendthrift earl: "A wonderfull matter that the king should be so inchanted with the said earle, and so addict himselfe, or rather fix his hart vpon a man of such a corrupt humor, against whome the heads of the noblest houses in the land were bent to deuise his ouerthrow." ¹³ Although Holinshed here posits no direct relation between the king's homosexuality and his eventual deposition, except to marvel at his persistence in loving Gaveston, throughout the chronicle he periodically erupts in indignation at the king's "vndiscreet and wanton misgouernance," building to a scenario in which the king comes to acknowledge that the cause of his undoing has been forbidden desire: "purg[ing]" his "heinous vices . . . by repentance," Edward "patientlie suffered manie reproofes, and finallie death it selfe . . . after a most cruel maner." Capitulating to the providentialist tradition of Renaissance historiography, and minimizing the sexual overtones of the political struggle for power, Holinshed asserts that the kingdom would have fallen into greater disarray "if Gods goodnesse had not béene the greater." ¹⁴ In effect, the assumption in all of the chronicles is that Edward's sexual habits finally incurred not political rebellion but the wrath of heaven: "in pryson," concurs Fabyan, the king "tooke great repentaunce of his former lyfe, and made a lamentable complaynt for that he had so greuously offendyd God." ¹⁵ Marlowe, on the other hand, unequivocally treats Edward's reinstatement of his friend and lover, which contradicts the late Edward I's edict that Gaveston be forever banished from the kingdom, as the main cause of the ensuing clashes of power. This essay will argue that Marlowe's deliberate departures from official explanations of the insurrection against an anointed king help to locate the dramatization of Edward II's homosexuality as a practice whose punishment is rooted in a form of paranoia--specifically, homophobia--that is fostered and encouraged by a society that is in crisis precisely because the structures of patriarchy (an orderly body politic, compulsory heterosexuality, and strict allegiance to the law) are no longer tenable.

In his revision of official Tudor history, Marlowe posits a dialectical relationship between psychosexual identity and political authority, and he does so within a complex psychological framework. The appropriation of historical discourses is mediated by the play's fantasy structures, which revolve around forbidden sexuality. Marlowe portrays a sexually "deviant" relationship by distorting the history of Edward II's reign recorded in his sources, clarifying the (unconscious) expressions of desire underlying the political crisis. This is not to posit a transhistorical human subjectivity, but rather to suggest that Marlowe constructs a world in which ideological structures are negotiated by individuals' desires and repressions. The "premise of limited agency," writes Valerie Traub, "refuses to view individuals as freely subjugated victims of their culture and recognizes the import of subjective, psychic experience as well--for it is within the unconscious (itself a social product) that the possibility of erotic disruption is born." Although psychoanalysis often "ignores the location" of erotic experience and practice within ideological structures, this "does not obviate the existence of unconscious practices." Instead, the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious permits us to tap individual fantasies, displacements, and repressions "as they exist within a cultural field." ¹⁶ A psychoanalytic inquiry into Marlowe's reconstruction of recorded history reveals an interplay between the oedipal drama and other fantasy patterns that are inextricable from the early modern ideological codes that regulate the body and the body politic. The psychological subtext of Edward II counters the providentialism that underwrites Tudor historiography by locating the tragic deaths of the major characters in the widespread, repressed fears of a heterosexist culture dominated by rigid divisions in society and the self, divisions that are under scrutiny in the play.

The dominant conflict in Edward II is between subversive desire and the political structures of authority. The chief exponent of the political and moral order is the baron Mortimer Junior, the ahistorical leader of the rebellion against Edward. Historically, the Mortimers took no active part in the peers' opposition to Gaveston, and, although Roger Mortimer did have a hand in Edward's death, both Holinshed and Stow are vague about the extent of his involvement in regicide. ¹⁷ By linking Mortimer Junior to both Gaveston's and Edward's murders, Marlowe overlaps the careers of the two most influential men in Edward's life, intensifying the problematic relation between homophobia and the political rebellion. It is chiefly through Mortimer's efforts that the state eradicates the forbidden sexuality practiced by the king and his "minion" Gaveston. Mortimer's selfprofessed role as the voice of order is unquestioned not only by his supporters in the play but also by modern critics. As Debra Belt recently has noted, " Mortimer's self-representation as plain-speaker and moral man of affairs has been accepted despite contrary evidence" in the play. ¹⁸ Mortimer is not the voice of authorial consent to the judgments brought against Edward and Gaveston. Like Edward, Mortimer is highly individuated, the 1598 quarto's subtitle, "with the tragicall fall of proud Mortimer," suggesting that Mortimer's personal tragedy counterpoints Edward's. Mortimer's tragedy, like Edward's, is rooted in the oedipal struggle between desire and the law of the father, a struggle that mediates the crisis of order at the heart of the play.

Politically, Mortimer's anxiety about Edward's disruption of the body politic upholds the culturally inscribed fear of the negation of compulsory heterosexuality, an institution that, by reference to traditional ideals of law and order, justifies patriarchal authority and dominance. ¹⁹ In his desire to enhance his position and status, Mortimer's political ambition is inextricable from his virulent homophobia. Mortimer defends the structures of patriarchal authority that Edward renounces and that are predicated on the law of the father. "It is in the name of the father," writes Jacques Lacan, "that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which . . . has identified his person with the figure of the law." ²⁰ In a patriarchal society such as early modern England, in which the family formed "the fundamental economic unit of society" and "provided the basis for . . . social order" ²¹ presided over by the father, only fathers "were admitted to any share of political power." ²² The family was an entrenched and "frequently employed category in political philosophy prior to the seventeenth century," and "the patriarchal-familial conception had become the chief view of political origins" by the time of the Stuarts. ²³ Marlowe's audience would have recognized that a king's responsibilities to his subjects were similar to those of the father in his role as head of the household. The close link between paternal and kingly authority had become "a burgeoning concept by the mid-sixteenth century," ²⁴ and writers and educators often employed the analogy between sovereign and father in their discussions of an orderly state. In book 1 of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (c. 1594), Richard Hooker upheld the natural, coterminous development of paternal and kingly government:

To Fathers, within their private families, Nature hath given a supreme power; for which cause . . . all men have ever been taken as lords and lawful kings in their own houses. . . . It is no improbable opinion, therefore, . . . that as the chiefest person in every household was always as it were a king, so when numbers of households joined themselves in civil societies together, kings were the first kind of governors amongst them. Which is also . . . the reason why the name of Father continued still in them, who of fathers were made rulers. ²⁵

In 1609 King James declared that "Kings are . . . compared to Fathers in families: for a King is trewly Parens patriae, the politique father of his people," and William Perkins defined the family as the "first Societie" or "the Schoole," ruled over by the father, "wherein are taught and learned the principles of authorities and subiection." ²⁶ Rebellion within the family was thus considered synonymous with rebellion against the state. Those in subordinate positions--servants, women, and children--"were 'subsumed' into the personalities of their fathers and masters. Obedience was seen as the principal duty of children and it was instilled in them by all the religious, emotional and social pressures available"; indeed, the conduct-book literature considered filial disobedience a grave transgression. ²⁷

To the play's political rivalries Marlowe adds a cluster of father-son relationships that mirror the larger conflict between king and peers. Altogether, there are three sets of fathers (or father-figures) and sons in Edward II: the three Edwards, the Spencers, and the two Mortimers. Central to the king/father/son configuration is the protracted hostility between Edward and Mortimer Junior, a hostility grounded in the two characters' antithetical feelings for the deceased king. Edward's chief weakness as a monarch is his refusal to embody and perpetrate the orderly body politic that he has inherited from his father. The "law of the father" or the symbolic order of language, writes Lacan, organizes human relationships according to the strictures of civilization, namely, authority, decorum, and the order of meaning. Desire, which "is affirmed as the absolute condition" and the provenance of "paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even scandalous" impulses, and which is therefore contrary to the law of the father, must be filtered through and subordinated to the symbolic order. ²⁸ In defying the late king's edict that Gaveston be banished-"'My father is deceased. Come, Gaveston, / And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend'" (1.1.1-2)--Edward gratifies a forbidden pleasure, for which he will be punished. Edward's defiance of the father's authority is juxtaposed with Mortimer Junior's allegiance to the late king, to whom he had sworn that Gaveston would never be reinstated (1.1.82-89). Psychologically, the Edward-Mortimer action conforms to rudimentary oedipal impulses involving the male child's ambivalence toward the father. More specifically, the opposition between Edward and Mortimer configures a set of contradictory attitudes toward the father, anticipating what Freud refers to as the "simple . . . Oedipus complex," ²⁹ in which the male child's feelings for the father range from desiring to kill him or to substitute for him, to acquiescing to his authority. Freud has observed that the "relation of a boy to his father is . . . an 'ambivalent' one. In addition to the hate which seeks to get rid of the father as a rival, a measure of tenderness for him is also . . . present." The ambivalence coalesces in the boy's "identification with" and admiration for the father, on the one hand, and his desire to destroy him, on the other: "At a certain moment," however, "the child comes to understand that an attempt to remove his father as a rival would be punished by him with castration." ³⁰ Edward's affection for Gaveston (the object of the father's hatred) and his neglect of political responsibility suggest a desire to subvert the power of the father. Mortimer Junior's relentless opposition to Gaveston, however, suggests the son's defense against subversive feelings for the father.

Mortimer Junior is the ideal son and subject whom the father would have favored as the defender of patriarchal hierarchy and heterosexual legitimacy. In his undivided loyalty to and consummate identification with the father, Mortimer vicariously fulfills the role of castrating father-figure, the parent eager to destroy the son for daring to disobey. Although the other barons repeatedly vilify Gaveston, Mortimer's rage far surpasses their hostility, to the point that he is cautioned by Warwick: "Bridle thy anger, gentle Mortimer" (1.1.121). That Mortimer's aggression has an extrapolitical underpinning is reinforced by Marlowe's employment of the Actaeon myth to clarify the patterns of violence in the play. Sara Munson Deats has observed that the imagery of the play, and specifically the "ActaeonDian masque described in Gaveston's second soliloquy, . . . associate[s] the King with Actaeon" who was destroyed by a pack of hounds and who "suffered a similar transformation from predator to prey"; especially significant is the fact that Marlowe "links only one of the fractious nobles (the ruthless Mortimer Junior) with the 'hounds' who attack and dilacerate the King." ³¹ Mortimer's verbal assaults against Edward and Gaveston reveal a strong identification with the father's jealous aggressiveness. These include references to the "brainsick king" (1.1.125) who is "love-sick for his minion" (1.4.87), and to the "sly inveigling [that is, seductive] Frenchman" (1.2.57) whom Mortimer "abhor[s]" (1.4.239) and whom he hopes to "hale . . . from the bosom of the king, / And at the court gate hang" (1.2.29-30). Mortimer's paternal rhetoric stems from a personal animosity toward Gaveston and "a burning zeal / To mend the king" (1.4.256-57). The subjective nature of Mortimer's outbursts is reinforced by the pride that he takes in his sword, the instrument with which he eagerly defeats the father's enemies. Mortimer frequently refers to the sword as his most valuable possession, an object with a vitality of its own: "This sword," he warns Edward, "shall sleep within the scabbard" before Mortimer will break his oath to the late king (1.1.86-87); and he articulates his fantasy to "strike off" the source of Edward's pleasure, Gaveston's "head," in a barrage of phallic imagery:

Mortimer Jr. . . . our hands I hope shall fence our heads
And strike off his that makes you [ Edward] threaten us.

[1.1.123-24]

But whiles I have a sword, a hand, a heart,
I will not yield to any such upstart.
You know my mind . . .

[1.4.421-23]

"To decapitate," writes Freud, "is to castrate"; and Norman Holland suggests that "eyes, hands, legs, head, or mind can all symbolize the
phallus in castration fantasies." ³² However abhorrent the signifiers of castration may be "in themselves," argues Freud, "they nevertheless serve . . . as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror." ³³ Indeed, the relation of manhood, the phallus, and power in Edward II revolves around anxiety about castration. "While imagery of beheading, or wounding of the head, is obtrusive throughout Marlowe," observes Constance Kuriyama, " Edward II is the only play in which it is so insistent that it might be considered a structural device." ³⁴ The device, I would suggest, is brought into relief in the Edward-Mortimer action, where the oedipal rivalry is centered.

Edward, although ostensibly more passive and self-pitying than Mortimer, reciprocates the latter's verbal assaults with the threat of his own phallic strength:

The sword shall plane the furrows of thy brows,
And hew these knees that now are grown so stiff.

[1.1.94-95]

Treacherous Warwick! Traitorous Mortimer!
If I be England's king, in lakes of gore
Your headless trunks, your bodies will I trail,
That you may drink your fill, and quaff in blood,
And stain my royal standard with the same,
That so my bloody colors may suggest
Remembrance of revenge immortally
On your accursèd traitorous progeny.

[3.2.134-41]

In his study of Edward's masochistic suffering as it is manifested in extreme "passivity and self-pity," Matthew Proser writes that "masochism is not really passive at all, but like sadism, requires activity, risk, and energy." ³⁵ Noting that "active and passive forms are habitually found to occur together in the same individual," Freud conjectures that "a sadist is always at the same time a masochist, although the active or the passive aspect of the perversion may be the more strongly developed." ³⁶ More important, Freud locates sadomasochistic tendencies in the fear of castration stemming from the simultaneous desire for and hatred of the father: the rage, for example, that frequently accompanies "the sadistic phase" is an urge "to force punishments and beatings" from the father, thereby "obtain[ing] from him the masochistic sexual satisfaction" that is desired. ³⁷ If viewed in the context of father-fixation, Edward's provocations of the peers are tantamount to the desire for both their respect and their disapproval or punishment. However, a similar castration anxiety, we have seen, is enacted by Mortimer Junior. To both Edward and Mortimer the phallus represents autonomy, its loss equated with the loss of self.

While Mortimer Junior identifies with that aspect of the father that is terrifying and threatening to the son, the text's multiple fantasy structures also call attention to Mortimer's dangerous identification with Edward. Mortimer, at least ostensibly, is heterosexual like the father. Yet his love relationship with Queen Isabella always takes second place to his desire to overthrow Gaveston, suggesting, I will argue, an unconscious fear of his own homoerotic impulses. Mortimer's latent homosexuality is suggested by two important ahistorical developments: his preoccupation with and contempt for Gaveston's deviant masculinity, which the barons equate with baseness; and his collusion with Isabella in plotting Gaveston's death.

For some commentators, Marlowe's departure from his sources in the (apparent) demotion of Gaveston from gentleman to "groom," together with the political controversy that Gaveston's low birth provokes, is a serious dramatic weakness. The baronial faction, complains Wilbur Sanders, "is from the start frozen in the least interesting of postures, and condemned in its utterances to a monotone, . . . as they inveigh interminably against 'that base and obscure Gaveston,' . . . [so that] it is hard to imagine anything less instructive than this head-on collision of meaningless obsessions." ³⁸ Others readily accept Mortimer's and the peers' stated reason for wanting to be rid of Gaveston--that he is a social climber. Claude Summers voices a common observation when he writes that "the barons' objection to Gaveston (and, later, to Spencer) has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with class. Most simply, they are determined not to be 'ouerpeerd.'" ³⁹ Yet, while the barons persistently refer to Gaveston as a "peasant," a characterization that has been readily accepted by critics, there is no textual evidence to support the claim that Marlowe has modified his sources to make Gaveston lowly born. As Debra Belt observes, " Marlowe himself goes to some lengths to insure that this characterization is not confused with literal fact: he has not only Edward but Mortimer admit that the label is inaccurate (see 1.4.29)." ⁴⁰ A fourteenth-century monastic account of the life of Edward II suggests that the barons' raillery at Gaveston's (exaggerated) social inferiority was historically commonplace: "The earls and barons of England looked down upon Piers, because, as a foreigner and formerly a mere man-at-arms raised to such distinction and eminence, he was unmindful of his former rank. Thus he was an object of mockery to almost everyone in the kingdom." ⁴¹ The widespread insistence, in elite and popular discourses, on Gaveston's social climbing as a target of derision conforms to the need, during periods of intense political crisis, to displace "non-sexual fears on to the sexual deviant," a process that attains its success because other forms of insubordination "are not only loosely associated with the sexual deviant, but 'condensed' in the very definition of deviance." ⁴² It is Holinshed, the Elizabethan chronicler, who clarifies the link between Gaveston's "baseness," sexual deviance, and political instability. Blaming Gaveston for Edward's "plaie[ing] diuers wanton and light parts," a practice that became more and more "outragious," Holinshed writes that the king preferred to give

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 . . . 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, blanketing [sic], and in such other filthie and dishonorable exercises. ⁴³

The "other filthie and dishonorable exercises," we infer, include sodomy, which in Elizabethan and Puritan treatises was generally characterized as a form of debauchery, a heinous vice rooted in postlapsarian corruption, whose widespread practice threatened the integrity of the social order. ⁴⁴ In his history of the Plymouth colony, Governor William Bradford, wondering why "sodomy and buggery (things fearful to name) have broke forth in this land," concluded that "our corrupt natures" are to blame; and for the Puritan divine John Rainolds sodomy was a sin to which "men's natural corruption and viciousness is prone." ⁴⁵

Edward II brings into focus the anxiety that in Marlowe's sources is merely implied, namely, that the barons' political insurrection is situated in the conceptualization of sodomy as a (base) threat to heterosexual privilege--a threat attesting to profound disorder in the body politic. Indeed, the "scandal" at the heart of Edward's "wilful" disregard of the proscriptions against sodomy inherent in homosocial codes is an alternative body politic. Edward's unrestrained love for Gaveston represents the reconfiguration not only of the (normal) body, but also of the political economy. In male-bonding patriarchal cultures such as feudal and early modern England, in which all primary political relationships are between men, and in which women participate only as "objects" in "the total relationship of exchange" and not as "partners," ⁴⁶ the regulation of homoeroticism must be strictly enforced. As Eve Sedgwick points out, the emphasis on the homosexual as a separate entity in homosocial cultures stems "not necessarily from its regulatory relation to a nascent or alreadyconstituted minority of homosexual people or desires, but from its potential for giving whoever wields it a structuring definitional leverage over the whole range of male bonds that shape the social constitution." ⁴⁷

In Edward II "baseness," then, is a signifier of the unstated cause of political and social instability--homoeroticism. The two epithets most frequently hurled at Gaveston by the barons are "base" and "minion"; and, as Harry Levin notes, the most common of these two epithets is "minion." ⁴⁸ Throughout the play the barons' language, and Mortimer Junior's in particular, fuses Gaveston's despised baseness with his corrupt body/phallus: "that base peasant" (1.4.7), "fish" (1.4.221), "that vile torpedo" (1.4.223). For Mortimer, the epithet "base" signifies the minion's pathologized body, the site of anal filth and disease: Gaveston is a "canker [that] creeps" (2.2.18), a "plague" in need of "purging" (1.4.270). Mortimer's anxiety conforms to "'homosexual panic,' . . . the most private, psychologized form [of homophobic violence]" in which many men in male-bonding societies "experience their vulnerability to the social pressure of homophobic blackmail." ⁴⁹ Vile, sodomized bodies must be coerced, if necessary, to enact the ritual of heterosexual identity. As Michel Foucault has shown, "the body is . . . directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs." ⁵⁰ Among the institutions whose function in the early modern period was to circumscribe eroticized bodies was marriage. "Desire," writes Catherine Belsey, "was to be more thoroughly contained and confined within . . . marriage, and thus brought under the control of the Law (and the law). . . . Marriage makes desire legitimate, brings it within the bounds of propriety and orthodoxy, on condition . . . that it is suitably heterosexual" and "non-incestuous." ⁵¹ Early in the play, the king yields to political pressure against his relationship with Gaveston by arranging Gaveston's marriage to his (Edward's) niece (1.4.376-78). Edward's concession temporarily brings about political amity between himself and the barons. Appeased by the prospect of the pending marriage, Warwick promises to undertake whatever "your highness shall command" (1.4.383), and the elder Mortimer, observing that "now . . . the king is changed" (1.4.419), advises Mortimer Junior: "Leave now to oppose thyself against the king" (1.4.386). Reminding his nephew that "the mightiest kings have had their minions" (1.4.390), Mortimer Senior advises him to permit the "youth[ful]" and "flexible" king (1.4.397) to "enjoy that vain, light-headed earl, / For riper years will wean him from such toys" (1.4.399-400). The elder baron's plea is usually interpreted as evidence that the king's wish to keep a male lover is not a political issue, ⁵² a reading that fails to account for the causal relation between Gaveston's marriage and the peers' sudden reversal on the issue of Edward's flagrant homosexuality. As long as heterosexuality is officially, if not privately, practiced sodomy is a containable threat. But despite Gaveston's marriage, Edward intensifies his public displays of affection. When Edward taunts the barons with his "outrageous" (2.2.55) desire for Gaveston, we overhear Marlowe debunking Holinshed's judgment of Edward's and Gaveston's "disordred dooings" as increasingly "outragious." ⁵³

King Edward. My Gaveston!
Welcome to Tynemouth! Welcome to thy friend!
Thy absence made me droop and pine away;
For, as the lovers of fair Danë,
When she was locked up in a brazen tower,
Desired her more and waxed outrageous,
So did it sure with me. . . .

[2.2.50-56]

As the father's and the state's defender of order and propriety, Mortimer Junior initiates the plot--"I'll give the onset" (2.3.19)--to rid the state of the deviance embodied by the "wanton" king (1.4.199) and his minion.

In response to his uncle's reminder of the widespread practice of

men loving men even among mighty warriors (1.4.390-95), Mortimer Junior initially defends his passionate disdain for Gaveston by denying that homoeroticism troubles him: "Uncle, his wanton humor grieves not me; / But this I scorn, that one so basely born / Should by his sovereign's favor grow so pert" (1.4.401-3). Yet in the same speech Mortimer's scorn fixes upon the seemingly pettier issue of Gaveston's apparel. What Mortimer finds particularly disturbing about Gaveston's ultrafashionable attire is not only that its Italianate character is a reminder of a degenerate foreign world, but that it is also ostentatiously and grotesquely effeminate:

He wears a lord's revenue on his back,
And, Midas-like, he jets it in the court
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.

[1.4.406-14]

Mortimer is obliquely echoing the cultural commonplace that Italians were responsible for exporting to England and France not only a "fashion" for clothes but also for sodomy. ⁵⁴ The imputation would also have reminded an Elizabethan audience of the warning against effeminacy found in the "Sermon against Excess of Apparel" in the 1547 Book of Homilies: "Yea many men are become so effeminate, that they care not what they spend in disguising themselves, ever desiring new toys, and inventing new fashions." ⁵⁵ Mortimer's use of the polynomial word "jet" (1.4.407) to describe Gaveston's effeminate behavior situates Gaveston's threat within a political economy of the body. In noun form, a jet is "a hard, compact black form of brown coal, . . . capable of receiving a brilliant polish"; a "fashion, style," or "manner"; a "projection, protruding part"; and "an affected movement . . . of the body." As a verb, "jet" is associated with pride, effeminacy, and excess: it means to "vaunt," "brag," and "walk or move about in ostentatious manner" ( Oxford English Dictionary). Effeminacy associates men with a vain and unruly femininity that challenges patriarchal authority in the degeneration of rational men into the irrational predisposition of women. ⁵⁶ Mortimer's quip that it is "as if that Proteus, god of shapes, appeared" (1.4.410) further confirms that the source of his anxiety is Gaveston's abrogation of the political field through social and sexual fluidity.

Gaveston's protean ability to transgress fixed boundaries contrasts sharply with the younger Mortimer's self-image as the defender of orthodoxy. But at the same time as Mortimer functions as the custodian of the status quo, he betrays a perverse fascination with the king's "base . . . groom" (1.4.291). In effect, the shrillness of his accusations against Gaveston disguises a fear of his own subversive impulses, a fear that is subtly reinforced by his request of the barons to equate him with Gaveston's baseness, should he prove lax in his efforts to depose him: "My lords, if to perform this I be slack, / Think me as base a groom as Gaveston" (1.4.290-91). In a startling ironic reversal, Mortimer in act 5 is castigated as a "traitor," and the epithet formerly hurled at Gaveston, "base," is now applied to Mortimer by Kent (5.5.89). Mortimer is so repulsed by Gaveston's "baseness" that, at the instigation of Isabella (1.4.225-29), he plots Gaveston's death; ⁵⁷ later, he independently conspires Edward's overthrow (two plots to which the other barons readily assent).

While Mortimer's and the other barons' fear of Gaveston's social climbing follows the common practice in Marlowe's sources, and in early modern society at large, of projecting "non-sexual fears on to the sexual deviant," ⁵⁸ Mortimer's intense hatred of Gaveston's "baseness" also springs from the fear of being engulfed by something dirty, a common anal fantasy. The fear--or, more accurately, the paranoia--provokes aggression, guilt, and the desire to destroy the "hated" object. In his discussion of the "institution of conscience" as being "at bottom an embodiment, first of parental criticism, and subsequently of that of society," Freud cites repressed "libido of an essentially homosexual kind" as an example of "a process which is repeated in what takes place when a tendency towards repression develops out of a prohibition or obstacle that came in the first instance from without." The rebellion against "this 'censoring agency'" stems from the individual's "desire . . . to liberate himself from all these influences, beginning with the parental one, and out of his withdrawal of homosexual libido from them," at which point conscience "confronts him in a regressive form as a hostile influence from without," a fear concomitant with paranoia. ⁵⁹ Elsewhere, Freud further observes that in instances of paranoia "no self-reproach . . . is formed"; instead, the pain "generated is referred to [one's] . . . fellow-men in accordance with the psychical formula of projection," the principal symptom of which is "distrust." ⁶⁰ Jonathan Dollimore, following Freud, refers to the delusional paranoia underlying repressed homosexuality as "not just a delusion of being persecuted but an active homophobic attempt to persecute":

Certain kinds of paranoia are the expression of desublimated but still repressed homosexual desire. . . . The tortuous process whereby repressed homosexuality comes to be expressed as paranoia can be paraphrased as follows: the proposition "I (a man) love him" is contradicted by delusions of persecution which loudly assert: "I do not love him--I hate him." This proposition then becomes transformed by projection into another: "he hates (persecutes) me, which will justify me in hating him," and ends up as "I do not love him--I hate him, because he persecutes me." ⁶¹

The collusion between Mortimer and Queen Isabella foregrounds the two related fantasies in which Mortimer's paranoia is rooted: first, the child's desire for both the father and the mother; and second, the son's rage against the name and the law of the father, a rage that stems from the father's ambiguous position with regard to the son's sexuality.

Through Mortimer's plan to recall Gaveston from banishment at the behest of Isabella, Marlowe casts the queen as a symbolic mother/ mistress on whom the male child, in this case Mortimer Junior, projects his sexual ambivalence. According to Freud, "the simple Oedipus complex is by no means its commonest form, but rather represents a simplification or schematization which . . . is often enough justified for practical purposes"; a "more complete Oedipus complex" is actually "twofold, positive and negative, and is due to the bisexuality originally present in children." ⁶² During these early stages of psychosexual development, the child is as yet incapable of formulating distinctions according to gender: "All human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious. . . . A choice of an object independently of its sex--freedom to range equally over male and female objects--as it is found in childhood . . . and early periods of history, is the original basis from which . . . both the normal and the inverted types develop." ⁶³ Freud goes so far as to propose that "the ambivalence displayed in the relations to the parents should be attributed entirely to bisexuality," that "it is not . . . developed out of identification in consequence of rivalry." ⁶⁴ Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, develops Freud's insight by suggesting that the ambivalence in such a case would be conditioned by the boy's being forced to mediate "not only between the two object choices, but the two sexual dispositions, masculine and feminine." The male child's more typical repression of homosexual desire, reasons Butler, "would, then, be the result, not of the fear of castration by the father, but of the fear of castration--that is, the [institutionalized] fear of 'feminization' associated . . . with male homosexuality." According to this important clarification of the oedipal drama, it is not, then, first and foremost the heterosexual desire for the mother that must be punished and repressed, "but the homosexual cathexis that must be subordinated to a culturally sanctioned heterosexuality." ⁶⁵ The fact that Mortimer Junior intensifies his illicit involvement with Isabella only after she pleads with him for Gaveston's reinstatement, and presumably his death, is a coherent extension of Mortimer's fear of his own feminization. Flaunting his heterosexual union with Edward's queen while simultaneously abhorring her feminine discourse--he rebukes her, "Nay, madam, if you be a warrior, / You must not grow so passionate in speeches" (4.4.15-16) -- Mortimer forfeits his desire for the father, thereby consolidating his masculinity. ⁶⁶

Mortimer's repressed homosexuality, however, is reified in his fantasies about Gaveston's demise. Notwithstanding the protective delusion that keeps Mortimer from killing Gaveston on the grounds that murder would bring "shame" to Mortimer's reputation as a soldier (2.5.11-14), Mortimer fervently desires Gaveston's death. His "burning zeal" (1.4.256) to cleanse the kingdom of the minion's influence is consistent with "the intense 'burning' ambition" of those individuals described by Freud as having sublimated "the excitations of particular erotogenic zones." ⁶⁷ More specifically, Mortimer's obstinacy and his fear of Gaveston's sordidness are akin to the link noted by Freud between "obstinacy" and "the sublimation of anal erotism"; the link is part of "a reaction-formation against an interest in what is unclean and disturbing and should not be part of the body," a response common in individuals "who have retained the anal zone's erotogenic character in adult life." ⁶⁸ Freud insists, however, that this form of sublimation is not innate; it develops instead "in accordance with the education demanded by our present civilization," which suppresses certain forms of sexuality as "unserviceable." ⁶⁹ Underlying Mortimer's protective delusion is a deeper, unconscious source of shame and apprehension, that is, his desire to penetrate Gaveston. Provoked by Isabella's plea to reinstate Gaveston, Mortimer fantasizes about how the latter's death will be carried out: "How easily might some base slave be suborned / To greet his lordship with a poniard" (1.4.265-66), thereby "purging . . . the realm" (1.4.270). Soon thereafter, Mortimer and the other barons witness the amorous and sumptuous reunion of Edward and Gaveston (2.2.50-63). Incited by Edward's and Gaveston's "outrageous" behavior, Lancaster "draws his sword," but it is Mortimer Junior who "wounds Gaveston" (2.2.80,84). Fulfilling his previous fantasy of wounding Gaveston with his own dagger, Mortimer ironically becomes the "base slave" of his dream who greets Gaveston with "a poniard." Edward's phallus, the object of Gaveston's pleasure, is displaced by Mortimer's sword, a displacement serving at once as vicarious fulfillment and as punishment of subversive desire.

In an instance of what critics have explained away as Marlowe's rough plotting, the beheading of Gaveston is almost immediately followed by a message "from the barons" (3.2.148) requesting the "remov[al]" of the king's new favorite, Spencer Junior, whose "baseness" becomes the fresh target of abuse: "a putrifying branch / That deads the royal vine" (3.2.162-63). ⁷⁰ In a subsequent scene Mortimer Junior orders the execution of the Spencers (4.6.49-50,74-75). If viewed according to the play's understructures of desire, projection, and displacement, this seemingly hasty compression of historical events enhances the cause-and-effect relation between homophobia and the political uprising against the king and his favorites.

Finally, Mortimer's punishment of Edward is a direct extension of the identification and repression that clarify his need to murder Gaveston and to denounce Spencer Junior. Marlowe's sources are either silent about the extent of Mortimer's involvement in Edward's death or else understate its political implications. ⁷¹ Marlowe, on the other hand, makes Mortimer responsible for Edward's "varied and increasingly cruel tortures." ⁷² Before Edward is executed, Mortimer has the king committed to a dungeon that is, for all intents and purposes, a sewer. In prison, Edward complains of "stench" (5.3.18) and of being surrounded by "foul excrement" (5.3.26). Once again, Marlowe has modified his source material in that the scatological emphasis is largely his creation. ⁷³ In both Holinshed and Stow the fetid air of Edward's dungeon is caused by decaying matter, not by excrement. ⁷⁴ Edward's grotesque punishment by Mortimer's emissary Lightborn, who administers the king's death by plunging a hot poker through his anus, is an act of vengeance against the threat to society posed by sodomy. ⁷⁵ In this context, the corporal torture of Edward is both the symbolic fulfillment of Mortimer's own anal-erotic impulses, which he has expressed and evaded all along, and a form of "ceremonial punishment" of the body that, as Foucault observes, coextends with the early modern construction of the body "as the major target of penal repression." ⁷⁶ As part of the apparatus of repression that underwrites early modern patriarchal law, the "quality, intensity, [and] duration of pain," together with the execution itself, must be public and "spectacular" and must be perceived "by all" as the law's "triumph." ⁷⁷ Thus, while the chronicles record that Edward II's murder took place "suddenlie one night . . . [in] the chamber where he laie in bed fast asléepe," the nature of the punishment is such that it reverberates far beyond the castle walls: "His [ Edward's] crie did mooue manie within the castell and towne of Berkley to compassion, plainelie hearing him vtter a wailefull noise, . . . so that diuerse being awakened therewith . . . praied heartilie to God to receiue his soule, when they vnderstood by his crie what the matter ment." ⁷⁸ In Edward II the success of the gruesome ritual of justice hinges on its acceptance by the theater audience. Karen Cunningham has observed the metatheatrical interplay of erotic and violent impulses in the execution scene: "Lightborn . . . lovingly detail[s] the poisonings, stranglings, and throat piercings that make up his preferred modes of murder. . . . But he seeks to surpass his earlier performances" by appealing to "theatrical bravado, . . . murder[ing] the king with iron and table, then solicit[ing] the approval of his accomplice-spectators." ⁷⁹ But at the same time as the play encodes the ideology of corporal repression, Marlowe invites the spectator to perceive the ritual of pain as the expression of an economy of power. While the denouement ostensibly "erupts into a show of homosexual sadism . . . in which the punishment fits the crime," observes Purvis Boyette, Marlowe "provokes an audience to question, and by questioning to doubt, the institutions and world models presumed and defended by the characters in the play." ⁸⁰

The law of the father, in which the economy of power is situated, prevails in the end. Although Mortimer has executed Edward, colluded with Isabella, and become the Lord Protector of young Edward III, his transgressions are in turn punished by the new king, who prefers the penalty of beheading:

My father's murdered through thy [ Mortimer's] treachery,
And thou shalt die, and on his mournful hearse
Thy hateful and accursèd head shall lie
To witness to the world that by thy means
His kingly body was too soon interred.

[5.6.28-32]

Alone on stage with Mortimer's severed head, Edward III, who wants to be thought of as neither "pitiful" (5.6.82) nor lenient--"Accursèd head, / Could I have ruled thee then, as I do now, / Thou hadst not hatched this monstrous treachery!" (5.6.95-97)--vindicates the order of meaning, providing "graphic proof that he has come of age in this brutal society as his father's lawful and worthy successor." ⁸¹

By accepting at face value the barons' deposition of Edward II strictly on the grounds of political incompetence, as has been the general practice in Marlowe scholarship, we are thus ignoring the subversive implications of Marlowe's interrogation of official history. As leader of the rebel faction, Mortimer Junior has been concerned not only with "hav[ing] the people of our side" (1.4.282) but, more important, with how his actions will be recorded by historians. Significantly, none of the chroniclers explores either the political or moral implications of Mortimer's love relationship with the queen. And they all say very little about the murder of Gaveston, except to verify Mortimer's unsettling prediction, as early as act 1, that Gaveston's murderer shall "in the chronicle enrol his name / For purging the realm of such a plague" (1.4.269-70) with no one "so much as blam[ing] the murderer" (1.4.267). Holinshed, for one, applauds Gaveston's murder precisely as Mortimer has anticipated: "A iust reward for so scornefull and contemptuous a merchant, . . . which he [ Gaveston] pulled by violent meanes on himselfe with the cords of his owne lewdnesse, and could not escape this fatall fall." ⁸² Mortimer's prediction was also echoed in a number of contemporary treatises and popular songs; a case in point is the political jingle "De Petro de Gaverstone" ("On the Death of Peter Gaveston"), which concludes: "Gloria sit Creator! gloria comitibus / Quifecerunt Petrum mori cum suis carminibus! / A modo sit pax et plausus in Anglorum finibus!" (Glory to the Earls / Who have made Peter die with his charms! / Henceforth may there be peace and rejoicing throughout England!). ⁸³ In the denouement of Edward II Marlowe exposes the popular resentment against Gaveston by hinging the punishments of the traitors strictly on regicide, not on Gaveston's murder. ⁸⁴ Whereas in the chronicles Edward's and Gaveston's punishments amount to a providential cleansing of the state, in Edward II they are heinous acts rooted in "the paranoid instabilities" at the core of early modern culture. ⁸⁵ Marlowe's radical reassessment of Edward II's reign encodes an incisive critique of Tudor historiography, whose aim is to impose on human action an idealized, providentialist naturalism that is out of step with the brutal world of realpolitik and repressed desire in Edward II.

____________________

A shorter version of this paper was presented to the Marlowe Society at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association of America, San Francisco, December 27-30, 1991. I am especially grateful to Sara Munson Deats and Constance Kuriyama for their helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of the History of Sexuality and Kay Stockholder, who read and commented on an early draft.

Because the term "homosexuality" is not found in Renaissance discourses, I am following the practice of a number of modern historiographers and commentators who employ it "in as directly physical--and hence culturally neutral--a sense as possible" ( Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England [ Boston, 1982 ], p. 17). This does not mean, however, that the early modern period did not conceptualize forbidden sexual practices. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA, 1990 ), notes that while "the word 'homosexual' entered Euro-American discourse during the last third of the nineteenth century, . . . the sexual behaviors, and even for some people the conscious identities, denoted by the new term 'homosexual' and its contemporary variants already had a long, rich history" (p. 2). And Jonathan Dollimore, in his analysis of the construction of sexual deviance in early modern England, writes that the "nearest concepts" to the term "homosexual" at this time "were probably sodomy and buggery" but that "there remain certain continuities" between early modern conceptions of sodomy and homosexuality "as a modern identity"; sodomy, for example, was a signifier of deviance, namely, "the point of entry into civilization for the unnatural, the aberrant, and the abhorrent, the wilderness of disorder" that "might . . . infiltrate civilization through diverse subject types" ( Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault [ Oxford, 1991 ], pp. 238-39). Joseph Cady, arguing against "the dominant claim in gay studies now that homosexuality is a relatively new historical 'invention,'" carefully and persuasively demonstrates that the term "masculine love," which was especially widespread in early modern discourses "as a language for a male homosexual orientation," indicates that there was "a definite recognition of a distinct homosexuality, acknowledged at least by those who were willing to face and discuss the subject frankly" ( Joseph Cady, "'Masculine Love,' Renaissance Writing, and the 'New Invention' of Homosexuality," in Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context, ed. Claude J. Summers [ New York, 1992 ], p. 9). Similarly, Bruce R. Smith, in his Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago, 1991 ), asserts that while "no one in England during the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries would have thought of himself as 'gay' or 'homosexual' for the simple reason that those categories of self-definition did not exist," that does not preclude the existence of "men . . . whose sexual desires were turned primarily toward other men" (p. 12). Valerie Traub, in her Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (New York, 1992 ), cites current historical and anthropological research demonstrating that "a significant proportion of men and women have engaged in same-gender erotic activities throughout history" (pp. 8-9). Although Traub concedes that "no such category as homosexuality operated in early modern culture," she postulates that "insofar as the entire erotic system seemed relatively fluid and continuous, we need to entertain the related proposition that the early modern construction of heterosexuality was neither as unified nor as codified as it was to later become" (p. 16). And John Boswell, in "Categories, Experience, and Sexuality," in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, ed. Edward Stein (New York, 1992 ), argues that "modern terms for sexuality are not necessarily any more comprehensive or accurate about the present than ancient ones are for the past," and that "application of modern categories to the past, even if they do not match precisely, may be a useful strategy for determining the relationship between the two" (p. 142).

W. L. Godshalk's is the most reductive assessment of Marlowe's didactic intent: Edward's and Gaveston's "unnatural relationship" leads "directly to the anarchy which England experiences under Edward" ( W. L. Godshalk, The Marlovian World Picture [ The Hague, 1974 ], p. 69). Similarly, Charles G. Masington links Edward's homosexuality to original sin and interprets Gaveston as the serpent intent on destroying a paradisal England ( Charles G. Masington, Christopher Marlowe's Tragic Vision: A Study in Damnation [ Athens, OH, 1972 ], pp. 86-94).

W. Moelwyn Merchant, introduction to Edward the Second, New Mermaids Series (1967; rpt. London, 1975 ), p. xvi. Leonora Leet Brodwin only obliquely acknowledges the political implications of sodomy in her suggestion that in Edward II Marlowe accepts and "feel[s] empathy with all expressions of love," including "Edward's pathetic attempt to base a life on love rather than policy" ( Leonora Leet Brodwin, "Edward II:Marlowe's Culminating Treatment of Love," ELH 31 [ 1964 ]: 155, 143). Scott Giantvalley also observes that Marlowe "ennobles the relationship" between Edward and Gaveston but suggests that "the condemnation of Gaveston by Edward's nobles is politically rather than sexually motivated" ( Scott Giantvalley, "Barnfield, Drayton, and Marlowe: Homoeroticism and Homosexuality in Elizabethan Literature," Pacific Coast Philology 16, no. 2 [ 1981 ]: 21). And Bruce Smith, while noting that Marlowe's depiction of "a homosexual relationship" creates a tension between "the autonomy of individuals" and "the society in which they live," reaches the orthodox conclusion that Edward fails to understand "England's needs as a kingdom" and that "it is Gaveston's lowly birth, not the sexual relationship between Edward and Gaveston, that truly enrages the lords" (Smith, pp. 217, 215).

⁴	Simon Shepherd's revisionary assessment of the Marlowe canon, in his Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (New York, 1986 ), also treats the construction of homosexuality in Edward II primarily from the point of view of how it subverts conventional morality: Marlowe focuses on "the issue of sodomy" (p. 204) according to early modern definitions of "manliness" in order to disrupt prevailing notions of moral order (p. 207).
⁵	Stephen Guy-Bray, "Homophobia and the Depoliticizing of Edward II," English Studies in Canada 17 ( 1991 ): 132.
⁶	Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca, NY, 1991 ), pp. 77, 61.
⁷	The dissemination and popularity of chronicle and historical literature took hold in England "with the accession of Elizabeth in 1558" (see Josie Slaughter Shumake, "The Sources of Marlowe's Edward II" [Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1984], p. cxlv). It is generally accepted that Marlowe may have been familiar with earlier notable histories of Edward II's reign, including the numerous Latin and English chronicles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and, in particular, William Caxton The Chronicles of England ( London, 1480), Ranulf Higden Polychronicon (London, 1482), the several early sixteenth-century accounts (including Polydore Vergil 's Anglicae Historiae [1534, 1546]), and Richard Grafton Chronicle at Large and Meere History of the Affayres of England (London, 1569), works from which the English popular chroniclers drew. Marlowe's presentation of historical material, however, suggests that he relies primarily "on the popular and more easily accessible printed sources of his day" (Shumake, p. cxlvi; see also R. I. Page, "Christopher Marlowe and the Library of Matthew Parker," Notes and Queries, n.s. 24, no. 6 [ 1977 ]: 510-14; and Merchant, p. xiii).

¹⁰	Fabyan writes that Edward "lyghtly . . . wolde discouer thynges of great counsayl" and that "the kynges treasoure, by meane of the sayd Piers, was wasted" ( Robert Fabyan , The New Chronicles of England and France [1516 and 1599; rpt. London, 1811 ], p. 417).
⁸	Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, ed. Irving Ribner (New York, 1970 ). Subsequent references to the play are to this edition (within parentheses in the text).
⁹	Historically, Gaveston was the son of a well-to-do Gascon knight, while the Spencers belonged to the secondary nobility and came to lead the royalists. On Marlowe's "deliberate departure from Holinshed" in his portrayal of Gaveston's and the Spencers' social standing, see Claude J. Summers, "Sex, Politics, and Self-Realization in Edward II," in "A Poet and a Filthy Play-maker": New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama (New York, 1988 ), p. 226; and A. R. Myers, England in the Late Middle Ages (Baltimore, 1952 ), p. 2.

¹¹	Fabyan, p. lxx.
¹²	John Stow, The Annales of England (London, 1592), p. 320, section 38. Stow's rendition of Edward's disorderly behavior echoes Fabyan's account: "This Edwarde was fayre of body and great of strengthe, but vnstedfast of maners & vyle in condycions; for he wolde refuse the company of lordes and men of honoure, and haunte hym with vylayns & vyle persones: he also gaue hym to great drynkynge, and lyghtly he wolde discouer thynges of great counsayl . . ., which tourned hym to great dishonoure, and his lordes to great vnrest" (p. 417). Both passages are in turn derived from Ranulf Higden Polychronicon (see Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis; Together with the English Translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Joseph R. Lumby, Rolls Series, vol. 8, no. 41 [1882; rpt. London, 1964 ], p. 298).
¹³	Raphael Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles (1577, 1586), in Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, vol. 2 ( 1807 ; rpt. New York, 1965 ), p. 549.

¹⁴	Ibid., p. 587.
¹⁵	Fabyan, p. 431.
¹⁶	Traub, p. 11.

¹⁷

Roger Mortimer, eighth Baron of Wigmore and first Earl of March, "was one of the Marcher lords who had briefly been a member of the Middle Party and who had later rebelled against the Spensers. In early 1322 he had submitted himself to Edward and was placed in the Tower. In August 1324 he escaped and made his way to France where he joined a group of English fugitives" (Shumake, p. xlv). Holinshed, like Stow, does not clearly implicate Mortimer in Edward's murder; Edward II's chief enemies after his deposition are Queen Isabella (now Mortimer's lover) and the Bishop of Hereford, who conspire in the king's torture and death (Holinshed, p. 586). Fabyan notes only perfunctorily that the king was removed to Berkeley Castle, "where after, about seynt Mathewys tyde, the sayd Edwarde, by the meanys of Syr Roger Mortimer, was myserably slayne" (p. 436).

¹⁸

Debra Belt, "Anti-Theatricalism and Rhetoric in Marlowe's Edward II," English Literary Renaissance 21 ( 1991 ): 152. See also Bredbeck, p. 63, who notes "the primacy of Mortimer" not in terms of his role as the exponent of moral order but as the central figure in the struggle "between temporal and politic" discourses in the play.

¹⁹	Although James Voss does not locate the political strife in Edward II in Marlowe's treatment of the heterosexual and patriarchal structures of authority, I am indebted to his reading of the events surrounding Edward's defeat as reinforcing "the current hierarchy of authority" ( James Voss, "Edward H: Marlowe's Historical Tragedy," English Studies 63 [ 1982 ]: 530).
²⁰	Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977 ), p. 67.
²¹	Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York, 1988 ), p. 1.
²²	J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (New York, 1986 ), p. 27.
²³	Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1975 ), p. 54.
²⁴	Ibid., p. 43.

²⁵	Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in The Works of Mr. Richard Hooker, Containing Eight Books of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and Several Other Treatises, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1843 ), 1:198.
²⁶	James I, "A Speach to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at White-Hall," in The Political Works of King James I, ed. Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge, MA, 1918 ), p. 307; William Perkins, Christian Oeconomy (London, 1609 ), Qq5.
²⁷	Sommerville, p. 27.

²⁸	Lacan, pp. 265, 286.
²⁹	Sigmund Freud, "The Ego and the Id," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., trans. and ed. James Strachey (London, 1953-74 ), 19:32 (hereafter cited as SE).
³⁰	Sigmund Freud, "Dostoevsky and Parricide," SE 21:183.

³¹	Sara Munson Deats, "Marlowe's Fearful Symmetry in Edward II," in Friedenreich et al., eds., p. 245.

³²	Sigmund Freud, "Medusa's Head," SE 18:273; Norman Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York, 1975 ), p. 43.
³³	Freud, "Medusa's Head," p. 273.
³⁴	Constance Brown Kuriyama, Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe's Plays (New Brunswick, NJ, 1980 ), p. 190.
³⁵	Matthew N. Proser, "Edward's Perils: Masochism in Marlowe's Suffering King," Literature and Psychology 34 ( 1988 ): 17.

³⁶	Sigmund Freud, "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," SE 7:159.
³⁷	Sigmund Freud, "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis," SE 17:27-28.
³⁸	Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1968 ), p. 134.

³⁹	Summers, "Sex, Politics, and Self-Realization," p. 225. Cf. Sharon Tyler: "That Edward wishes to keep a minion is not a state affair. But when that minion is . . . invited to use the treasury and seal at will, that is a state affair" ( Sharon Tyler, "Bedfellows Make Strange Politics: Christopher Marlowe's Edward II," in Drama, Sex, and Politics, ed. James Redmond [ Cambridge, MA, 1985 ], p. 58). A compelling although strictly historical reading of the baronial opposition to Gaveston has been undertaken by Walter Cohen, in his Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, NY, 1985 ), who suggests that the political opposition must be related to the fact that "throughout western Europe, royal centralization required the partial exclusion of the titular nobility from political power and its replacement by men of humbler station" who relied extensively on monarchical favor (p. 232). In this context the opposition to Gaveston in Edward II goes beyond "class condescension"; it derives from the "fundamental feudal attack on the formation of the absolutist state" (p. 233).
⁴⁰	Belt, p. 152. The reference is to Mortimer's quip that Gaveston is "hardly . . . a gentleman by birth," to which Edward retorts: "Were he a peasant, being my minion, / I'll make the proudest of you stoop to him" (1.4.29-31; emphasis mine).
⁴¹	The Life of Edward the Second by the So-called Monk of Malmesbury, trans. and ed. N. Denholm-Young (London, 1957 ), p. 3.
⁴²	Dollimore (n. 1 above), p. 237. "It is a process," argues Dollimore, "especially apparent in early modern England, not least because of the differences between its categories of sexual deviance and ours" (ibid.).

⁴³	Holinshed, p. 547.
⁴⁴	See Bray (n. 1 above), pp. 16-17: "The temptation to debauchery, from which homosexuality was not clearly distinguished, was accepted as part of the common lot, be it never so abhorred"; and Smith (n. 1 above), p. 217: "'Filthy,' in particular, is a word one seldom sees in connection with any other moral concern."
⁴⁵	William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 ( 1856 ; rpt. New York, 1981), p. 351; John Rainolds, Th'Overthrow of Stage-Playes (London, 1599), pp. 10, 32.
⁴⁶	Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle

____________________

Belland and John Richard von Sturmer, ed. Rodney Needham (Boston, 1969), p. 115.

⁴⁷	Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985 ), p. 86.
⁴⁸	Harry Levin, The Overreacher: Christopher Marlowe (London, 1961 ), p. 115.
⁴⁹	Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 88-89.
⁵⁰	Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979 ), p. 25.

⁵¹	Catherine Belsey, "Desire's Excess and the English Renaissance Theatre: Edward II, Troilus and Cressida, Othello," in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York, 1992 ), pp. 95-96.
⁵²	Tyler, p. 58; Giantvalley (n. 3 above), p. 21.
⁵³	Holinshed, p. 547.

⁵⁴

See Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York, 1981 ), p. 35; and James M. Saslow , "Homosexuality in the Renaissance: Behavior, Identity, and Artistic Expression," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman , Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York, 1989 ), p. 97.

⁵⁵

The Book of Homilies (1547), p. 60.

⁵⁶	In a trenchant analysis of "the culture of vanity" in early modern England, Barry Taylor suggests that "the feminine is not merely another of the categories which is marked negatively, as participating in the counter-Commonwealth of vanity and singularity--it is the mark of that negativity itself, the condition into which men fall when they have dislodged themselves from the fully human order of Commonwealth" ( Barry Taylor, Vagrant Writing: Social and Semiotic Disorders in the English Renaissance [ Toronto, 1991 ], p. 68).
⁵⁷	For the now widely accepted view that Isabella first suggests to Mortimer that Gaveston be recalled from banishment in order that he may be murdered, see Claude J. Summers , "Isabella's Plea for Gaveston in Marlowe's Edward II," Philological Quarterly 52 ( 1973 ): 308-10.
⁵⁸	Dollimore, p. 237 (see n. 42 above).

⁵⁹	Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction," SE 14:96.
⁶⁰	Sigmund Freud, "Case Histories II: Draft K," SE 1:226.
⁶¹	Dollimore, p. 177.

⁶²	Freud, "The Ego and the Id," p. 33.
⁶³	Freud, "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," pp. 145-46, n. 1.
⁶⁴	Freud, "The Ego and the Id," p. 33.
⁶⁵	Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990 ), p. 59.
⁶⁶	"As the metaphor of consolidation suggests," writes Butler, "there are clearly bits and pieces of masculinity to be found within the psychic landscape, dispositions, sexual trends, and aims, but they are diffuse and disorganized, unbounded by the exclusivity of a heterosexual object choice. Indeed, if the boy renounces both aim and object and, therefore, heterosexual cathexis altogether, he internalizes the mother and sets up a feminine superego which dissolves and disorganizes masculinity, consolidating feminine libidinal dispositions in its place" (p. 60).

⁶⁷	Sigmund Freud, "Character and Anal Erotism," SE 9:175.
⁶⁸	Ibid., pp. 171-75.
⁶⁹	Ibid., p. 171.

⁷⁰	On the supposed dramatic "improbabilities" of "this overlapping of action and reaction," see Shumake, p. ciii.
⁷¹	See n. 17 above.
⁷²	Shumake, p. cxli.
⁷³	Kuriyama, Hammer or Anvil, p. 194.
⁷⁴	"The miserable prisoner" was "lodged . . . in a chamber ouer a foule filthie dungeon, full of dead carrion," so that he might die from breathing "the abhominable stinch thereof" (Holinshed, p. 586). Stow describes the foul air as stemming from "the stench of dead carcases, layde in a Cellar vnder him [Edward]" (p. 344).
⁷⁵	Gregory Woods, in an insightful analysis of the erotic subtext of Lightborn's role, writes that Edward's executioner acts "like an importunate lover, in order to gain access to the king's anus. He is meticulous in his choice of an 'apt' death for the sodomite, a deadly rape to be carried out in the place of excrement: cistern and rectum" ( Gregory Woods , "Body, Costume, and Desire in Christopher Marlowe," in Summers, ed. [n. 1 above], p. 79).

⁷⁶	Foucault (n. 50 above), p. 8.
⁷⁷	Ibid., p. 34.
⁷⁸	Holinshed, p. 587.
⁷⁹	Karen Cunningham, "Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death," PMLA 105 ( 1990 ): 215.
⁸⁰	Purvis E. Boyette, "Wanton Humour and Wanton Poets: Homosexuality in Marlowe's Edward II," Tulane Studies in English 22 ( 1977 ): 48-49.

⁸¹	Frank R. Ardolino, "Severed and Brazen Heads: Headhunting in Elizabethan Drama," Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 4, nos. 3-4 ( 1983 ): 176.
⁸²	Holinshed, p. 552.

⁸³	The Political Songs of England from the Reign of John to That of Edward II, trans. and ed. Thomas Wright (London, 1839 ), p. 260.
⁸⁴	Tyler (n. 39 above) also observes that the "young Edward III . . . speak[s] . . . of treason rather than murder" (p. 56), but she understates the thematic significance of the distinction by viewing it strictly as Marlowe's affirmation of his dramatic interest in the political responsibilities of kingship.
⁸⁵	Dollimore, p. 237.