GAVESTON [reads]
‘My father is deceased; come, Gaveston,
And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend.’
Ah, words that make me surfeit with delight!
(1.1.1-3)
The king…exists to maintain social order, yet Edward, from the first line of Marlowe's play, inviting Gaveston to share the kingdom, instigates a sodomitical order, one that alienates his peers and his wife, driving Queen Isabella and the younger
Mortimer into an adulterous and rebellious embrace… The transgression of the legal system in Edward II starts with the
king, and it begins in the first line of the play. It stops nowhere. The figure upon which all systems of relationship between men depend, whether conducted through women or not, is the figure who, in the very exercise of his prerogatives, violates the law that he is supposed to found. The site of legitimation and. transgression at once, the king, from his opening words, announcing the death of his father and the refusal of the paternal law for the sake of friendship, institutes a sodomitical regime. In the extended sense of the term, as not only the ruination of the maintainence of male/male hierarchies through friendship, but also as the explosion of the marital tie, sodomy is the name for all behavior in the play. (Jonathan Goldberg,
Sodometries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 122-123)

GAVESTON
I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits,
Musicians that with touching of a string
May draw the pliant king which way I please.
(1.1.50-52)

MORTIMER
Why should you love him whom the world hates so?
EDWARD
Because he loves me more than all the world.
(1.1.76-77)

Small time, but in that small most greatly lived
This star of England. (Henry V, Epilogue 5-6)
Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake. (Hamlet 4.1.52-55)
To be or not to be… (Hamlet 3.1.55)
I am not what I am. (Iago in Othello 1.1.63)
I do; I will. (Prince Hal in 1 Henry IV 2.4.438)
Has he affections in him? (Measure for Measure 3.1.107)

EDWARD
Instead of ink, I’ll write it with my tears.
MORTIMER
The king is lovesick for his minion.
(1.4.86-87)
It is Gaveston’s lowly birth, not the sexual relationship between Edward and Gaveston, that truly enrages the lords. ‘Minion’ seldom passes their lips without a qualifying ‘base.’ The reunion scene, in which Gaveston first kisses Edward’s hand, then is raised by Edward to an embrace, enacts the conflict before our eyes… For the lords, it is Gaveston’s lowly station that makes him so threatening. For Edward, it is what makes
Gaveston so beguiling… In that coupling of king and commoner the lords…perceive a threat to social order itself. In the orthodox hierarchy of Elizabethan society, power was conceived as a force that properly
operates in one direction only, from ‘higher’ to ‘lower’ – from god to mortal, from king to subject, from older to younger, from male to female… With politics, as with gender and social class, Edward II
demonstrates that power works in two directions. (Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakepseare’s
England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 215-216)

MORTIMER SENIOR
And seeing his mind so dotes on Gaveston,
Let him without controlment have his will.
The mightiest kings have had their minions:
Great Alexander loved Hephaestion...
Then let his grace, whose youth is flexible,
And promiseth as much as we can wish,
Freely enjoy that vain, light-headed earl,
For riper years will wean him from such toys.
(1.4.390-401)

MORTIMER
Uncle, his wanton humour grieves not me,
But this I scorn, that one so basely born
Should by his sovereign’s favour grow so pert
And riot it with the treasure of the realm.
While soldiers mutiny for want of pay
He wears a lord’s revenue on his back,
And Midas-like he jets it in the court
With base outlandish cullions at his heels,
Whose proud fantastic liveries make such show
As if that Proteus, god of shapes, appeared.
I have not seen a dapper jack so brisk.
He wears a short Italian hooded cloak,
Larded with pearl, and in his Tuscan cap
A jewel of more value than the crown.
Whiles other walk below, the king and he
From out a window laugh at such as we,
And flout our train, and jest at our attire.
Uncle, ’tis this that makes me impatient.
(1.4.402-419)

But this I scorn, that one so basely born
Should by his sovereign’s favour grow so pert
And riot it with the treasure of the realm.
While soldiers mutiny for want of pay
He wears a lord’s revenue on his back,
And Midas-like he jets it in the court
Mortimer charges Gaveston with a travesty of class, not gender, the theatricalization of social difference, not sexual difference. Indeed, sexual and social issues are explicitly separated, for Mortimer Junior responds, at this moment in the play, to his uncle, who counsels him not to oppose the king… “Uncle, his wanton humor grieves not me,” Mortimer replies… This is an extraordinary moment in the play, precisely because it is usual to suppose that social and sexual irregularities are mutually causative and equally to be condemned.
Mortimer's allowance of the sexual relation is as disarming as the flaunt delivered by Gaveston's transvestite theater, for Mortimer countenances what the antitheatricalists abhor, sexual behavior usually thought to be tantamountto social dissolution. (Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries p. 117)

He wears a short Italian hooded cloak,
Larded with pearl, and in his Tuscan cap
A jewel of more value than the crown.

Whiles other walk below, the king and he
From out a window laugh at such as we,
And flout our train, and jest at our attire.
Uncle, ’tis this that makes me impatient.

Edward’s enemies: a shift in motivation from ‘a matter of principle’ to ‘self-interest’
• This shift is a gradual one.
• Edward’s enemies are as self-interested as they accuse him of being.

To talk of an individual in this period as being or not being ‘a homosexual’ is an anachronism and ruinously
misleading… Only two of the possible [alternatives], bugger and sodomite, were in general use and neither was synonymous with homosexuality alone. ‘Buggery’ could be used with as equal ease to mean bestiality as homosexuality… ‘Sodomy’ was a concept at least as broad… It could also be a heterosexual sin. (Alan Bray,
Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), pp. 14, 16)
Above all else, what God created was order… It is a view of the world in which Nature is a unity, as is its Creator…
‘So that,’ as Sir John Fortescue wrote, ‘there is nothing which the bond of order does not embrace’. Nothing except an inescapable possibility: that the chaos of the first day of Creation when ‘the earth was without form, and void’ might come again. It is here that homosexuality had its place in the myth, altogether outside the ordered world of creation. In Michael Drayton’s Peirs Gaveston the Creation retreats in horror when Gaveston’s love for Edward II falls into homosexuality… [Homosexuality] was not conceived as part of the created order at all; it was part of its dissolution. And as such it was not a sexuality in its own right, but existed as a potential for confusion and disorder in one undivided sexuality. Hence the absence already commented on of any satisfactory parallel for the contemporary use of ‘homosexuality’ in the sense of an alternative sexuality. What sodomy and buggery represented – and homosexuality was only part of these – was rather the disorder in sexual relations that, in
principle at least, could break out anywhere… In John Taylor’s narrative of the reign of Edward II in his The English
Monarchs, it is not the homosexual nature of the King’s passion for Gaveston – a subject on which Taylor is ambiguous – that brings him to disaster… In Taylor’s history the catastrophe is brought about by Edward’s offence against orrder, his ‘immoderate love’. (Bray, pp. 23-26)
[In cases of prosecution for sodomy] what was at issue was primarily the maintenance of the social order, in particular the maintenance of parental rights, and only secondarily the enforcement of the legislation against homosexuality. So long as homosexuality was expressed through established social institutions, in normal times the courts were not concerned with it; and generally this meant patriarchal institutions – the household, the
educational system, homosexual prostitution and the like. (Bray, p. 74)

Heresy, homosexuality, and treason were blended in the famous allegations made against the playwright
Christopher Marlowe by the sinister figure of the informant Richard Baines. For the authorities the most alarming part would have been the blasphemous and treasonable nature of the remarks he is supposed to have made (among others), ‘that the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe’ and ‘that he
had as good a right to coin as the Queen of England’; but Baines went a step further and quietly added enough to colour them and enhance their plausibility. Marlowe, he implies, is a sodomite: ‘St John the
Evangelist,’ Baines reports Marlowe as saying, ‘was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom,
that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma’ and ‘that all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools’.
Although a sceptic he is also, according to Baines, a Papist sympathiser: ‘if there be any God or any good
religion, then it is in the Papists.’… Whether or not there is any truth in Baines’s stories, these were connections in which people were inclined to believe: the Papist was a sodomite and a traitor. (Bray 20)
For hauing reuoked againe into England his old mate the said Peers de Gaueston, he receiued him into most high fauour, creating him earle of Cornewall, and lord of Man, his principall secretarie, and lord chamberlaine of the realme, through whose companie and societie he was suddenlie so corrupted, that he burst out into most heinous vices; for then vsing the said Peers as a procurer of his disordred dooings, he began to haue his nobles in no regard, to set nothing by their instructions, and to take small heed vnto the good gouernement of the commonwealth, so that within a while, he gaue himselfe to wantonnes, passing his time in voluptuous pleasure, and riotous excesse: and (to helpe them forward in that kind of life, the foresaid Peers, who (as it may be thought, he had sworne to make the king to forget himselfe, and the state, to the which he was called) furnished his court with companies of iesters, ruffians, flattering parasites, musicians, and other vile and naughtie ribalds, that the king might spend both daies and nights in iesting, plaieng, banketing, and in such other filthie and dishonorable exercises. (Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles
of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587), Vol. 6, p. 318; accessed via The Holinshed Project http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/ )

Through the torture of Edward, a strictly homophobic connection appears to be made between the sodomitical body and excrement. It is not a connection of which Mortimer or the queen necessarily needs to be conscious; indeed their irrationally compulsive degradation of Edward suggests that it is not… Both the martyrdom and murder of Edward imply a violent and deeply embedded ‘homophobia’. (Jonathan Crewe,
‘Disorderly Love: Sodomy Revisited in Marlowe’s
Edward II’, Criticism 51.3 (2009), 385-99; pp. 395-396)
[available via Literature Online]

MORTIMER
Uncle, his wanton humour grieves not me,
But this I scorn, that one so basely born
Should by his sovereign’s favour grow so pert
And riot it with the treasure of the realm.
While soldiers mutiny for want of pay
He wears a lord’s revenue on his back,
And Midas-like he jets it in the court
With base outlandish cullions at his heels,
Whose proud fantastic liveries make such show
As if that Proteus, god of shapes, appeared.
I have not seen a dapper jack so brisk.
He wears a short Italian hooded cloak,
Larded with pearl, and in his Tuscan cap
A jewel of more value than the crown.
Whiles other walk below, the king and he
From out a window laugh at such as we,
And flout our train, and jest at our attire.
Uncle, ’tis this that makes me impatient.
(1.4.402-419)

[M]ark the flocking and running to theaters and curtains, daily and hourly, night and day, time and tide, to see plays and interludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes, and the like is used, as is wonderful to behold. Then these goodly pageants being done, every mate sorts to his mate, everyone brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly)
they play the sodomites, or worse. And these be the fruits of plays and interludes, for the most part. (Philip Stubbes,
‘Anatomy of Abuses’ (1583), in Shakespeare’s Theater: A
Sourcebook (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 115-
123; 121) [available online via the library catalogue]

How to make a film of a gay love affair and get it
commissioned. Find a dusty old play and violate it.
Heterosexuals have fucked up the screen so completely that there’s hardly room for us to kiss there. Marlowe outs the past – why don’t we out the present?... This book is dedicated to: the repeal of all
anti-gay laws, particularly Section 28. (Derek Jarman,
Queer Edward II (London: The British Film Institute,
1991), p. v)

MORTIMER
Lightborn,
Come forth.
(5.4.21-22)

LIGHTBORN
Ne’er was there any
So finely handled as this king shall be.
(5.5.39-40)

MORTIMER
Base Fortune, now I see that in thy wheel
There is a point to which when men aspire
They tumble headlong down. That point I touched,
And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher,
Why should I grieve at my declining fall?
Farewell, fair queen. Weep not for Mortimer,
That scorns the world, and as a traveller
Goes to discover countries yet unknown.
(5.6.59-66)
HAMLET
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns... (Hamlet 3.1.77-79)

GUISE
That like I best that flies beyond my reach.
Set me to scale the high pyramides,
And thereon set the diadem of France;
I’ll either rend it with my nails to naught,
Or mount the top with my aspiring wings,
Although my downfall be the deepest hell.
(The Massacre at Paris, Scene 2, 42-47)
Students of Marlowe know his propensity to 'unfettered soaring' as the signature of the ‘overreacher’, epitomised in the
Ovidian myths of Icarus and Phaethon. But we can profitably historicise Marlowe's high-flying verse in terms of the
Western sublime, as practiced by Lucan, Ovid and Longinus. (Patrick Cheney, ‘Edward II: Marlowe, Tragedy and the Sublime’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, ed. by Emma Smith et al. (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), pp. 174-
187; 178)