Royal carnality and illicit desire in the English history plays of the 1590s.(Articles)(Critical Essay)

I

IN a famous passage defending native plays, Thomas Nashe praises dramas "borrowed out of our English Chronicles" such as The Famous Victories of Henry V and 1 Henry VI (glorifying Talbot) that confer "immortalitie" upon the nation's heroes and inspire patriotism, valor, and moral uplift in spectators; compared to the theater "beyond sea," he continues, "our Sceane is more statelye furnisht..., our representations honourable, and full of gallant resolution, not consisting, like theirs, of a Pantaloun, a Whore, and a Zanie, but of Emperours, Kings, and Princes...." (1) Honor, resolution, and stateliness do indeed abound in the stage histories performed during the decade in which Nashe wrote, but a number of these plays also contain a greater element of lust, adultery, and nonconformist sexuality than Nashe suggests. Nor is it unremarkable that the royal figures who give their names to many of the plays' titles are themselves profoundly implicated in attempted seductions, extramarital affairs, or other illicit expressions of sexual desire as well as sometimes being cuckolded. The intention of this essay is to survey some of the more obvious instances of carnality in the histories of the period, to inquire what dramatic purposes they serve, and to suggest that the pervasiveness of these elements may help illuminate the politics and cultural significance of a genre that flowered colorfully in the 1590s and thereafter rapidly declined. It is convenient to begin with the four King Edward plays--Peele's Edward I (1590-91), Marlowe's Edward II (1591-92), Shakespeare's (?) Edward III (1592-93), and the two parts of Heywood's Edward IV (1592-99)--not only because these works comprise a range of playwrights and styles but also because, the difficulties of precise dating aside, they would appear to span the decade chronologically.

II

Peele's play, which probably preceded Marlowe's since the latter seems to have borrowed verbally from it, (2) is episodic, textually garbled as the result of imperfect revision, and inconsistent in its characterization of Queen Elinor: sometimes she appears as a comedic figure, speaking in a tone of unroyal jocosity as King Edward's "sweete Nell" (line 74) (3)--as his earthy, plain-spoken but adored companion in military campaigns (including a crusade) and even as a vulgar boxer of her husband's ear; at other points she emblematizes hateful Spanish pride, being portrayed as a witch-like foreign princess (Elinor of Castile) who would have the beards of all her male subjects shaved off and the breasts of all women mutilated, and who is given to haughty, egregiously inflated rhetoric. By the end of the play she has become the "scourge of England" (line 2104), an "accursed monster" (line 2473) guilty of both murder and adultery, although her deathbed repentance is represented as sincere. Apart from the use of chronicle material for the depiction of Edward's conquest of Wales and Scotland and the influence of Tamburlaine for the tone of Edward's more vaunting speeches, the play obviously draws upon the traditions of balladry and romantic comedy (several scenes invoke the holiday ambience and greenwood setting of the Robin Hood legend) like that represented by the anonymous Fair Em (1589-91?) and Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589-92) and The Scottish History of James IV (1590?). (4) A pageant in the middle of the play presents Edward's "beautuous lovely Queene" (line 1452) discovered in her tent, having just been delivered of the Prince of Wales (the future Edward II) whom she ceremoniously presents to the king for christening: "He is thine owne, as true as he is thine" (line 1479). The legitimacy of royal descent is thus celebrated with regal pomp and much lyrical effusion in an episode that echoes the equally ceremonial presentation of the crown to the title character as successor of Henry III in the opening scene.

The final section of Edward I then vilifies Elinor almost beyond recognition, concentrating on her barbaric cruelty, her jealousy of the Mayoress of London (whom she poisons by means of an adder applied to her breast), and on her "loose delights" (line 2466) and "lawles lust" (line 2517); in a death-bed confession the queen reveals that she has violated her marriage to King Edward by sleeping with his brother Edmund and by conceiving her daughter Joan of Acon (now married to the Earl of Gloucester) not legitimately as everyone had supposed, but rather by "a leacherous Frier" (line 2579). The "tragic" matter of the drama, which ends with the deaths of both Queen Elinor and Joan (after the latter's bastardy has been revealed to her), is drawn from two ballads. (5) One of these, as in the play, recounts the poisoning of the mayoress and the miraculous incident by which the queen is punished for her arrogance by being swallowed up by the earth at Charing Cross and resurrected at Queenhithe; the other, concerning a different Elinor (the wife of Henry II) but adapted by Peele for the reign he was dramatizing, tells the story of how the dying queen confesses her carnal sins to two French friars who are really the king and a high official in disguise. In Peele the second friar becomes King Edward's offending brother. The play's blackening of Elinor's character seems to reflect popular anti-Spanish feeling, perhaps exacerbated by the recent Armada against England and the memory that "bloody Mary" (Queen Elizabeth's Catholic predecessor on the throne) had been the daughter of Catherine of Aragon as well as the wife of Philip II. Peele's text contains a vague reference to the "Proud incest" (line 1689) of the Spanish royal family into which Elinor had been born. Although Elizabethan audiences would hardly have known the genealogical particulars--the fact, for instance, that the pope had dissolved the marriage of her grand-parents on grounds of consanguinity and that her grandfather's earlier marriage had also brought on papal condemnation for the same reason--they would surely be aware that Spanish royalty was notorious for inbreeding and intermarriage. (6)

Edward I is more interested in romance, stage spectacle, and the patriotic celebration of "merrie England" (line 521) than it is seriously concerned with politics. Nevertheless, as Ribner points out, the play makes clear that "kings must treat their subjects as they would be treated themselves" (90), and Queen Elinor, in contrast to her husband, becomes a negative example of good relations with her English subjects. Just as importantly, the play underlines the dangerous threat to stable rule that illicit sexuality within a royal marriage can present. While Edward demonstrates his prowess as a warrior-hero and defender of his country against traitors and military enemies, his foreign wife, although she bears him a legitimate heir, undermines his position by unpopular displays of un-English arrogance and is finally revealed to have been unfaithful to his bed--"a Traitresse to [her] Lord" (line 2477) and the perpetrator of an "incestuous sinne" (line 2552) with the king's closest ally, his brother Edmund.

Peele's drama, like most Elizabethan histories, endorses the doctrine of divine right: the queen herself alludes to Edward's "sacred person" (line 1666) while the Earl of March pursues rebels who "havock ... Englands sacred roialty" (line 2070). Elinor's extramarital lust thus counts as an insidious form of treason, not only to God but to her liege lord--an assault not only upon the family of which she is theoretically the responsible mother but also upon the state; her infidelities have imperiled both of the king's two bodies, his body natural and his body politic, as united in the sanctity of the anointed Edward and his successors. If, as Thomas Bilson wrote in 1585, the "priuate familie ... is both a part and a paterne of the common-wealth," (7) how much more vital is the solidarity of the most prominent of public families--that which embodies national sovereignty and is the breeding place of future monarchs. In the final scene of Peele's play the betrayed king, grieving for his "lovelie Elinor late deceast" (line 2640), decrees that she "Shall have [such] Honor as beseemes [her] state" (line 2629) and orders that an elaborate cross be erected in her memory, thus apparently forgiving her adultery and refusing to moralize upon it. But the play implies nonetheless that the infant Prince of Wales, who embodies the future hope of England and secures the continuity of Edward's line, is legitimate as much in spite of his mother's character as because of it.