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

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-05

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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.

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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.

In terms of sexual politics as well as in most other respects, Edward II, Marlowe's grimly realistic, tightly structured tragedy of royal weakness, is infinitely more sophisticated and complex than Peele's gallimaufry of chronicle epic, romance, and supernatural legend. The dramatic action is based almost exclusively on Holinshed, supplemented by Fabyan, Stow, and probably Grafton, (8) but effectively compressed to dramatize a ruinous sequence of events spanning more than two decades so as to highlight King Edward's regnal ineptitude, the de casibus rise and fall of Mortimer (his overreaching chief adversary), the king's rejection of his queen for his male favorites (Gaveston and Spencer, Jr.), the civil chaos resulting from these conflicts, and, most importantly, the degradation, intense personal suffering, and sadistic death of Edward himself as both man and monarch. Showing no interest whatever in the sanctity of kingship despite the savage humiliation of which Edward himself becomes the victim, Marlowe concentrates on the intersection of sexual magnetism with political power at the level of human desire and frustration; and the tragedy is notable for being the only Elizabethan play to portray the homoerotic passions of a major character with honesty, psychological insight, and tragic sympathy.

Illegitimacy as a threat to monarchical succession ceases to be an issue. Edward's sexual liaisons with male lovers obviously present no danger of unwanted progeny, and we learn of Queen Isabella's adultery with Mortimer after she has been driven from her husband's bed (the couple "kiss while they conspire," she continuing hypocritically to bear "a face of love" to the fallen king [4.6.13-14]) only after Edward's son has been clearly established as heir apparent. Mortimer commands a military force in Prince Edward's "right" (4.4.17) well before his father's dethronement and aspires no higher than to be Lord Protector (5.2.12, 5.4.62) after the boy's accession as Edward III. Marlowe is far from demonizing the protagonist's deviant sexuality in a crudely moralistic way as the mortal sin from which the political disasters of the play inevitably flow. Sodomy for Elizabethans was indeed a capital offense, but, as is now widely recognized, remarkably few prosecutions for it occurred, (9) and Mortimer's uncle, a senior baron who opposes Edward for weightier reasons, defends the king's obsession with Gaveston as a passing and relatively harmless proclivity of youth, citing classical precedents--Alexander the Great, Hercules, Achilles, Cicero, and Socrates:

The mightiest kings have had their minions ... And not kings only, but the wisest men.... 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. (1.4.390-400)

The political conflicts of the play are rooted in a contest of adamant wills--of assertion and defiance involving the clash of egos, class struggle, and the good of the commonwealth in competition with royal prerogative and all-consuming personal desire. Gaveston and Spencer Jr. are hated and hunted to their deaths not because of their sexual propensities but because their amorous relationships with Edward alter the traditional power structure of the realm. From the perspective of the hereditary aristocracy, obsessive love affairs between a reigning sovereign and a "minion," whether he be the "basely born" Gaveston (1.4.402) or the "base upstart" Spencer (3.2.21), invert the time-honored hierarchy of respect and authority, rendering the feudal source of national honor and prestige passive, manipulable, and capable of being exploited for private advantage. Edward outrages his court by turning over the Great Seal of England to Gaveston to "Save or condemn" at will in the king's name (1.1.167-69) and by seating his "base peasant" beside him on the throne where the queen ought to sit in a symbolically disruptive act that makes the favorite politically equal to himself (1.4.7-9).

But Marlowe also ironizes the stereotypical and much satirized relationship between master and minion since Gaveston plays the symbolic role of Edward's submissive "Ganymede" (1.4.180) or adolescent boy (at 1.1.143 Edward likens him to the beautiful lad Hylas and himself to the bereaved Hercules) while nevertheless asserting himself ambitiously as a grown man, thus dominating his protector so as to share royal power and wealth. Holinshed, the principal source, describes the Gascon favorite as "a goodly gentleman and a stout" who "would not once yeeld an inch" to his enemies. (10) Edward is portrayed as the sexually passive partner in the love relationship (he plays Hero to Gaveston's Leander in the latter's opening soliloquy)--a fact that becomes dramatically shocking in the anal ravishment to which the king is subjected in the death scene: Lightborn, Edward's executioner and a political extension of Mortimer's stolen power, overmasters and sodomizes his prostrate sovereign by reaming him with a red-hot spit. And the queen (now Mortimer's concubine) cruelly avenges herself upon the spouse who had estranged her by agreeing to "willingly subscribe" (5.2.20) to any fate for the deposed king that Mortimer shall devise. Her treason as a passive accessory to her husband's destruction thus becomes at once sexual and political, preparing us for the intense pathos of a moment in the murder episode where the bedraggled Edward, half-immersed in sewage and ignorant of his wife's malice, cries out:

Tell Isabel, the queen, I looked not thus When for her sake I ran at tilt in France And there unhorsed the Duke of Cleremont. (5.5.67-69)

Marlowe in fact devises a dramatic structure in which carnal passion and power politics both reinforce and obstruct each other in complex and symbolic ways, involving all the major characters--Edward II, Gaveston, Spencer Jr., Isabella, Mortimer, and even the satanic Lightborn, who caresses his royal victim in a parody of sexual foreplay before the hideous consummation of the murder itself, which takes place on a bed and involves the sufferer's being pressed down under an overturned table in addition to the fiery penetration of his fundament. Kingly failure and sodomitic rape are seen to coincide. The tragedy explores interconnections between monarchical, psychic, and sexual identity in its title figure, as well as raising complicated questions about what is natural and unnatural for a man who is both a head of state and a vulnerable...

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