Marlowe, Edward II, and the Cult of Elizabeth Essay Example For Students

Marlowe, Edward II, and the Cult of Elizabeth Essay Introduction I recognise my title may appear an archaic reversion to the critical discourse of the later 1980quot;s: after all, Edward II is one of a select group of Elizabethan literary performances that has so far failed to arouse much critical interest in such terms. This state of affairs is surprising for several reasons. There was, for instance, a strong and continuing Elizabethan and Jacobean curiosity about the reign of Edward II and the years immediately following his death I have in mind the writings of Heywood, Jonson, and, above all, Michael Drayton, not to mention the important account of Edwardquot;s Queen, Isabel of France, in Foxequot;s Actes and Monumentes, and Elizabeth Careyquot;s Edward II. On the other hand, the playquot;s relative neglect is understandable. Like Shakespearequot;s Lovequot;s Labourquot;s Lost or King John, for example, Edward II represents power relations in ways that may seem, at first sight, to be unassimilable to some contemporary interpretive procedures, or at least inconsistent with some venerable and resilient assumptions. We have only to recall the very powerlessness of the rulers depicted in these plays, together with the scrutiny and questioning to which their words are routinely subjected by other speakers. Claude Summers has located the playquot;s heterodoxy in its refusal to subscribe to a comforting Tudor political myth: in the words of Marlowequot;s Edward Am I a king and must be overruled? 1. 1. 134. An important element in the context of Edward II is the widespread 1590quot;s interest in Mortimer and in the Baronsquot; Wars, but I do not wish to elaborate on this phenomenon; rather, I seek to relate Edward II to the cult of Elizabeth, suggesting that it participates fully in the discursive procedures that surrounded the Tudor monarchy. Let me state my argument at its starkest: I propose that in Marlowequot;s play the image of the king may be construed as a negative exemplum, being defined negatively in terms of the well established cult of Queen Elizabeth. Similarly, Shakespearequot;s King Lear establishes a pointed contrast between the assiduously promoted public image of King James as judge, patriarch and unifier of the kingdoms of Britain, and Shakespearequot;s depiction of Lear, the last ruler of the whole island, as one who judges foolishly, fragments his family and carves up his realm. Like the world of Lear, that of Edward II is constructed as an admonitory negative example for the present. Moreover, the parallels extend beyond the age to the more specific question of the ruler as an individual, and that, of course, was a question that could hardly be considered or even imagined outside the terms of reference of Elizabethquot;s cult. Allow me to cite another negative example. In Shakespearequot;s Twelfth Night a text which operates, as Marlowequot;s does, through gender reversal, Orsino seems designed almost as an anthology of many of the personal inadequacies that might hamstring a ruler. More specifically, his failings are those conventionally associated in Tudor misogynist discourse with a female ruler. He is, as women were held to be by such writers, changeable, governed by his moods and passions. And he falls in love with one of his followers, who thereby becomes specially favoured among his entourage, consequently threatening the political system and the delicate balance of relationships among his subjects. He is therefore, like Edward II, the antithesis of Queen Elizabeth: it is against the ideal of the ruler as enshrined in her cult that he is judged and found wanting. Culture of the Early 1590quot;s By the early 1590quot;s, Elizabeth might have been forgiven for thinking that such issues had been thoroughly ventilated a generation before, at the time of her accession and in the question of her marriage. But one of the features of the Elizabethan settlement was that nothing was ever finally settled: there was always room for renegotiation, revaluation, changes of emphasis. Alan Sinfield has argued for an understanding of the Elizabethan state not as a static totality whose power structure is revealed in the ideology of monarchy, but as diverse and changing, a site of profound contradictions. Certainly, it was a site of conflicts, checks and balances, not just between the aristocracy and an emergent, upwardly mobile middling sort, but also between groups within the nobility. Elizabeth had evolved a strategy for dealing with the competitive pack of nobles who served her: Sir Robert Naunton observed that The principal note of her reign will be, that she ruled much by faction and parties, which she herself both made, upheld, and weakened, as her own great judgement advised he commented that we find no Gaveston, Vere, or Spencer to have swayed alone during forty-four years. Elizabethquot;s cult had a purpose: its central image of singleness and immutability the Queenquot;s motto was Semper eadem, always the same was constructed in response to threats of fracture, disruption, and rebellion. And its most extreme manifestations in the 1590quot;s imply profound anxieties both about the current political climate and about the unknowable almost literally unthinkable future that would unfold after Glorianaquot;s death. Marlowe constantly nudges the spectator to find contemporary parallels. Thus, although the historical Edward had been in his early forties at his death, Marlowe explicitly makes him an old man he is aged at 5. 2. 118, Old Edward at 5. 2. 23, and is compared to an old wolf at 5. 2. 7. The world of the play is that of the money economy, in which the crownquot;s finances were under increasing strain. It is a site of conflict between an old aristocracy and a new one. It is a world like that of the 1590quot;s, in which financing wars in France empties the treasury coffers. Leah Marcus has recently shown how Shakespearequot;s Joan La Pucelle in 1 Henry VI is presented as part of critique of the Queenquot;s hesitations in foreign polity, and there is a similar contemporary implication in the depiction of Edwardquot;s failure to meet his financial obligations. By 1592, there was a disruptive influx of deserters from the French wars, some of whom were reported as using most slanderous speeches of . . . er Highness: in the following year, these wretched men crowded round the Queen and petitioned her at every opportunity: a contemporary wrote, The Queen is troubled wherever she takes the air with these miserable creatures. Leicester had died in 1588, Walsingham in 1590, and Burghley was not in good health. It was clear that the Queen would have to listen to the voices of the younger generation, and that the question of the succession would lie beneath her dealings with them, just as the question of marriage had informed her relations with the older generation at the time of her accession. So the controversies and tensions of the 1560quot;s surfaced again a quarter of a century later, in the time of confusion and trepidation that followed the scarcely believable victory over the Spanish Armada. Courtly Performances The courtly behaviours that we see in the play are recognisably Elizabethan. To cite some relatively trivial instances, early in the second act, Edward compares himself to Danaequot;s lover, Gaveston to the shepherd seeing the first shoots of spring. Their self-presentation relates them to the fashions of Ovidian and pastoral writing in the 1590s. While earlier Mortimer had left the court like a disaffected 1590quot;s melancholic, Unto the forest . . . To live in grief and baleful discontent, For now my lord the king regards me not . . . . This represents the typical behaviour of the political exile, or disaffected lord the Earl of Essex regularly acted in this way in the 1590quot;s. Marlowequot;s Isabella likewise declares I will endure a melancholy life, And let him frolic with his minion 1. 2. 66-7. Gaveston the Elizabethan Courtier The most striking example, however, is Gaveston himself, who is figured as the quintessential Elizabethan Courtier. He is praised by Spencer, for instance, as the liberal earl of Cornwall recalling Elyotquot;s observation that liberality resteth not in the quantity or quality of things that be given, but in the natural disposition of the giver. When in the first scene of the play Gaveston anticipates the performance of his new role as royal favourite, he uses terms that explicitly echo the behaviours and discourses of royal celebration under Elizabeth. At least one Elizabethan political theorist mounted a defence of Gaveston, arguing that although he may have been personally proud, he did little harm, and was certainly not an argument against the hereditary principle. One recent critic compares the King and Gaveston at their window to courtiers on the Elizabethan stage 1. 4. 416-8. Like Essex and Leicester, Gaveston is characterised as an impresario of courtly entertainments 10. In the early scenes of the play there is a sense that the nobles are mainly moved by snobbery and that Gaveston is in his anarchic way on the crowdquot;s side against entrenched privilege. Technological development EssayHe is punctilious in his greeting to Gaveston at 2. 2. 68 Welcome master Secretary. In the space of a few dozen lines we are apprised of a Pembrokequot;s support for the crown, when Edward says Pembroke shall bear the sword before the King, and the Earl replies, And with this sword Pembroke will fight for you 1. . 352; b Pembrokequot;s support for the killing of Gaveston in his taking an oath to that effect 2. 2. 108; and c his sensitivity to popular opinion, This will be good news to the common sort 1. 4. 92. In the debate in 2. 5 where the lords consider how they should respond to the Kingquot;s request for Gavestonquot;s return, it is Pembroke who proposes a solution: Because his majesty so earnestly Desire to see the man before his death, I will upon mine honour undertake To carry him and bring him back again . . 78-81. And his disinterest is stressed: My lords, I will not over-woo your honours, But if you dare trust Pembroke with the prisoner, Upon mine oath I will return him back. 87-9 Lancaster is given words that confirm the trust reposed in Pembrokequot;s honesty I say, let him go on Pembrokequot;s word 91. Pembroke subsequently rebukes Arundel with a breach of chivalric honour in abducting Gaveston: Your lordship doth dishonour to your self / And wrong our lord, your honourable friend 3. . 9-10. Arundelquot;s narrative of these events includes a defence of Pembrokequot;s behaviour saying he said least during the debate on rebellion and then reporting that The Earl of Pembroke mildly thus bespake . . . I will this undertake, to have him hence And see him redelivered to your hands. 3. 2. 108-112 Blame is specifically not attached to Pembroke Arundel goes out of his way to identify Warwick as the dishonourable and untrustworthy villain. It is at such moments that we recall the words on the title page informing us that Marlowequot;s play had been publiquely acted by the right honorable the Earle of Pembrook his seruantes, and there are episodes when this fact is reflected in the script very crudely. So, for instance, when Warwick appears in the first moments of the third act to say: My lord of Pembrokequot;s men, / Strive you no longer 3. 1. 7- 8, the words would have had a special resonance in performance. Ambiguity Spencerquot;s advice to Baldock about how he should turn himself from a scholar into a courtier has some relevance to Marlowequot;s own situation. It is not servility that gains favour, Spencer says, You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute, And now and then stab as occasion serves 42-3 If we look at the important scene 2. 2 which features the devices by Mortimer and Lancaster, Mortimerquot;s device of the diseased cedar may recall the use of a tree to represent the state res publica during Elizabethquot;s entry pageant in the City of London in 1559. It is parallelled by Lylyquot;s use of the image in Sapho and Phao, but is also fairly commonplace. 18] Lancasterquot;s emblem of the flying fish that faces death whether it flies or swims is hardly more complex or ambiguous. It may well be the crudity of the images, their lack of teasing ambiguity or subtlety, that makes them unsuitable. As is now widely recognised, ambiguity was a feature of Elizabethan courtly performance. In the Arte of Rhetorique, Thomas Wilson had described how the miseries of the courtierquot;s life could be described by the use of similitudes, examples, comparisons from one thing to another, apte translacions, and heaping of allegories. And one of the most famous allegorical performances of Elizabethquot;s reign occurred at Kenilworth, where the Queen was entertained by Robert Dudley from 9 July 1575. Marlowe collapses history, reminding us of this episode when he has Leicester say to the King in the fourth act Your majesty must go to Killingworth 4. 4. 81. Dudley had collapsed history too, in a way that connects his show with Marlowequot;s play. When Elizabeth entered the castle precincts, she made her way into the newly-constructed tiltyard by passing under an edifice called Mortimerquot;s Tower. William Dugdale in his antiquities of Warwickshire reports that Leicester caused the tower to be decorated with the Arms of Mortimer . . . cut in stone. Now Leicester was clearly invoking the memory of a previous owner of Kenilworth, Roger Mortimer, who had staged a great pageant based on the idea of the round table in 1279, and his own diversions for the Queen explicitly tapped into the same Arthurian myth. But Dugdale and he cannot have been alone took the arms to be those of a different Mortimer, grandson of the above, namely our and Marlowequot;s Mortimer, the Earl of March, lover of a Queen who shared Elizabethquot;s name, and therefore, in Dugdalequot;s view, a precedent of sorts for Dudley himself. Perhaps the inscription on the tower participates in the same strategy of obliquity that Marlowequot;s Mortimer deploys with his letter to the murderers. The application of the inscription could be taken as a powerful declaration of desire, of courtship: but it could equally plausibly be glossed as an act of courtesy, as a fulsome welcome by a generous host. Like most Elizabethan treatments of political questions, Edward II is necessarily oblique, constructed like Mortimerquot;s letter or Dudleyquot;s inscription on the basis of what Annabel Patterson in Censorship and Interpretation following Pierre Bourdieu refers to as functional ambiguity. The playquot;s commentators have connected such ambiguity with its tendency to question, to qualify, to undermine. 23] They might also have connected them with Elizabethquot;s crab-wise journey towards signing the death-warrant of Mary Queen of Scots. The play seems designed to prevent comparisons from hardening into allegory, allusions from implying applications. If Edward is a negative example of Elizabeth, what are we to make of Isabella? Her very name would have had a special resonance for an Elizabethan audience, and there were many attempts in the period to analyse her behaviour, to ask if her rebellion was justified, to investigate the power-relations in her involvement with Mortimer. 24] In Marlowequot;s version, her subjection to Mortimer also constitutes a warning, and involves the danger of a Protectorate: he tells her, erect your son with all the speed we may . . . that I may be protector over him 5. 2. 11-12. The focus of the play is partly on the king himself, of course. And as such it poses a negative example, an opposite model of monarchy from the one Elizabeth was acting out. But it also investigates the predicament of those who have to live under a monarch who thwarts expectations and repudiates convention. Marlowequot;s play is an anthology of career moves for the Elizabethan courtier: the range stretches from those who are presented as honourably negotiating the conflicts of loyalty implicit in the courtierquot;s life Pembroke and Leicester through those who succumb to their pressures Warwick, Kent, Arundel to those who are fatally drawn to the centres of power, in order to literalise the metaphoric eroticism of service and duty. For Gaveston, Spencer and Mortimer, the opening allegory of Actaeon is actualised in their experience as a salutary warning to future ages. But as Debra Belt has shown, Marlowequot;s is a highly self-conscious art, in which acts of speech and of interpretation are shown to be complex and interlocking. If one version of the Elizabethan ideal in the play is the young Edward III, virginal, ruthless, and decisive, then perhaps Marlowequot;s own ambiguities are understandable. It is as if he has taken to heart Spencerquot;s advice to Baldock You must cast the scholar off / And learn to court it like a gentleman 2. 1. 31-2. Marlowe approaches Diana more obliquely than Mortimer or Gaveston; in so doing he produces in Edward II one of the most charged and subtle dramatic engagements on the public stage with the cult of Elizabeth.