SEI.

44, 2 (Sprinig 2004): 233-253

ISSN 0039-3657

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Status, Sodomy, and the Theater in Marlowe's Edward II

DAVID STYMEIST

Stephen Orgel contends "that English Renaissance culture does not appear to have had a morbid fear of male homoerotic behavior."' Similarly, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that homosexual practice during the period did not constitute a threat because of its compatibility with heterosexuality and marriage. 2 Nevertheless, sodomy could constitute a social threat in early modern England when it was combined with issues of status transgression. 3 The notable trial of Mervin Touchet, second Earl of Castlehaven, reveals a pervasive judicial anxiety over the combination of open male homoeroticism and the failure to uphold aristocratic ideals. Castlehaven was executed in 1631 on two counts of sodomy and one of abetting rape. 4 He demonstrated considerable courage in his scaffold speech by openly denying his guilt; nevertheless, "[the] sight of the headsman . .. with the apprehension of his near approaching end, made him somewhat to change colour, and shew some signs of trembling passion; for
his hands shook a little in undoing his bandstrings . . . Then

taking leave again of the lords, the doctors, and his man, saying a very short prayer by himself, he pulled down his handkerchief over his face, and laid his head upon the block; which was taken off at one blow." 5 Castlehaven's two servants, Lawrence FitzPatrick and Giles Broadway, were also hanged for their involvement in the sodomy charges despite Lord Dorset's promises to Fitz-Patrick of legal immunity and the fact that both Broadway and Fitz-Patrick had been coerced and/or bribed into illegal sexual
David Stymeist (Ph.D., Queen's University) teaches English literature at the University of Alberta. He is a specialist in early modern drama, crime pamphlets, and travel narratives; he has published in journals such as Renaissanceand Reformation and Mosaic and has work forthcoming in Genre.

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acts by Castlehaven.i Castlehaven's trial itself contained numerous legal irregularities: he was denied the plea of "clergy," which would have prevented his civil trial and subsequent execution for the rape charge; imprisoned without adequate council in the Tower of London for six months; not allowed legal council during the trial proceedings; his wife and servants, who had taken oaths of allegiance to him, were allowed to present evidence against him; several of his jurors had shown past prejudice against Castlehaven; and the prosecution liberally expanded the legal definition of sodomy.7 The Crown described Castlehaven's sexual conduct as a threat to sexual differentiation, morality, domestic order, and even the nation's health. One attorney argued that "never poet invented, nor historian writ of any deed so foul" and described these sexual acts as "of a pestilential nature" by which "the land is defiled" and "so abominable a sin, which brought such plagues after it"' Sodomy was also described as an act of emasculation, which disrupted gender norms: "the earl used lBroadway'sJ body as the body of a woman." 9 In this trial, which built on earlier charges against Lord Hungerford (1540) and the Earl of Oxford (1 580s), the judiciary actively constructed the sodomite as a scapegoat, whose execution would cleanse society by removing the source of "plague."'0 Nevertheless, Castlehaven was not brought to trial solely because of his "aberrant" sexuality but because of a confluence of political agendas. Building on Alan Bray's observation that sodomy was associated with atheism, witchcraft, popery, heresy, and sedition, Jonathan Goldberg convincingly argues that "sodomy named sexual acts only in particularly stigmatizing contexts."" Castlehaven's trial seems to bear this out, for the main impetus behind the trial was his son's complaint to the king; James Touchet had just reached his majority and desired to take over his father's estate before its financial ruin and before his father convinced James's wife to bear children fathered by household servants. As Cynthia B. Herrup has noted, it was not solely sexual crimes that mobilized official forces against the earl, but the perception that he was publicly defiling his stewardship of a noble household, especially in his invitation of "the disparagement of his blood in the next generation."' 2 Castlehaven also threatened the English caste system with his excessive monetary generosity toward his male lovers, who were of inferior social standing. '3 The prosecutors accused Castlehaven of betraying his obligations "to God, to his gender, to his status, and to his country." '4 Thus, the earl was accused, tried, and executed because of a confluence of perceived sexual immorality and political and religious radi-

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calism. Neither his sodomitical acts, his involvement in his wife's rape, his purported irreligiosity, his disregard for proper hierarchical relationships to his servants, nor his financial improprieties would have been sufficient in themselves to bring a peer to the executioner's block, but together these actions were enough of a social threat to activate the judiciary.' 5 In Edward II, Christopher Marlowe dramatizes the history of an English king who, like Castlehaven, is accused of allowing his homoeroticism to take precedence over his political and social obligations; in this, the play not only debates the criminality of sodomy but also indirectly engages in the early modern controversy about the sodomitical theater. 16 The early modern commercial theater acquired a disadvantageous association with male homoeroticism, largely because of the practice of cross-dressing. For example, the author 1. G., often identified as John Greene, attacks the theater as the site where youth is corrupted to sexual vice: "then begin they to repeate the lascivious acts and speeches they have heard, and thereby infect their minde with wicked passions, so that in their secret conclaves they play the Sodomits, or 7 worse. And these for the most part are the fruits of Playes."' Similarly, John Rainoldes in Th' Overthrow of Stage-Playes explicitly associates the theater's transvestism with homoerotic sodomy: "[W]hat sparkles of lust to that vice the putting of womens
attire on men may kindle in uncleane affections . . . we shall

perceive that hee, who condemneth the female hoore and male, and, detesting speciallie the male by terming him a dogge, rejecteth both their offeringes with these wordes that they both are abomination to the Lorde thy God, might well controll likewise the meanes and occasions whereby men are transformed into dogges, the sooner, to cutt off all incitements to that beastlie filthines, or rather more then beastlie. "1 8 With its validation of sexual alterity, theatrical cross-dressing could be seen as threatening to the social order of early modem England, which was dependent on stable 9 Stephen Greenblatt argues that theatrical transsexual norms. 1 vestism was a natural and unthreatening byproduct of a society that posited only one proper sex and viewed women as imperfectly formed men.2 0 Nonetheless, the reiteration of sexual difference and female subservience from court, pulpit, and religious tract seems to indicate a societal impulse to police gender divisions strictly; Phillip Stubbes insists on sexual normativity for the successful operation of society: "Our Apparell was given us as a signe distinctive to discern betwixt sex and sex, & therfore one to weare the Apparel of another sex is to participate with the

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same, and to adulterate the veritie of his owne kinde." 2 1 Stubbes, building on Anthony Munday's condemnation of the theater as a dangerously 'Camelion" art, argues that theatrical practice not only induces the "whordom & unclennes" of sodomy, but also concomitantly encourages political rebellion .22 In this cultural milieu, where the commercial theater was directly linked to an iniquitous and possibly dangerous alternative sexuality, it would have been necessary for Marlowe to negotiate carefully the representation of sodomy in his play about King Edward 11.23 Before the advent of new historical approaches, critics tended to depoliticize the sodomy in Edward II and to interpret Marlowe's presentation of the execution of sodomites as an indication that he was "naturally attracted towards cruelty and sadism." 2 4 Although critics now tend to emphasize the political aspect of Marlowe's representation of sodomy, they are divided into two distinct and opposed camps. One camp, largely emerging out of the field of queer studies, argues that Marlowe was a political subversive who actively critiques the scapegoating of homosexuals in his plays. 2 5 Gregory W. Bredbeck, for instance, argues that Piers Gaveston's political use of homoeroticism in Edward II is both deconstructive and empowering. 2 6 Jonathan Goldberg similarly argues that it is "imperative, to recognize in Marlowe a site of political resistance," for his representation of sodomy "allows for differences-sexual difference, gender difference-and allows for ways of conceiving sexual and gender construction that cannot be reduced to the normative structure of male/female relations under the modern regimes of heterosexuality."2 7 Karen Cunningham contends that Marlowe's representations of execution in Edward HI transform "a theater of pain into a drama of subversion." 2 8 Viviana Comensoli correspondingly views Edward HI as a radical sexual-social critique: "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 ... are no longer tenable." 2 9 In opposition to this first group of commentators who foreground Marlowe's cultural iconoclasm and his subversive representations of sodomy, a second critical camp contends that Marlowe's representation of sodomy is inherently and invariably "contained" by early modern ideology concerning sexual aberration. Greenblatt identifies the direct, and almost conspiratorial, co-operation of the Tudor government and the professional the-

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ater: "Each branding or hanging or disemboweling was theatrical in conception and performance, a repeatable admonitory drama enacted on a scaffold before a rapt audience. Those who threatened order[-Jthe traitor, the vagabond, the homosexual, the thief-were identified and punished accordingly. This idea of the Inotable spectacle,' the 'theater of God's judgments,' extended quite naturally to the drama itself, and, indeed, to all of literature which thus takes its rightful place as part of a vast, interlocking system of repetitions, embracing homilies and hangings, royal progresses and rote learning. "30 While noting that power "is not perfectly monolithic," Greenblatt nevertheless argues that Marlowe's "attempts to challenge this system-Tamburlaine's world conquests, Barabas's Machiavellianism, Edward's homosexuality, and
Faustus's skepticism-are .

that social construction of identity against which they struggle." 3 ' Similarly, Sara Munson Deats argues that Marlowe's radicalism is ultimately contained by a pervasive disciplinary and admonitory ideology: "the roles that Edward and Isabella ultimately select-or are constrained to perform-deviate too markedly from society's authorized subject positions, and so they must be sacrificed as scapegoats of their inflexible culture." 3 2 Dympna Callaghan furthers this assertion by contending that since male homoerotic bonds play a central role within patriarchy the sexual alliances 33 between men in the play support power rather than contest it. While Marlowe might temper his representations of male homoeroticism with partial allegiances to disciplinary justice, Edward II does not provide an entirely demonized version of alternative sexuality, in which the sodomite is figured as a monstrous perversity; rather, the representation of sodomy in the play is strategically ambivalent. In attempting to reconcile the current critical controversy, this paper contends that Edward II constitutes a cleft text that simultaneously condemns and defends the practice of executing sodomites for sexual and social crimes. In the play, Edward and Gaveston constitute a cultural threat because they insist that their homoeroticism not be divorced from their political and social identities. Thus, on one hand, Edward HI figures as a culturally anomalous defense of gender transgression, which can be linked to wider theatrical concerns with the decriminalization of alternative sexualities such as cross-dressing; in validating an alternative sexuality the play deconstructs the assumption that gender normativity is static and god-ordained rather than cultural and changeable. On the other hand, the play is also bound, in order to avoid detrimental financial and legal

. exposed as unwitting tributes to

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consequences associated with the affiliation to sexualities classified as aberrant and illegal, to defend the judicial and popular construction of the sodomite as an appropriate scapegoat, who may be brutally executed for flaunting a complex of early modern sexual, economic, and class strictures. The play's ostensible allegiance to the legal fiction that homoerotic sodomy is a criminal activity distances it from the charge of promoting male homoeroticism; by providing an admonitory show, the play can appear to concur with popular, religious, and legal prejudices, which condemn sodomy and its supposed effeminization of males. Representational ambivalence allows the play to mediate between contradictory social demands and countervailing points of force; primarily, the professional need to decriminalize sodomy due to its cultural connection to theatrical cross-dressing had to be balanced against the needs of the theater to be seen as serving an admonitory and normative role in society. The most obvious site of cultural radicalism in Edward 11 is its candid portrayal of alternative sexuality in King Edward's carnal relationship with his male courtier, Gaveston. What is most shocking, offensive, and ultimately threatening to the rebellious earls is the open and lascivious nature of Edward's love for Gaveston. If Edward had maintained his male lover solely in a sexual capacity, then the nobles could simply categorize and dismiss Gaveston as catamite, whore, or ingle (male prostitute); what menaces them is Edward's demand that Gaveston be politically recognized and given official status as royal consort. Marlowe opens his play with Gaveston explicitly exposing the sexual nature of his relationship with King Edward: Sweet prince, I come. These, these thy amorous lines Might have enforced me to have swum from France, And, like Leander, gasped upon the sand, So thou wouldst smile and take me in thy arms.3 4 The political dimension of this sodomitical romance appears in both Gaveston's ambition to garner power and titles and Edward's official demand that his homoeroticism be publicly accepted and consecrated by his nobles. During his second reunion with Edward, Gaveston openly insults the nobles of the court, who refuse to salute him and recognize his political position: Base leaden earls that glory in your birth, Go sit at home and eat your tenants' beef,

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And come not here to scoff at Gaveston, Whose mounting thoughts did never creep so low As to bestow a look on such as you. (Il.ii.74-8) Gaveston's insolent abuse of the lords, as well as commoners and the clergy, stems directly from his desire to be publicly acknowledged and the cognizance that he will never be accepted because of his status as the king's sodomite, despite acquiring the titles of Lord Chamberlain, Earl of Cornwall, Lord Governor of the Isle of Man, and Master Secretary. Lancaster questions the king on why he allows the openly ambitious and scornful Gaveston into court: "why do you thus incense your peers, / That naturally would love and honour you / But for that base and obscure Gaveston?" (I.i.98-100). Politics and the question of sodomy become inseparable in this play and constitute the significant cause of civil rebellion. The theory and practice of the king's two bodies, as summarized by Ernst H. Kantorowicz, 3 5 might have proved useful in separating personal desires from political persona and thus have saved the ruler and his nobles from public shame for private conduct. However, as Bredbeck observes, Edward and Gaveston intermingle "the temporal and the politic," creating "a conscious conflation" of these categories, and establish the causes of civil conflict. 3 6 Mortimer Senior's speech constitutes a significant rhetorical defense of the king's sexual deviation. The speech itself relies largely on classical precedent in its justification of Edward's alternative sexuality: The mightiest kings have had their minions: Great Alexander loved Hephestion; The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept; And for Patroclus stern Achilles drooped. And not kings only, but the wisest men: The Roman Tully loved Octavius, Grave Socrates, wild Alcibiades. (I.iv.390-6) Mortimer's list of great men who engaged in homoerotic relationships serves to legitimize the king's love for Gaveston. Notably, the examples of Alexander and Hercules indicate that sodomy in itself does not necessarily cause men to lose their masculinity, countering the legal and biblical fictions that show men to be

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Marlowe's EdwardH

emasculated by sexual deviation. Moreover, Mortimer Senior does not link sodomy to contagion and sin, for these legendary figures led meritorious lives variously dedicated to philosophy, rhetoric, or empire building. Here, the play contests the legal and religious fictions that alternative sexuality necessarily brings "plagues after it." Furthermore, Mortimer Junior notes that Edward's "wanton humour grieves not me" (I.iv.401): this apparent lack of concern for the king's homoeroticism tends to decriminalize sodomy in the play. While Mortimer Senior's speech has been seen as unambivalent proof of the play's openness to homoeroticism and a further indication that sodomy has little to do with the executions of Edward and Gaveston, 3 7 this speech on sexual permissiveness needs to be placed within the larger context of the play. This speech occurs during a brief and tenuous moment of reconciliation between Edward and the earls: thus, it is voiced mainly to temporarily defuse antisodomitical language that could disrupt political reconciliation. Mortimer Junior quickly switches into derisive heteronormative language. He describes how Edward's murderer would enroll his name in future chronicles by "purging of the realm of such a plague" (L.iv.270). That homoeroticism needed to be defended in a formal rhetorical manner indicates its pejorative value within the playhouse community, for the public audience were not mainly university graduates schooled on a classical discourse favorable to homoeroticism; rather, the audience's primary schooling included the church pulpit and the Tudor scaffold. Mortimer Senior's exposition on the relative innocuousness of Edward's alternative sexuality is agonistically counterbalanced. In direct opposition to affirmations of male homoeroticism, Gaveston is represented as actively and maliciously manipulating the king with his sexuality; Gaveston says that he wants "wanton poets, pleasant wits" in order to "draw the pliant king which way I please" (I.i.50, 52). Gaveston's exploitation of his sexuality to further his political and status ambitions constitutes one of the disruptive forces that lead toward Edward's misgovernance and the rebellion of his nobles. Gaveston actively fantasizes about his sexual mastery of Edward and his power to unsettle political events through his use of theater; he imagines creating a mocktragic tableau in which Acteon's desire for "a lovely boy" in "Dian's shape" leads Acteon to be ripped apart by his own hounds (I.i.60). This emblematic performance creates a disturbing allegorical parallel between the classical myth and the play's present. Diana is a thinly disguised Gaveston who teases Acteon, the double of

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the love-struck Edward who, like Acteon by the hounds, is tracked down and murdered by his own earls. 3 8 This representation of a pliant king and a manipulative male consort also serves to depict how sodomy could effeminize men; here, alternative sexuality constitutes a direct threat to gender designation and sexual hierarchy. Edward participates in transgendering, for instead of representing the standard of masculinity, as a king is expected to, Marlowe depicts Edward as demonstrating stereotyped feminine traits. In contrast to his virile and bellicose father, Longshanks, Edward's nature is "mild and calm" (I.iv.387). Furthermore, Mortimer Senior recognizes that Edward so "dotes on Gaveston" (I.iv.388); "doting" here implies a frivolous and inappropriate infatuation. Edward even describes himself as "frantic for my Gaveston" and "giddy" in his sorrow (L.iv.312, 313). Moreover, as Alan Shepard has shown, the earls dismiss Edward "as an effeminate creature content to wear 'women's favors."' 3 9 The mere fact that Edward would jeopardize his kingship for a carnal affair indicates a substantial inversion of traditional kingly masculinity. As Gaveston can "draw the pliant king which way I please," he figures a relationship in which he plays a dominant male role and Edward a submissive female role. In terms of early modern gender normativity, Edward has been largely emasculated by entering into this sodomitical relationship; in fact, it is only after Gaveston's death that Edward is able to mount a successful military campaign of revenge. Nevertheless, Gaveston also becomes effeminized in the play, complicating the simple inversion of gender roles. When Gaveston is captured by the earls, they viciously condemn his homosexuality; for instance, Lancaster calls Gaveston a "[m]onster of men" and compares him to "the Greekish strumpet," emphatically connecting his gender transgression-or being a womanish man-to the destruction of Troy (Il.v. 14-5). All the classical precedents cited in the text can be neatly divided into instances in which the effects of gender transgression are positive-such as the references to Alexander, Leander, and Hercules-or negative-as in this allusion to the destruction of Troy. Laura Levine argues that to openly dramatize individuals who were considered effeminized males, especially empowered effeminized males, directly threatened gender normativity. 4 0 The play, in order to defuse the threat to gender roles posed by dramatizing homosexuality, at times accords more with traditional homiletics, which attempted to entrench sexual norms by depicting alternative sexuality as in-

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variably producing monstrosity, plagues, and civil rebellion. By representing the dangers of gender transformation, the play attempts to elide charges that the theatrical practice "maketh the man effeminate."'4 1 Although the fact of theatrical cross-dressing could not be effaced, the message that the theater condemned sodomy and real gender transgression (as opposed to theatrical "playing") could serve to deflect criticism. While these intimations of the corrosive effect a sodomitical relationship has on kingship play a part in the antihomoerotic content in Edward H, perhaps the most virulent attack against sodomy is the inclusion of Old Testament language concerning its "unnatural" and "base" nature. This seems to contradict Stephen Guy-Bray, who argues that "ic]ertainly the fact that Edward and Gaveston are lovers does not appear to bother their enemies." 4 2 Yet, there is considerable textual evidence suggesting that their sexual deviance does bother their enemies. Classical homoerotic precedent called forth by Mortimer Senior is called into doubt when Isabella, spurned by her husband, states "never doted Jove on Ganymede / So much as he on cursed Gaveston" (L.iv. 180-1). In this, Isabella argues that Jupiter, as chief patriarch of the Roman gods, may have dallied with homosexuality, but that this expression of alternative sexuality never took precedence over his heterosexual, military, and political obligations. The earls compare Gaveston, with obvious and profane sexual innuendo, to a "night-grown mushroom" (I.iv.284). Yet, the most convincing proof of antihomoerotic language is that the opponents of Edward code his conduct with one word: "unnatural." Isabella describes the civil conflict as the "luinnatural wars" (III.i.86), Warwick calls on the king's "unnatural resolution" (III.ii.33), and Kent designates Edward as an "[ulnnatural king" (IV.i.8). Kent also certifies that the basis of Edward's "unnatural" conduct is his "looseness" (IV.i.7). Here, sodomy is directly attacked, as in Leviticus and Exodus, as well as the trials of the period, as a crime against procreation and nature. Isabella goes on to closely link the realm's ruin with Edward's deviant sexuality: "Edward ... / Whose looseness hath betrayed thy land to spoil / And made the channels overflow with blood" (IV.iv. 10-2).43 Despite the centrality of sodomy in Gaveston's and Edward's executions, it is their demand that their homoerotic relationship be publicly consecrated that activates these antisodomitical stereotypes within the play; while the category of sexual aberration legitimizes their persecution, it is the threat of class ambition that mobilizes their enemies. Coupled with the various sexual

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slurs directed against Gaveston and Edward is the ardent criticism of Gaveston's social overreaching. The two most common epithets used against Gaveston are "base" and "minion." For instance, Mortimer Junior states that he is not "as base a groom as Gaveston" and later complains that "one so basely born / Should by his sovereign's favour grow so pert" (I.iv.291, 402-3). Consistently the earls condemn Gaveston's lowly status and Edward's unseemly promotion of "the abject villain" (II.ii. 106). Comensoli argues that the emphasis on Gaveston's "baseness" signifies "the unstated cause of political and social instability-homoeroticism." While her analysis of "base" in Marlowe's play as signifying the minion's pathologized body, the site of anal filth and disease" is intriguing, 4 4 it overshadows the more common signification of "base" as connoting lower social status. The earls' ridicule of masculine homoerotics and their derision of social climbing contaminate each other and indicate the centrality of status taboos in Gaveston's demise. As with Castlehaven's trial, the imperative to maintain the class status quo enables and releases responses harshly opposed to sodomy. Breaking with many recent studies, Mario DiGangi refuses to read Marlowe's Edward as a sodomite: rather, he argues that the play may censure Edward's favoritism toward Gaveston (while still providing a positive homoerotics associated with a tradition of male friendship), but only locates "the political crime of sodomy in [Mortimer Junior's] transgressive access to the royal body."4 5 Neither Gaveston's overreaching nor Edward's disorderly homoeroticism are sufficient in themselves to spur rebellion: however, in Edward II, it is the precise combination of political ambition and sexual alterity that comprise a sufficient threat to precipitate persecution under the banner of sexual aberration. Even with Gaveston's execution at the end of the second act, the play's engagement with the politics of homoeroticism continues unabated; in fact, the pattern of status, alternative sexuality, and power is largely reduplicated in the figure of Spencer Junior. The removal of the king's new sycophantic consort becomes the focus of the earls' demands, and Spencer Junior is described in antihomoerotic terms similar to those applied to Gaveston; Spencer Junior is compared to syphilitic male genitalia that disease the kingship: "a putrifying branch / That deads the royal vine" (III.i. 162-3). Moreover, "wanton Spencer" (IV.iv.50) is directly condemned for combining status transgression, in being a "base upstart" (III.ii.2 1), a "pernicious [upstart]" (IIl.i. 165), with sexual deviancy. Out of his "love," Edward gives titles and

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honors that once belonged to Gaveston, such as the position of Lord Chamberlain, to "Spencer, ah sweet Spencer" (III.i. 145, 144). Furthermore, Edward embraces Spencer Junior in front of his enemies, which parallels an earlier scene in which Edward demanded that Gaveston "Kiss not my hand; / Embrace me .. . as I do thee" (I.i. 139-40); this public embrace emblematically physicalizes the king's relationship to Spencer. Finally, Edward himself conflates his two consorts when he describes how he has sacrificed himself for a transgressive form of love: "O Gaveston, it is for thee that I am wronged; / For me, both thou and both the Spencers died" (V.iii.41-2). Gaveston's summary execution itself participates in the social convention of the fitting end; this engagement in moral instruction indicates the play's appropriation of traditional homiletics, for Marlowe joins in the concerted effort of professional playwrights to have their artistic activity classified as admonitory instruction rather than corrupting sexual influence. In the early modern period, physical punishment was expected to precisely fit the crime, for execution rituals were much more than simply the beheading or hanging of a criminal. Public execution functioned as the preeminent form of ritual removal of the criminalized scapegoat; in this ceremonialized murder, every mark and act upon the physical body had its symbolic value. 4 6 The early modern historiographer Jean Froissart records the younger Spencer's execution as one suited for sodomites: "[H]is member a sodomite, even, it was said, with the King." 4 7 Thus, Marlowe's staging of a sodomite's execution could serve as an admonitory warning to any that might contemplate adopting an alternative sexuality. Mortimer Junior denies Gaveston's last request before execution (as well as the king's order) to see Edward; additionally, he demeans Gaveston's status by treating him like a petty thief: Away, base groom, robber of kings' renown" (II.v.70). The manner of Gaveston's death is more of an unceremonious murder than a formal execution, and is named as such by Edward, for Warwick's men "bare [Gaveston] to his death, and in a trench / Strake off his head" (III.i. 119-20). While the rebel lords behead Gaveston, as befits his social rank, they do this in the most ignominious way possible. Instead of a highly constructed public ritual in which Gaveston would get to refute his crimes before decapitation, he is executed in isolation without ceremony. Holinshed records that Gaveston was beheaded in a somewhat more ceremonial manner on Blacklow Hill in the presence of the Earl of
and . . . testicles were first cut off, because he was a heretic and

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Warwick and after an extended conference among the rebel leaders.4 8 Marlowe, by making Gaveston's death "base," participates fully in the expectation of an appropriate execution than a strictly historical reading would allow: Gaveston's "secret," i.e. sexual, crimes are reduplicated in the secretive manner of his death. Also, the image of the trench as type of open sewer or conduit creates a physical site that parallels the locale of Edward's own torture and execution and hints at and parodies the kind of criminalized sodomitical acts of which he is accused. The play's ostensible allegiance with traditional homiletics that we see in its treatment of Gaveston's death is repeated in the portrayal of Edward's execution, as the form his death takes symbolically fits his alleged sodomitical crimes. In the historical record, Queen Isabella ordered Edward's murderers "to leave no mark on his body": they circumvented the letter of her orders by killing him with a red hot spit thrust up into his bowels. 4 9 In contrast, the play does not mention the queen's directive and sensationalizes the sexual aspect of Edward's murder. Marlowe also alters the historical record with his use of the feather bed and table in the play. The mattress is placed over Edward's body to smother and hold him down as they penetrate him with the hot spit; the use of the bed not only serves to domesticate the scene of execution but its inversion also furthers the parodic travesty of sodomy in Edward's brutal execution. Moreover, the executioner's speech is heavily laden with homoerotic innuendo: "So now, must I about this gear; ne'er was there any / So finely handled as this king shall be" (V.v.38). Lightborn soothingly invites Edward to lie upon the bed, and Edward tellingly offers his last jewel up to him: here, the offering of his "jewel," a common metaphor for a woman's maidenhead, suggests that Edward's death is a form of sexual initiation. Edward is prepared for his "fitting" end, tormented for ten days by being chained in the castle's sewer: "This dungeon where they keep me is the sink / Wherein the filth of all the castle falls" (V.v.55-6). The scatological site of punishment for the sodomite is further fabricated to parody and ridicule anal eroticism with the filth and waste of the castle's cloaca. 5 0 In staging this graphic and grotesque murder that figuratively joins homoeroticism with violent rape, Edward HI becomes part of the wider theater of punishment of early modern England. 5 ' Despite the secretive manner of Edward's actual execution, Marlowe creates an admonitory show by reenacting the king's death in front of an audience. Here, the disciplinary machinery of appropriate execution creates a fearful warning to the audience on the dan-

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gers of sodomy by objectifying the king's body as criminally sodomitical and then torturing that abject and alienized body. While spectacles of execution intended that the victim be entirely objectified so that their suffering did not move the audience, Edward's torture and death being the play's climax may serve to problematize rather than entrench the cultural legitimacy of admonitory displays against homoeroticism. 5 2 While Edward's torture and death represent what Michel Foucault called the "theatre of hell" where the cries and struggles of the condemned provide a glimpse of perdition, 5 3 to an English audience brought up on John Foxe's Martyrology as well as public punishments, Edward's cries and struggles could also represent the sufferings of a wrongly accused martyr. Drawing on the medieval morality tradition, Marlowe names the executioner Lightborn, an anglicized form of Lucifer. But is Lightborn God's righteous scourge or simply Satan's whip? What complicates the execution by torture is not necessarily its inhumaneness, for an early modern audience would have fewer reservations about the treatment of criminality than a modern one, but that Edward occupies a more ambiguous subject position in the scenes leading up to his death. Despite the fact of Edward's sodomy and his "wanton misgovernance, "54 the portrait of a king intimidated, threatened, humiliated, sleep deprived, shorn of his hair, chained in a sewer, denied the knowledge of when and how his death might occur, and denied a public execution could be enough to shock a Renaissance audience educated to respect the authority of the royal personage and kingship in general. 5 5 Even Lightborn exclaims, "what eyes can refrain from shedding tears / To see a king in this most piteous state?" (V.v.49-50). In fact, it is the repetition and accumulation of the word "pity" in the scenes leading up to Edward's death that indicates that his torment is not commensurate with his crimes. Another executioner; Matrevis, repents after Edward's murder and wishes "it were undone" and begs to be released in order to "fly" from his crimes (V.vi.2, 8). Due ceremony and decorum is not adhered to in his pre-execution treatment, and the king's death itself begins to function more as a murderous martyrdom than as an admonitory execution. 5 6 As well, the open fact of Isabella's transgressive adultery and state treason undercuts the construction of Edward as sole malefactor, for she is described in the play as "that unnatural queen, false Isabel," who spots Edward's "nuptial bed with infamy" (V.i. 17, 31). From the opening acts Isabella's adultery with Mortimer is suggested, and throughout the play her sexual transgression

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becomes more pronounced as does her political ambition: they "do kiss while they conspire" (IV.vi. 13). While openly and cruelly spurned by Edward and consumed with sexual jealousy toward Gaveston, Isabella shows an increasing lack of concern for her son's safety and a desire for Edward's death that gradually alienate her from the audience's sympathy. When Edward is being tortured in the castle's sewer, he describes Isabella in inhuman terms, for her "eyes, being turned to steel, / Will sooner sparkle fire than shed a tear" (V.i. 104-5). As a foreign and female regent-the "she-wolf of France"-who ruled England by force of arms between 1326-30 before her own son imprisoned her, Queen Isabella is a figure who excited extreme animosity in increasingly nationalistic England. Marlowe, in sexualizing his portrait of Isabella by joining the qualities of "subtle queen" (IlI.ii.88) and "french strumpet" (I.iv. 145), continues to describe how threats of power and sex combine in persecutory figures; to a degree, she becomes a nightmarish emblem of adultery and unnatural motherhood, allowing her son to be forcefully taken away by her paramour and murdering her husband. Marlowe's use of source material is demonstrably more ambivalent in its treatment of alternative sexuality than that of contemporary historiographers. The historiography of the period seamlessly represents male homoeroticism as sexually aberrant; the strong political implications of Gaveston's promotion are often obscured by reducing the story to that of a sexual moral tale. Holinshed's account moralizes that the king's sexual relationship with Gaveston was a corrupting influence: "[Hiaving revoked againe into England his old mate the said Peers de Gaveston ... through whose companie and societie he was suddenlie so corrupted, that he burst out into most heinous vices; for then using the said Peers as a procurer of his disordred dooings, he began to have his nobles in no regard, to set nothing by their instructions, and to take small heed unto the good governement of the commonwealth, so that within a while, he gave him[s]elfe to wantonnes, passing his time in voluptuous pleasure, and riotous excesse."5 7 The idea of sodomy as the basis of Edward's misrule dominates the era; John Taylor's sonnet on Edward II accords with Holinshed: Peirce Gaveston to thee my love combind: My friendship to thee scarce left me a friend, But made my Queene, Peeres, People, all unkind, I tortur'd, both in body and in mind,

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A red-hot Spit my Bowels through did gore, Such misery, no slave endured more. 5 8 In another treatment of the issue of sodomy and kingship, Michael Drayton, in the poem "Piers Gaveston," has Gaveston voice a flat denial to the slanders that he "lived in filthy sodomy" with the king and became "his instrument of vice." 59 While Tomas Cartelli argues that by giving Gaveston his own voice Drayton encodes a prevalent cultural ambivalence toward "the categories for representing homosexuality," 6 0 Gaveston's defense may be more of an ironic pose on Drayton's part rather than the partial defense of sodomy that cultural ambivalence would call for. In opposition to the antihomoerotic discourse of his contemporaries, Marlowe complicates this sexual castigation by making "Gaveston a baseborn social climber"; 6 ' this foregrounds the status threat of Gaveston's political ambition, which in turn complicates the charge of sexual perversion. Edward rI provides a less univocal condemnation than other historiographers and problematizes the causes for social disorder in England by showing how the threats of homoeroticism and political ambition combine in the category of sodomy. In EdwardII, Marlowe undermines the early modern practice of execution for sexual deviance by unveiling governmental justice as a form of social persecution; nevertheless, the text also reduplicates the religious and state use of the sodomite as a public scapegoat to police status and gender normativity. On one level, the play argues for a theater operating as moral censor, for it condemns male homoeroticism and its imagined concomitant effect of effeminization; in this guise, the play's apparent allegiance to legal, popular, and religious prejudice against sodomy functions to partially defuse antitheatrical charges that the theater was in itself a bastion of sodomy and insurgence. On another level, the play recuperates an alternative sexuality, actively demystifying how sexual acts become criminalized. Rene Girard argues that "[olnce understood, the mechanisms [of scapegoatingi can no longer operate; we believe less and less in the culpability of the victims." 6 2 While Girard is partially correct, the text's ambivalence should not be regarded as entirely subversive. While the strategy of representational ambivalence may allow for a culturally anomalous defense of alternative sexualities, this defense is at the same time embedded within a discourse of persecution: it is difficult to gauge what an audience would have taken as the

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dominant discursive stream. Neither the critics who typecast Marlowe as a sexual dissident nor those who classify his work as an "unwitting tribute" to dominant ideology are wholly correct: rather, the play pragmatically combines both of these apparently oppositional ideological positions. While Edward II indicates the cultural instability of the professional theater, it reveals as well the theater's ability to negotiate countervailing social directives through complex representational strategies. NOTES 'Stephen Orgel argues that sex had to be pederastic rape for it to be
prosecuted (Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's

England [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 19961, pp. 58-9).

2

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male

Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 1-27. 3 By sodomy itself, I mean forms of Renaissance male homoeroticism considered disorderly; sodomy. although referring to a physical act, comes to signify a complex of sexual and social deviances during the period. The term homosexual only came into use during the nineteenth century and describes a different set of cultural assumptions from the early modern expressions "sodomy" and "buggery." Sodomy in Renaissance England designates a whole series of connections with the class of the abject: the unnatural, the foreign. the contagious, and the unholy. Cf. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982), p. 17; Gregory W.
Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation:Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca and London:

Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 5-23: Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: RenaissanceTexts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992),

pp. 1-28. 4 While Castlehaven's trial occurred after production of Edward n1 had ended, it remains the most fully documented sodomy trial of a noble during the period and as such provides a rich repository of judicial fictions about the combination of power and sodomy. During this period, James I was especially sensitive to public accusations of sodomy, especially those that might be used to slander his own court: George Whither was imprisoned twice for writing poetry offensive to the king; Thomas Scott's polemics against James forced him to flee the country: and Frances Tennent was hanged for slandering the king in letters (Michael B. Young, King James and the History of Homosexuality [New York: New York Univ. Press, 2000], pp. 37, 52, 55). Both the Tudor and Stuart judiciary seldom prosecuted sodomy as it was nearly impossible to elicit confessions when the law demanded that both parties to the act be executed. Present Time, ed. T. J. Howell, William Cobbett, and David Jardine, 34 vols. (London: R. Bagshaw, 1809), 3:417.
6

5 Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedingsfor High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanorsfrom the EarliestPeriod to the Cobbet's State Trials, 3:421-2, 413.

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Marlowe's EdwardlH

7 Cobbett's State Trials, 3:402-17; Cynthia B. Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder:Sex, Law, and the Second Earl of Castlehaven (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 51-2. 8 Cobbett's State Trials, 3:408-9, 409, 413, 410. 9 Cobbett's State Trials, p. 413. t'Herrup, p. 36. "Bray, pp. 16-32; Goldberg, p. 19. 12 Herrup, p. 42. 13 Castlehaven allowed one of his favorites, Skipwith, to spend five hundred pounds out of his purse per annum and gave him a single disbursement of one thousand pounds. Also, the earl allowed Amtil (or Ankil) use of his land to keep horses by which he earned two thousand pounds, and gave him seven thousand pounds and "a farm of seven hundred pounds per annum" (Cobbett's State Trials, pp. 410-1). '4 Herrup, p. 68. '5 This occurred under the aegis of Henry Vlii's buggery laws, which remained in consistent use throughout the early modern period, except during Mary I's reign. The text records that "for the detestable and abominable vice of buggery committed with mankind or beast ... .the offenders .. . shall suffer such pains of death, and losses and penalties of their goods, chattels, debts, lands, tenements, and hereditaments, as felons" (The Statutes at Large, from the FirstYear of King RichardIII to the Thirty-FirstYear of King Henry VIII Inclusive, ed. Danby Pickering, 5 vols. ICambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1763], 4:267). Ib Lawrence Normand argues that Marlowe's play is a direct reference to James's reputed sodomy ("'What Passions Call You These?': Edward II and James VI," in Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (Hants UK: Scolar Press, 1996], pp. 17297). " 1. G., A Refultation of the Apology For Actors (London, 1615; rprt. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1941), p. 61. Some archaic spelling conventions have been silently modernized, especially the use of the long s, u's, i's, and v's. I"John Rainoldes, Th' Overthrow of Stage-Playes, ed. Arthur Freeman (London, 1599; rprt. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1974), p.

11.
lb Bryan Reynolds contends that the theater was inherently radical because of its association with alternative sexualities ("The Devil's House, 'or Worse': Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England," TheatreJournal49, 2 [May 19971: 142-67, 165). 20 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), p. 88. 21 Phillip Stubbes 's "Anatomy ofAbuses" in Englandin Slhakspere's Youth, A.D. 1583, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: New Shakspere Society, 187779), p. 73. Responding to the perceived social threat of alternative sexuality, James I required that the church censure the practice of cross-dressing from the pulpit. See Jean E. Howard, "Cross-Dressing, the Theater, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England," in Crossing the Stage: Controversies

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on Cross-Dressing,ed. Lesley Ferris [London and New York: Routledge, 19931, pp. 20-46, 21. 22 Anthony Munday, A Second and Third Blast of Retraitfrom Plaies and Theaters, ed. Arthur Freeman (London and New York: Garland Publishing, 1973), p. 113: Stubbes, pp. 73. 144. 23 Edward II was first performed by the ill-fated Pembroke's Men in 159293; this company first formed in the early 1590s and due to the closure of the theaters during the plague and civil disorder, the troupe went bankrupt in the summer of 1593, when they were forced to sell their valuable costumes and scripts (Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 19701, pp. 26-30). 24 Michel Poirier, ChristopherMarlowe (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951), p. 37. 25 Many of these critics argue that Marlowe's own homoeroticism provided the impetus for his critique of the criminalization of alternative sexualities. Goldberg contends that, "Il]ike the heroes he created, Marlowe lived and died in the impossible project-as author, government spy, and homosexual-of the marginalized, negativized existence permitted him" ("Sodomy and Society: The Case of Christopher Marlowe," Southwest Review 69, 4 [Autumn 1984]: 371-8, 377). Proof of Marlowe's "sodomy" stems from the forced confession of his roommate and fellow playwright Thomas Kyd and the paid informer Richard Bains (Millar Maclure, Marlowe: The CriticalHeritage, 1588-1896 [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 19791 pp. 32-8). 26 Bredbeck notes that "[tlhe perceived threat here is not that [Piers] Gaveston's homoeroticism subjugates the body politic to the temporal but that it allows Gaveston to traverse (or more properly, to act uninscribed by) the artificial division that keeps the two realms separate" (p. 63). 27 Goldberg, pp. 141, 129. Bruce R. Smith situates the negative response to sodomy in legal statutes and official practice while foregrounding literature as a repository of a more positive view due to its link to classical tradition (Homosexual Desirein Shakespeare'sEngland:A CulturalPoetics [Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 19911, pp. 13-4). Stephen Guy-Bray contends that the play is a radical narrative that criticizes early modern attitudes toward homoerotic desire and its politicization ("Homophobia and the Depoliticizing of Edward II," ESC 17, 2 IJune 1991]: 125-33, 131). 28 Karen Cunningham, "Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death," PMLA 105, 2 (March 1990): 209-22, 210. 2 "Viviana Comensoli. "Homophobia and the Regulation of Desire: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Marlowe's Edward I," JHSex 4, 2 (October 1993): 175-200, 180. I" Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 201. 31 Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion," Glyph 8 (1981): 40-61, 50; Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 209. 32 Sara Munson Deats, Sex, Gender and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press; London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1997), p. 186. 3` Dympna Callaghan, "The Terms of Gender: 'Gay' and 'Feminist' Edward II," Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects. ed.

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Marlowe's EdwardHI

Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 275-301. 34 Christopher Marlowe, Edward the Second, ed. Charles R. Forker, Revels Plays (Manchester UK and New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 1994), 1.i.6-9. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number. 35 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval PoliticalTheology (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957). 36 Bredbeck, p. 58. He argues that Edward II effectively describes the radical movement from "the original conception of homoeroticism as an affront to order and the new conception of it as a political tool" (p. 75). In contrast, Sharon Tyler emphasizes that the king's inappropriate gifts to Gaveston were more transgressive than Edward's homoeroticism ("Bedfellows Make Strange Politics: Christopher Marlowe's Edward 11." in Drama, Sex, and Politics, ed. James Redmond, Themes in Drama 7 ICambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 19851, pp. 55-68). 37 Fred B. Tromly additionally notes that "the play as a whole does not present the relationship of Edward and Gaveston as intrinsically sinful" (Playing with Desire: ChristopherMarlowe and the Art of Tantalization [Toronto and Buffalo NY: Univ. of Toronto Press, 19981, p. 130); Guy-Bray, p. 130. 35 Cf. Marlowe, Edward the Second, ed. Forker, p. 145n66. Rick Bowers has convincingly argued in his response to Christopher Wessman that the use of the Acteon myth in the play indicates Gaveston's involvement with performance rather than espionage ("Edward 11, 'Actaeonesque History,' Espionage, and Performance," Connotations 9, 3 11999/2000]: 241-7). 39 Alan Shepard, Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada (Aldershot UK and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2002), p. 92. 40 Laura Levine, "Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization from 1579 to 1642,- Criticism 28, 2 (Spring 1986): 121-43, 135. 4' Alexander Leighton, A Shorte Treatise against Stage-Playes (London, 1625; rprt. in Critics and Apologists of English Theatre:A Selection of Seventeenth-Century Pamphlets in Fascimile, ed. Peter Davison [New York: Johnson Reprint, 19721), p. 17. 4 2 Guy-Bray, p. 130. Cf. Orgel, "Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women," SAQ 88, 1 [Winter 19891: 7-29, 25. 43 W. L. Godshalk connects Edward's homoeroticism with wider chaos and disorder in society: "the unnatural relationship with Gaveston has led directly to the anarchy which England experiences under Edward' (The Marlovian World Picture, Studies in English Literature 93 [The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1974], p. 69). Deats characterizes a generation of critics, such as Douglas Cole, John P. Cutts, and Charles Masington, as generally promoting the view that the play constitutes a "prudential warning against the dangers of gender and status transgression" (p. 188). 44 Comensoli, p. 190. 45 Mario DiGangi, "Marlowe, Queer Studies, and Renaissance Homoeroticism," in Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitfield White (New York: AMS Press, 1998), pp. 195-212, 209.

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46 Cf Michel Foucault on torture (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vintage, 1995], pp. 34 and 46) and J. A. Sharpe ("'Last Dying Speeches': Religion, Ideology, and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England," P&P 107 119851: 144-67, 146) on the public ritual of execution. 47 Jean Froissart, Chronicles, trans. and ed. Geoffrey Brereton (Bungay UK: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 44. 48 Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed's Chronicle of England, Scotland, and Ireland in Six Volumes, ed. J. Johnson (rprt. London: AMS, 1965), 2:551. 49 Peter Earle, "The Plantagenets," in The Lives of the Kings and Queens ofEngland, ed. Antonia Fraser (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1993), p. 96. 50 Cf Marlowe's innovation of a scatological emphasis in Constance Brown Kuriyama, Hammer orAnvil: PsychologicalPatternsin ChristopherMarlowe's Plays (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1980), p. 194; Comensoli, p. 197. 51The quarto edition of Edward II fails to give stage directions as to the use of the spit; critics have assumed that it was omitted from the stage action. Forker contends that the fact that Lightborn mentions the weapon during his preparations indicates that there would have been an audience expectation to see the execution represented, even if partially shielded from full view by the arras of the stage pavilion (p. 306n30). 52 Judith Weil notes that Edward is "a hero whose destruction can evoke our strong sympathy" (ChristopherMarlowe:Merlin's Prophet[Cambridge and London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977], p. 143). 53 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 46. 54 Holinshed, 2:587. 55 Cf. David Bevington and James Shapiro, "'What Are Kings, When Regiment Is Gone?': The Decay of Ceremony in Edward II," in 'A Poet and a Filthy Play-Maker": New Essays on ChristopherMarlowe, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Kuriyama (New York: AMS Press, 1988), pp. 263-78. 56 Purvis E. Boyette reads this scene as Marlowe's unambiguous attempt to present Edward as "the archetypal Victim, a scapegoat for the personal, cultural and social forces that have repudiated his essential humanity, his decline into flesh" ("Wanton Humor and Wanton Poets: Homosexuality in Marlowe's Edward II," Tulane Studies in English 22 [1977]: 33-50, 48). 7 9 Holinshed, 2:547. 58 John Taylor, "Edward the 11, King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Aquitaine, &c.," in All the Works of John Taylor, The Water Poet (London, 1630; rprt. London: Scolar Press, 1973), p. 306. 59 Michael Drayton, The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel, 5 vols. (Oxford: Published for Shakespeare Head Press by Blackwell Press, 1961), 1:194. 60 Thomas Cartelli, "Queer Edward II: Postmodern Sexualities and the Early Modern Subject," in Marlowe, History, and Sexuality, pp. 213-22, 217. 61 Harry Levin, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 113. 62 Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), p. 101.

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