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Product Description
Product Description
Marlowe's play retains its power to shock even today, and this edition gives full value to its three overriding themes of sexual favouritism, political confrontation and sheer cruelty. Critics in the last twenty years, who have focused on the overtly sexual relationship between Edward and his favourite Gaveston, have hailed it as a 'gay classic'; earlier interpretations concentrated rather on the deposition by his subjects of a weak king, reading it in tandem with Shakespeare's Richard II. The introduction shows how the play works to give the audience an equal emotional commitment to opposing points of view and concludes that this is what makes Edward II such an uncomfortable and challenging play.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a powerful play whereby Marlowe examines the humiliations that the King has to suffer due to his homosexuality. The reader begins to understand the great difficulty involved in balancing personal and political concerns, especially in centuries past. It sweeps the reader away into history, politics, corruption and controversy which exemplifies Marlowe at his best. I would recommend this play to anyone who has an interest in Renaissance culture or has enjoyed the works of Webster and Middleton & Rowley.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
To see this as a 'gay' play is incredibly anachronistic and actually doesn't do justice to the sophisticated and complex arguments at work in this text. Not just did the idea of homosexuality as a sexual identity not exist in Marlowe's time (although sexual acts between men, of course, did) but the very borders between male intimate friendship, which might frequently involve sharing a bed, and a male-male sexual relationship were very fluid and almost impossible to determine.
What makes Marlowe's play so challenging is the way in which possible sexual and political transgression are inextricably linked: and the text itself probes the way in which Edward II's detractors are themselves guilty of precisely the 'over-reaching' of which they accuse the king himself.
To understand the sexual context of this play, it is worth reading Montaigne's essay 'On affectionate relationships' (in The Complete Essays) where the most fevered, passionate relationships are not those between men and women, but between men, even though they are not sexual. The idea, especially, of male friends "seeking each other before we set eyes on each other... and so bound together that from then on none was so close as each was to the other" is one which culturally we no longer recognise, saving that kind of romantic diction for sexual relationships rather than non-sexual.
Commenting obliquely on favouritism at the Tudor court (Henry VIII's wives and their families; Elizabeth's favourites such as Leicester and Essex) and the way in which the personal life of the monarch might impact on his/her public life as ruler, this is a far more political play than an initial reading might support.
It is easy to read this as the product of a 'homosexual' playwright but there is no evidence that Marlowe fits this modern category more than any other Renaissance writer who eroticised the young, male body - as Shakespeare did in the 'fair youth' sonnets, for example.
Certainly the relationship between Edward and Gaveston is at the centre of this play - but to limit it to a 'gay' love story ahead of its time is to do a disservice both to the complexity of Marlowe's vision, and to the text itself.
What makes Marlowe's play so challenging is the way in which possible sexual and political transgression are inextricably linked: and the text itself probes the way in which Edward II's detractors are themselves guilty of precisely the 'over-reaching' of which they accuse the king himself.
To understand the sexual context of this play, it is worth reading Montaigne's essay 'On affectionate relationships' (in The Complete Essays) where the most fevered, passionate relationships are not those between men and women, but between men, even though they are not sexual. The idea, especially, of male friends "seeking each other before we set eyes on each other... and so bound together that from then on none was so close as each was to the other" is one which culturally we no longer recognise, saving that kind of romantic diction for sexual relationships rather than non-sexual.
Commenting obliquely on favouritism at the Tudor court (Henry VIII's wives and their families; Elizabeth's favourites such as Leicester and Essex) and the way in which the personal life of the monarch might impact on his/her public life as ruler, this is a far more political play than an initial reading might support.
It is easy to read this as the product of a 'homosexual' playwright but there is no evidence that Marlowe fits this modern category more than any other Renaissance writer who eroticised the young, male body - as Shakespeare did in the 'fair youth' sonnets, for example.
Certainly the relationship between Edward and Gaveston is at the centre of this play - but to limit it to a 'gay' love story ahead of its time is to do a disservice both to the complexity of Marlowe's vision, and to the text itself.
6 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Marlowe's play about the gay king of England seems incredibly modern in its sympathetic representation of a homosexual man. Sure, Edward may get 'punished' for his crime (in the most hideous way imaginable), but Marlowe's sympathies are clearly with Edward, whose love scenes with Gaveston are poetic and touching. By contrast, Edward's overthrower, Mortimer is a cold-blooded villain, and he too gets his comeuppance. Compare this play with the supposedly modern film 'Braveheart', which vilifies Edward II's homosexuality, and you can see that Marlowe is ahead of his time even now.
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