The Rebel and the Red Hot Spit: Marlowe's Edward II as Anal-Sadistic Prototype

Writing in a land where trespass against the society was (as it still is) considered an offense against the Crown, Christopher Marlowe employed a singular irony by choosing in Edward II (1592) a hero who both wears the crown of England and rebels throughout the play against English society and its dictates. The irony is compounded by Marlowe's depiction of Edward's antagonist Mortimer as a rebel against the Crown who becomes over the course of the play the principal authority figure of the society. So neatly do these ironic juxtapositions coincide that Edward and Mortimer may be seen to represent alternative phases of psychological development contending for center stage of the psyche, with Mortimer's transition from adolescent rebellion to parental authority taking for its inception the point at which Edward's development is arrested. Edward's dramatic development is very much a matter of his earning, through escalating adversity, our perhaps reluctant admiration for his consistency, but his psychological development is fixed from start to finish at a stage corresponding so remarkably to Freud's description of the anal-sadistic phase of childhood that Marlowe's hero may be offered as a prototype of that phase.

I mean to suggest, then, that Marlowe anticipated Freud with the symptomatological insight of a Dostoevsky and the symbological flair of a Sophocles and gave us in his Edward II a definitive portrait of anal rebellion. I mean to illustrate this thesis by reference to the Marlovian Edward's willfulness, to his excesses, to his egocentricity, and to the literally anal nature (as well as the literally anal consequences) of his sexual behavior.

To begin with, though, I think it will be helpful to place Edward in his Marlovian context by establishing and examining Marlowe's frequent use of homoerotic subject matter and its relationship to his own persistent rebellious drive. What I do not propose to do here is prove a case either for or against the familiar assumptions regarding the author's sexual preferences and activities. His reputation as a sexual transgressor is worth addressing, however, insofar as it reflects the essentially transgressive nature of both the man and his work.

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The attribution to Marlowe of homoerotic sexual practices is more or less consistent with what we know about his life, can be traced back to the week of his death, and has persisted ever since, though the actual evidence is so dubious that were Marlowe a contemporary figure only a supermarket tabloid would risk the allegation. It is an allegation that was made, so far as anyone now knows, only once during Marlowe's life, and it is to be found in a document that has come to be called the Baines Note, which is generally believed to have been composed before Marlowe's fatal stabbing on May 30, 1593, since it recommends that his mouth "be stopped" (Baines 1593a, 38). Either shortly before or shortly after the killing—surviving records conflict—a certain Richard Baines, an "intelligencer" and agent provocateur (or "projector" in the parlance of the day), presented the authorities with a list of complaints against Marlowe. Among the outrages ascribed to him was the conviction "That all they that love not Tobacco & Boies were fooles" (37). The author of Edward II was thus outed by Baines specifically as an advocate of homoerotic sexual activity, not necessarily as a practitioner.

Being an advocate was in fact the more socially seditious violation. Sexual acts between men, commonplace then as now, were potential death-penalty offenses, but they were tacitly tolerated in the vast majority of instances, so long as they were sufficiently circumspect in performance and not associated with other violations threatening the social order. Henry VIII had claimed legal jurisdiction over sodomy as part of a campaign to strip the Catholic...