ABSTRACT
Marlowe’s Edward II is a play about desire-and about desire’s excess. There is not a great deal of love poetry in this textually austere tragedy. Instead, Edward’s desire for Gaveston is dramatically represented, made palpable for the audience, in terms of a succession of separations. His lover’s absence constitutes both the occasion and also the figure of Edward’s longing. Gaveston is exiled, recalled, banished, brought back, parted from the king; they are reunited and then separated again. The first half of this divided play1 repeatedly shows the king either mourning Gaveston’s banishment (Edward II 1.4.305-18)2, or anxiously asking for his absent favourite. This indeed is how the play begins, as Gaveston reads the king’s letter recalling him from exile: ‘My father is deceast, come Gaveston,/And share the kingdom with thy deerest friend’ (1.1.1-2). At Edward’s own first appearance, he insists more defiantly that he must have Gaveston as his companion: ‘Ile bandie with the Barons and the Earles,/And eyther die, or live with Gaveston’ (1.1.137-8). In Act 2, after Gaveston’s second banishment is repealed, The winde is good, I wonder why he stayes,/I feare me he is wrackt upon the sea’ (2.2.1-2). The Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1990 showed Edward here staring longingly into the distance, shading his eyes with his hand. ‘How now, what newes, is Gaveston arrivde?’ (2.2.6). And again after their brief secret reunion at Tynemouth, ‘O tell me Spencer, where is Gaveston? (2.4.1). His lover’s absences give material form to Edward’s passion, endow with dramatic substance the lack which motivates desire, and thus enable a condition which is quintessentially negative to find a mode of representation.
