ABSTRACT
While Christopher Marlowe's rendition of the story diverges considerably from other contemporary versions, its focus on the dangers posed by pleasure and effeminacy to the well-being of the empire mirrors some of these other accounts. Sue Mansfield calls such leaders 'culture heroes' when they anoint themselves the enemies of chaos who must use violence to create peace. Peirs Gaveston embodies the link between pleasure, performance, and impending national disgrace that so agitated Elizabethan soldiers. Through their efforts, such culture heroes claim, 'the forces of destruction and chaos are themselves destructured'. Sue Mansfield's idea is based on her study of Apache and Papago war myths of the nineteenth-century American southwest, but she suggests that the idea may be universal. If Edward's tragedy was commonly used to whip up support for calcifying English masculinity in the shadow of the Armada, it is sometimes appropriated today for virtually diametrical purposes.
