Edward II and the Aesthetics of Survival

Edward II and the Aesthetics of Survival This chapter begins with a familiar contradiction: The king is dead. Long live the king. The ritual proclamation ostensibly ensures royal succession and supplies a community of mourners with a sense of civic cohesion during a time of crisis. In the truncated narrative that overcomes loss through declaration, the king is pronounced dead in the first sentence only to be resurrected immediately in the command-“Long live the king”—which follows the endpoint. Royal succession and civic cohesion are maintained, literally, in the space of a period. As efficient as it is in efforts to overcome loss and maintain community, the ritual pronouncement is haunted. The sense of collective identity generated by the ritual of royal succession is a virtual civic consciousness with a ghostly agent whose presence depends on the force of proclamation. Civic life, in this case, becomes what Derrida might describe as an unavowable community, an endlessly frustrated desire, a messianism without a Messiah, a seemingly authoritative imperative that denies its own status as an impossible demand. The structure of the language of the demand, “Long live the king,” in fact, belies its impossibility: the status of “the king” in the imperative is ambiguous. On one hand, it appears to be the object of the command “to live”; on the other, however, it bears traces of the subject-the same subject declared dead before the space of the period. This chapter is a foray into the problem posed by the space of the endpoint above-where loss vanishes in the period between death and royal continuity. Where Richard II memorializes the past by repeatedly disavowing its claims on the present, Edward II examines these claims directly in its paradoxical representation of the king’s rape and violent death. For Marlowe, the staging of the violent murder is a drama about the death of allegory and its failure to connect past to present. At the same time, however, Edward II demonstrates the absolute necessity of the rituals that enable civic life and contribute to a fragile sense of national identity. In staging the death of Edward II, Marlowe’s play offers its audience two critical insights. First, it reveals among generations of survivors the haunting reminder of Edward’s violent death; second, it exposes the contradiction at the source of royal power and its continuity. Both of the play’s insights however are fleeting. The loss inherited by the living appears too severe. As if interrogating and then challenging the way that Richard II represents the claims of the past with the haunting reminders of Gloucester’s murder, in representing Edward’s rape and murder, Marlowe’s play lays open the limits of historical reflection. In the process

the drama radically exposes the cost of inheriting the legacy of a traumatic past which is bequeathed in the act of historical transmission. This cost is vividly experienced in the play as a failure of language. As an allegorical image of the satanic, Lightborn’s own death in act five demonstrates the failure of language to accommodate the limit event, and a close-reading of the scene reveals the failed attempt to aestheticize the trauma of royal death for an audience that is at once a detached observer of and an accomplice in the event. It is on this threshold between observer and participant-a position occupied by the play’s various characters as well as its spectators-that a glimpse of Edward’s murder becomes possible, only to vanish into the rituals of sovereign perpetuity that follow it, overcome by a period. Lightborn and Allegorical Assassination

As an expert assassin, Lightborn brings a bureaucratic efficiency to his craft. Reciting a list of techniques of murder which suggests his proficiency at dealing in death, the assassin rebuffs Younger Mortimer’s attempt “to give instructions” (5.4. 27) on how to kill the king in act five:1

You shall not need to give instructions; ‘Tis not the first time I have kill’d a man. I learn’d in Naples how to poison flowers, To strangle with a lawn thrust down the throat, To pierce the wind pipe with a needle’s point, Or, whilst one is asleep, to take a quill, And blow a little powder in his ears, Or open his mouth, and pour quick-silver down. But yet I have a braver way than these. (5.4.28-36)

Lightborn’s cruelly bureaucratic technologies of death, combined with the secrecy that surrounds his most sophisticated techniques-“Nay, you shall pardon me; none shall know my tricks” (5.4.38)—sanitize the impending act of murder. Moreover, Mortimer’s insistence that the effects of the crime “be not spied” (5.4.39) suggests that ocular proof of the event is the knowledge most threatening to the conspirators; thus, Edward’s body becomes the site of both commemoration and erasure, at once a monument of brutal murder and a reminder of the impossibility of bearing witness to the deed. Lightborn’s instructions to Matrevis and Gurney to “lay the table down, and stamp on it, / But not too hard, lest that you bruise his body” (5.5.114-15) simultaneously capture the act of murder and its memorial effacement. In his own language during the moments immediately before his death, Edward presciently articulates the way the impact of his murder will be mediated by

narrative. He says to Lightborn, “These looks of thine can harbour naught but death; / I see my tragedy written in thy brows” (5.5.75-6). Edward, as a subject recognizing his own image in Lightborn’s presence, understands the impending events as an object of tragedy. He reads in the brow of the conspirator an imagined narrative which displaces the “I” of subject-centered discourse into the “him” of a decentering narrative. Not only will others not bear witness to his murder because of the act of effacement performed during the crime, but Edward himself experiences the event of his own death in a prematurely mediated and distorted manner. Running counter to the way Gloucester’s murder signifies belatedly in Richard II, the mediating narrative in Marlowe’s play anticipates the event. For Edward, the tragedy “written in the brows” appears to erase the contingency of the crime. Edward’s recognition allows him to “see the stroke before it comes” (5.5.78). Yet, even with this recognition generated by the imagined narrative of events in Lightborn’s image, Edward is not able to alter events. His response to Lightborn’s insincere offer to leave the king’s room before the crime suggests that repetition is all that is available in light of the prescient experience of his own death. Edward says, “No, no; for thou mean’st to murder me / Thou wilt return again; and therefore stay” (5.5.100-101). Lightborn becomes a figure for allegory as well as a murderer, narrative as well as the agent of death. The promise of the return of the claims of the past is distorted by narratives-the sad stories of the death of kingswhich define what counts as historical consciousness. I will return to this moment in more detail later in this chapter. First, however, it is important to explore how other sources familiar to an early modern audience represented Edward’s death. Marlowe’s three primary sources for Edward II were the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), the second edition of Stow’s Chronicles (1580), appearing in 1592 with a new title, The Annals of England, and the fourth edition of Fabyan’s The Chronicle of Fabyan (1559).2 Marlowe’s reliance on Holinshed’s Chronicles reflects the instability that Annabel Patterson argues inheres in the historical document itself and that we explored in chapter three. In the previous chapter we saw that Patterson and other literary critics emphasized the polyvocal quality of the history. Extending their analysis, Emily Bartels has noted Holinshed’s ambivalent allegiances to the various powerful figures and oppositional forces during Edward’s reign,3 and this ambivalence, a negotiated allegiance in the document, seems a part of Marlowe’s play. In a moral aside after Edward’s murder, Holinshed employs an “all are punished” sentiment that precludes any moral fixity during the historical moment:

All these mischiefs and many more happened not only to him, but also to the whole state of the realm, in that he wanted judgement and prudent discretion to make choice of sage and discreet counsellors, receiving those into his favour that abused the same to their private gain and advantage, not respecting the advancement of the commonwealth, so they themselves might attain to riches and honour, for which they only sought,

insomuch that by their covetous rapine, spoil, and immoderate ambition, the hearts of the common people and nobility were quite estranged from their dutiful love and obedience which they ought to have showed to their sovereign, going about ... to seek the destruction of them whom he commonly favoured, wherein surely they were worthy of blame, and to taste the deserved punishment for their... disloyal demeanors .... as to those that shall well consider the pitiful tragedy of this king’s time .... (2:587)4

While documenting the history of the “king’s time” and condemning all the players in the tragedy, Holinshed seems to perform the historiographic safety dance which recent literary hitorians argue is the Chronicles’s principle distinction.5 Marlowe’s play captures the spirit of Holinshed’s history as it challenges any notion of allegiance. Edward early in the play seems to merit the wrath of the nobles, and the nobles’ concern about kingship and country seem plausible. By the play’s end, however, Marlowe has decentered any fixed notions of sympathy, as Edward wallows in misery and mud, and the noble Mortimer exalts in treachery and deceit. Marlowe’s portrayal of Gaveston is also consistent with Holinshed’s historical record. Holinshed writes of Gaveston’s influence on the king, who began playing “wanton and light parts” (2:547), and the history documents the: company of jesters, ruffians, flattering parasites, musicians, and other vile and naughty ribalds, that the king might spend both days and nights ... in such and other filthy and dishonorable exercises ... desirous to advance those that were like to himself, he procured for them honorable offices (2:547). The spirit of the historical record, if not its vocabulary, seems to inform Marlowe’s play. The play, like the Chronicles, presents a cabal of nobles jealous of the upstart Gaveston, but the historical record does not include Mortimer in the intrigue. He does not appear in the historical record until 1315, at least a year after Gaveston’s beheading. Not surprisingly, the fictional Mortimer-Gaveston relationship in the play is Marlowe’s method to collapse the historical narrative, one that spans twenty-three years, into a manageable production for the stage. From Stow, Marlowe is able to locate Gaveston’s marriage to Edward’s niece after his return from exile in Ireland rather than before the king’s coronation, as Holinshed suggests. Marlowe too acquires more flexibility in introducing minor characters such as the younger Spencer and Baldock, whom Holinshed does not mention until after Gaveston’s death. Stow also records Geoffrey le Baker’s account of eyewitness reports that detail both Mortimer’s arrest and Edward’s final journey to Berkeley Castle. Fabyan offers Marlowe material about Edward’s war with the Scots, especially a derisive song that mocks English attempts to defeat Scotland, to which Younger Mortimer alludes and Lancaster recounts in act two, scene two. More importantly, however, Marlowe eliminates from both Fabyan and Stow all references to Edward’s repentance; he elides completely a mock-crowning recorded in the chronicles, and he invents the murderer Lightborn, whose collusion with Mortimer only increases Mortimer’s own guilt in the crime.6