Abstract
This chapter suggests that Marlowe unsettles both childhood and youth as social categories by queering prince Edward in Edward II. While it is possible to read this character normatively, I argue instead for a queered subjectivity in the boy that enables resistant self-fashioning. Marlowe queers young Edward, not in a homoerotic sense, but rather by destabilizing the prince’s age, insisting on his non-normative growth. He first scripts the boy as much younger than the prince of historical record, and then causes him to grow up in what seems like an instant. Engaging Robin Bernstein’s concept of agequeerness, and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theory of the “queer child,” I will argue that instability around the question of age creates Edward as a queer adolescent subject.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Sharon Tyler (1985) argues that Edward is the only character who can “reaffirm the legitimate kingship corrupted by Edward II ” (61), and she views his growth as linear and normative . Carla Prichard (1998) similarly contends that the “child-king is the one who restores order to the empire by normalizing relationships” (30), while Judith Weil (2008), although her chapter on Edward deals with difference and contrariety, views young Edward as a curative: Marlowe allows us to “observe how a process that has engendered contradictions, finally drives them out” (146–7).
- 3.
Harriet engages in adult activities and behaves in a mature manner not befitting her ten years. Bernstein (2011) argues that Fitzhugh “destabilizes age ; her inclusion of adultlike children and immature adults disarticulates age as an identity from chronological or biological age” (115); finally, the novel positions agequeerness as “crucial to survival” (118).
- 4.
Marlowe abbreviates the considerable time that elapsed historically between Edward II’s death and his son’s coming to power . Ian Mortimer’s biography of Edward III, The Perfect King, details the rule of Mortimer and Isabella during the first four years of the young king ’s reign: “he had been utterly disempowered by his mother and Mortimer” (2006, 4). Crowned in 1327, Edward III did not successfully seize control of the throne and execute Mortimer until 1330, shortly after he turned eighteen .
- 5.
Critics and cultural historians generally agree that homosexuality , as we think of it today, did not exist in early modern England as a specific sexual identity, and that it would therefore be anachronistic , even in such a play as Edward II , to discuss homosexuality as an early modern subjectivity . The premise of Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1995), that homosexuality did not exist in the period, has influenced such subsequent work on the subject as Jonathan Goldberg’s Queering the Renaissance (1994), Mario DiGangi’s The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (1997), and Gregory Bredbeck’s Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (1991).
- 6.
Bray (1995, 41) explains that “sodomy ” to the Elizabethans signified something closer to “debauchery,” covering a range of sexual acts; moreover, a “sodomite” was not merely sexually aberrant, but rebellious and unnatural in other ways as well: he might be an atheist, a blasphemer, or a liar. Today, Mario DiGangi (1997, 12) notes, our “modern ideological formations … more crisply distinguish homoeroticism from friendship, sexual desire from social desire” than did early modern gender ideology.
- 7.
Michael Warner argues that the use of the term “queer” “rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal” (qtd. in Cartelli 1998, 213).
- 8.
For instance, Stockton ’s wide-ranging examples of fictional texts and films that represent queer children include Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Henry James’ The Pupil, Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden , and Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
- 9.
- 10.
Encapsulated in the familiar narrative of the prodigal son, the sin-and-redemption pattern proliferated in the didactic literature of the period. Sixteenth-century morality plays, such as the anonymous Interlude of Youth (c. 1513) and R. Wever’s Lusty Juventus (c. 1547), depict the redemption of the stock character Youth from the clutches of such foes as Riot, Pride, and Abominable Living. The interlude Nice Wanton (c. 1547) advocates the subjugation of youth to parents and to God. Similarly, conduct literature about youth, bearing such titles as Anthony Stafford’s Meditations and Resolutions, Moral, Divine, Political, Written for the Instruction and Bettering of Youth (1612), also stressed the importance of moral and religious instruction , along with strict subjugation, in the shaping of young people.
- 11.
Griffiths (1996, 20) finds that “youth ” was the term usually applied to the stage of life between childhood and adolescence . The word “adolescent ,” while it has medieval origins, appears less frequently; the first recorded use of “teen” appears in 1673 (Purkiss 2005, 57). My anachronistic use of the term “teenager” is meant to emphasize Marlowe ’s (and Shakespeare ’s) contribution to the unstable teenaged subject that we recognize today. The label brings into focus the close connections between our contemporary understandings of young people and the depiction of Prince Edward that Marlowe offers in his play.
- 12.
Early modern youth , enjoined as they were to conform and caught within a mesh of authoritative structures, still situated themselves in their period’s larger culture of resistance. Susan Brigden (1982) discusses the important example of youth and the Reformation: young people were of particular interest to Protestant reformers, who linked notions of renewal to the rising generation. The phenomenon of misrule also raised apprehensions about youthful disorder. May Day and Shrovetide, in particular, occasioned the festive overturning of authority . Natalie Zemon Davis’ well-known study on youth groups in sixteenth-century France, “The Reasons of Misrule,” analyzes themes of “youth, misrule, pleasure, folly, even madness” among the organizations known as the Abbayes de la Jeunesse, or “Abbeys of Misrule” (1971, 43). These youth groups engaged in forms of carnival, often charivaris and parades, to mock such figures as the subjugated husband , the domineering woman, or the remarrying widow . The nature of this misrule, Davis concludes, was not rebellious, since it served to protect existing community values; importantly, though, it did create a space for youthful autonomy and the expression of the “raucous voice ” of the young in the community (1971, 55).
- 13.
Marlowe’s use of historical sources points to his particular interest in Gaveston: while the play’s main source is Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, Maureen Godman (1993) has pointed out that for his portrait of Gaveston, Marlowe drew particularly on John Stow’s “Summarie” of 1565, an abridged English history which devotes a third of its eleven octavo pages on the reign of Edward II to a treatment of Gaveston; of the Chronicles’ forty-two folio pages on Edward, in contrast, just five concern Gaveston. Moreover, Stow provides Marlowe with his representation of Gaveston as base-born and morally destructive; Gaveston’s low birth and opportunism do not figure in Holinshed’s account.
- 14.
References
Anderson, Kathleen. 1992. ‘Stab as Occasion Serves’: The Real Isabella in Marlowe’s Edward II. Renaissance Papers: 29–39.
Bartels, Emily C. 1993. Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Belsey, Catherine. 2007. Little Princes: Shakespeare’s Royal Children. In Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Robert Shaughnessay, 32–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman. 1994. Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bernstein, Robin. 2011. The Queerness of Harriet the Spy. In Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature, ed. Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd, 111–120. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Bray, Alan. 1994. Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England. In Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg, 40–61. Durham: Duke University Press.
———. 1995. Homosexuality in Renaissance England: With a New Afterword. ACLS Humanities E-Book. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bredbeck, Gregory W. 1991. Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Brigden, Susan. 1982. Youth and the English Reformation. Past and Present 95: 37–67.
Bruhm, Steven, and Natasha Hurley, eds. 2004. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cartelli, Thomas. 1998. Queer Edward II: Postmodern Sexualities and the Early Modern Subject. In Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitfield White, 213–221. New York: AMS Press.
Clark, David. 2013. Marlowe and Queer Theory. In Christopher Marlowe in Context, ed. Emily C. Bartels and Emma Smith, 232–241. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1971. The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France. Past and Present 50: 41–75.
Deats, Sara Munson. 1997. Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
DiGangi, Mario. 1997. The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1998. Marlowe, Queer Studies, and Renaissance Homoeroticism. In Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitfield White, 195–212. New York: AMS Press.
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press.
Edward II. 1991. Dir. Derek Jarman, Performances by Steven Waddington, Tilda Swinton, and Andrew Tiernan. National Film Trustee Company.
Eisenbichler, Konrad, ed. 2002. The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society, 1150–1650. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies.
Garber, Marjorie. 1977. ‘Infinite Riches in a Little Room’: Closure and Enclosure in Marlowe. In Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ed. Alvin Kernan, 3–21. Baltimore and London: The John’s Hopkins University Press.
Godman, Maureen. 1993. Stow’s Summarie: Source for Marlowe’s Edward II. Notes and Queries 40 (2): 160–164.
Goldberg, Jonathan, ed. 1994. Queering the Renaissance. Durham: Duke University Press.
Greenblatt, Stephen. 1977. Marlowe and Renaissance Self-Fashioning. In Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ed. Alvin Kernan, 41–69. Baltimore and London: The John’s Hopkins University Press.
Griffiths, Paul. 1996. Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640. Oxford: Clarendon.
Marlowe, Christopher. 2008. Edward II. Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McElroy, John F. 1984. Repetition, Contrariety, and Individualization in Edward II. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 24: 205–224.
Mitterauer, Michael. 1992. A History of Youth. Trans. Graeme Dunphy. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mortimer, Ian. 2006. The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation. London: Jonathan Cape.
Parsons, Alexandra. 2014. History, Activism, and the Queer Child in Derek Jarman’s Queer Edward II. Shakespeare Bulletin 32 (3): 413–428.
Prichard, Carla Coleman. 1998. ‘Learn Then to Rule Us Better and the Realm’: Restoration of Order and the Boy King in Marlowe’s Edward II. Renaissance Papers, 29–38.
Purkiss, Diane. 2005. Fractious: Teenage Girls’ Tales in and out of Shakespeare. In Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Texts, ed. Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford, 57–72. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Rutkoski, Marie. 2006. Breeching the Boy in Marlowe’s Edward II. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 26 (2): 281–306.
Smith, Bruce. 1991. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. 2009. The Queer Child, or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke University Press.
Tyler, Sharon. 1985. Bedfellows Make Strange Politics: Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. In Drama, Sex and Politics, ed. James Redmond, 55–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Voss, James. 1982. Edward II: Marlowe’s Historical Tragedy. English Studies 63 (6): 517–530.
Weil, Judith. 2008. Christopher Marlowe: Merlin’s Prophet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Prusko, R. (2018). “A Prince so Young as I”: Agequeerness and Marlowe’s Boy King. In: Higginbotham, J., Johnston, M. (eds) Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72769-1_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72769-1_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-72768-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-72769-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)