Homosexuality/Sodomy and Politics in Edward II and Richard II

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and compare how Marlowe and Shakespeare depicted in their plays the shocking events of rebellion, usurpation and assassination of the kings Edward II and Richard II, especially focusing on their actual or assumed homoerotic relationships with their favorites in connection with questions regarding kingship. And the aim of this study is to examine how the two playwrights are taking different political positions and attitudes toward the clash between the medieval view of providential history and early modern Machiavellian discourse surrounding the myth of absolute sovereignty in Elizabethan Tudor England. There are many similarities and parallels between the two works. Each play depicts the rebellious aristocrats who accuse the king’s favorites of performing homosexual favors for him in order to gain their own political advantages. Those acts were considered sodomitic, which in its early modern sense, encompasses the broad range of religious, social, and sexual transgressions combined with the intention of political attack against one’s own opponents, unlike our own contemporary understanding of homosexuality and sodomy. The aristocrats argue that such a heinous sexual relationship not only defiled and corrupted Edward's and Richard's anointed bodies but that as a result, the misled kings became effeminated, incompetent, and even tyrannical rulers. On these bases, the barons rebel against, depose, torture and murder their own sovereign who is believed to have divine authority in order to prevent the Imperial England from being effeminized and shamefully conquered by the foreign countries who were in competition in building empire. However, the two playwrights show distinguishing attitudes in dealing with the two kings’ homosexuality as well. According to Marlowe, it is not Edward’s homosexuality but his overt dependence on his favorites that makes him an incompetent ruler. Marlowe explicitly defends homosexuality through the mouth of Mortimer Senior. Rather than emphasizing Edward’s own faults and incompetence, he is finally seen to be destroyed by inhumanly cruel and violent Mortimer Junior and Queen Isabella who are sodomites in that they commit adultery. Then, perhaps Marlowe, a radical, by boldly presenting the theme of homosexuality on the stage, wants to defend himself against the accusation of his being an atheist and a homosexual, i.e. he depicts the political opponents as violent and inhuman for their attacks and threats toward sodomites. Unlike Marlowe, Shakespeare focuses on Richard’s own flaws and incompetence as a ruler and justifies Bolingbroke’s rebellion and dethronement simultaneously. Perhaps this ambiguous stance is to justify and affirm the Tudor myth while demystifying it. Eventually, though both plays deal with the issues of homosexuality and rulership, the true problem is the inseparability of those issues from politics.