Fear of the Other and Internal Discord Theme Analysis

At the time Edward II was written, the casual xenophobia of its characters would not have seemed out of the ordinary in English society. War was common, both in Marlowe’s day and in Edward’s, and tensions with the French, Scottish, and Irish ran correspondingly high. With that said, the mistrust of foreigners and the pervasive threat of war in the play also points to a broader suspicion of “otherness,” whether based on ethnicity, sexuality, or even class. Ultimately, however, these fears prove to be misguided, as the most serious threats faced by characters in the play are internal.

The character who most clearly fulfills the role of outsider in Edward II is Gaveston. In fact, Marlowe underscores Gaveston’s otherness by making him low-born—something that was not true of the historical Gaveston, but which clearly unnerves the nobles, who have inherited their position in the court. Gaveston’s sexual behavior is also more obviously at odds with societal norms than Edward’s. This is partly because Isabella and the nobles view Gaveston as the corrupter of an otherwise innocent (though weak) king, but it is also because Gaveston is quite open about where his sexual preferences lie. He talks, for instance, about arranging homoerotic “masques” with “men like satyrs grazing on the lawns” and “a lovely boy in Dian’s shape, / …in his sportful hands an olive tree / To hide those parts which men delight to see.” Finally, Gaveston is a foreigner both by birth (he is French) and by habits and appearance; in a speech that links Gaveston’s class, sexuality, and foreignness, Mortimer Junior complains that Gaveston “wears a short Italian hooded cloak” and goes around “with base outlandish cullions at his heels.” Since “cullions”—an insult comparable to the modern “low-life”—also was sometimes used as slang to refer to testicles, the term captures much of what marks Gaveston as different, and much of what other characters malign him for.

What is ultimately threatening to the nobles about Gaveston, however, is not his threefold status as an outsider (homosexual, low-born, and foreign), but rather his status as an insider—specifically, the fact that Edward views his favorite as an extension of himself. Edward not only gives Gaveston permission to issue commands in his own name, but repeatedly describes the two of them as being one and the same person: Edward responds to Gaveston’s exile, for example, by claiming, “I from my self am banished.” To some extent, then, Gaveston’s influence over the king (and all the ill effects that follow) are simply a reflection of Edward’s own “brainsickness”—a problem that is internal to both England and Edward himself. What exactly this sickness consists of is never entirely clear, but Edward’s remarks about being separated from himself suggest that his sense of identity is unstable or divided. In this way, Edward’s inner state mirrors the political divisions that eventually erupt into civil war. In fact, when fighting eventually does break out between Edward and the nobility, Isabella’s remarks underscore the idea that the violence is an outward manifestation of the king’s own state of mind; her description of “kin and countrymen / Slaughter[ing] themselves in others” recalls Edward’s comments about his relationship with Gaveston, and she concludes by attributing these problems to “misgoverned kings.”

In the end, then, it is not the foreigner—the “wild O’Neill” or the “haughty Dane”—that poses the real danger to England, but rather internal discord, which manifests not only in the rebellion of the nobility against the king, but also in the psychology of the king himself. In fact, as the political situation deteriorates further under Mortimer’s rule, Edward descends so far into inner turmoil that he becomes a complete stranger to himself: he says, for instance, that he cannot tell whether he has “limbs” or not. By the end of the play, Marlowe suggests that the true “other” is not an external enemy but rather something that comes from within.