Teaching Marlowe’s Edward II: Representation of Sovereign Body as Sacred Body

This paper argues that the death of Edward II described in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II shows a dramatic strategy of Marlowe to criticize the Renaissance English society’s cultural antagonism against homosexuality as an extreme otherness in political and religious senses by representing the moment of the reversal of the sovereign ruler becoming a subordinate subject of sovereignty due to his homosexuality. In Marlowe’s Edward II too, the word “homosexuality” or “sodomy” is never spoken out or defined clearly, but Marlowe tries to make the unspeakable speakable by foregrounding the way Edward II was killed without any legal judgment or trial—without hearing any clarification of the name of his crime. Recent criticism tends to agree that Marlowe takes Edward’s homosexuality as a historical case to expose the sexual dogma and its oppression against sexual otherness the Elizabethan English society had. This paper is also in line with recent critical consensus by reading this play as a subversive text to criticize the intolerant society that divides the world in dichotomous order: Heaven or Hell, the noble or the lower, and the heterosexuality or homosexuality etc. But this paper’s focus will be not on the critical message itself but on the way this play shows how society abandons and banishes its others into the “place of exception” in Giorgio Agamben’s term. Agamben’s argument discussed in Homo Sacer will also be examined in analyzing the political meaning of the banishment represented in this play as the most important way that the sovereign power isolate the other by driving them out of world of political life.