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Status, sodomy, and the theater in Marlowe's Edward II.(Abstracts)(Christopher Marlowe)(Brief Article)

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From: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
Date: 20040322
Author:Stymeist, David

While critics of Marlowe's Edward II have seen the play as an "unwitting tribute" to the dominant ideology or an iconoclastic rewriting of sexual politics, sodomy in the play constitutes a pragmatic strategy of representational ambivalence. On one level, Edward II condemns male homoeroticism when it is specifically combined with issues of status; in this guise, the play's apparent allegiance with legal, popular, and religious prejudice against sodomy functions to partially defuse antitheatrical charges that the theater was a bastion of sodomy and insurgence. On another level, the ...

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